by Of course, the Civil War had to do with slavery and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery, something that, as I will explain later, has echoes in the current fight. about the right to abortion.
So Haley deserves all the condemnation she received for initially refusing to acknowledge the obvious at a campaign event last week.
But it may be worth digging a little deeper into the background. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it limited to only one part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?
Let me start with a potentially controversial statement: the American system of slavery was not motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. The slavers were racists and used Racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions of people more sustainable, but it was money and inhuman greed that drove the racist system.
In 1970, MIT economist Evsey Domar published a classic paper titled “The Causes of Slavery or Servitude: A Hypothesis,” which began with a historical observation that probably surprised most of its readers. Everyone knew that Tsarist Russia was a nation where serfs were tied to the land, but it turned out that Russian serfdom was not an ancient institution dating back to the depths of medieval history. Instead, it was introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, after gunpowder finally gave peasant infantry the military advantage over nomadic horse archers, allowing the Russian Empire to expand into vast and fertile new territories.
As Domar pointed out, there is little reason to enslave a worker (not exactly the same thing, but let’s leave that aside) if labor is plentiful and land scarce, so the amount that worker could earn if he ran away would barely exceeds the cost of subsistence. But if land becomes abundant and labor scarce, the ruling class will want to immobilize the workers so that they can forcibly extract the difference between the value of what the workers can produce (strictly speaking, their Marginal Product – and the cost of keeping them alive.
Hence the rise of serfdom as Russia expanded eastward and the rise of slavery as Europe colonized the New World.
In fact, the real historical puzzle is why high wages did not always lead to widespread slavery or serfdom. As Domar pointed out, serfdom in the West had more or less disappeared around 1300, because Western Europe was overpopulated, given the technologies of the time, which in turn meant that landowners did not have to worry about their tenants and workers leaving. looking for lower rents or higher salaries. But the Black Death caused the population to collapse and wages to rise. In fact, for a time, real wages in Britain reached a level that they would not recover until around 1870:
However, the easement was not reimposed, for reasons that are not entirely clear. One idea, however, is that holding people captive to steal the fruits of their labor is not easy. (runaway servants were a major problem in Russia, as were escaped and rebellious slaves in the United States: Second Amendment It was largely about making it easier to retain slaves. A slave rebellion led in 1848 to emancipation on St. Croix, where President Biden spent his most recent vacation). Which brings us to the history of the American Civil War.
Labor was scarce in the United States before the Civil War, so free workers earned high wages by European standards. Here are some estimates of real wages in several countries as a percentage of US levels on the eve of the Civil War:
Note that Australia – another land-rich, labor-scarce nation – was more or less on par with the United States; In other places, workers earned much less.
The landowners, of course, did not want to pay high wages. In the early days of colonial settlement, many Europeans arrived as servants – in effect, temporary servants. But landowners quickly turned to African slaves, who offered two advantages to their exploiters: because they looked different from white settlers, they found it difficult to escape, and they received less sympathy from poor white workers who would otherwise have noticed. that they had many interests. in common. Of course, white Southerners also viewed slaves as property, not people, so the value of slaves was a factor in the balance of this greed-driven system.
So, again, the dynamic was one in which greedy slaveholders used and perpetuated racism to sustain their reign of exploitation and terror.
However, because slavery in the United States was based on race, there was a limited supply of slaves, and it turned out that slaves earned more for their masters in Southern agriculture than in other occupations or places. Northern blacks were sold down the river to Southern planters who were willing to pay more for them, so slavery became an institution peculiar to one part of the country.
As such, slaves became an enormously important financial asset for their owners. Estimates of the market value of slaves before the Civil War vary widely, but they were clearly worth much more than the land they farmed and may well have accounted for most of the South’s wealth. Inevitably, slaveholders became staunch defenders of the system underlying their wealth: fierce and often violent defenders (remember bleeding kansas), because nothing makes a man angrier than his own suspicion, probably unacknowledged, that he is actually wrong.
In fact, slave owners and their defenders lashed out at anyone who even suggested that slavery was bad. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Cooper Union Addressthe interest of the slaves in effect demanded that northerners “stop considering slavery wrong and join them in considering it right.”
But northerners wouldn’t do that. There were relatively few Americans pushing for national abolition, but the northern states, one by one, abolished slavery in their own territories. This was not as noble an act as it might have been if they had been confiscating the property of slave owners, rather than waiting until the slaves had been sold. Still, credit must be given to voters for finding slavery repugnant.
And this posed a problem for the South. Anyone who believes or pretends to believe that the Civil War was a states’ rights issue should read Ulysses S. Grant’s book. memories, who point out that the truth was almost the opposite. In his conclusion, Grant noted that maintaining slavery was difficult when much of the nation was made up of free states, so the slave states actually demanded control over the policies of the free states. “The marshals of the North became slave catchers and the courts of the North had to contribute to the support and protection of the institution,” he wrote.
This should sound familiar. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states that have banned abortion have become increasingly frantic over women’s ability to travel to states where abortion rights persist; It’s obvious that the right will eventually impose a national abortion ban if they can.
For a long time, the South managed to exert that kind of national control. But industrialization gradually shifted the balance of power within the United States from the South to the North:
So did immigration, with very few immigrants move to slave states.
And the war occurred because the increasingly empowered people of the North, as Grant wrote, “were unwilling to play the role of policeman of the South” in protecting slavery.
So yes, the Civil War was about slavery, an institution that existed solely to enrich some men by depriving others of their freedom. And there is no excuse for anyone who claims that there was anything noble or even defensible about the Southern cause: the Civil War was fought to defend an absolutely vile institution.
quick hits
He Southernification of rural America.
Why the south was left behind.
He suppressed history of the southern unionists.
This song is written from the perspective of a slave and her owner as Union soldiers approach. Based on a true story.
