Atack on Wright, _Slavery and American Economic Development_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (May 2007)

Gavin Wright, _Slavery and American Economic Development_. Baton 
Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. x + 162 pp. $25 
(cloth), ISBN: 0-8071-3183-0.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Jeremy Atack, Department of Economics, 
Vanderbilt University.


My mother always told me that "good things come in small packages." 
This slender volume, which began its life as the Fleming public 
lecture series delivered at Louisiana State University in 1997, is a 
case in point. Wright returns to the subject -- American slavery -- 
that marked his professional debut and which has punctuated much of 
his distinguished career. Despite, or perhaps because of, his long 
association with the topic, this work is far more than a simple 
synopsis of past research. While the book is not path-breaking and 
innovative in the ways that _The Political Economy of the Cotton 
South_ (Wright 1978) or _Old South, New South_ (Wright 1986) were, it 
reflects new insights and research (such as the work by Olmstead and 
Rhode (2005) on cotton picking rates) and restates past arguments 
more forcefully, more eloquently, and more persuasively as well. 
Nowhere is this clearer than in the lengthy third chapter which 
expands and elaborates upon Wright's 1979 invited _American Economic 
Review_ critique of Fogel and Engerman's work on the relative 
efficiency of slavery (Wright 1979).

The book's pervasive theme is that of slavery as a set of property 
rights which vested the slave's human capital in the slave owner 
rather than the slave. This made the slave a highly portable resource 
that could be employed in any way that best served the slave owner's 
interests. Property rights, not personhood, defined the system and it 
was the rejection of the former in favor of the latter that 
ultimately distinguished the North from the South with respect to 
labor. A defining moment in the philosophical switch was the Indiana 
Supreme Court's decision in _Mary Clark, a Woman of Color_ whereby 
the court denied specific performance as a remedy to the claim that 
Mary Clark had voluntarily agreed to a long-term labor contract with 
her putative master, General Johnson, noting that "such performance 
... would produce a state of servitude as degrading and demoralizing 
... as a state of absolute slavery" (Indiana 1821; Williams 1997).

The first substantive chapter, "Slavery, Geography and Commerce," is 
the least focused of the three. About two-thirds of the chapter is 
devoted to linking the rise of the Atlantic slave trade to the 
development of the Atlantic Economy and the growth of European demand 
for Caribbean sugar. Wright's argument is that sugar production was 
so unpleasant and arduous yet demand for it was so strong that it 
could only be satisfied through the involuntary reallocation of labor 
as profit overcame moral scruples. The balance of the chapter 
addresses the disappearance of northern slavery from collective 
consciousness in the years following the Revolution so that the 
"Peculiar Institution" became a peculiarly southern institution 
despite persistent but failed efforts to extend slavery to the rich 
bottomlands of southern Illinois and other areas covered by the 
Northwest Ordinances.

Chapter 2 examines the pace of economic progress in the North and 
South in the decade prior to the Civil War. It concludes that the 
illusion of southern progress depended critically upon the accounting 
convention of treating the human capital of a portion of the 
population - slaves -- as the personal property of the slave-owning 
classes. The result of this was to raise southern wealth far above 
that in the North where the rate of population growth was 80 percent 
higher. While people were voting with their feet moving into the 
northern states which also invested more in general public education, 
thus beating the South on both the quantity and quality dimension, 
southerners hoarded a specific form of labor instead of investing in 
land and infrastructure. The resulting differences at the 
county-level are vividly shown in maps: the percentage of slaves in 
the total population correlates highly with the value of personal 
property per capita and inversely with the value of farms per acre. 
One paradox of this was that slave labor became expensive labor which 
owners sought to protect from injury and death by means of more 
complete contracts and life insurance, while free labor bore all the 
vicissitudes of workplace dangers. Meanwhile, the lack of effective 
demand from the enslaved population limited and skewed southern 
economic development (Russel 1938; Linden 1940; Genovese 1961, 1962).

In "The Efficiency of Slavery: Another Interpretation," Wright (1979) 
focused upon just two factors -- the exceptionalism of the 1859-60 
crop year and effects which the crop mix had upon the apparent 
efficiency of slavery -- in attacking Fogel and Engerman's position 
on the relative efficiency of slave agriculture (Fogel and Engerman 
1971, 1977). Here, in Chapter Three, he elaborates on his earlier 
critique. Wright also follows up on some "alternatives lines of 
interpretation" he did not follow then and also makes new points. 
Specifically, Wright supplements the customary total factor 
productivity (TFP) estimates from the Parker-Gallman sample for 1860 
with new estimates from the much less well-known Foust and Swan 
sample for 1850, revealing quite different patterns in the two years 
and between the Southeast and the Southwest. Even without these 
contradictory data, those who have not followed the debate especially 
closely and those who are unfamiliar with the underlying data will 
find the scatter plots of average TFP by number of slaves (Figure 
3.4) damning of the simple relative efficiency histograms in _Time on 
the Cross_ (Fogel and Engerman 1974) and elsewhere. One more or one 
less slave turns out to be associated with very large variations in 
average TFP especially among the bigger plantations.

Among the alternative lines of interpretation for the relative 
efficiency story which Wright explores is the role played by Fogel 
and Engerman's weights in reducing male and female labor to "hand 
equivalents." Men and women often performed different tasks 
throughout the year and their relative contributions to revenue were 
not synonymous to physical productivity differences. This latter 
point is particularly important since TFP is measured in dollar 
rather than physical terms. Among the new issues raised by Wright is 
the role played by land value. The census only reports the "cash 
value of land and buildings" but by regressing farm value on improved 
and unimproved acres, Wright shows that slave owners consistently 
farmed more valuable land (unimproved as well as improved) than those 
who relied upon free labor. Wright attributes this to the slave 
owners' high degree of mobility which enabled them, as first comers, 
to claim the most fertile and best situated land at the most 
favorable prices.

Although _Slavery and American Economic Development_ is not expressly 
couched as a critique of _Time on the Cross_ and _Without Consent or 
Contract_ (Fogel 1989; Fogel, Engerman et al. 1992; fogel, Galantine 
et al. 1992), make no mistake: it is. As Wright remarks in his 
Epilogue "Contrary to depictions of the slave South as a prosperous 
economy devastated by war and abolition, these essays locate the 
roots of postbellum regional backwardness firmly in the antebellum 
period. This era was prosperous indeed for the slaveowners [but] ... 
the antebellum South is [more] appropriately grouped with the 
middling countries of that era, such as Spain, Austria, Norway or 
Portugal" (p. 123-24).

References:

Fogel, R. W. (1989). _Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall 
of American Slavery_. New York, Norton.

Fogel, R. W. and S. L. Engerman (1971). "The Relative Efficiency of 
Slavery: A Comparison of Northern and Southern Agriculture in 1860." 
_Explorations in Economic History_ 8(3): 353-67.

Fogel, R. W. and S. L. Engerman (1974). _Time on the Cross: The 
Economics of American Negro Slavery_. Boston,, Little Brown.

Fogel, R. W. and S. L. Engerman (1977). "Explaining the Relative 
Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South," _American 
Economic Review_ 67(3): 275-96.

Fogel, R. W., S. L. Engerman, et al. (1992). _Without Consent or 
Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (Technical Papers)_. 
New York, Norton.

Fogel, R. W., R. A. Galantine, et al. (1992). _Without Consent or 
Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery: Evidence and 
Methods_. New York, Norton.

Genovese, E. D. (1961). _The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in 
the Economy and Society of the Slave South_. New York: Pantheon.

Genovese, E. D. (1962). "The Significance of the Slave Plantation for 
Southern Economic Development." _Journal of Southern History_ 28(4): 
422-37.

Indiana (1821). In re Clark, 1 Blackf. 124-5

Linden, F. (1940). "Repercussions of Manufacturing in the Antebellum 
South." _North Carolina Historical Review_ 17: 313-31.

Olmstead, A. and P. W. Rhode (2005). "Wait a Cotton Pickin' Minute! A 
New View of Slave Productivity." NBER Summer Institute: Development 
of the American Economy.

Russel, R. R. (1938). "The General Effects of Slavery upon Southern 
Economic Progress." _Journal of Southern History_ 4(1): 34-54.

Williams, S. B. (1997). "The Indiana Supreme Court and the Struggle 
against Slavery." _Indiana Law Review_ 30: 305-17.

Wright, G. (1978). _The Political Economy of the Cotton South: 
Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century_. New York, 
Norton.

Wright, G. (1979). "The Efficiency of Slavery: Another 
Interpretation." _American Economic Review_ 69(1): 219-26.

Wright, G. (1986). _Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern 
Economy since the Civil War_. New York: Basic Books.


Jeremy Atack is editor of the _Journal of Economic History_.

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