Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 4: Another side of slavery and economics

Photo of African-Americans fleeing slavery during the Civil War

In my previous post in this series, I discussed an essay by James Oakes dealing with an aspect of classical economics that figured into polemics over slavery, the notion that slavery was inherently inefficient compared to free labor.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., touches on a different aspect of slavery and economics in an article in the October 1949 Partisan Review, "The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism". He was critiquing a trend in professional US history that had become popular during the 1930s, one that borrowed considerably from Lost Cause themes. As he described it, with reference to historians like James Randall, Avery Craven, and Alan Nevins:

Scholars now denied the traditional assumption of the inevitability of the war and boldly advanced the thesis that a "blundering generation" had transformed a "repressible conflict" into a "needless war."

The basic argument of what I'll call here the Blundering Generation school ran like this: the Civil War could have been avoided; fanaticism on both sides (but especially that of the Northern Abolitionists!) made compromise impossible; slavery could have been ended without war.

At a sky-high level of abstraction, it's obvious that if everyone had been acting in good faith and with a genuine commitment to democracy and American patriotism, it's easy to conjure up a vague "what-if" scenario in which the Civil War would not have occurred. A major way in which the Blundering Generation view was a key one. They denied that slavery was the cause of the war. Schlesinger summarizes:

Nor was the slavery the cause. The issues arising over slavery were in Randall's judgment "highly artificial, almost fabricated. . . , They produced quarrels out of things that would have settled themselves were it not for political agitation." Slavery, Craven observed, was in any case a much overrated problem. It is "perfectly clear," he wrote, "that slavery played a rather minor part in the life of the South and of the Negro."

How an historian could write that last claim and not lose most of his credibility immediately is hard for me to imagine. But Craven was one of the leading historians of the Civil War.

If we take the slavery-was-not-the-cause seriously as anything more than a partisan Lost Cause slogan, it breaks down quickly when we look at the actual history. Whether it was substandard statesmanship or whatever else is alleged to be the real cause, it's a remarkable coincidence that the major crises and conflicts leading up to the war happened to be about slavery. Slavery was the subject on which the supposedly Blundering Generation blundered.

In discussing some of the major problems of this approach, Schlesinger focused on the issue of slavery and faults the Blundering Generation school of historians for failing to appreciate two major aspects of slavery in its real historical form. One of them economic, the other moral. I'll discuss his comments on the moral aspect in the next post in this series. Here I'll focus on the economic one.

The Blundering Generation school argued that slavery could have been peacefully resolved. But to say that alternative policies would have prevented war, historians would need to point to a plausible what-if case for at least one alternative. Schlesinger notes that such explanations were difficult to find in their work. James Randall, he notes, "declared that there were few policies of the [eighteen-]fifties he would wish repeated if the period were to be lived over again; but he was not communicative about the policies he would wish pursued."

Schlesinger dismisses the notion that an indefinite continuation of slavery was any kind of feasible alternative. And he considers alternative scenarios by which slavery might have been abolished without war. Compensated emancipation schemes were an option. But in practice Southern slaveowners flat-out opposed them. On the contrary, they considered slavery a "sacred institution." And as Schlesinger points out, "Abraham Lincoln made repeated proposals of compensated emancipation." There was a failure of statesman involved with the rejection. But it was hardly the fault of the opponents of slavery.

There was also the argument that slavery would have inevitably died out from economic causes. (This argument was echoed in the later argument that segregation would have gradually died out on its own.) Schlesinger writes:

Slavery, it has been pointed out, was on the skids economically. It was overcapitalized and inefficient; it immobilized both capital and labor; its one-crop system was draining the soil of fertility; it stood in the way of industrialization. As the South came to realize these facts, a revisionist might argue, it would have moved to abolish slavery for its own economic good. As Craven put it, slavery "may have been almost ready to break down of its own
weight."

This argument assumed, of course, that southerners would have recognized the causes of their economic predicament and taken the appropriate measures. Yet such an assumption would be plainly contrary to history and to experience. From the beginning the South has always blamed its economic shortcomings, not on its own economic ruling class and its own inefficient use of resources, but on northern exploitation. Hard times in the eighteen-fifties produced in the South, not a reconsideration of the slavery system, but blasts against the North for the high prices of manufactured goods. The overcapitalization of slavery led, not to criticisms of the system, but to increasingly insistent demands for the reopening of the slave trade. Advanced southern writers like George Fitzhugh and James D. B. DeBow were even arguing that slavery was adapted to industrialism. When Hinton R. Helper did advance before the Civil War an early version of Craven's argument, asserting that emancipation was necessary to save the southern economy, the South burned his book. Nothing in the historical record suggests that the southern ruling class was preparing to deviate from its traditional pattern of self-exculpation long enough to take such a drastic step as the abolition of slavery. [my emphasis]

As James Oakes describes in the essay I discussed yesterday, recent research has shown that slavery as it existed was a profitable system. But recognizing that doesn't mean that slavery didn't have its economic downsides for the white South, like those Schlesinger mentions in the first of the two paragraphs just quoted.

Slavery did, for instance, stand in the way of industrialization. Despite proposals and limited experiments with using slaves as industrial workers, in reality slavery faced a very practical difficulty in applying advanced technology to its tools and machinery. In general, the more advanced a piece of equipment was, the more ways there were to sabotage it. That kind of sabotage was a reality of the slave system, and one of which the slaveowners were keenly aware.

Nineteenth century industrial workers didn't need Ph.D.'s to run their machinery. But the more complex the machinery, the greater the need for some education and basic literacy. And literacy for slaves was a severe taboo. It was a crime in the slave states to teach a slave how to read. Frederick Douglass, who did learn how to read while a slave in Maryland explained the need for the ban straightforward. A slave who can read, he said, is a slave who will not be content to remain a slave.

There were real economic problems with slavery. But classical political economy failed to appreciate their exact nature.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south