was the fate of everything worth while in Western civilization.
NOTES
1 For a succinct statement of the first view see Frank L. Owsley, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” in Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand (New York, 1930), p. 74. One of the clearest statements of the second view is that of Thomas P. Govan, “Was the Old South Different?” JSH, XXI (Nov. 1955), 448.
2 History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (2 vols.; Gloucester, Mass., 1958), I, 302.
3 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York, 1947), pp. 276 ff. The term “rational” is used in its strictly economic sense to indicate that production is proceeding in accordance with the most advanced methods to maximize profits.
4 This simple observation has come under curious attack. Kenneth M. Stampp insists that the cost of purchasing a slave forms the equivalent of the free worker’s wage bill. See The Peculiar Institution (New York, 1956), pp. 403 ff. The initial outlay is the equivalent of part of the capitalist’s investment in fixed capital and constitutes what Ulrich B. Phillips called the “overcapitalization of labor” under slavery. The cost of maintaining a slave is only a small part of the free worker’s wage bill, but the difference in their productivity is probably greater than the difference in their cost under most conditions.
5 The Pro-Slavery Argument (Charleston, S.C., 1852), p. 488.
6 Blaise Pascel, Pensées (Modern Librarby ed.; New York, 1941), p. 105.
7 This colonial dependence on the British and Northern markets did not end when slavery ended. Sharecropping and tenantry produced similar results. Since abolition occurred under Northern guns and under the program of a victorious, predatory outside bourgeoisie, instead of under internal bourgeois auspices, the colonial bondage of the economy was preserved, but the South’s political independence was lost.
8 Govan, JSH, XXI (Nov. 1955), 448.
9 Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York, 1947), pp. 17 f. In the words of Gunnar Myrdal: “Trade by itself … rather tends to have backwash effects and to strengthen the forces maintaining stagnation or regression.” Rich Lands and Poor (New York, 1957), p. 53.
10 An attempt was made by Frank L. Owsley and his students to prove that the Southern yeomanry was strong and prosperous. For a summary treatment see Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge, La., 1949). This view was convincingly refuted by Fabian Linden, “Economic Democracy in the Slave South: An Appraisal of Some Recent Views,” JNH, XXXI (April 1946), 140–89.
11 Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York, 1957), p. 194.
12 The best introduction to this period of Western banking is the unpublished doctoral dissertation of Carter H. Golembe, “State Banks and the Economic Development of the West, 1830–1844,” Columbia University, 1952, esp. pp. 10, 82–91. Cf. Bray Hammond, “Long and Short Term Credit in Early American Banking,” QJE, XLIX (Nov. 1934), esp. p. 87.
13 Slavery impeded white immigration by presenting Europeans with an aristocratic, caste-ridden society that scarcely disguised its contempt for the working classes. The economic opportunities in the North were, in most respects, far greater. When white labor was used in Southern factories, it was not always superior to slave labor. The incentives offered by the Northern economic and social system were largely missing; opportunities for acquiring skills were fewer; in general, productivity was much lower than in the North.
14 Richard C. Wade’s recent Slavery in the Cities (New York, 1964) provides new support for these conclusions.
15 William Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry (first published in 1845; Graniteville, S.C., 1941), p. 4. Original emphasis.
16 Consider the experience of the locomotive, paper, and cotton manufacturers as reported in: Carrol H. Quenzel, “The Manufacture of Locomotives and Cars in Alexandria in the 1850’s,” VMHB, LXII (April 1954), 182 ff; Ernest M. Lander, Jr., “Paper Manufacturing in South Carolina before the Civil War,” NCHR, XXIX (April 1952), 225 ff; Adelaide L. Fries, “One Hundred Years of Textiles in Salem,” NCHR, XXVII (Jan. 1950), 13.
17 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2 vols.; New York, 1945), I, 364.
18 Achille Murat, America and the Americans (Buffalo, 1851), pp. 19, 75.
19 J. W. D. in the Southern Eclectic, II (Sept. 1853), 63–66.
20 Address to the Virginia State Agricultural Society (Richmond, Va., 1853), p. 9.
21 Diary dated Aug. 25, 1855, but clearly written later. Ms. in the University of North Carolina.
22 William M. Sanford (?), Southern Dial, I (Nov. 1857), 9.
23 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (2 vols.; London, 1910), I, 183 ff.
24 Cf. Karl Marx, Capital (3 vols.; New York, 1947), I, 41–55.
25 Everard Green Baker Diary, Feb. 13, 1849, in the University of North Carolina. The entry was unfinished.
26 These measures met opposition from powerful sections of the slaveholding class for reasons that cannot be discussed here. The independence of the South would only have brought the latent intraclass antagonisms to the surface.
27 The loyalty of these classes was real but unstable. For our present purposes let us merely note that Lincoln’s election and federal patronage would, if Southern fears were justified, have led to the formation of an antiplanter party in the South.
PART TWO
What these men of slow voices and leisurely bearing and great capacity for intimate personal relationships and inbred fondness for power stood for at Washington was not slavery alone, not cotton and rice and sugar-cane alone, not agriculture alone, but the whole social organism, the whole civilization …
■ WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN
The Lower South in American History
Two ■ The Low Productivity of Southern Slave Labor: Causes and Effects
The economic backwardness that condemned the slaveholding South to defeat in 1861–1865 had at its root the low productivity of labor, which expressed itself in several ways. Most significant was the carelessness and wastefulness of the slaves. Bondage forced the Negro to give his labor grudgingly and badly, and his poor work habits retarded those social and economic advances that could have raised the general level of productivity. Less direct were limitations imposed on the free work force, on technological development, and on the division of labor.
Although the debate on slave productivity is an old one, few arguments have appeared during the last hundred years to supplement those of contemporaries like John Elliott Cairnes and Edmund Ruffin. Cairnes made the much-assailed assertion that the slave was so defective in versatility that his labor could be exploited profitably only if he were taught one task and kept at it. If we allow for exaggeration, Cairnes’s thesis is sound. Most competent observers agreed that slaves worked badly, without interest or effort. Edmund Ruffin, although sometimes arguing the reverse, pointed out that whereas at one time cheap, fertile farmland required little skill, soil exhaustion had finally created conditions demanding the intelligent participation of the labor force.1 Ruffin neither developed his idea nor drew the appropriate conclusions. The systematic education and training of the slaves would have been politically dangerous. The use of skilled workers would increasingly have required a smaller slave force, which would in turn have depended on expanding markets for surplus slaves and thus could not have been realized in the South as a whole. Other Southerners simply dropped the matter with the observation that the difference in productivity between free and slave labor only illustrated how well the Negroes were treated.2