Ingenuity, not capital
accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a little king.
In his second inaugural, Abraham Lincoln declared that "if
God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the
bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk…as was said 3,000 years
ago, so still it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether.'"
It is a noble sentiment. Yet the economic idea implied—that
exploitation made us rich—is mistaken. Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a
few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched
Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves.
It's
hard to dispel the idea embedded in Lincoln's poetry. TeachUSHistory.org
assumes "that northern finance made the Cotton Kingdom possible"
because "northern factories required that cotton." The idea underlies
recent books of a new King Cotton school of history: Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams (Harvard
University Press), Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf),
and Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of
American Capitalism (Basic Books).
The rise of capitalism depended, the King Cottoners claim, on the
making of cotton cloth in Manchester, England, and Manchester, New Hampshire.
The raw cotton, they say, could come only from the South. The growing of
cotton, in turn, is said to have depended on slavery. The conclusion—just as
our good friends on the left have been saying all these years—is that
capitalism was conceived in sin, the sin of slavery.
Yet each step in the logic of the King Cotton historians is
mistaken. The enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles.
Cotton mills, true, were pioneers of some industrial techniques, techniques
applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making
and engineering and mining and farming, had nothing to do with cotton. Britain
in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills.
Nor is it true that if a supply chain is interrupted there are no
possible substitutes. Such is the theory behind strategic bombing, as of the Ho
Chi Minh trail. Yet only in the short run is it "necessary" for a
good to come from a particular region by a particular route. A missing link can
be replaced, as in fact it was during the blockade of raw cotton from the South
during the war. British and other European manufacturers turned to Egypt to
provide some of what the South could not.
Growing cotton, further, unlike sugar or rice, never required
slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South
produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in
southwest China, where it was grown in bulk anciently. And many whites in the
South grew it, too, before the war and after. That slaves produced cotton does
not imply that they were essential or causal in the production.
Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a
century. You wouldn't know it from the King Cottoners. They assert, for
example, that a slave was "cheap labor." Mistaken again. After all, slaves
ate, and they didn't produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late
Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense
would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a
slave. It's how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the
cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from
the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.
The King Cotton school has been devastated recently in detail by
two economic historians, Alan Olmstead of the University of California at Davis
and Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan. They point out, for example, that
the influential and leftish economist Thomas Piketty grossly exaggerated the
share of slaves in U.S. wealth, yet Edward Baptist uses Piketty's estimates to
put slavery at the center of the country's economic history. Olmstead and Rhode
note, too, from their research on the cotton economy that the price of slaves
increased from 1820 to 1860 not because of institutional change (more
whippings) or the demand for cotton, but because of an astonishing rise in the
productivity of the cotton plant, achieved by selective breeding. Ingenuity, not
capital accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a little king.
Slavery was of course appalling, a plain theft of labor. The war
to end it was righteous altogether—though had the South been coldly rational,
the ending could have been achieved as in the British Empire in 1833 or Brazil
in 1888 without 600,000 deaths. But prosperity did not depend on slavery. The
United States and the United Kingdom and the rest would have become just as
rich without the 250 years of unrequited toil. They have remained rich,
observe, even after the peculiar institution was abolished, because their
riches did not depend on its sinfulness.
The
virtue of liberty did matter. The magic world is liberalism, the
liberalism of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft and Henry David Thoreau. The
explosion of ingenuity after 1800 came from the gradual inspiriting of millions
of liberated people to have a go. Thoreau ran his father's pencil factory, and
made it flourish. Liberalism liberated first poor white men, then, yes, former
slaves, then women, then immigrants, then colonial people, then gays.
Liberation and innovation dance together.
To
cast enslavement of some as requisite for the wealth of others is bad
economics, then, and bad history. But it is also a toxic ideology. The left has
long regarded any employment
as slavish exploitation. The phrase wage
slave is defined coolly by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English as
"a person who is wholly dependent on income from employment," with
the notation "informal"—but not "ironic" or
"jocular" or, better, "economically illiterate." By such a
definition, you and I are slaves, even though we are paid the traded value of
goods and services we produce at the margin for others.
The other Marx, Groucho, at the height of his success in movies
during the hungry 1930s, was approached by an old friend, whom Groucho knew to
be a communist. As the perhaps apocryphal story goes, the friend said, "I
desperately need a job. You have contacts." Groucho, whose sense of humor
was often cruel, replied, "Harry, I can't. You're my dear, dear communist
friend. I don't want to exploit you." Ha, ha. But no employee in a
capitalist economy owes coerced or unpaid service to any boss.
Well, except for our boss the state, through taxation by payment
or draft or eminent domain. Taxation is a slavery admired by most of the left
and much of the right. Its defenses echo Southern rhetoric in 1860.
"Citizens are children who need to be protected, yet forced to work."
"Liberty is dangerous." "The defense of property depends on a
big government." "God ordained it."
We need to stop using the history of slavery to bolster
anti-capitalist ideology. Ingenuity, not exploitation by slavery or imperialism
or finance, is the story of the modern world.
Deirdre McCloskey is emerita professor of
economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at
Chicago and the author most recently of Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not
Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World