The Political Economy of Slavery. Eugene D. Genovese

AHR American Historical Review AHQ Alabama Historical Quarterly DBR De Bow’s Review GHQ Georgia Historical Quarterly HMM Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine JEBH Journal of Economic and Business History JEH Journal of Economic History JMH Journal of Mississippi History JNH Journal of Negro History JPE Journal of Political Economy JSH Journal of Southern History LHQ Louisiana Historical Quarterly MHR Missouri Historical Review MVHR Mississippi Valley Historical Review NCHR North Carolina Historical Review PSQ Political Science Quarterly QJE Quarterly Journal of Economics SAQ South Atlantic Quarterly SCHGM South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine (The word “Genealogical” is no longer in the title, but for convenience the same abbreviation is used for both the earlier and later volumes.) SEJ Southern Economic Journal SHQ Southwestern Historical Quarterly SQR Southern Quarterly Review THR Textile History Review (The early volumes were called Cotton History Review, but for convenience the same abbreviation is used.) VMHB Virginia Magazine of History and Biography

      The Political Economy of Slavery ■ Studies in the Economy & Society of the Slave South

      ■ Plantation slavery had in strictly business aspects at least as many drawbacks as it had attractions. But in the large it was less a business than a life; it made fewer fortunes than it made men.

      ■ ULRICH BONNELL PHILLIPS

      Introduction

      

One

      These studies fall under the rubric of “the political economy of slavery,” not “the economics of slavery,” because they are concerned less with economics or even economic history as generally understood than with the economic aspect of a society in crisis. They argue that slavery gave the South a social system and a civilization with a distinct class structure, political community, economy, ideology, and set of psychological patterns and that, as a result, the South increasingly grew away from the rest of the nation and from the rapidly developing sections of the world. That this civilization had difficulty in surviving during the nineteenth century—a bourgeois century if any deserves the name—raises only minor problems. The difficulty, from this point of view, was neither economic, nor political, nor moral, nor ideological; it was all of these, which constituted manifestations of a fundamental antagonism between modern and premodern worlds.

      The premodern quality of the Southern world was imparted to it by its dominant slaveholding class. Slavery has existed in many places, side by side with other labor systems, without producing anything like the civilization of the South. Slavery gave the South a special way of life because it provided the basis for a regional social order in which the slave labor system could dominate all others. Southern slavery was not “mere slavery”—to recall Louis Hartz’s luckless term—but the foundation on which rose a powerful and remarkable social class: a class constituting only a tiny portion of the white population and yet so powerful and remarkable as to try, with more success than our neo-abolitionists care to see, to build a new, or rather to rebuild an old, civilization.

      The first of these studies, “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” sketches the main features of antebellum Southern civilization, which it describes as having been moving steadily into a general crisis of society as a whole and especially of its dominant slaveholding class.¹ The slaveholders’ economic and political interests, as well as ideological and psychological commitments, clashed at many points with those of Northern and European capitalists, farmers, and laborers. The successful defense of slavery presupposed an adequate rate of material growth, but the South could not keep pace with an increasingly hostile North in population growth, manufacturing, transportation, or even agricultural development. The weaknesses of Southern agriculture were especially dangerous and galling to the regime-dangerous because without adequate agricultural progress other kinds of material progress were difficult to effect; galling because Southerners prided themselves on their rural society and its alleged virtues.

      Part Two examines the agricultural base of the Southern economy and especially labor productivity, soil exhaustion, the quantity and quality of livestock, crop diversification, and the movement for agricultural reform. These studies attempt to demonstrate that the efforts of Southerners to develop a sound agricultural economy within the slave system were yielding meager results and had little hope of success as measured by the general and political needs of the slaveholders.

      Part Three consists of three studies that take up some of the more important impediments to industrialization: the retardation of demand, the ambiguous position of the industrialists in a slaveholding society, and the relationship of the slaveholding planters to industrial development. These subjects do not exhaust the list of impediments, and none of the studies pretends to exhaust its particular subject. They are submitted in the hope that they demonstrate the partial and restricted nature of industrial advance under the slaveholders’ regime.

      Part Four begins with a paper on “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism,” which may serve as a conclusion for the book as a whole.