Mike Scruggs
I have read two articles on the Civil War recently that mis-characterized slave labor as free labor, meaning labor without a cost to the slave owner. One of these articles was by a well-known sociologist and popular author. Both writers may have been so conditioned to the exaggerated negative reputation of Southern slavery that they failed to apply some basic economic analysis. Perhaps they were so conditioned that they temporarily took flight from common sense.=========
However distasteful institutionalized slavery may seem, slave owners, by their own economic necessity and often by law, had to provide food, shelter, clothing, and basic healthcare for their slaves. Sick, incapacitated, and poorly nourished slaves were not in the economic interest of reasonably intelligent slave owners. Moreover, this economic necessity, which most Southern slave owners also considered a moral and ethical obligation, was from cradle (or purchase) to grave. This included provision for the lame and elderly. Slaves and the master’s family generally received the same basic healthcare. Larger plantations even had small hospitals and full-time physicians. Many slave owners also provided cash incentives and free time for meeting established goals and allowed slaves effective possession of homes and a plot of land to raise a few crops.
According to a formidable study of Southern slavery by R. W. Fogel and S. L Engerman published in 1974—entitled Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery—nutrition, housing, and healthcare standards for Southern slaves compared favorably to Northern factory workers. The nutrient value of food consumed by Southern slaves was superior to that of most Southern or Northern whites. This was principally because the slaves raised sweet potatoes on their small plots of land. Sweet potatoes have much higher food values than white potatoes. The clothing and shoes allotted to slaves were adequate, sturdy, and made to last.
In general, the conditions endured by Southern slaves in terms of nutrition, housing, and especially healthcare were superior to Northern factory workers. When cash incentives are included, their total compensation was about 15 percent higher than comparable non-slave labor in the South. The profit margin to slave owners after all expenses was only about 14 percent. When a baby was born in slavery, it took slightly more than 21 years for the master to breakeven.
The point I am making in all these statistics is that slave labor was not free. Food, shelter, clothing, and basic healthcare are not free. Although several recent academic studies have proclaimed that Southern slavery was so profitable that it would have continued indefinitely had not slavery been outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, I believe their conclusion is extremely doubtful. They have simply not counted all the costs, particularly the aspects of cradle to grave security. In my opinion, technological innovation, human aspirations, foreign competition, and political opposition within the South—where only 26 percent households owned slaves—would have made it economically obsolete and politically untenable within a generation or two.
However, the politically correct pressure to justify over 620,000 military and a minimum of 50,000 civilian deaths with a glorious cause is very great, and there is nowhere where the chains of political correctness are forged more heavily than in modern academia. The chains are only a little lighter in media and political circles. In addition, decades of propaganda in many layers have buried, obscured, and twisted both facts and logic. The 150th anniversary of the so-called “Civil” War is a good time to throw political correctness and all its totalitarian relatives in the garbage and reexamine our history.
It ought to be obvious just from reading Lincoln’s first inaugural address that his military action against the Confederacy was not about freeing slaves. As to the nature of the slavery issue, Lincoln’s inaugural remarks pointed out that the “only substantial dispute” was over the extension of slavery to new states. This is quite far from calling for a moral crusade to end slavery.
Lincoln, however, could not live with the consequences of Southern secession. The North would lose over 80 percent of its tax revenue, of which 95 percent was derived from tariffs on imports. More than 83 percent of tariff revenue was paid by Southern importers. The economic abuse of the South by Northern sponsored protective tariffs had been a burning issue for 40 years, and the new Morrill Tariff would more than double the tax burden on the South with dutiable tariff rates progressively increasing to 47 percent within three years. The South and their British economic allies favored low tariffs and free trade, but Northern industry and politicians had become addicted to high protective tariffs. Lincoln, Northern industry, and most of the Northern Congress correctly saw that Southern secession and especially Southern free trade would result in near-term economic disaster for the North. But their political and economic urgency was of their own making—nearly 40 years of sectionalist avarice that had been indifferent to Southern economic suffering.
I believe that there were multiple causes of Southern secession and the subsequent tragedy of four years of extraordinarily bloody and destructive war. But the slavery issue has been substantially reshaped and exaggerated to justify the war as a necessary and glorious moral cause. The tariff issue has been largely suppressed and unjustifiably minimized in importance because it contracts politically approved mythology and uncovers astonishing partisan greed, political tyranny, and moral indifference to sectional injustice.
Civil War Misconceptions #7
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