Calculating the Value of the Union

Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War

James L. Huston

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781469629100, 9780807828045
• eBook ISBN: 9780807861684
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

While slavery is often at the heart of debates over the causes of the Civil War, historians are not agreed on precisely what aspect of slavery — with its various social, economic, political, cultural, and moral ramifications — gave rise to the sectional rift. In Calculating the Value of the Union, James Huston integrates economic, social, and political history to argue that the issue of property rights as it pertained to slavery was at the center of the Civil War.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, southern slaveholders sought a national definition of property rights that would recognize and protect their ownership of slaves. Northern interests, on the other hand, opposed any national interpretation of property rights because of the threat slavery posed to the northern free labor market, particularly if allowed to spread to western territories. This impasse sparked a process of political realignment that culminated in the creation of the Republican Party, ultimately leading to the secession crisis.

Deeply researched and carefully written, this study rebuts recent trends in antebellum historiography and persuasively argues for a fundamentally economic interpretation of the slavery issue and the coming of the Civil War.

PART
ONE
THE THEMES OF SLAVERY AND PROPERTY RIGHTS, 1776–1860

With them [abolitionists] the right of property is nothing; the deficiency of the powers of the general government is nothing; the acknowledged and incontestible powers of the States are nothing; a civil war, a dissolution of the Union, and the overthrow of a government in which are concentrated the fondest hopes of the civilized world, are nothing. A single idea has taken possession of their minds, and onward they pursue it, overlooking all barriers, and regardless of all consequences.…

A third impediment to immediate abolition is to be found in the immense amount of capital which is invested in slave property. The total number of slaves in the United States, according to the last enumeration of the population, was a little upwards of two millions. Assuming their increase at a ratio, which it probably is, of five per cent. per annum, their present number would be three millions. The average value of slaves at this time is stated by persons well informed to be as high as five hundred dollars each. To be certainly within the mark, let us suppose that it is only four hundred dollars. The total value, then, by that estimate, of the slave property in the United States, is twelve hundred millions of dollars. This property is diffused throughout all classes and conditions of society. It is owned by widows and orphans, by the aged and infirm, as well as the sound and vigorous. It is the subject of mortgages, deeds of trust, and family settlements. It has been made the basis of numerous debts contracted upon its faith, and is the sole reliance, in many instances, of creditors within and without the slave States, for the payment of debts due to them. And now it is rashly proposed, by a single fiat of legislation, to annihilate this immense amount of property! To annihilate it without indemnity and without compensation to its owners! Does any considerate man believe it to be possible to effect such an object without convulsion, revolution, and bloodshed?

I know that there is a visionary dogma, which holds that negro slaves cannot be the subject of property. I shall not dwell long on this speculative abstraction. That is property which the law declares to be property.

—Speech of Henry Clay on abolitionist petitions in the Senate, February 7, 1839, in Swain, The Life and Speeches of Henry Clay, 2:398, 410 (emphasis added)

1
Slavery, Property Rights, and the American Revolution

When the English settled at Jamestown, they began creating a European civilization in North America, and thus they imprinted upon the early English outposts all the elements of their culture, bad as well as good. From the unhealthy side came the planting of slavery in the English colonies. Slavery grew in the American colonies because it was profitable, and by the time of the Revolution it was a massive institution representing one and one-half centuries of investment. That investment required state protection. As the newly formed United States found out, a central government with some power was necessary if the nation were to survive. At the formation of the Constitution came then the marriage of politics and economics that haunted six decades of the nineteenth century. To create a nation, the Constitution makers pulled together different and antagonistic strands of English political and cultural ideals as well as American colonial practices: the necessity of protecting private property from majoritarian assault, the requirements of individual liberty, the enshrinement of local authority, and an acknowledgment that African slaves in North America were in some manner property. The well-understood antagonism lodged within the nation was that the nation was founded upon the principle of individual liberty while it sanctioned chattel slavery. At the same time, however, leaders broadcasted all the deficiencies of slavery, a list to which the later decades would add virtually nothing. But the afterglow of the Revolution bathed many difficult problems in a warm, optimistic light. Slavery would disappear, and property rights, instead of being used as a device to make aristocracy impregnable, would instead be instrumental in protecting the rights of common folk, thus helping to preserve popular government and the principle of majority rule.

Several conditions led to the establishment of slavery in North America. Upper-class Englishmen had low opinions of those who did manual labor, and the elite used various forms of servitude to obtain cheap labor. The English were also interested in amassing wealth. North America was strangely unpopulated compared with the other continents of the Earth, and at the time of the arrival of the English, diseases had decimated the resident Indian tribes. There was thus a vast amount of land but little population—a unique condition in the world of 1600. When the English found a commercial crop in tobacco, they were able to supply their needs through servants brought over from England by the system of indentured servitude. In Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina (where rice became the important commercial staple), the rise of large farms using some form of controlled labor had fully blossomed by the last half of the seventeenth century. Slavery had been dead in England for about 400 years or so, its demise slowly being recognized in statutes and judicial proceedings, but servitude continued to possess certain aspects of slavery. The master had some conditional property rights in the labor of the servant and control over the servant’s mobility; he had the capacity to sell the property rights in labor to other parties. The conditional aspects of those property rights were limitations on punishments, a limit to term of service, the non-hereditary quality of servitude, and the fact that servants could sue masters for breach of contract. The essential difference was that the law recognized servants as human beings (usually English human beings) possessing nonbarterable rights. That is, servitude did not reduce a person to the level of an animal, to personal property.

Dutch traders brought the first Africans to Jamestown in 1619 for sale as servants, although the normal tendency in today’s scholarship is to stress the early emergence of chattel slavery. Slavery for Africans may have developed rapidly, but it is clear that the numbers of slaves did not. Planters until the 1660s depended on English labor in the form of indentured servants to take care of their labor requirements for tobacco cultivation. Between 1660 and 1700, however, the supply of English labor dwindled because wages in England improved, and the planters suddenly lacked an adequate servile labor force—which simply meant they lacked cheap, manageable labor. Moreover, English servants in the colonies became unruly. For these reasons, the colonial planters, through their legislators, turned to Africans for a labor supply. They wrote the laws of slavery that defined slaves by race, made the condition hereditary, and denied that emancipation could be achieved by conversion to Christianity. In these laws the slave also became a chattel—a piece of property over whom, except for certain public safety reasons, the slave master had total dominance, as much as a property holder had over land, animals, or other articles of personal possessions.¹ As of 1660, there were probably barely 3,000 Africans on the North American mainland. The engine of the slave trade then roared; by 1680, there were 7,000, by 1700, 28,000, by 1720, 69,000, by 1740, 150,000, and in 1770, 460,000. Imports from Africa would reach their height after the Revolution, between 1800 and 1820.²

Why slavery manifested itself in North (and South) America just when its death was being recorded in Europe has two reasons. The first was economic. Europeans in either of the Americas were few, but the land mass was great. To obtain labor, the Europeans turned to forced labor, either of Indians or of some imported race. Second, the Europeans carried with them an ethnocentrism that easily rationalized the enslavement of people different from themselves. The skin color difference between Indians, Africans, and Europeans led to an obvious rationale for enslavement of people of different color: they were easily identified and controlled. But the ethnocentrism element among Europeans operated in a particular way to promote slavery. European society had been built on communities of quite homogeneous population types; they noted the differences among themselves, let alone between them and the rest of the world’s population. Within their group they incorporated individuals into the existing community; that is, they bestowed upon individuals the community notion of rights, privileges, and activity. Those outside of the community did not receive the same treatment; they were the “others.” In North America in 1610 or 1660 or 1700, English men and women were not made slaves—they were members of the English community and had the “rights and privileges” of English people. The crown and Parliament would never have allowed English colonials to have enslaved other English colonials.³ Nor could the English have easily enslaved other Europeans without risk of retaliation from their mother countries. The Spanish were in Florida and parts of Georgia, the French in Canada, and other Europeans could rely upon their descent to ward off the labor-hunger of the English. But none of these rules applied to Indians or to Africans. They were not members of the community, and they, except for the Indians, lacked a national power base to threaten the English. In short, Indians and Africans were vulnerable and so became the obvious sources for some sort of servile labor pool for the English.

To this must be added the inchoate stage of economic development of Europe. Economic rules, except for vague ones supplied by church and government, did not exist in terms of how individual and national wealth could be best accumulated. Theorists were only beginning to promote the ideas that became mercantilism; physiocracy awaited the opening of the eighteenth century; and Adam Smith would not begin the codification of the rules of a market economy until 1776. Shortly after 1650 or so, the Atlantic economic community assumed a distinct shape, and the benefits of extended trade would teach people how individuals and nations acquired wealth by exchange of goods. Prior to 1600, however, the way to wealth was fairly simple and had been simple for 2,000 years. Wealth was obtained, it was somewhat true, by trade, but mostly from the employment of servile labor—a cheap labor made to work to benefit a social superior—and more generally by conquest. The earth yielded its fruits, grains, and minerals, and individuals by their own labor could obtain a modestly healthy living; but to live in grandeur one had to conquer others and force them into a cheap labor pool, into some form of servility.

When the English (or the French or the Spanish) came to the Americas, they brought this older notion of wealth accumulation with them. Some trade or barter with the indigenous people might occur, but the invaders knew that the wealth they wanted could only be obtained via conquest and servile labor. And so we come to one of the major original sins of the English founding of North America. They condoned and legitimized violence in the pursuit of wealth—violence against the “others” not wrapped in the protective folds of European community. In modern economic terms, a market economy is ethical and legitimate (among these type of economists) only so long as all actors make uncoerced choices, and the existing alternatives represent real choices (not alternatives that deny a choice, such as life or death). Servitude could be an uncoerced choice; but slavery was the offspring of unrelenting violence.⁴

Given the conditions of early America, the English should not have established slavery. Had the rules of a market economy been formulated and enforced, coercion of either labor, yeoman farmer, or aristocrat would have been forbidden. The result would have been small farms producing subsistence crops and a vastly reduced tobacco and rice yield. Such a result was foretold by the conditions of North America in the seventeenth century: extensive land that could be obtained at a low price, few settlers, and the observance of the rule of noncoercion. Remove the rule of no violence to obtain material goals, that all economic activity had to be done by mutual consent, and the result was slavery.⁵

Even then, Virginians and South Carolinians might have established slavery without the chattel principle. Other means existed to deal with the labor shortage than by legally transforming people into property. In particular, the colonial governments or even Parliament or the king could have maintained ownership of all slaves and merely have leased them out to planters. Through some arrangement, planters could have been allowed to obtain the labor of slaves without acquiring property rights in the bodies of slaves and their progeny. Under that circumstance, emancipation might in the future have been more easily accomplished. But domination of others via the right of an individual to an absolute control of his or her property was to be the guiding principle of American slavery. That principle created the snowball effect. The slave became an asset, a thing representing invested wealth; as the use of slaves became economically effective in certain types of agricultural activity, the wealth grew in a compound fashion. As the slaveholders recognized that their wealth in slaves was compounding, they became more and more resistant to any infringement upon their r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Calculating the Value of the Union
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Preface
• PART ONE: THE THEMES OF SLAVERY AND PROPERTY RIGHTS, 1776–1860
• PART TWO: THE POLITICAL REALIGNMENT OF THE 1850S
• Afterword
• Appendix A: A Theory of Political Realignment
• Appendix B: Graphing U.S. Politics, 1840–1860
• Appendix C: State and Congressional Elections Used in Figures 6.1, 7.1, and B.1–10
• Appendix D: Number of Cases for Regions in Average Vote in Elections Used for Figures 6.1, 7.1, and B.1–10
• Notes
• Sources
• Index