A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Other indicators reveal how critical a position slavery held in the overall wealth of the South. Wealth estimates by the U.S. government based on the 1860 census showed that slaves accounted for $3 billion in (mostly Southern) wealth, an amount exceeding the investments in railroads and manufacturing combined! To an extent—but only to an extent—the approaching conflict was one over the definition of property rights.33 It might therefore be said that whenever the historical record says “states’ rights” in the context of sectional debates, the phrase “rights to own slaves” should more correctly be inserted.34 When Alabama’s Franklin W. Bowdon wrote about the property rights in slaves, “If any of these rights can be invaded, there is no security for the remainder,” Northerners instinctively knew that the inverse was true: if one group of people could be condemned to slavery for their race, another could suffer the same fate for their religious convictions, or their political affiliations.35

  This aspect of slavery gnawed at the many nonslaveholders who composed the South’s majority. Of all the Southerners who did own slaves, about 12 percent held most of the slaves, whereas some 36 percent of Southern farms in the most fertile valley regions had no slave labor at all; overall nearly half the farms in the cotton belt were slaveless.36 Indeed, in some regions free farmers dominated the politics, particularly eastern Tennessee, western Virginia, northerwestern Mississippi, and parts of Missouri. Even the small farmers who owned slaves steadily moved away from the large cash-crop practice of growing cotton, entering small-scale manufacturing by 1860. If one had little land, it made no sense economically to hold slaves. A field hand in the 1850s could cost $1,200, although prices fell with age and remaining productive years.

  The stability and permanence of the system, however, arose from the large plantations, where a division of labor and assignment of slave gangs under the whip could overcome any inefficiencies associated with unfree labor. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in their famous Time on the Cross (1974), found that farms with slaves “were 29 percent more productive than those without slaves,” and, more important, that the gains increased as farm size increased.37 What is surprising is that the profitability of slavery was doubted for as long as it was, but that was largely because of the biased comments of contemporaries like antislavery activist Frank Blair, who wrote that “no one from a slave state could pass through ‘the splendid farms of Sangamon and Morgan, without permitting an envious sigh to escape him at the evident superiority of free labor.’”38 Nathaniel Banks argued in the 1850s before audiences in Boston and New York that slavery was “the foe of all industrial progress and the highest material prosperity.”39 It was true that deep pockets of poverty existed in the South, and that as a region it lagged behind United States per capita value-added average in 1860 by a substantial seven dollars, falling behind even the undeveloped Midwest.40

  Adding to the unprofitability myth was a generation of Southern historians that included Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and Charles Sydnor, who could not reconcile the immorality of slavery with the obvious returns in the market system; they used flawed methodologies to conclude plantations had to be losing money.41 A final argument that slavery was unprofitable came from the “backwardness” of the South (that is, its rural and nonindustrial character) that seemed to confirm that slavery caused the relative lack of industry compared to that in the North.42

  Conditions among slaves differed dramatically. Frederick Douglass pointed out that “a city slave is almost a free citizen” who enjoyed “privileges altogether unknown to the whip-driven slave on the plantation.”43 A slave undertaker in Savannah hired other slaves, and made “payments” to his master at $250 a year. Artisans, mechanics, domestic servants, millers, ranchers, and other occupations were open to slaves. Simon Gray, a Mississippi slave, became a lumber raft captain whose crew included whites.44 Gray also invested in real estate, speculated in raw timber, and owned several houses. Half of the workforce at the Richmond Tredegar Iron Works was comprised of slaves.

  Even the most “benign” slavery, however, was always immoral and oppressive. Every female slave knew that ultimately if her master chose to make sexual advances, she had no authority to refuse. The system legitimized rape, even though benign masters never touched their female slaves. Every field hand was subject to the lash; some knew it more often than others. Much slavery in the South was cruel and violent even by the standards of the defenders. Runaways, if caught, were mutilated or executed, sometimes tortured by being boiled in cauldrons; and slaves for any reason—usually “insubordination”—were whipped. Free-market advocates argue that it made no sense to destroy a “fifteen-hundred-dollar investment,” but such contentions assume that the slave owners always acted as rational capitalists instead of (occasionally) racists involved in reinforcement of social power structures.

  Often the two intermingled—the capitalist mentality and the racial oppression—to the point that the system made no sense when viewed solely in the context of either the market or race relations. For example, Fogel and Engerman’s antiseptic economic conclusion that slaves were whipped an “average” of 0.7 times per year is put into perspective by pictures of slaves whose backs were scarred beyond recognition by the whip. Fogel and Engerman’s data were reconstructed from a single slave owner’s diary and are very questionable. Other evidence is that beatings were so frequent that they occurred more than once a week, and that fear of the lash permeated the plantations.45 Some states had laws against killing a slave, though the punishments were relatively minor compared to the act. But such laws wilted in light of the slaves’ actual testimony:

  It’s too bad to belong to folks dat own you soul an’ body; dat can tie you up to a tree, wid yo’ face to de tree an’ you’ arms fastened tight aroun’ it; who take a long curlin’ whip an’ cut de blood ever’ lick. Folks a mile away could hear dem awful whippings. Dey was a terrible part of livin’.46

  Plantation slave diets were rich in calories, but it is doubtful the provisions kept pace with the field labor, since data show that slaves born between 1790 and 1800 tended to be shorter than the free white population.47 In other respects, though, Fogel and Engerman were right: while many historians have overemphasized the breakup of families under slavery—a point hammered home by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional Uncle Tom’s Cabin—fewer slaves were separated from their mates than is often portrayed in television or the movies. As the result of narratives from living former slaves, collected during the New Deal by the Federal Writers Project, it has been determined that two thirds had lived in nuclear families.48 If, however, one third of all slave families were destroyed by force in the form of sales on the auction block, that statistic alone reiterates the oppressive and inhumane nature of the institution. Nevertheless, the old saw that crime doesn’t pay does not always apply, as was the case with slavery.

  Several economic historians have placed the returns on slavery at about 8.5 percent, leaving no doubt that it was not only profitable in the short term, but viable in the long run because of the constantly increasing value of slaves as a scarce resource.49 It would be equally mistaken, however, to assume that slave-based plantation agriculture was so profitable as to funnel the South into slavery in an almost deterministic manner. Quite the contrary, studies of Southern manufacturing have revealed that returns in fledgling Southern industries often exceeded 22 percent and in some instances reached as high as 45 percent—yet even those profits were not sufficient to pry the plantation owners’ hands off their slaves.50

  So what to make of a discrepancy of 45 percent returns in manufacturing compared with 8 percent in plantation agriculture? Why would Southerners pass up such gains in the industrial sector? Economic culture explains some of the reluctance. Few Southerners knew or understood the industrial system. More important, however, there were psychic gains associated with slave-based agriculture—dominance and control—that one could never find in industry. Gains on the plantations may have been lower, but they undergirded an entire way of
life and the privileged position of the upper tiers of Southern society. The short answer to our question, then, is that it was about more than money. In the end, the persistence of slavery in the face of high nonagricultural returns testifies to aspects of its noneconomic character.

  Ultimately slavery could exist only through the power of the state. It survived “because political forces prevented the typical decay and destruction of slavery experienced elsewhere.”51 Laws forcing free whites to join posses for runaway slaves, censoring mails, and forbidding slaves to own property all emanated from government, not the market. Slaveholders passed statutes prohibiting the manumission of slaves throughout the South, banned the practice of slaves’s purchasing their own freedom, and used the criminal justice system to put teeth in the slave codes. States enforced laws against educating slaves and prohibiting slaves from testifying in court.52 Those laws existed atop still other statutes that restricted the movement of even free blacks within the South or the disembarking of free black merchant sailors in Southern ports.53 In total, slaveholders benefited from monumental reductions in the cost of slavery by, as economists would say, externalizing the costs to nonslaveowners. Moreover, the system insulated itself from market pressures, for there was no true free market as long as slavery was permitted anywhere; thus there could be no market discipline. Capitalism’s emancipating powers could work only where the government served as a neutral referee instead of a hired gun working for the slave owner.

  In contrast to Latin American countries and Mexico, which had institutionalized self-purchase, the American South moved in the opposite direction. It all made for a system in which, with each passing year, despite the advantages enjoyed by urban servant-slaves and mechanics, slaves were increasingly less likely to win their freedom and be treated as people. Combined with the growing perversion of Christian doctrines in the South that maintained that blacks were permanent slaves, it was inevitable that the South would grow more repressive, both toward blacks and whites.

  Lincoln hoped that the “natural limits” of slavery would prove its undoing—that cotton production would peter out and slavery would become untenable.54 In this Lincoln was in error. New uses for slave labor could always be found, and several studies have identified growing slave employment in cities and industry.55 Lincoln also failed to anticipate that slavery could easily be adapted to mining and other large-scale agriculture, and he did not appreciate the significance of the Southern churches’ scriptural revisionism as it applied to blacks. In the long run, only the market, or a war with the North, could have saved the South from its trajectory. When slaveholders foisted the costs of the peculiar institution onto the Southern citizenry through the government, no market correction was possible. Ultimately, Southern slave owners rejected both morality and the market, then went about trying to justify themselves.

  Defending the Indefensible

  Driven by the Declaration’s inexorable logic that “all men are created equal,” pressure rose for defenders of the slave system to explain their continued participation in the peculiar institution. John C. Calhoun, in 1838, noted that the defense of slavery had changed:

  This agitation [from abolitionists] has produced one happy effect; it has compelled us…to look into the nature and character of this great institution, and to correct many false impressions…. Many…once believed that [slavery] was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we now see it in its true light…as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world [emphasis ours].56

  Calhoun espoused the labor theory of value—the backbone of Marxist economic thinking—and in this he was joined by George Fitzhugh, Virginia’s leading proslavery intellectual and proponent of socialism. Fitzhugh exposed slavery as the nonmarket, anticapitalist construct that it was by arguing that not only should all blacks be slaves, but so should most whites. “We are all cannibals,” Fitzhugh intoned, “Cannibals all!” Slaves Without Masters, the subtitle of his book Cannibals All! (1854), offered a shockingly accurate exposé of the reality of socialism—or slavery, for to Fitzhugh they were one and the same.57

  Slavery in the South, according to Fitzhugh, scarcely differed from factory labor in the North, where the mills of Massachusetts placed their workers in a captivity as sure as the fields of Alabama. Yet African slaves, Fitzhugh maintained, probably lived better than free white workers in the North because they were liberated from decision making. A few slaves even bought into Fitzhugh’s nonsense: Harrison Berry, an Atlanta slave, published a pamphlet called Slavery and Abolitionism, as Viewed by a Georgia Slave, in which he warned slaves contemplating escape to the North that “subordination of the poor colored man [there], is greater than that of the slave South.”58 And, he added, “a Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism; it is a joint concern, in which the slave consumes more than the master…and is far happier, because although the concern may fail, he is always sure of support.”59

  Where Fitzhugh’s argument differed from that of Berry and others was in advocating slavery for whites: “Liberty is an evil which government is intended to correct,” he maintained in Sociology for the South.60 Like many of his Northern utopian counterparts, Fitzhugh viewed every “relationship” as a form of bondage or oppression. Marriage, parenting, and property ownership of any kind merely constituted different forms of slavery. Here, strange as it may seem, Fitzhugh had come full circle to the radical abolitionists of the North. Stephen Pearl Andrews, William Lloyd Garrison, and, earlier, Robert Owen had all contended that marriage constituted an unequal, oppressive relationship.61 Radical communitarian abolitionists, of course, endeavored to minimize or ignore these similarities to the South’s greatest intellectual defender of slavery.62 But the distinctions between Owen’s subjection to the tyranny of the commune and Fitzhugh’s “blessings” of “liberation” through the lash nearly touched, if they did not overlap, in theory.

  Equally ironic was the way in which Fitzhugh stood the North’s free-labor argument on its head. Lincoln and other Northerners maintained that laborers must be free to contract with anyone for their work. Free labor meant the freedom to negotiate with any employer. Fitzhugh, however, arguing that all contract labor was essentially unfree, called factory work slave labor. In an astounding inversion, he then maintained that since slaves were free from all decisions, they truly were the free laborers. Thus, northern wage labor (in his view) was slave labor, whereas actual slave labor was free labor!

  Aside from Fitzhugh’s more exotic defenses of slavery, religion and the law offered the two best protections available to Southerners to perpetuate human bondage. Both the Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church (which had a relatively minor influence in the South, except for Missouri and Louisiana) permitted or enthusiastically embraced slavery as a means to convert “heathen” Africans, and in 1822 the South Carolina Baptist Association published the first defenses of slavery that saw it as a “positive good” by biblical standards. By the mid-1800s, many Protestant leaders had come to see slavery as the only hope of salvation for Africans, thus creating the “ultimate rationalization.”63 Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright of New Orleans reflected this view when he wrote in 1852 that it was impossible to “Christianize the negro without the intervention of slavery.”64

  Such a defense of slavery presented a massive dilemma, not only to the church, but also to all practicing Christians and, indeed, all Southerners: if slavery was for the purpose of Christianizing the heathen, why were there so few efforts made to evangelize blacks and, more important, to encourage them to read the Bible? Still more important, why were slaves who converted not automatically freed on the grounds that having become “new creatures” in Christ, they were now equals? To say the least, these were uncomfortable questions that most clergy and lay alike in Dixie avoided entirely.

  Ironically, many of the antislavery societies got their start in the South, where the first three periodicals to challenge slavery appeared, although all three soon moved to free st
ates or Maryland.65

  Not surprisingly, after the Nat Turner rebellion in August 1831, which left fifty-seven whites brutally murdered, many Southern churches abandoned their view that slavery was a necessary evil and accepted the desirability of slavery as a means of social control. Turner’s was not the first active resistance to slavery. Colonial precedents included the Charleston Plot, and in 1807 two shiploads of slaves starved themselves to death rather than submit to the auction block. In 1822 a South Carolina court condemned Denmark Vesey to the gallows for, it claimed, leading an uprising. Vesey, a slave who had won a lottery and purchased his freedom with the winnings, established an African Methodist Church in Charleston, which had three thousand members. Although it was taken as gospel for more than a century that Vesey actually led a rebellion, historian Michael Johnson, obtaining the original court records, has recently cast doubt on whether any slave revolt occurred at all. Johnson argues that the court, using testimony from a few slaves obtained through torture or coercion, framed Vesey and many others. Ultimately, he and thirty-five “conspirators” were hanged, but the “rebellion” may well have been a creation of the court’s.66

  In addition to the Vesey and Nat Turner uprisings, slave runaways were becoming more common, as demonstrated by the thousands who escaped and thousands more who were hunted down and maimed or killed. Nat Turner, however, threw a different scare into Southerners because he claimed as the inspiration for his actions the prompting of the Holy Spirit.67 A “sign appearing in the heavens,” he told Thomas Gray, would indicate the proper time to “fight against the Serpent.”68 The episode brought Virginia to a turning point—emancipation or complete repression—and it chose the latter. All meetings of free blacks or mulattoes were prohibited, even “under the pretense or pretext of attending a religious meeting.”69 Anne Arundel County, Maryland, enacted a resolution requiring vigilante committees to visit the houses of every free black “regularly” for “prompt correction of misconduct,” or in other words, to intimidate them into staying indoors.70 The message of the Vesey/Turner rebellions was also clear to whites: blacks had to be kept from Christianity, and Christianity from blacks, unless a new variant of Christianity could be concocted that explained black slavery in terms of the “curse of Ham” or some other misreading of scripture.