Slavery’s impact on regional rates of economic growth, the workings of the interstate slave trade.




Economists have done significant research into many other questions about American slavery not treated in this entry. These include slavery’s impact on regional rates of economic growth, the workings of the interstate slave trade, the demographics of the slave family, and slave health and nutrition. But focusing on slavery’s profitability and inefficiency exposes the true horror of this labor system. Slavery inflicted on African Americans tremendous pain, suffering, and sometimes death, along with other less brutal burdens such as lost income. This massive decline in welfare from output inefficiency did increase the South’s production of cotton and other goods, but classical inefficiency had the opposite effect on the South’s total output. The misallocation of African American labor through restrictions on manumission made non-slaveholding southern whites poorer as well, as did their burden from the enforcement inefficiency of mandatory slave patrols. The net effect on the South’s purely monetary income per capita is difficult to pin down. But suggestive is the fact that income per capita in the slave states (counting slaves) remained more than 25 percent lower than that of the free states throughout the three decades leading up to the Civil War. Moreover, planters who extracted enormous coercive transfers from slaves earned rates of return no greater on average than northern merchants and manufacturers. Nonetheless, slaveholders had so much wealth tied up in this human capital that they were willing to invest considerable resources and eventually fight tooth and nail to preserve a system that provided them only market returns.

The ultimate beneficiaries of slavery were those who could buy cheaper cotton textiles or other consumption goods, the output of which was increased by slave labor. The New History of Capitalism has grossly exaggerated these gains in order to magnify slavery’s exploitation. But unlike economists, these historians fail to think at the margin. It does not follow, simply because slavery increased output, that it was essential to that output. Not only did the total losses borne by slaves far exceed the market value of the increased output, but also, for each slave working in the cotton fields, there were hundreds of American, English, and continental users of cotton cloth. Because there were so many consumers of slave-produced products, any fall in prices resulting from this marginal increase in output was widely distributed. The fact that these individual gains were so small relative to their human cost much more forcefully underscores slavery’s barbarity.

About the Author

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel is Emeritus Professor of economics at San Jose State University and the author of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, the second edition of which was released in 2014.

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