The political economy of the cotton South: Households, markets, and wealth in the nineteenth century

by Gavin Wright

The impact of cotton and slavery in the nineteenth century American South was so dramatic and enduring that neither the region nor the nation has yet escaped from the influence of that era of regional prominence.

Genres: History

205 pages, Hardcover

First published April 17, 1978

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wright argues "that slavery retarded the mechanization of agriculture, the development of manufacturing, the emergence of cities, and immigration to the South; that the South was on the verge of economic crisis in 1860; that tenancy and the associated credit systems caused 'overproduction' of cotton after the war; and that the Civil War was fundamentally caused by the economics of slavery." (p. 4) He comes to these conclusions by looking at the homogenizing effect which slave ownership (and the potential for slave ownership) had on farmers -- big and small -- in the South. Because slave labor allowed for the allocation of labor to market production, the South became linked to the international cotton market early on and thereby to the vicissitudes of world cotton demand. Lacking slaves in the North, a creative tension which led to mechanization of agriculture and industrialization. The equity value in slave property drove the Southern conception of wealth. This tied them to the cotton crop and left them vulnerable to the market.

Wright develops this focus on the nature of property ownership in the North and South in a section called "On Making Economic Sense of Cotton, Slavery, and the Civil War." He he argues as follows:

In the North, property rights in labor were prohibited, and, hence, efforts to augment property values focused on land: land clearing and improvement, promotion of canals and railroads to improve access to markets, attracting immigrants through vigorous recruitment and offers of credit, schools, roads, etc. In the South one could own slaves, and for this reason much of the same drive toward property accumulation was channeled along very different lines. In the North energies went toward raising the values of local farms and local areas because land is not moveable; in the South there was relatively little a slave owner could do to raise the value of individual slaves, though he could hope to accumulate slave property over time by fostering high fertility and low mortality. Slaves were moveable personal property; the value of an owner's slave property was determined not by his individual behavior, but by regional slave markets and world cotton markets, and this value was essentially uniform in all parts of the slave South at any moment. (p. 129)

There are several "economic" interpretations, which Wright debunks - the war was not a conflict between agrarian interests and industry, nor was it caused by competition of land in the west (at least not directly) as the South had plenty of land to grow cotton on in the South. It was expansion of slavery into the territories that aroused Southern ire, not expansion per se. Since Northern politicians had the politically expedient free labor rhetoric to fall back on, they could please the abolitionists by arguing that slavery would actually die out if contained -- without having to press for abolition per se. Free labor also had the appeal of brining western interests under the "big tent." There was no political benefit to the North in respecting the "peculiar institution."

It was, above all, the capital gains in slave values that united small and large planters with all those who hoped some day to be planters in the South:

the capital arising from rising slave prices were sufficient to make financial successes of all but the most incompetent slaveowners. The fact is that virtually every slaveholder who was careful enough to keep his slaves alive made at least a nominal profit during the 1850s from capital gains alone. (p. 141)

The value which Southerners held in slave property was a great unifying force in the 1850s. Similar to home ownership in the 1990s, it was tied to long-term calculation of family worth and -- even for those who only had a slave or two -- represented the hope for the future that slaveholders had for their families. Opposition to secession would come mostly from states where slave holding was limited. Southerners were touchy on this subject, seeing any implicit threat to the value of slaves as a threat to their prosperity and their posterity. Deeply immersed in market capitalism, the very perception of slave values was of far reaching consequence. Even reopening the slave trade, which was bandied about in the South in the 1850s didn't get much support because it might lower slave property values. Blinded by the power of King Cotton, secessionists believed that the Union would be too concerned about provoking England's wrath to stop secession.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

The question of the profitability of slavery is one that has always struck me as deeply interesting and sometimes quite funny.  Nevertheless, one does not expect to find books on political economy to be riveting reading because much of the time they argue over definitions and categories and assumptions.  How did slaveowners make money during the 19th century and how did the cotton economy of the South survive after the Civil War?  Absent slavery, sharecropping for both poor whites and blacks was a sensible if not necessarily very profitable option for everyone involved, but with slavery slaveowners had the chance to earn money from their slaves in three main ways.  Either those slaves could work for the master for goods that were to be sold, either the slaves or their children could be sold for profit, or the slaves could be hired out to others for a wage to be paid to the owner.  And looking at how this was done in the region of the South as a whole is interesting to me even if it may not be as interesting to everyone else.

This book is a bit less than 200 pages and is divided into six large chapters.  The book begins with tables, figures, maps, a preface, and then an introduction that discusses various models that economists have developed about slavery and the argument of the book (1).  After that the author discusses the structure of the cotton-slave economy of the antebellum South, including the rise of Cotton, the status of the South in 1860, the distribution of wealth at the time and in the historical perspective, as well as the paradox of personal wealth and societal backwardness (2).  After that the author looks at the microeconomics of plantation and farm by discussing issues of scale, choice of crops, risk, economies of slave, and labor as a commodity (3).  There are then materials relating to the pace of progress in the Cotton South depending on demand, productivity, non-agricultural economic activity, and immigration (4).  The author discusses how one makes sense of cotton, slavery, and the Civil War from an economic perspective (5), and then the last chapter of the book looks at the rise of tenancy after the Civil War (6), after which there is a bibliography and index.

This book is dry and technical, but the information it talks about is worthwhile because it deals with the thorny repercussions of what happens when labor is also property and when the benefits of that labor do not serve the interests of the worker himself (or herself) but serve a third party.  The fact that slaves themselves could provide great wealth to their owners while bringing poverty to the regions as a whole and destroying the trust and basis for prosperity for the area as a whole is one of the more fascinating aspects of the paradoxes of slavery that are really the paradox of tyranny in general.  Tyrants benefit from oppression, but the reality of that oppression harms the well-being of everyone else, even those who are deceived into going along with that oppression for non-economic benefits like having someone else to look down on.  Obviously, this is relevant not only to the history of the antebellum South or to American history in general or even the subject of slavery in general but to the larger question of how it is that what benefits some people can be immensely harmful to society at large but nonetheless impossible to root out because those who benefit are the ones who have the power to make the decisions.