A Few Random Thoughts on Capitalism and Slavery

Too much is made of the supposedly vast methodological divide between economic historians and the rest of us. Of course I can’t understand the econometric equations that fill many of the pages in economic history journals. But neither can I understand the ancient Greek that is spread so thickly in the classical studies journal Acta Classica. I can’t read anything in Humanitas Taiwanica. But that never stopped me from reading The Ancient Economy by M. I. Finley. I can still be awed by Robert Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages and have no trouble reading books by Chris Wickham or Robert Bartlett.  I’m the farthest thing from an Asian history scholar, but I’ve enjoyed the books I’ve read by Frederick Wakeman and Jonathan Spence. In fact, I would be out of touch with my own field if I did not read Kenneth Pomeranz or Prassannan Parthasarathi.

So too with economic history. The fact that I was not trained as an econometrician did not mean I could not understand books by Douglass North, Albert Fishlow, Richard Sutch, Gavin Wright, or Robert Fogel. What was true when I was a youngster is just as true today. Does anyone have trouble following Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth? Shouldn’t Lindert and Williamson’s Unequal Gains be required reading for all US historians? It takes a while to get through Findlay and O’Rourke’s Power and Plenty, but not because it’s hard to follow. Is Creating Abundance by Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode the least bit indecipherable to those of us who are not trained as economic historians?

It’s not that there are no methods specific to economic history. The point is that some intractable methodological divide will not explain the criticism of the  New History of Capitalism [NHC] by economic historians. Nor are economic historians the only folks leveling the criticism. It will not do to pretend otherwise.

Nor will it do to treat criticism of some historians as if it were criticism of the New History of Capitalism in general. If the broader purpose of the NHC is to revive the history of capitalism, especially as an exploration of the way power is distributed and exercised in society, it must be seen as a welcome development. But it’s worth pointing out that although economic historians sometimes focus on highly technical problems the best of them have long studied the distribution of economic and political power. Few mainstream historians can match Gavin Wright’s skill in analyzing the way the property right gave slave owners the power to construct an economy that employers of free or indentured labor could not. As of now, Unequal Gains is the definitive account of the distribution and maldistribution of wealth over the long course of American history. Still, the NHC’s emphasis on capitalism as power seems exactly right.

Moreover, if we take the contributors to Slavery’s Capitalism as representative of the larger project, it will not do to focus on the most controversial elements as representative. Bonnie Martin’s deep research into mortgages on slaves is both impressive and innovative; it needs only to be incorporated into the broader credit system of the slave South. John Majewski’s essay adds to his already impressive body of scholarship and, in its emphasis on the fundamental differences between the northern and southern economies, goes against the grain of editors’ introduction. One of those editors, Seth Rockman, is the author of a richly detailed study of working-class experience on the ground in Baltimore, revealing all the strengths but also many of the limitations of social history organized around “experience.” The other editor, Sven Beckert, is the author of an erudite and theoretically sophisticated history of the “empire of cotton,” despite my misgivings about whether the history of capitalism can be told through the history of a commodity.

These are all very different historians with very different approaches to the history of capitalism. It’s important to keep this in perspective when we take into account what the critics of the NHC have had to say. The problems they cite are, to repeat, not grounded in methodological difference. They are most often straightforward and old-fashioned problems, others are recent but quite serious, and some are definitional.

The straightforward problem is the factual errors and unsupported assertions made by scholars who make audacious claims about economic history that are manifestly false and who evince no evidence of having seriously engaged with the economic historians who have studied the same problems with far more rigor. So when a prominent historian wonders at the paradox of a southern agricultural economy in which the slaves were starving and had to be fed with grains imported from the Midwest, the problem is not methodological. The problem is a basic factual error based on a startling ignorance of the scholarship. And it is not a minor error. The self-sufficiency of slave plantations had significant consequences for the southern economy as a whole, not to mention its implications for the relationship between southern slavery and northern capitalism.

A different sort of factual error arose in the claim made by Edward Baptist that the four-fold increase in the productivity of southern cotton farms was a consequence of a daily quota system imposed on slaves by owners who kept fastidious records of daily picking rates.  Baptist and his defenders tried to make this into a methodological issue based on different types of sources, when in fact the indispensable source he cited — the plantation record books — easily disprove his factual claim. It’s worth spending some time on this to demonstrate why this is not a methodological issue.

Scans of many plantation record books are readily available online and I occasionally distribute pages from them to my students. It takes them about a minute to notice that, from one day to the next, the slaves are not meeting or exceeding a quota. The day-to-day picking weights are all over the place and, again, anyone who reads the logbook entries can see why: It rained in the afternoon so picking stopped; the grass was getting too thick so work shifted from picking to weeding; there was rust on the plants or worms that had to be dealt with; so-and-so was sick. The sheer amount of cotton available for picking varied from week to week. There were a dozen reasons why slaves could not possibly pick the same or more cotton from one day to the next. To be sure, there were patterns in picking rates over the course of the harvesting season, but the patterns further disprove Baptist’s claim. Daily picking rates, on average, rose rapidly in the first weeks of the harvest, beginning around late August; they peaked about a month later, and then began a slow steady decline through October, November, and December, until the last of the cotton was picked. This means that for most of the harvest season average daily picking rates declined. Either the quota system failed miserably, or there was no quota system.

There are still more basic reasons why a quota system based on close supervision of daily picking rates cannot account for the four-fold productivity increase in cotton production after 1800. That increase began in the first decades of the nineteenth century when new seeds were initially introduced, picked up in the 1820s as the “black belt” was settled, and may have begun leveling off in the 1850s. By contrast, the first edition of Affleck’s cotton record book did not appear until 1847, long after most of the productivity increase had occurred. The record books were most widely used in the 1850s, when the productivity may have been levelling off.  Furthermore, only a fraction of the planters ever used the books, and picking weights were diligently recorded in only a fraction of the books that were used. In short, Baptist’s claim is not only unsupported by the evidence, it is manifestly disproven by the evidence. I’m not an economic historian. I have no expertise in econometric analysis, and neither do my students. But we can all see the problem with Baptist’s claim, and it has nothing to do with the difference in the way economic historians go about their work.

Everybody makes mistakes, and Baptist’s error would not matter so much were it not for broad claims he made for the quota system as the source of productivity increases, and the astonishing disdain he and his supporters expressed toward the economic historians who pointed out his errors. He went so far as to imply that his critics were racists, and all over Twitter Baptist’s defenders paraded their philistine contempt for economic history as a badge of honor. No doubt it was this rancorous response to his critics that accounts for the harsh tone of subsequent replies to Baptist, including my own.

I suspect — and this is just speculation on my part — that what’s going on here is not a methodological difference but a difference of professional cultures. Economists, including economic historians, enjoy a vigorous culture of robust dispute in which disagreement is encouraged and not taken personally, whereas social and cultural historians have a tendency to look askance and sharp criticism, disengage, and too often interpret disagreement as evidence of political apostasy.

If mainstream historians are largely unfamiliar with the disputatious culture of economic historians it’s because sometime in the 1980s history graduate students stopped being expected to demonstrate any basic familiarity with economic history. The triumph of cultural studies has produced a narrowness among many mainstream historians that is less of a problem among economic historians. I’m dismayed when I hear graduate students proclaim that they will read economic history only when economic historians read cultural history. Pick up a book by Joel Mokyr or Diedre McCloskey and you can’t help but notice that there are prominent economic historians who have made strong arguments for the cultural origins of capitalism. (And, I would add, not many historians write prose as engaging as McCloskey’s.) Time after time I read books and articles by mainstream historians making bold, error-ridden claims about American economic development and search in vain for a footnote citation to the economic history scholarship that would justify the claims. By contrast, books written by the most thoroughgoing cliometricians regularly cite, respectfully, the work of mainstream historians. Fogel and Engerman incited many of their fellow economic historians in large measure because it was so disrespectful of scholars like Kenneth Stampp.

Mind you, because I entered graduate school the year Time on the Cross was published, when the attacks on it were pouring forth from some of my own teachers, I’m as aware as anyone of the hubris that some econometric historians brought to the study of slavery.  And recent essays by Richard Sutch and Eric Hilt demonstrate both the achievements as well as the limitations of cliometric history. One the one hand, some basic issues about profitability, productivity, slave diets, and a few other aspects of the cotton economy have been settled. There is now something of a consensus among economic historians that in the eighteenth century slavery and the slave trade were integral to the economic development of Great Britain during the critical early decades of the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, there are plenty of important questions that econometric history alone is not adequate to address. Most economic historians don’t deal in terms like “capitalism,” and so have not been as fully engaged as others — David Eltis, Joseph Miller and Robin Blackburn, for example — with the critical question of the relationship between capitalist development and slavery in the modern world. And that’s OK. Cultural historians don’t calculate GDP or productivity increases, and that’s OK too.

But the difference doesn’t have much to do with some eccentric penchant for counterfactual claims among economic historians. Max Weber pointed out long ago that all causal historical claims contain implicit counterfactuals. When I first started giving talks about the antislavery project that provoked secession I was invariably asked, “Would the project have worked without the Civil War?” A counterfactual question. And when I answer that the Civil War was a necessary but not sufficient explanation for the abolition of slavery in the United States, I am implicitly saying: “Take away the Civil War and slavery would not have been abolished in 1865.” Here’s another example.  Caitlin Rosenthal notes that planters developed the most sophisticated accounting procedures for calculating depreciation in antebellum America, but that they were not the precedent for the more enduring accounting techniques developed by northern manufacturers after the Civil War. We can reframe that insight as a counterfactual:  The later methods of depreciation would have developed even without those earlier slave depreciation calculations. This is not fundamentally different from saying: “Take away slavery and the Industrial Revolution in England would still have happened, only more slowly.” When economic historians tell us this, they do not mean that slavery and the slave trade were not integral to the Industrial Revolution.

The problem arises when historians claim that all the wealth of advanced capitalist nations depended on slavery or that industrialization could not have happened without slavery. Not only do such statements imply strong counterfactual claims, but they are also dependent on implicit theories of capitalist development. And this is where the question of definitions and theoretical premises comes into play.

As Rosenthal points out, the New Economic Historians have been taken to task for claiming to write about “capitalism” without telling readers what they mean by the word. But for me, the problem is not that historians should define their terms. The problem is that the historians who claim to be studying capitalism “on the ground” are, unavoidably, already defining the term in the very process of choosing which “ground” they look at. I don’t think its possible to say you’re studying capitalism without defining the term, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Consider the theory of economic development implicit in much of the NHC and which is quite widespread among historians and the public. Broadly speaking, the theory holds that the profits of large scale enterprises (in this case slave plantations) are filtered through the financial system from whence they “trickle down” into investments in new businesses (in this case northern industries). Today we would call this supply-side economics. It is the theory reproduced in Matthew Desmond’s disgraceful essay in the 1619 Project, an error that virtually distills the most egregious errors made by some of the new historians of capitalism. The slaveholders accumulated enormous wealth, Desmond argues, and that wealth was the basis of northern prosperity and development. Right. And thanks to the staggering wealth accumulated by Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates, American workers have likewise enjoyed several decades unprecedented affluence! This kind of argument can be found six days a week on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Let’s promote investment by lowering taxes on the rich so that profits can be filtered down to new investments. Now, thanks to the NHC, the paper’s editors have a compelling precedent from American history: The extreme concentration of wealth among southern planters was the basis of northern economic development!

This trickle-down theory is opposed to one that holds that a relatively equitable distribution of farmland among market-dependent families, together with historically high wages, produced a dynamic interaction between the city and the countryside that sustained the unusually rapid development of the northern economy. As Gavin Wright has argued, it was not slavery but the abolition of slavery that set the northern economy on a path of robust economic development.

I’ve posited this admittedly simple dichotomy between two competing theories in order to highlight the crucial importance of the theoretical premises we bring to bear on the study of the study of slavery and capitalism. One theory holds that the concentration of wealth based on the enslavement of millions of workers is an especially effective way to generate economic development. The other holds that high wages and a relatively equitable distribution of wealth are the best way to promote robust economic development. I consider most of the NHC theoretically naïve, not because supply side economics is indefensible (although I find it completely unpersuasive), but because the scholars promoting it seem oblivious to their own theoretical premises. Use whatever definition of capitalism you prefer, but acknowledge your definition and be prepared to defend it.

Rosenthal herself defines capitalism as the commodification of labor, a definition that encompasses both wage labor and slavery. I’m not convinced that the commodification of labor power is the same thing as the commodification of laborers. Rosenthal quotes Scott Marler’s point that if capitalism means wage labor then slavery is not capitalist by definition, and she seems to object to that definition on just that ground — that it rules out the possibility that slavery was a capitalist system of exploitation. But Marler’s definition of capitalism has a long intellectual pedigree unrelated to slavery, whereas Rosenthal seems intent on conjuring up a definition that will, a priori, produce the result she wants — a definition that encompasses both slavery and wage labor.

Oddly, what’s missing from her list of alternative definitions is the one that has been most prominent among the critics of the NHC who are not economic historians.  Charles Post and John Clegg are both sociologists. Like myself, they are not economic historians. But although we arrive at different conclusions, we all start from Robert Brenner’s definition of capitalism as systemic market dependency. This definition is similar to the one that emerged separately some decades ago among historians who debated the transition to capitalism in the northern states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The grand synthesis of this approach came with Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution, which depicted the slaveholders as capitalists par excellence. (For what it’s worth, Sellers was probably the single most important influence on me as a graduate student.) More recently, through an ingenious analysis of the credit market in the slave South, Clegg comes to a similar conclusion — that southern slavery was fundamentally a capitalist system of production.

But that conclusion is not foreordained by Brenner’s definition. For Post, for example, slave labor was directly dominated by slaveholders rather than driven by the market imperatives of a wage labor system, and so for him southern slavery was fundamentally a non-capitalist system.

A good theory is not straight-jacket; it establishes guidelines and priorities for empirical research. Post and Clegg are two of the smartest students of the southern slave economy, and the fact that they reach different conclusions operating from identical theoretical premises is, to me at least, encouraging but also telling. Telling enough that I’m inclined to split the difference and fall back on Eugene Genovese’s old observation that southern slavery was a “hybrid” system. Genovese never really explained what he meant by that, and I’ve never found the proposition that the slave South was “in-but-not-of capitalism” a particularly helpful formulation.

But Brenner helps. Start from his observation that social property relations register along three distinct axes: between exploiter and exploiter; between exploiter and exploited, and among the exploited. Apply this to the southern slave economy and you get relations between slaveholders and slaveholders, between masters and slaves, and among slaves themselves. What Clegg shows, and what I’ve long believed, is that the slaveholders were forced to compete with one another because all were dependent on a credit market that required them to engage in the profit-maximizing behavior of capitalists. Gavin Wright made a similar point quite a while ago, in a book I read while I was working on my dissertation.

On the other hand, the relationship between master and slave was not mediated by the market, just as Post argues. The slaves were compelled to work by the direct domination of their owners, not because they were forced by economic necessity to sell their labor power in order to survive. The slaveholder’s domination was secured by a property right in the laborer, not in the slave’s labor power. Nor did the slaves encounter one another as competitors in a wage labor market.

Hence the hybrid nature of the slave economy. Slaveholders could not extricate themselves from the competitive demands of the global market. They owned the most valuable southern “capital” and they were market dependent. You could say, then, that the slaveholders were “capitalists.” I certainly would not object to that. But the slaves did not compete with one another in a labor market and their labor was driven not by economic necessity but by the direct power of the slaveholders. They were not a capitalist proletariat.

This is not to say that slave life was untouched by the market. Hardly. They were bought and sold. Their owners’ very market dependency put slave families and communities at perpetual risk of being disrupted by bankruptcies and failures, credit crunches, and depressions, not to mention the whims and fancies of owners. But this merely confirms my own sense that the slave economy was a hybrid system marked by fundamentally capitalist and fundamentally non-capitalist elements. This is not an unfamiliar thing. Capitalist economies, more often than not, depend on seemingly non-capitalist elements. Consider, for example, the critical issue of domestic patriarchy.

It’s important to keep in mind that before the Civil War the North was still a predominantly rural economy, one in which most of the labor available was contained within patriarchal farm families. When a woman married her property came under the legal control of her husband. Husbands had sexual access to their wives as a matter of conjugal right. Husbands and fathers “represented” wives and children in public life. Women could not vote, sign contracts, sue or be sued — at least not legally. The gender and age-based division of farm labor operated within these patriarchal constraints. Children owed their labor to the family until they reached adulthood, when they were legally “emancipated.” As those families became increasingly dependent on the market for their livelihood, the limited labor supply available within the family generated a powerful incentive to specialize in marketable crops, to hybridize farm animals and seeds to make them more productive, and ultimately to mechanize production. The city and the countryside developed in dynamic inter-relationship. Work itself changed. Families nearest to cities switched dairy farming, further out they produced fruits and vegetables. Women ceased to spin yarn and weave cloth because store-bought fabric and clothing were more efficient. Market-oriented specialization made it possible for northern families to prosper even as women reduced the family’s labor supply by reducing the number of children they bore. Families became consumers as well as producers, and a robust consumer market became the critical basis of capitalist development in the North.

But slave labor liberated owners from the constraints of domestic patriarchy. With the purchase of the first slave the gender and age-based division of labor in slaveholding families began to change until “work” among family members became largely administrative and managerial. This was not the pattern on northern farms. At the same time, slavery allowed masters to inflict levels of violence on slaves that were legally and culturally impermissible within the family. Legal marriage gave husbands sexual access only to wives; slavery gave masters sexual access to human beings outside the family, without the legal consequences of adultery. A father who had sex with his daughter committed the crime of incest, whereas slaveholders had sexual access to their human property of any age or gender. All of this was possible because of the slaves’ exclusion from the patriarchal family. Slave families themselves had no legal standing, hence obligations and restraints of legal patriarchy were essentially irrelevant to their working lives.  For good reason Claude Meillasoux declared that slavery was “the anthesis of family.”

Not surprisingly, a paternalist defense of the patriarchal family became a central theme of the northern critique of slavery. The bonds of the marriage contract were real and consequential for women, but the contracts imposed limits and responsibilities on husbands and fathers as well. Hence the assumption, running like a red line through Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that the bonds of patriarchy protected northern women and children, whereas slavery exposed women to barbarous sexual abuse and stripped husbands of their power to protect their wives and children. Negotiations are a feature of all power relations, including the relations of master and slave, but slaveholders had no need to sign contracts with their slaves, and no slave ever contracted to be owned.

The economic consequences of the slaveholders’ escape from the restraints of patriarchy were profound. It gave slaveholders a steady source of labor above and beyond the members of the family. Because slaveholders could increase production by increasing the number of slaves there was little incentive to mechanize beyond what was necessary to remove bottlenecks. Owners could adjust the size of their labor force by selling slaves in hard times and buying them when cotton prices were high. In making these adjustments slaveowners were free to break up slave families at will. It was difficult for a husband to divorce a wife, but an owner could dispose of a troublesome slave, almost literally, at the drop of a dime — precisely because slaves were not members of the family and the slaves’ own family ties presented no legal barrier. A father lost control of much of his family’s labor when his children reached adulthood; a slaveholder never had to worry about that.

We can speak of the concentration of slaveholder wealth because slaves were accumulated as capital assets. Wives and children don’t figure in those calculations because their roles in the economy were fundamentally different.  As economic historians long ago demonstrated, because slaves were a form of “fixed capital” their owners had a powerful incentive to keep them busy year-round and to minimize costs by making sure that the slaves produce their own food.  The result was a plantation economy that was largely self-sufficient.  Consequently, there were millions of slaves in the Old South but not many consumers. The dynamic relationship between farm families and market towns and cities, a fundamental characteristic of the northern economy, was largely absent from the South. Not even Baltimore developed the kind of relationship with its hinterland that was true of Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Cleveland, and Chicago, because the hinterland around Baltimore was slave country.

All of this made the slave economy different, again in fundamental ways, from the consumer-driven economy of the North. The differences put the two regions on very different long-term trajectories. Much as I disagree with the paternalist thesis advanced by Genovese, I still consider The Political Economy of Slavery one of the most important and influential books I’ve ever read. Indeed, decades ago, before my own first book was published, I gave a job talk at Princeton in which I argued that whereas the slave economy grew, the northern economy developed. My understanding of that distinction has gotten more complicated over time, but it still serves as a relatively decent shorthand for capturing those distinctive economic trajectories. And as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, take those differences away and you risk falling into the old revisionist claim that the Civil War was an inexplicable accident. This is why searching for a definition of capitalism that is seemingly designed to collapse the distinction between slavery and free labor strikes me as both an analytical and historical dead end.

Many of the new historians of capitalism have made it quite clear that a major goal of their work is to demonstrate the complicity of all Americans, North and South, in the brutality of slavery, and the fascination with complicity is in turn driven by contemporary politics, especially the politics of reparations. All historians write from a political perspective, including economic historians, but complicity has never been part of economic history’s ideological baggage and my sense is that it’s practitioners find the new emphasis on complicity disconcerting. For me, complicity is a road that leads everywhere, and that makes it all but useless as an organizing framework. The only thing about it that fascinates about the scramble to expose complicity is the way historians choose to draw the boundaries of collective guilt. In an interview with Skip Gates at Harvard, for example, Nikole Hannah-Jones — editor of the 1619 Project — made it clear that she had no intention of looking into the well-documented history of African complicity in the slave trade and the reason, she said, is because she didn’t want to give white people an excuse for not paying reparations.  [And not just any reparations: “I want cash,” she says.] The same animating principle, less crudely put, seems to be at work among some of the new historians of capitalism.

And this is ironic, because from my perspective the NHC ends up letting capitalism off the hook. Let me explain. Dale Tomich’s formulation of a “second slavery” posits a useful distinction between the plantation economies of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. But the broader scholarship on the slave trade suggests that what Tomich has discerned is a third slavery. The earliest European empires engaged in the slave trade — Spain and Portugal in particular — were in many ways manifestations of feudal expansion. They did not initially build plantation economies, and the slave systems they created in the Americas did not promote economic development of the imperial centers. By the time the British got deeply involved, those earlier slave empires were in decline. Only in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the development of capitalism in northwest Europe, especially Great Britain, were vast plantation economies constructed in the New World to feed the consumer demand of populations that were now dependent on the market for their livelihoods. Sidney Mintz explored this development years ago in his still invaluable study of Sweetness and Power. Indeed, the momentous shift from a pre-capitalist “baroque” slavery to capitalist-driven plantation slavery is the central theme of the monumental works of Robin Blackburn. In this reading, it was not slavery that drove the development of capitalism, it was capitalism that drove the development of plantation slavery.

This has implications for the somewhat different question of the relationship between slavery and the Industrial Revolution, in both Britain and the United States. As I mentioned earlier, economic historians long ago demonstrated that slavery and the slave trade played an integral role in the early industrialization of England in the eighteenth century. Hardly anyone seriously disputes this. What is in dispute is the claim that slavery was the central, indispensable cause of the Industrial Revolution. This is both an empirical and an analytical dispute.

Empirically, slavery was one of many sources of investment capital. To verify this observation scholars make heroic attempts to calculate the size and locus of slavery’s contribution to the British economy in the eighteenth century, and not surprisingly they come up with different numbers. I’m less bothered than others by the conclusion that slavery played an integral, but not an indispensable role, in the early industrialization of England. But that’s because there is, for me, a prior analytical issue: Industrial development is not the same thing as capitalist development. And it’s not just Marxists who believe this. If you’re inclined to argue that southern slavery was “capitalist”, then you are virtually defining capitalism as something other than industrial society. You’re saying, in effect, that the North was an “advanced” capitalist society whereas the slave South was a “backward” capitalist society. There are worse ways to think about it.

But things look very different if you start from the assumption that capitalist development was the basic precondition for British industrialization. England was already capitalist by the late seventeenth century, when its colonial slave plantations were just gearing up. By 1700, for example, England alone had more large cities that all the rest of Europe combined. It follows that capitalist development was the cause more than the consequence of plantation slavery. Industrialization and slave plantations both owed their origins to a capitalist economy marked by widespread market dependence, that is, a capitalist economy with a broad base of consumers who had no claim to the means of production. From this perspective, it looks as though slavery needed capitalism more than capitalism needed slavery.

The same principle holds if capitalism was already in the driver’s seat by the time King Cotton arrived in the American South. Almost no cotton was being commercially produced in the North America when Arkwright built his first cotton factory in England. Slater’s mill went up in Rhode Island a year before Eli Whitney patented his gin. If capitalism could shout, it was shouting for southern cotton before there was southern cotton to be had. The slaveholders heeded the call. Cotton’s ascension to the throne was a response to, not the cause of, northern capitalism. The same could be said of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and rice. Mass, slave-based production undoubtedly pushed the demand curve to the right, but it did not create the demand.

We can certainly call the relationship between slavery and capitalism “interdependency,” but it is not the ordinary practice of political economists to describe export-based economies as the dominant partners in their relations with the importing metropoles. Such economies are more apt to be termed “colonies,” a designation that has frequently been applied to a slave South whose prosperity rested on the demand for cheap fabric by consumers who were increasingly dependent on the market to meet their needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Except the cotton South was no ordinary colony, exploited by some distant and indifferent Mother Country. Instead, the slave economy was bound constitutionally to a larger nation-state and within that state the slaveholders exercised grossly disproportionate political influence. Contemporaries had a term for this influence — they called it the Slave Power — and they resented the fact that 400,000 slaveholders seemed to dominate a nation of 32 million. How, critics asked, could this backward economy —which deprived millions of enslaved workers of the legitimate fruits of their labor, destroyed families and exposed women to ruthless exploitation, and deprived millions of poor whites of the schools, roads, and market towns that they needed to prosper — how could such a society ride roughshod over a far larger North in which children were educated, wives were protected, where farmers prospered and cities flourished? Make all the necessary allowances for Yankee hypocrisy, stare unblinkered at the racial discrimination and patriarchy and immigrant slums of the North, and the underlying truth of the Slave Power’s critics remains. There was something fundamentally different about the slave economy of the South and the capitalist economy of the North. And if there was to be any real human progress, the Slave Power had to be crushed.

 

About the author: James Oakes, one of the leading historians of nineteenth-century America, has an international reputation for path-breaking scholarship. In a series of influential books and essays, he tackled the history of the United States from the Revolution through the Civil War. His early work focused on the South, examining slavery as an economic and social system that shaped Southern life. His pioneering books include The Ruling Race (1982; 2nd ed., 1998); Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (1990); The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (2007); and his latest, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012). The latter two garnered, respectively, the 2008 and 2013 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, an annual award for the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln or the American Civil War era.