American Exceptionalism Part 9 Systemic Racism: Our Inheritance from Slavery

Slavery was abolished in the United States with the ratification of the 13^th Amendment in December 1865. As can be seen from the map below, this was considerably later than all of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and Russia. 

But it was not the late date of American emancipation that has defined the impact that slavery had on the American economy and society, but the deep economic dependence on slavery of the Southern, and by extension, the American economy. What this has meant is a subject of great controversy. A major source of the controversy has been the influential book The Half has never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist, published in 2014. One of Baptist’s main ideas according to reviewer Eric Foner in The New York Times is the fact that “Slavery was essential to American development and, indeed, to the violent construction of the capitalist world in which we live.” 

Other reviewers have not been so kind. Trevor Burnard, writing the journal Slavery and Abolition does not pull his punches.  He writes, “This is a poor book. It is badly written, sometimes spectacularly so. It shows a lack of research and an unfamiliarity with economic theory, It is overblown and full of overstatements…In short, a lot of the book is just made up, a deliberate strategy resulting from a faulty research design.” Another reviewer, who has delved deeply into the cotton economy, Alan Olmstead writes “Edward Baptist’s study of capitalism and slavery is flawed beyond repair.”      

What should we make of Baptist’s conclusions? To what degree did slavery contribute to the economic prosperity of the free parts of the United States and of the Western world, more generally?  I am unable to answer this question with any confidence, but I do want to point out some of the facts about the economics of American slavery:

• Economic historians, such as Fogel and Engerman, found that slavery was a very profitable business at the outbreak of the civil war; in fact, cotton output doubled every decade.
• According to data from Williamson and Cain,
  • In 1860, Southern wealth was almost equal to Northern wealth, and, indeed, on a per capita basis excluding slaves, was 80% higher.
  • Slaves represented 48% of total Southern wealth.
  • The value of slaves was three times all capital, North and South, invested in manufacturing, 12 times the value of the cotton crop and 48 times the entire expenditures of the Federal Government.
• In 1860, cotton from the South represented 80% of all British imports of cotton, and textiles represented 40% of all British exports.
• Indeed, one author estimated that in 1862, fully 20 million people worldwide—one out of every 65 people alive—were involved in the cultivation of cotton or the production of cotton cloth.
• As David Blight put it, cotton in 1860 was comparable to Mideast oil in the 20^th century. If oil was back gold, then cotton was white gold, although it was produced by black labor.

My next post will examine what systemic racism is, and lay out the data on the inequities that are still, 155 years after the passage of the thirteenth amendment, very much present in the America of the present day.