[legitster]

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

More or less.

Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).

Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.

In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.

[roenxi]

> Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery...

Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.

And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.

[legitster]

Slavery was already being abolished in the West when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. But what was notable was that Adam Smith was really the first to make a strong case and prediction that it was not just the moral thing to do, but would lead to prosperity.

Adam Smith also differentiated between different levels of slavery - that Roman slavery was different than Serfdom was different from chattel slavery in the US.

It's worth noting that Adam Smith did not think total abolition was possible. One of his concerns about free markets was that people deeply desired control of other people, and slavery would increase as a byproduct of wealth.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point

Would note that New World-style chattel slavery doesn't seem to have broadly historically precedented.

[Retric]

Slavery in Europe was replaced with a more efficient system in the Middle Ages.

So calling it a constant throughout history is only true in the way that slavery still exists today, in that you could find it somewhere on the globe.

[jacquesm]

Ah, the master of bad takes is at it again.

> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point,

Except that of course it wasn't.

> and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said.

And many smart people do.

> There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild.

Yes, such as the one that wealth is not very good as a context free metric for societal success.

> With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick.

You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.

> And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.

Yes, they relied on the misery of others to drive their former wealth, but they are not the important people in that story. The important people are the ones that were no longer slaves.

And never mind that many of those former slave owners did just fine economically afterwards, after all, they already were fantastically wealthy so they just switched 'business models' and still made money hand over fist.

[Braxton1980]

Mississippi declaration of secession.

"“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world....Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”

Georgia

"“The prohibition of slavery in the Territories… is destructive of our rights and interests.”

[legitster]

The full preamble of the Mississippi declaration is fascinating, and further shuts down doubters that the civil war wasn't about slavery and racism:

> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin

Also, they clearly make the case that cotton was the most important good in the world, perhaps imploring the intercession of foreign powers.

I think it's worth pointing out though that these people were not being honest with themselves - nothing in their argument about the importance of cotton suggests it couldn't have been done with wage labor. They are dancing around the fact that only a very few benefit from slavery.

[xhkkffbf]

Capital was actually a big part of it. The plantation owner didn't just need to capitalize the cost of the land, but the labor as well. When someone purchased a slave, they were paying up front for the remaining labor that could come from that body. This was often pretty expensive when the body was young. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the biggest banking centers of the US because of all of the borrowing.

People often make the mistake that the labor was "free". It wasn't to the people who bought slaves. It wasn't even really free to the slave traders because of the cost of transport.

It was a horrible system in many ways, but it was also a outrageously expensive because of all of the banking and loans involved.

[parineum]

Reading this post made me wonder if there were "temp agency" type businesses for slaves. Having to own the labor would make your it very difficult to expand and contract your workforce.

Morality aside, it really doesn't seem like a great system.

[MengerSponge]

Technology developed after Smith's writing changed the calculus. The cotton gin made wide-scale cotton cultivation far more lucrative, and drove American slavery: https://historyincharts.com/the-impact-of-the-cotton-gin-on-...

Without the cotton gin, chattel slavery would have probably ended at least one generation earlier in the US

[helterskelter]

The south wasn't really situated for industrialization at the time. They didn't have enough rivers that could turn a water wheel effectively. (That's what I've heard anyway)

[legitster]

It's true the first mills were in the north because they had some good sites, but there are good mill sites throughout the South as well. More tellingly, when the first steam engines in the US were imported from Europe - they could have been just as easily installed in the South.

I think more importantly, steam mills solved for a problem the south did not have. If one was to tell a southerner, I have a technology that will save on labor costs, the southerner's response would have been "what are labor costs?"

[pm90]

Hmm, this doesn’t seem to be accurate. The missouri/mississipi rivers come to mind, as do many other river systems.

[munificent]

> It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).

The enslaved people sure as fuck aren't prospering in that situation, so the only way one could possibly equate slavery with economic prosperity is by simply not counting them as people at all.

> Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization... and how hard regular (white) people had to work.

One way to think of slavery is that it's a far point on the continuum between equality and inequality. What they really hated was equality because that necessarily involves taking something away from them, the people who have the most.

[legitster]

- The difference between Ben Franklin writing about farming in the 1770s and the civil war was that industrialization didn't hit the US until the 1810s/1820s when the first steel mills and steam engines were set up.

- "These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine." The vast majority of immigrants to the US at this time WERE farmers who were not allowed to own land in Europe. The reason they came to the North instead of the South is because they were largely not allowed to settle anywhere East of the Appalachians in the South. The South was staunchly anti-immigrant and barely had any cities at the time.

- At the outbreak of war, the Union army was almost entirely made up of American born volunteers. Later, immigrant brigades were enlisted, but most were highly regarded and commended and still made up less than half of the army.

- Your explanation cutely ignores the fact that Southern troops fired first in the Civil War

[tclancy]

I liked it better when you guys called yourselves "Know Nothings". It made it easier to follow what was going on.

[snozolli]

These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine.

Please tell me more on your theories regarding these immigrants.

The only ones I'm aware of were Irish immigrants. Most of them were urban dwellers, not farmers. The Irish who were farmers were generally working on farms owned by the English.

[thinkingtoilet]

What makes you think the newspapers of the day are all telling the truth? Does the media today tell the truth? Did newspapers disclose when the equivalent of a billionaire bought them out and drastically changed the editorial bias?

I'm not saying we shouldn't read historical documents. I'm saying to not apply the same skepticism you would apply to modern media to old media is a mistake.

[octernion]

ah yes the famine was because the people were lazy and did not want to farm. the history understander has logged on for everyone here!

[legitster]

Maybe - a lot of the material wealth of the South was having a lot of land divided amongst fewer people. Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.

Here's specifically what Adam Smith had to say in the Wealth of Nations:

> But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.

Later, to explain this trap of why people insist on owning slaves even if paying workers would be more productive in the long run:

> "The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen."

[dosinga]

> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.

In other words, if you remove the people that earned the least (close to nothing) the overall income per capita goes up? If you exclude the non nobles I am sure the middle ages had a very high GDP too

[ceejayoz]

> Being able to lounge around while others toil for your gain is absolutely economic.

And being comfortable doing it via slave labor is cultural.

> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita

If you exclude the murders, Ted Bundy was a really nice guy.

[margalabargala]

> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.

That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excluding enslaved people.

I do agree with your broader point about usage of labor and how being able to have leisure via slavery is economic.

[cobbzilla]

There is certainly a cultural component. A very good book named Albion’s Seed traces the waves of early American immigration. The North was mostly settled by dissidents pre-ECW. The South was mostly divided up into estates and settled by post-ECW lords that mirrored the social structure and power dynamics they liked.

[lovich]

> …if you exclude the enslaved…

If you ignore the part that makes you wrong, then you are right.

[watwut]

> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita

Yeah because your "capita" is severely undercounted.

If I exclude every who dont live in New York, USA has astonishing GDP per capita ... because I am assigning each person production of many. Same thing.

[bluGill]

If you own a lot of slaves your life is better than the freemen who own less/none, much less slaves. However society overall could be muca better even if for you personally it is worse