By "bourgeois", Oakes means here the classical English political economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and their followers. Classical economics was based on the assumptions operative in capitalist firms and economies, one of which that free labor were more efficient than compelled labor of the type seen in feudal serfdom and slavery. In the late 18th century and early 19th, both supporters and opponents of slavery made this assumption. In one interesting side observation, Oakes notes that it's possible that Adam Smith's views on slavery were directly influenced by Benjamin Franklin's 1751 essay, Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. ... Smith's own statement on the inefficiency of slave versus free labor in his famous Wealth of Nations (1776) was, "The experience of all ages demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any."
But there were empirical problems with this theory. For one thing, slaveowners kept buying and using slaves despite their theoretically inferior efficiency to free wage labor. For another, the slave economies of the South thrived over a long period of time. And, as Oakes reminds us that historical studies using quantitative economic analysis have generally settled the question of slavery's economic viability in terms of the assumptions of neoclassical market economics:
... neo-classical economics gave rise to a "cliometric revolution" that has definitively established slavery’s economic profitability. In neo-classical terms if slavery was profitable it was by definition viable. Thus not only have the terms of the debate shifted, but the question of slavery’s profitability is no longer in play for most of us. [my emphasis]But neoclassical economics, of which Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) was the most famous exponent, emerged after Southern slavery had been destroyed. Marshall's Principles of Economics appeared in 1890.
Various approaches were used to explain slavery's continuing prosperity within the terms of classical economics. One was to draw on Malthus' theory of population dispersion and to argue that the massive available of land in North America, i.e., Indian land which could be taken by whites, drew the more efficient free labor west, requiring slavery as a system of coerced labor to maintain the agricultural economies of the South. Otherwise, too many laborers would move west to allow the Southern economies to thrive.
Another was to focus on particular qualities of crops like cotton and tobacco to argue that their particular qualities as physical and economic goods required slave rather than free labor. Oakes quotes William Goode from the Virginia Legislature's debate over slavery in 1831-1932 making this case:
Among small farmers and graziers in the western and northern states, Goode explained, the demand for labor was “but occasional.” For such enterprises, it made no sense to employ slave labor. By contrast, on the tobacco, cotton, and other plantations of the South, there was “a constant, and unremitted demand for a regular force, the whole year round.” Thus the planter’s operations “must not depend on any precarious supply of labor; it must be certain, and always at command.”Eventually, a racial justification moved to prominence. While traces of the old, patriarchal justifications of race-based slavery as a way of raising the "lower" black race to American levels of civilization persisted in the Upper South, in the decades before the Civil War a pseudo-scientific racism became the preferred ideological justification for the Peculiar Institution. Oakes says that Thomas Roderick Dew came "within an intellectual millimeter" of this argument in his analysis of the Virginia slavery debate.
In the economic variant of this new brand of racism, it wasn't slave labor that was inferior to free labor, it was black people who were inferior to whites. And therefore slavery was required to get profitable labor from the "inferior" black race. Pro-slavery polemicists like David Christie and James Henry Hammond, Samuel Cartwright and Edmund Ruffin pressed this racist case. In this way, they avoid rejecting the classical economists' argument for the superiority of free labor entirely by carving out an enormous exception for black labor. Oakes summarizes Ruffin's version of this argument:
Here was a theory of political economy that simultaneously preserved and evaded the implications of the bourgeois critique of slavery. In northern climates where white people worked, the general laws of classical economics applied. But in tropical climates, nobody would work except by compulsion. And black people would never work hard, in any climate, except by compulsion. Hence the reason southern slavery was profitable: it generated wealth from an otherwise unproductive people in an otherwise unproductive climate.Abraham Lincoln did not employ the classical economic argument that slavery was inefficient. He based his opposition to slavery on a moral argument. But Oakes argues that the effectiveness of Lincoln's argument was also based on assumptions of classical political economy:
To be sure, classical political economy could not see that a careful balance of economic rationalization and physical coercion could make slavery profitable, even for centuries. But it did see that the social relations of slave society could not be understood from the simple observation that the masters made a lot of money. This was the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln finally came to. He had very little to say about slavery before the 1850s. The available fragments of his early thinking suggest that he accepted the classical theory of slavery’s economic inferiority. But after the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, when he began to speak of slavery at length, Lincoln never claimed that free labor was economically superior, nor did he evince any faith in its inevitable demise. In this he parted company with his fellow Republican, William H. Seward. To be sure, Lincoln understood the profound difference between slavery and free labor, and he could articulate those differences with piercing clarity. But for Lincoln, the political economy of slavery was immoral not because it wrecked the southern economy, but because it took from the mouths of enslaved men and women the bread they had earned. For this reason above all others, slavery was simply wrong. Absent the power of classical political economy, Lincoln’s argument would have carried no weight.Even though the most adamant defenders of slavery had abandoned the classical economic position of Franklin and Smith, there were still critics of slavery like Seward who were arguing on the basis of the inferiority of slave labor to free, founded in classical economics.
Lincoln wasn't entirely married to traditional classical economics, though, as he illustrated in his first State of the Union Address on Dec. 3, 1861:
It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.Oakes writes near the end of his essay:
Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. [my emphasis]
It retrospect it is not easy to fathom why nineteenth-century Americans struggled so hard to explain slavery’s profitability. We live on the other side of two intellectual transformations that have distanced us from the mindset of antebellum America. The first was the theoretical development of “neoclassical” economics, led by Alfred Marshall and others in the late nineteenth century. Economists ever since then have turned away from the labor theory of value and have focused their attention instead on the operation of markets. This has long since become the standard framework within which Americans discuss the economy. Some of this shift was breaking through in the antebellum debate over slavery’s efficiency, but for the most part the participants made their points within the terms of classical rather than neo-classical economic theory. [my emphasis]Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south
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