Slavery, Complicity, and US Economic Growth

Those Americans determined to find nothing but misery and wickedness in our past like to say things like this:

The white folks who did not personally own slaves gleefully participated in the economy and white supremacy created by slavery. Slavery turned America into an economic superpower. That is indisputable.

But as far as the last statement goes, most economic historians very much do dispute it. First, the US was not an "economic superpower" until a generation after the abolition of slavery. And, the real engines of US growth seem to have little to do with slavery or plantation agriculture:

One central issue is that much historical writing conflates complicity with slavery—for example, routinely engaging in business with slaveholders, including transactions that facilitated slaveholding and the domestic slave trade—with national economic impact. Complicity with slavery was indeed widespread in the free states. Indifference to the enslaved status of southern labor was more the rule than the exception among northern shippers, manufacturers, and financial firms. Further, such groups often supported slaveholder interests in national politics, fearful that turmoil over slavery would disrupt economic activity. However, accounts of the sources of US economic growth in the nineteenth-century suggest that slavery and the shift of the slave-owning South to cotton production early in the century had relatively little effect on growth for the nation as a whole. The southern economy shared in the growth acceleration, expanding lands committed to cotton production and raising labor productivity in the process. But the deeper sources of long-run US economic growth were improvements in technology, internal transportation, finance, and education, and the slave-owning South lagged in all of these areas. A simple summary of these patterns might be this: Slavery enriched slave-owners, but impoverished the southern region and did little to boost the US economy as a whole. 

Which is not to say that slavery was not, in certain situations, economically productive; I have written here before about the advantages that large plantations had in sweet-scented tobacco production, for example. The spread of plantations worked by slaves or indentured laborers is one of the great themes of the colonial era, and a driving force of the first global economy. But when they look in detail at the specific question of what made the US rich, most economists do not think slavery was helpful. If slavery made countries rich, then Brazil and Jamaica should have been richer than North America, and they were not. South Carolina should have been richer than New England, and it very much was not. Worldwide, economists find a very strong association between a free, mobile labor force and modern economic growth. Think about it this way: when left-wing historians write about the spread of plantations across Africa and Asia, they usually assume that the main beneficiaries were, not people in those countries, but European merchants; so why does anyone think that the spread of plantations across North America was a big benefit to North Americans? Other than the plantation owners, that is.

The biggest contribution of plantation agricultue to the US economy was growing cotton, but cotton production did not fall after the end of slavery.

I am not a big fan of mathematical economic counterfacturals, but FWIW when economists rerun the history of the US without slavery they find that the nation would have been richer in 1860, not poorer. Africans made a huge contribution just by being here and working, but the (lousy) numbers show that they would have added even more had they been free.

My own view is that Lincoln was elected partly because people in the North were feeling less and less connection to or dependence on the slave economy of the South, and therefore less inclination to compromise with the South politically. The energy in the North was in railroads, steel, and the ever-expanding wheat lands of the old Northwest. Northern businessmen viewed the plantations as an old-fashioned drag on their modernizing commercial and industrial world, and modern economic historians agree.