International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Slavery also necessitated enforcement costs beyond those entailed by free labor. This converted slavery’s enforcement into an added expense for the region. Without slavery, these resources would have been used in other endeavors. The most that can be said about this additional cost is that it was offset by the output it generated—so long as each individual planter covered his own security costs. Even this ceased to be true, however, if slaveholders could impose part of the costs on non–slaveholding whites. And that is what they did. The chief way that state and local governments externalized enforcement costs was the use of slave patrols . Loosely connected with the local militia, patrol duty was compulsory for most able–bodied white males. Exemption usually required the exempt person to pay a fine or hire a substitute. The slave patrols thereby affixed a tax-in-kind upon small slaveholders and poor whites who owned no slaves. As a result, coercion was now less expensive for l...

Slavery’s classical inefficiency resulted from restrictions on slaveholders freeing their slaves. These restrictions had been in place since the colonial period and were only briefly relaxed in the upper South after the American Revolution. By the time of the Civil War, seven slave states had gone so far as to outlaw manumission without specific legislative approval. The South’s free-labor sector tended to comprise jobs requiring initiative, discretion, and diligence—in other words, jobs that commanded higher wages because the output had greater market value. Many African Americans , if free, might have performed these well–paid jobs. They therefore could have produced either of two possible streams of future output—one less remunerative while slaves and one more remunerative while free. Such a discrepancy made possible a mutually profitable deal for a slave to buy freedom from his or her owner. Why did slaveholders erect such barriers when it was in their individual self–inte...

The slaveholder was like an employer of free labor with extra options. Masters had two ways to motivate their slaves : the positive incentives of free labor or negative incentives employing force and violence.  Slaveholders thus confronted a classic trade–off.   They would tend to choose whichever incentive was cheaper at the margin. Because coercion itself requires labor, as well as other resources, not to mention possible loss of output from injuring or killing the slave, it was not always cheaper than paying an implicit wage. Not all of a slave’s labor was coercively extracted. American slaves not only were fed and housed, but also sometimes received other payments. Slaveholders found positive incentives to be less costly for jobs requiring greater skill, initiative, or self–discipline. In towns and cities, where such jobs were more common, the practice of hiring out slaves and giving them a fixed sum or percentage became well established. Slaves who were skilled car...