Slavery and Capitalism: Interconnected Paths of Economic Growth

1. Slavery and Capitalism: Divergent Paths or One World? Wk 4, Powerpoint 1Hist 111, Summer 2019 Image courtesy LOC

2. THIS LECTURE The conventional story of the early-nineteenth-century United States stresses the growth and transformation of the northern economy – called the “market revolution” – alongside the development of southern slavery. Were these two separate developments, or were they connected? This lecture draws largely on Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told • RECAPPING THE TEXTBOOK: CH. 11 • SLAVERY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, 1783-1840

3. I. RECAPPING THE TEXTBOOK, CH 11

4. THE MARKET REVOLUTION (early 19th C.) Northern economic development • Changes in Banking • Changes in transportation • Roads, canals, steamboats, railroads

5. THE MARKET REVOLUTION (early 19th C.) • Changes in methods of production • Water-driven machinery catalyzes textile production (Ex. Lowell Mills) • Shoe industry reorganizes production in New England – hires women

6. COTTON TEXTILE INDUSTRY C. 1840

7. II. SLAVERY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, 1783-1840 • Past views and assumptions • What led to expansion? • Labor and Cotton Growth • Connections: South and North

8. 1) PAST VIEWS AND ASSUMPTIONS • Early 20th Century Views: • These historians suggested that slavery civilized savage Africans • Ex. Historian Ulrich B. Phillips called the plantation a “school constantly training and controlling pupils who were in a backward state of civilization” • Historians argued that slavery was a premodern economic system – one not geared toward profit-seeking. • Post-WWII to 1990s shift • Focus on agency and resistance of enslaved people

9. STILL, ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT SLAVERY As an economic system, slavery was seen as fundamentally different from the modern economy and separate from industrialization in the nineteenth century. • Stories of industrialization begin at the Lowell mills, emphasize white immigration and clever inventions while leaving out slave labor. • Slavery seen as an exception to a story of progress. • Slavery not implicated in story of American wealth, growth, and success.

10. US ECONOMIC GROWTH: THE 19TH CENTURY • From a small trading partner of Europe to the largest economy in the world

11. A DIFFERENT VIEW: SLAVERY A MODERNIZING INSTITUTION • Slavery not static but instead changing from 1783 to 1861 • Economy of slave South connected to North and Europe • The expansion of slavery shaping every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the US

12. A DIFFERENT VIEW: SLAVERY A MODERNIZING INSTITUTION “The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear.” – Historian Ed Baptist

13. 2) WHAT LED TO EXPANSION?

14. LAND ACQUISITION • Wars with indigenous peoples in old southwest

15. MIGRATION AND FORCED MIGRATION • Growth of an internal slave trade, which by the 1820s was composed of professional, specialized traders

16. SUPPRESSING REVOLT The German Coast Rebellion (1811): Largest Slave Rebellion in US History • Along east bank of Mississippi River, just north of New Orleans • Plan: march to New Orleans and take the city • Attacked enslavers, house by house • After two days, word reaches New Orleans. Governor responds by sending several armed groups the quell the rebellion. • Consequences: close to 100 enslaved people are shot and hanged. Some are decapitated.

17. SIGNIFICANCE OF GERMAN COAST REVOLT • Differences from (successful) Haitian Revolution: • White majority in Louisiana (versus black majority in Haiti) • Government support key to suppressing resistance on German Coast • Aftermath: regulation and surveillance of slave population increases (ex. patrols increase)

18. 3) LABOR AND COTTON GROWTH Five generations on Smith's Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, Timothy O’Sullivan, Courtesy LOC

19. GLOBAL ECONOMIC CHANGES • Before late 18th century: most world societies were “preindustrial” • 19th century • “industrial revolution” or “modernization” or the “great divergence” • fundamental shift takes place: expanding the amount of goods (ex. food, clothing) created from a given quantity of land or labor.

20. CHANGES IN THE UNITED STATES • The US Share of world cotton production rises to 76% by 1851

21. WHY THE RISE IN COTTON PRODUCTIVITY? Can’t simply explain with the cotton gin: “The best-known innovation in the history of cotton production, as every high-school history student knows, is the cotton gin. It allowed enslavers to clean as much cotton for market as they could grow and harvest. As far as most historians have been concerned, the gin is where the study of innovation in the production of cotton ends – at least until the invention of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1930s, which ended the sharecropper regime. But here is the questions historians should have asked: Once enslavers had the cotton gin, how then did enslavers produce…as much as the gin could clean?” – Historian Ed Baptist

22. WHY THE RISE IN COTTON PRODUCTIVITY? • Can attribute part of the rise to bioengineering of new breeds of cotton (ex. Petit Gulf in 1820s) • Can’t simply explain with cotton gin in 1790s (separates fiber from seeds once it’s harvested): from 1790 to 1860, there were no technological innovations to quicken the harvesting of cotton. Yet: • Total gain in productivity per picker from 1800 to 1860: 400%

23. WHY THE RISE IN COTTON PRODUCTIVITY? • We might want to believe that free labor was both (1) more ethical and (2) more efficient. Yet the evidence shows a different story: • Positive incentives rarely used • Instead, slaveholders used measurements with the threat of violence to increase productivity. Over time, enslaved people were pushed to pick at higher and higher quotas.

24. WORK AND VIOLENCE As quotas rose, cotton picking increased • Rules for Louisiana Plantation (1820): The overseer… • “shall see that the people of the plantation that are fit to pick cotton shall do it and to Pick clean as much as possible and a quantity conforming [to] their age Strenght & Capacitys.” • Enslaved people commented on this in slave narratives: • If he failed to pick his quota, Charles Ball knew “it would go hard with me…I knew that the lash of the overseer would become familiar with my back.”

25. COLONIAL SLAVERY  19TH CENTURY • New World Slavery had long expanded through geographical expansion (ex. new slave states, new sugar islands) • Southwestern frontier in 19th century was also expanding, but there was something new: a continuous increase in productivity per person (often called efficiency) through increased quotes with the threat of violence

26. 4) CONNECTIONS: SOUTH AND NORTH • As enslaved labor built the South, it also enabled the northern economy to grow • 1832, US government compiles report on economy, Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States, produced by Jackson’s secretary of the treasury, Louis McLane • Interviewed northern companies • They wanted to show that the “Tariff of Abominations” was supporting US manufacturing • They found that cotton was significant force driving the northern economy

27. EX. LOWELL, MA • A factory town on the Merimack River in Massachussetts • Established in 1820s • By early 1830s, four mills in operation, where spinning and weaving took place, and 3,000 workers

28. EX. LOWELL, MA • Each year, mills used 13,000 bales of southern cotton • Representative of broader transformation: mills using New England labor, machinery designs taken from Britain, and southern cotton • Cotton mills more generally: • 1820, 75,000 workers in manufacturing • 1832: 200,000 workersin manufacturing, largest share of which was in cotton mills

29. OTHER NORTH-SOUTH CONNECTIONS • Collins Axe Works • Located on Farmington River in Connecticut • Significant sales to the old southwestern states, where axes were used to clear land for plantations • Clothing • Northern firms sold clothing for slaves • Ex. Peace Dale Manufacturing Firm sold cloth and hats in New Orleans • One estimate: 30% of Northeast’s “transportable” goods were sold to the West and South

30. THE IMPACT OF COTTON • Total amount of US economic activity in 1836: $1.5 billion • Direct and indirect economic activity related to cotton: $600 million • Includes: • value of cotton crop • 2nd order effects: Goods and services needed to produce cotton (purchase of slaves and land, axes, clothing, food) • 3rd order effects: money spent by those who took some of their income from cotton (ex. money millworkers spent, wages paid to steamboat workers, revenues from investments by merchants and manufacturers)

31. Divergent Paths or One World? South North

32. Divergent Paths or One World? North South Courtesy LOC