Enforcement Inefficiency.



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 large slaveholders, so that the trade–off between positive and negative incentives was shifted toward coercion. This worsened the slave’s lot and caused expenditures on enforcement to exceed gains to planters. But because planters did not bear these costs, they did not oppose such expenditures. Using the slave patrol fines imposed in all but three of the slave states, Hummel estimated the total annual opportunity cost of patrol duty to be $4.5 million, providing a lower-bound estimate of the deadweight loss from enforcement inefficiency.

Both the national government and the free states also subsidized slavery’s enforcement through Fugitive Slave Laws, which required the return of slaves fleeing north. Because the U.S. Censuses for 1850 and 1860 reported only about 1,000 runaways per year, no more than 0.03 percent of the total slave population, the economic (as opposed to political) significance of these laws was underrated. Franklin and Schweninger (1999), Hummel (2001, 2012) and Hummel and Weingast (2001, 2006) showed that the census data were unreliably low and that the raw numbers were misleading. Women and children were a lot less likely to run away; the danger of escape was concentrated in prime–age males. A slave’s initial distance from the free states also mattered, with runaways concentrated in the upper South. Out of the total slave population in Maryland, these adjustments suggest, the proportion of prime males reported escaping in the 1850 Census was 1.5 percent. Without Fugitive Slave Laws, percentages would have been higher.

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