Slaveocracy
The New York Times’ 1619 Project, written by luminaries who knew that it had won a Pulitzer Prize by mere virtue of its conception, makes some spectacularly ambitious claims about American history. Slavery, it reasons, is the foundation of America’s prosperity, and indeed her entire society. Plantation masters not only financed all development elsewhere in the country, they invented the modes of thinking that are the bedrock of the US economy today. The very idea of efficient production originated not with Adam Smith, nor basic ingenuity as old as human intelligence, but with plantation owners in the American South.
Slavery is and was a profoundly bad and unjust institution. But where the Times, and indeed many modern historians, go wrong is its significance to the United States. One of the structurally integral premises of the series is that slavery was somehow uniquely American. When one discounts this preposterous notion, most of the argument falls to pieces. Even if one tunnels one’s vision to slavery of Africans in the New World, the United States was a small player. Around 95% of Africans brought across the Atlantic were bound for Brazil or the West Indies, where they faced far more severe conditions than any in North America. By American revisionists’ calculus, Brazil and Haiti should be the richest nations on earth.
Of course, they are not. Indeed, there may well be an inverse correlation between how many slaves a nation kept historically, and how developed it is today. Latin America and the Islamic world used to depend on slavery far more heavily than the United States and Europe, and today they are far less developed and productive. This should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with global economics. Exporting commodities may yield impressive returns, but those mostly accrue to a tiny elite, leaving the rest of the country underdeveloped- thus the sorry fate of Latin America, Africa, tropical Asia, and indeed the American South.
This dysfunction is amplified by a system that actively curtails the development of human capital. Unlike free farmers or workers, slaves had no incentive to innovate, nor even to work any harder than necessary to avoid the lash. Masters vigilantly prevented their chattel from getting educated, dooming generations of people to underdevelopment.
As they do with the current US president, histrionic journalists tend vastly to overestimate both the insidiousness and the cleverness of slave owners. The charge that the United States is a nation founded on pro-slavery principles does not hold water. Most of the Founding Fathers, including those who themselves owned slaves, rightly saw the institution as backward and stupid. Thomas Jefferson, himself an owner of 600 souls, wrote a scathing passage in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence excoriating King George for having “waged a cruel war against human nature itself.” It is far from evident that Jefferson and Washington thought blacks were intellectually inferior to themselves, and they explicitly disavowed any moral difference.
But America’s founders did not free the slaves. Of course, it is very much to their discredit that they turned the world upside down to overthrow relatively reasonable taxation schemes but were content to keep nearly a million of their fellow men in chains. They understandably feared that suddenly freeing the wolf they had by the ear would be dangerous, and, mostly likely, were under pressure from harder-hearted peers and base financial self-interest. But what really turned slavery into a modern institution in the 19th Century was the cotton gin, which unlocked a productivity boom just as the Industrial Revolution was taking off in the North and Europe.
Whatever the English majors at the New York Times might claim, slavery was not an economic bonanza. This is clear from a macro development perspective, as we have already noted. On the level of individual plantations, investment in slaves does seem to have offered attractive returns. But it was still quite a thin-margin business. Masters saved on labor, but did face formidable upkeep costs. Unlike Northern factory owners, they had to feed, house, and clothe their workers, to whom they provided a standard of living superior to that enjoyed by most peasants around the world at the time. Just 0.1% of Southerners owned more than one hundred slaves (over 75% had none, and another fifth ten or fewer), but their plantations sucked up virtually all capital investment, to the detriment of the other 99.9% of white Southerners, who fell far behind the rest of the country.
It may be true that the Mississippi valley boasted a greater number of millionaires than any other part of the world in the 1850s. It is also true that Arabian petromonarchies have the highest GDP per capita of any nations in the world today. That does not mean those places are on the forefront of economic development; indeed, when all the GDP goes to just a few capita, it suggests the opposite. Like all true aristocrats, plantation masters thought striving for profit vulgar. They usually squandered a considerable share of their fortunes on palatial residences and lordly lifestyles, rather than reinvesting it like money-grubbing Northern factory owners.
It was those capitalists, not slave-driving aristocrats, who made the United States the economic powerhouse it is today. The contribution of slavery, both in raw materials and capital investment, helped. But only the silliest pseudoeconomist could manage to trace the development of the modern global economy to New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro rather than New York and Manchester. To the shock of Southerners, when their cotton exports were blockaded during the American Civil War, the British readily found new sources in Egypt and elsewhere. After the Civil War, the South sank into poverty as the Northern industrial economy continued to grow exponentially.
Slavery was stupid and a moral stain on American and European history that is even more irredeemable because it was unnecessary for modern economic development. Given all this it is even more shocking how universal it was. Neither Aristotle nor Sir Thomas More could imagine an ideal society without it. Arab slavers, pioneers of the African slave trade centuries before white men washed up on the beaches, tenaciously resisted Europeans’ efforts to suppress their black traffic. At considerable expense in money (HM Treasury did not finish paying off the debt incurred to free the slaves of the British Empire until 2015) and human lives, the imperial powers stamped slavery out in all the territories they controlled around the world.
It is amazing that something that seems to us so self-evidently bad was once accepted by everyone everywhere without a second thought. We should lament that we ever practiced it. But rather than lash ourselves while falsifying history to claim that we were the only ones who did, or that it was essential for our development, we should also celebrate how far we have come. The West was not the only civilization to practice slavery- but we were the only ones to abolish it. Surely that is a foundation on which to build a brighter future.
