Recognising the role of slavery in the United States’ development up to 1865 bolsters the case for making reparations
In a new working paper I outline how slavery contributed to the development of the United States before the Civil War. The paper is called ‘King Cotton, the Munificent’ because I argue that slavery benefitted the free society of the North. In a nutshell, I argue that slaves were required to produce the cotton exports that balanced the imports that the Federal Government taxed. Those customs revenues then financed westward expansion, which tended to benefit Northerners because they had prohibited slavery in the Midwest. As the free states grew faster than the slave states, Southern slaveholders recognised that their cotton exports were being used to finance their own disempowerment in Congress, so they seceded. The North would not let them go, however, because they threatened to take with them the customs revenues that the Federal Government had relied upon up to then. The result was the Civil War, which eventually led to emancipation. Such is my analysis in an abbreviated form.
It is, I think, a fairly original analysis and goes against much of the recent economic history literature, which argues that slavery made no positive contribution to the United States’ development. Indeed, if anything, economic historians argue that slavery led to underdevelopment in the South. Whether or not that was the case, my argument is that slavery did contribute to the development of the North, even as it condemned the slaves themselves to poverty. An implication of this analysis is, I believe, that recognising slavery’s contribution reinforces the call for reparations for the descendants of those slaves. It also suggests that the Federal Government would be the most suitable agency for making those reparations because it was the key institutional beneficiary.
Please do read the working paper and let me know what you think. If you would like to see more of such research, you could also consider supporting me at GoFundMe.
Hi,
Thanks to Twitter I stumbled onto this just as I was doing some reading on the topic from other sources. This all makes sense but it seems to discount any moral motivations with respect to ending slavery in the south WRT the start of the war. Do you see the Civil War as having been all about money?
Hi Andrew,
No, I don’t think so. Moral and pecuniary interests are always mixed up, unfortunately. I definitely don’t think the soldiers fighting the war were thinking about customs revenues! That said, the literature does suggest that the looming implementation of the Morrill Tariff did push Lincoln to act, since it threatened to undermine public finances. There was also pressure from the Northeastern business community because they did not want New York to lose its position as entrepôt to the West. I hope that makes sense!
Joe
The arguments that South and North economic advisors might have made in 1860-61 … were not the arguments that political decision-makers prioritized (or even considered) in deciding whether to secede and to fight for Union, resp. The history of the origins of the Civil War is primarily political history (incl public opinion), not just economic history.
Also, please, re reparations. You degrade your economic history with that. A) As you have said re Spanish colonial extraction — look at broader data sets: 1) % of growth that was immediately consumed pre-1861, not fed into some semi-eternal compounded wealth-generator (nor into semi-eternal trust funds for all whites); 2) Union fiscal costs for Civil War; 3) Union dead, and their lost lifetime production; 4) today, US spends $1 trillion on poverty relief, disproportionately to blacks per capita — not a huge amount per capita excess over whites receiving, but maybe $1000-$2000/person/yr. B) Then there are present US demographics versus past, immigration, etc. C) No amount of reparations will quell the demand for reparations, because no amount of reparations will suddenly equalize the savings and human capital earnings potential across sub-populations; much more is involved there.
My understanding of what pushed Lincoln is primarily based on K.M. Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis 1860-1861, 1950. On pages 231-38 of that book, you can see that issues of political economy were discussed extensively in the Northern press prior to the onset of the war. They were especially concerned about the loss of customs revenues, since a low tariff New Orleans threatened to undercut New York as an entrepôt for the West. You could also read B. Schoen, ‘The Political Economies of Secession’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 37:2, 2015. Schoen shows in considerable detail how both sides thought deeply about issues of political economy.
There have been two more recent studies of the North’s decision to go to war: R. McClintlock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession, Chapel Hill, 2008; and W.J. Cooper, We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861, New York, 2012. These focus more on politics, as you suggest. However, even they must acknowledge that there was concern about the loss of tax revenues due to secession. See McClintlock, Lincoln and the Decision for War, pp. 216-17; and Cooper, We Have the War, pp. 247-48.
Reparations isn’t my speciality. Nevertheless, I think that if you recognise slavery’s contribution to the United States’ development, it does strengthen the moral case for reparations. Moreover, my findings suggest that we need to go beyond simple calculations of unpaid labour time and instead think about how slavery made possible much broader processes of wealth creation that may not have been possible otherwise.
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