Fate left it to Abraham Lincoln, born February 12, 1809 in a backwoods log cabin in Kentucky, to repair the damage inflicted on the Republic by state-sponsored slavery. Could the American Founders have known the carnage of the Civil War, and the racial enmity both before and after it, perhaps they would not have compromised their lofty principles by allowing slavery to continue. For it had already existed from the earliest days of European settlement, in Jamestown Virginia in 1619. What if Negro slaves had never been brought to North America? What motivated the planters and plantation owners to import Negro slaves to do their work, rather than pick their own cotton, tobacco, and other crops? The answers are not so obvious as they might seem, and they differ throughout the course of antebellum slavery. Such what-if questions provide clues not only to what might-have-been, but also to what might be possible or impossible today.
The American Founders' experiment lasted, as Abraham Lincoln memorably noted, fourscore and seven years. They (the Founders) inherited an established system that gave the Southern slaveholders substantial political power, exercised through the States they controlled. The Founders believed that however flawed it was, a national association of finely balanced quasi-autonomous States was paramount.
Numerous doomed compromises with States representing slaveholders eventually fell apart, and a secessionist nation founded on Negro slavery raised an army and embarked on a hopeless and immensely destructive war over race. Historians have tended to focus on the inter-regional scars left by the Civil War, but surely the most corrosive scars are racial. How could it be otherwise between one race enslaved, its freedom stolen, families brutally separated, held in chains and sold like cattle, and another race that routinized such atrocities to maintain this servitude? How could anyone have ever expected their legacy to be anything other than mutual bitterness and enmity? Regardless of the absurdity of blaming all the members of one race (such as Northern abolitionists or later immigrants) for a slavery they had no part in, the legacy of racial bitterness remains ineradicable.
Surely it is not anachronistic to ask whether slave-owners were aware their human chattel preferred to be free. Were it not obvious from the fact that force was required to put and keep people in bondage, slave revolts before 1800 in the Caribbean, in America in 1800 (Prosser), 1822 (Vesey), 1831 (Turner), and the 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry by John Brown leave no doubt that Negro slaves were not happy with their circumstances, nor with the race that imposed them. From the earliest days of slavery, slave-owners could not help but be aware of their own cruelty and the hatred it naturally engendered.
Why then did the plantation owners (including many of the Founders themselves) import and exploit Negro slaves? Leaving aside the kindly slaveholders who encouraged education of their human property and even allowed some to buy their own freedom, why did this noxious institution persist for so long? Further north, settlers from Scandinavia were lured to the Northern Plains by fanciful visions of Nirvana. The first winters disabused them of that, but they stayed and built the North American inland grain empire with their own labor. For the Southern aristocracy, in contrast, the pastoral fantasy of gracious ease that they believed to be their birthright did not involve their own labor.
Picking cotton was easy, but getting the seeds out was hard work. One person could only de-seed one pound (half a kilogram) of cotton per day. Eli Whitney's cotton gin, invented in 1794, enabled one person to de-seed 50 pounds of cotton per day, an enormous increase in productivity. This would seem to have reduced the need for slave labor, though some have asserted otherwise, but it certainly reduced the comparative value of slave labor.
Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808. In the four years leading up to this ban, the numbers of Negro slaves who survived the horrendous voyages to the United States increased from 2,317 in 1803 to 9,717 in 1804, 10,917 in 1805, 17,100 in 1806, and 28,892 in 1807. The 1808 ban did not completely end the international slave trade, but reduced the numbers of Negro slaves brought to America to hundreds per year through 1860.
This embargo increased the market prices of slaves sold at auction in America1. Prices varied depending on age, physical condition, skill, and docility, but a compilation of average prices shows that they doubled from $250 in 1807 to nearly $500 in 1819. General economic conditions caused fluctuations in slave prices similar to those in commodities. Another peak, $600, occurred in 1839, rising to $800 on the eve of secession in 1860.
This $800 would be worth $180,000 in 2020 Dollars, double what it had been 14 years earlier. It represented a very substantial portion of slaveholders' wealth, generally rising in tandem with increasing land values. Significantly, the price of a female slave of child-bearing age was nearly as high as that of a young healthy male slave. From 1808 to 1858, the number of slaves in the United States tripled to reach nearly four million in 1860. As Williamson and Cain put it, 'the ownership of even one slave implied that the owner was a wealthy member of the community. Those who owned over 500 slaves had [wealth] that compares to billionaires today'. They were the Gateses and Bezoses of their day.
Taken together, the trans-Atlantic traffic, post-1808 population, and price data suggest that for most of post-Independence antebellum history, slavery was more profitable as a commodity in itself than as unpaid agricultural labor. This astonishing conclusion may explain why slaveholders clung to their vicious system for so long, founded a nation (the Confederacy), and started a hopeless war over it. Averting their eyes from the desire for vengeance that would inevitably arise, they embarked on a campaign of slaughter to defend a lifestyle that honored living off others' toil.
Is it any wonder then that bitterness and enmity between the races continues unabated up to and including the present day? That traffic cannot be undone now, but it would be possible to end state-sponsored (and enforced) racial preferences in education, jobs, government contracts, racial ghettoes in education, the hate-Whitey curriculum, endless reparations, and the unrelenting search for previously unrecognized instances of 'systemic racism'. These do nothing but reinforce mutual hatred with a new system of oppression based on invidious racial distinctions. The Federal plantation enforces this through taxation and by withholding discretionary grants from organizations that do not comply with its diktats. Diversity commissars write elaborate reports tracking compliance, and are lavishly paid for doing so. The beneficiaries of this system, like the 19th-century slaveholders, know very well that it is unjust, but seem satisfied to extort whatever they can from an easily guilt-tripped group afraid to commit the slightest 'micro-aggression' and hyper-anxious to demonstrate its virtue. This system makes no sense except as a means of keeping race relations on the boil. Adding fuel to the fire, it provides foreign enemies such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with a ready-made source of self-destructive conflict, as occurred in the CCP-financed BLM riots of 2020. Common-sense tells us this system is incompatible with social peace, economic welfare, military readiness, or continued national existence.
'The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,' as Chief Justice Roberts wrote. Nothing will extinguish the mutual bitterness that smolders in collective memory, but Americans can actually stop promoting mutual hatred if they truly wish to end it.
Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch and Gavin Wright, editors, Historical Statistics of the United States: earliest times to the present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), series Bb212.
What a thoughtful and thought-provoking rumination of America's horrific experience with slavery! Thank you. Ironically, the Founders' were challenged by one of their very best to put this issue to rest. George Mason, after full participation in its creation, declined to sign the Constitution. His two major objections were its lack of a "bill of rights" subsequently corrected, and its failure to do away with Slavery. He said that such a failure would doom our nation to unfathomable tragedy. And so it has....