The preceding section suggests that if slavery had been abolished nationally at the time of the Constitution, the Cotton South would have developed through family-scale farms like the rest of the country, delivering as much or perhaps more cotton to the eager textile mills of Lancashire, and building a more diverse and prosperous regional economy in the process.
Many historians will respond that they are less interested in hypothetical histories that did not happen, preferring to focus on the undeniable fact U.S. slavery persisted and grew. The question then becomes: what was the significance of slave-based southern expansion for U.S. economic development? Beckert is in no doubt: “It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world (p. 119). In their introduction to a recent collection, Beckert and Rockman put it even more strongly: “During the eighty years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery was indispensable to the economic development of the United States (2016, p. 1).
As with the British case, timing is crucial in assessing these claims. As discussed above, the port cities of colonial North America were intimately tied to slave-based commerce in the Atlantic economy. These trade connections revived after independence, and northeastern ports flourished during the Napoleonic Wars, at least until Jefferson’s Embargo of December 1807. The legacy of this urban and financial development clearly fostered later economic activities. If one were looking for a Williams-type transition from mercantile to industrial investment, post-Embargo New England provides a nearly ideal example. Wealthy New England merchants such as Francis Cabot Lowell turned to cotton textiles, launching the innovative Boston Manufacturing Company in 1813 (Dalzell 1987). In contrast to Lancashire, however, American textiles were designed for the protected domestic market, as opportunities in foreign trade declined. A generation later, the same New England capitalists turned their attention to railroads and development in the Midwestern states (Johnson and Supple 1967).
Beckert and Rockman, however, along with Edward Baptist, clearly mean to include the rise of cotton in their narrative. In an earlier article, Rockman wrote: “But no matter how frequently southern slaveholders denounced bourgeois liberalism, there can be little doubt that the slave system played an indispensable role in the emergence of a national capitalist economy...the simultaneous expansion of slavery and capitalism [was] no mere coincidence” (2006, pp. 346-347). Baptist writes: “Cotton also drove U.S. expansion, enabling the young country to grow from a narrow coastal belt into a vast, powerful nation with the fastest- growing economy in the world” (2014, p. 113). In this formulation, the New Historians of Capitalism are reviving an intellectual tradition associated with Douglass North, often regarded as one of the first contributions in cliometrics. In 1961, North wrote:
Cotton was strategic because it was the major independent variable in the interdependent structure of internal and international trade. The demands for western foodstuffs and northeastern services and manufactures were basically dependent upon the income received from the cotton trade...it was cotton which was the most important influence in the growth in the market size and consequent expansion of the economy...Cotton played the leading team role (1961, pp. 67-68, 194).
There is just one difficulty: this Cotton Staple Growth theory has largely been rejected by cliometric research.
Drawing on contemporary southern newspapers, railroad reports and periodicals, Diane Lindstrom (1970) confirmed Fishlow’s finding that the South provided only a limited market for imported foodstuffs: “the needs of the lower South for flour and corn were insufficient to absorb the output of these products from the upper South, to say nothing of their serving as a major outlet for western produce” (p. 113). The reason for this pattern is that most cotton plantations were themselves self-sufficient in food, planting ample corn crops to spread the fixed costs of slave labor across the year, and maintaining swine to feed the residents (Gallman 1970). Taken together, the evidence rejects the claim that “the growth of the market for western foodstuffs was geared to the expansion of the southern cotton economy” (p. 68).
As a market for northeastern manufactured goods, the South was sizeable in the immediate aftermath of the War of 1812, but its role was never dominant and diminished over time. Using capture-recapture methods to analyze the coastal trade from New York City, Lawrence Herbst (1978) estimated that no more than 16.4 percent of northern manufacturing output went South in 1839, of which only a subset was attributable to surging exports of cotton. In her study of economic development in the Philadelphia region, Lindstrom (1978) found that manufacturers rarely sold goods in distant markets before 1840, and when they did, these markets were normally in the East. Longer-distance trade grew over time, but primarily along east-west lines. The transportation revolution hastened both western settlement and commercialization, together comprising the majority of demand growth for U.S. manufactures. Figure 8 shows that total income of the South steadily declined as a share of national income, from the Revolution to the eve of the Civil War. Even during the 1850s, the most prosperous decade in southern economic history, the region’s share of national income ticked downward from 31.4 percent to 30.5 percent, primarily because of slower population growth.
Baptist asserts that “almost half of the economic activity of the United States in 1836 derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by... slaves” (2014, p. 322). As Olmstead and Rhode show, this figure is an egregious overstatement, generated by double-counting outputs, inputs, asset sales and financial transactions (2018, p. 13). Cotton production accounted for about five percent of GDP at that time. Cotton dominated U.S. exports after 1820, but exports never exceeded seven percent of GDP during the antebellum period. True, cotton textiles were important for U.S. industrialization, and New England mills used the same slave-grown raw material as their competitors in Lancashire. But location within national boundaries had little economic significance for this industry. As a bulky but lightweight commodity, raw cotton travels easily, and transportation costs play little if any role in textiles geography. The protective tariff – strongly opposed by the slave South – was of far greater importance for the competitiveness of the antebellum industry (Harley 1992, 2001).
As New Historians of Capitalism have emphasized, financial connections between the slave South and northern money markets were extensive and important, servicing not just cotton but the interstate slave trade (Schermerhorn 2015). The Natchez branch of Biddle’s Bank of the United States offered accommodation paper to planters so aggressively in the 1830s that the Bank found itself in possession of numerous slaves and several plantations after the failures of 1837 and 1839 (Kilbourne 2006). To the extent that outside credit financed moves onto better cotton land, it contributed to productivity growth. Olmstead and Rhode’s picking rate graph shows impressive gains, strongly correlated with the shift to the southwest.
Equally evident is the fact that the rate of advance was slowing over time, as one would expect from a growth source driven by geographic shifts (albeit, augmented by improvements in cotton plants). Because overall labor supply was inelastic, the primary effect of capital inflows was to drive up the price of the limiting factor. Soaring antebellum slave prices, often taken as signs of robust performance, can also be seen as symptoms of economic dysfunction.
It would wrap this analysis into a tidy, self-contained package to conclude that Anglo- American industrial and financial interests recognized this growing dysfunction and in response, fostered or at least encouraged the antislavery campaigns that culminated in Civil War. This is not exactly how it happened.
Slave owners had extensive business and financial ties to northern firms, most of whom apparently felt no compunctions and would have happily continued these arrangements indefinitely. Many of the “Cotton Whigs” associated with the textiles industry cultivated personal ties with southerners in the 1830s; an English visitor to the Lawrence family was amazed at “their sympathy with the Southerners on the slavery question” (O’Connor 1968, p. 133). In his book on New York City’s elite, Beckert reports that most bourgeois New Yorkers, especially merchants and bankers, wanted to accommodate the South politically (2001, p. 85). During the secession crisis, New York Mayor Fernando Wood openly favored the city seceding from the Union and setting itself up as a free city.
Despite these common interests, the slave South increasingly assumed the role of obstructer to a national pro-growth agenda. Not only did southerners favor low tariffs, but southern presidents vetoed seven Rivers & Harbors bills between 1838 and 1860, frustrating the ambitions of entrepreneurs in the Great Lakes states (Egnal 2009, pp. 101-122). The Dred Scott decision of 1857, apparently opening the territories to slavery, sharply depressed the share values of railroads who had plans for construction in Kansas (Wahl 2006). In the 1850s, the South stood in opposition to a Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad, currency reform, and federal support for agricultural research and education, measures that were favored by a majority of northern farmers, as well as business interests (Ron 2016, pp. 367-374). Regional differences in economic interests and policies by no means imply that these groups had active reasons to push for abolition. But when the slave South seemed intent on expanding into new territories, perhaps even into the free states through such measures as the Fugitive Slave Act, many northerners came to believe that their economic interests were under threat. Beckert writes that a rising group of upper-class New Yorkers believed “the political power of southern slaveholders over the federal government was nothing less than a threat to the development of the United States and to their own economic wellbeing...Moreover, the political power of southern slaveholders, these businessmen began to argue, prevented necessary reforms in the banking, currency, credit, and transportation systems” (2001, pp. 90-91).
Slave owners, for their part, were riding high in 1860, perhaps captives of their own King Cotton rhetoric, which held that the South “can defy the world – for the civilized world depends on the cotton of the South” (Wright 1978, p. 146). Evidently, they conflated elite financial success with southern economic strength. Slavery was unquestionably the basis for the former, but the opposite held true for the latter. By 1860, the civilized world still needed cotton, but it no longer needed slavery.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...1111/ehr.12962
|
Re: Is BLM more racist and dangerous than the KKK or Q Anon or Antifa
Originally Posted by enoch
Reply With Quote
Re: Is BLM more racist and dangerous than the KKK or Q Anon or Antifa
