To: Solon who wrote (3903 ) 4/27/2010 8:22:17 PM From: Brumar89 Read Replies (1) | Respond to I think that classical scholars such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus were correct in believing that free labor was more efficient and more profitable than forced labor. You didn't see a lot of slaves in the Christian North now did you?? If it was economically more feasible than paid labor... But they sure as Hell didn't like cutting sugar cane or risking their lives every day in a mine, did they? On the other hand, why not rely on the availability and the efficiency of paid labor in Pennsylvania? Often slaves were worked TO DEATH Anyway, the profitability issue is one that you are clearly not interested in, so I will leave it to the furious ongoing debates amongst economists and sociologists and historians. prime field hands went for four to six hundred dollars in the U.S. in 1800, thirteen to fifteen hundred dollars in 1850, and up to three thousand dollars just before Fort Sumter fell. Even controlling for inflation, the prices of U.S. slaves rose significantly in the six decades before South Carolina seceded from the Union. By 1860, Southerners owned close to $4 billion worth of slaves. Slavery remained a thriving business on the eve of the Civil War: Fogel and Engerman (1974) projected that by 1890 slave prices would have increased on average more than 50 percent over their 1860 levels. No wonder the South rose in armed resistance to protect its enormous investment.Consensus That Slavery Was Profitable Much like other businessmen, New World slaveowners responded to market signals -- adjusting crop mixes, reallocating slaves to more profitable tasks, hiring out idle slaves, and selling slaves for profit. One well-known instance shows that contemporaneous free labor thought that urban slavery may even have worked too well: employees of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, went out on their first strike in 1847 to protest the use of slave labor at the Works.Fogel's and Engerman's research led them to conclude that investments in slaves generated high rates of return, masters held slaves for profit motives rather than for prestige, and slavery thrived in cities and rural areas alike. They also found that antebellum Southern farms were 35 percent more efficient overall than Northern ones and that slave farms in the New South were 53 percent more efficient than free farms in either North or South. This would mean that a slave farm that is otherwise identical to a free farm (in terms of the amount of land, livestock, machinery and labor used) would produce output worth 53 percent more than the free. On the eve of the Civil War, slavery flourished in the South and generated a rate of economic growth comparable to that of many European countries, according to Fogel and Engerman. They also discovered that, because slaves constituted a considerable portion of individual wealth, masters fed and treated their slaves reasonably well. Although some evidence indicates that infant and young slaves suffered much worse conditions than their freeborn counterparts, teenaged and adult slaves lived in conditions similar to -- sometimes better than -- those enjoyed by many free laborers of the same period.One potent piece of evidence supporting the notion that slavery provides pecuniary benefits is this: slavery replaces other labor when it becomes relatively cheaper. In the early U.S. colonies, for example, indentured servitude was common. As the demand for skilled servants (and therefore their wages) rose in England, the cost of indentured servants went up in the colonies. At the same time, second-generation slaves became more productive than their forebears because they spoke English and did not have to adjust to life in a strange new world. Consequently, the balance of labor shifted away from indentured servitude and toward slavery. eh.net "Which doesn't mean much since pretty much everyone in the south was too. Even the slaves." "He didn't campaign against monarchy either, but does that make him a monarchist?"
