Introduction
Some scholars of American history suggest that the institution of slavery was dying on the eve of the Civil War, implying that the war itself was fought because of the more general, philosophical principles of state rights, and not because of slavery itself.
The economic data show that this conclusion is largely wrong.
No slavery, no survival
In the decades following the presentation of Alexander Hamilton's famous Industrial Manufacturing Report, in which Congress called for support for domestic manufacturing and technological innovation to reduce dependence on expensive foreign exports and free the United States from economic deficits, the North exploded in factory industries supporting worker growth. class. The South, while taking advantage of some of the benefits of this, remained committed to its structure of slave labor, supporting the dominant aristocracy formed through a system of wealthy plantation owners, poor sharecroppers, and disenfranchised black workers.
In the pre-war period, along with the expansion of the manufacturing and textile industries, the North saw an expansion of its agricultural economy, with a variety of crops grown. The South, however, continued to be heavily dependent on international demand for a stable cotton crop that sustained the southern economy.
By the 1830s, more than half of the value of all US exports came from cotton. By 1850, more than half of the slaves in the Southern States were working on cotton plantations, with approximately 75% of their production exported overseas as a critical component of the 19th century global industrial revolution.
In 1860, one study conservatively estimated that the number of slaves was 45.8% of the total population of the five leading cotton states, although only two-thirds of the South's population owned no more than fifty slaves. To put this in perspective, all land capital, buildings and other real estate together accounted for 35.5% of total wealth in the top five cotton producing states.
This blatantly unequal system was held together by a sense of a peculiar white superiority and racial control over the black population.
Thus, the economies of both the North and the South were at the peak of productivity growth in the pre-war period, which refutes the hypotheses of many historians who argued that the slave system stalled the economic development of the South in the mid-1800s and became unprofitable for slave owners on the eve of the Civil war.
The reason the slave system persisted was solely for the purpose of controlling blacks, who were considered wild semi-animals.
There is ample evidence that the institution of slavery did not slow down, but actually expanded and proved to be more profitable than ever, just on the eve of the Civil War.
Prior to the violent debate about the abolition of slavery that preceded the Civil War, black people were viewed as non-European at best, content with their role as enslaved workers and domestic workers, so the vast majority of white Americans, in both the North and the South, believed that slavery was the ultimate the score is "good" for blacks.
Capitalization of Labor and the Marginal Product of Labor
In an economic context, there is ample evidence that the "slavecracy" of the South did not in any way impede southern agricultural prosperity or its own extinction on the eve of the Civil War.
According to analysis by economic historian Gerald Gunderson in 1974, about half of the population of the cotton states was enslaved. The per capita income of free whites was particularly high in Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina. In these states, the share of these incomes from slavery averaged 30.6%, reaching 41.7% in Alabama and 35.8% in South Carolina.
From 1821 to 1825, the capitalized rent for an 18-year-old male slave was 58% of the average price. This number grew rapidly over a decade, reaching 75 percent in 1835, before jumping to 99 percent by 1860. There is a clear upward trend in the market value of the 18-year-old male slave above the costs spent on him before that age, nearly double the threshold on the eve of the Civil War.
Another component of capitalized rent is income earned during the childhood of a slave, income whose upward trajectory is clearly visible in the cumulative rise in value from 1821 to 1860. As a result of studying these factors of growth in the value of enslaved labor, one can come to the conclusion that in the pre-war South, slavery steadily strengthened its economic position.
Slavery did not die out on the eve of the Civil War. It flourished, expanding every day.
But in terms of profitability, the long-term downward trend in cotton prices can be said to indicate a decline in the profitability of enslaved labor.
True, cotton remained the main commodity in the North and among international buyers, and cotton production showed no signs of backwardness.
A mere glance at cotton prices was a self-evident constraint that ruled out the possibility of slavery spreading to other agricultural industries, such as the growing grain industry of the Midwest, as well as other potential crops on the expanding western frontier.
Some scholars argue that, in general, as long as the marginal product of slave labor minus the subsistence level exceeded the marginal product of free labor minus the market wage rate, there was profit and economic surplus for exploitation.
There is clear evidence that both through the lens of economics and through changing cultural dynamics surrounding cultural perceptions of black people, the “slavecracy” of the South flourished in the pre-war era and showed no signs of extinction on its own. The Confederate stakeholders had a very real economic interest in ending the abolition of slavery and fighting against the Union during the Civil War.
