Free Labor vs. Slave Labor

United States.

It is interesting to see David Brion Davis admit in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery that modern economic historians have found that slave labor in the nineteenth century South was more efficient than “free labor” in the nineteenth century North.

As always, Yankees destroyed what they did not understand on the basis of fashionable crank utopian theories:

“Indeed, many historians initially attacked the economic historians’ discovery that Southern slavery, despite its ghastly evils, was more efficient, productive, and profitable than free-labor farming in the North.”

You would think it would have been obvious: if free labor really was superior to slave labor, planters would have abandoned slavery for the obviously superior free labor system.

It is hard to believe that Yankees were still pushing this discredited theory after the collapse of plantation agriculture in Haiti and later in the British West Indies which were unable to compete with slave labor in Cuba and Brazil.

He writes of Haiti:

“In most respects the very existence of Haiti was a godsend for the abolitionists’ opponents. Sanguine predictions of the moral and educational advance of the people, of economic enterprise that would soon lead to thriving towns and to Haitian ships entering the harbors of the world, increasingly gave way to reports of political upheaval and hopeless poverty.”

Who could have predicted that?

“In contrast to Northern family farms, the larger Southern plantations were more like the agribusinesses of the later twentieth century in terms of size, efficiency, and complex organization…

Scholars still dispute some questions relating to the economics of American slavery, but during the past thirty years a broad consensus has confirmed the arguments of Stanley L. Engerman and the Nobel laureate Robert William Fogel concerning the extraordinary efficiency and productivity of plantation slave labor, which in no way implies they the system was less harsh or even less criminal. The historian Seymour Drescher has shown that most of the political economists of the early decades of the nineteenth century rejected Adam Smith’s overconfident assertion in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, that because of its incentives, free labor was always cheaper and more efficient and productive than slave labor.”

Efficient, productive, and profitable are words which have never been associated with black people – especially with the Black Undertow – under the free labor system.

“The large planters soon ranked among America’s wealthiest men. Indeed, by 1860 two-thirds of the wealthiest men in America lived in the South – a fact that became difficult to believe after the devastation of the Civil War and the full industrialization of the North.”

Unlike West Indian slavery, Southern slavery was also a middle class institution – the typical slaveowner owned less than 10 slaves, and most planters owned 20 to 40 slaves.

In the West Indies, hundreds of slaves worked on sugar plantations that sprawled across thousands of acres. They also processed and refined the sugar in Cuba. Huge plantations also existed in South Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta

“The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically “backward,” stagnating, and unproductive. We now know that investment in slaves brought a considerable profit and that the Southern economy grew rapidly throughout the pre-Civil War decades.”

After the South was annihilated, the slaves were emancipated, and freedom and equality triumphed, the subsequent impoverishment of the South was cited as proof by Yankees of the backwardness of slavery.

“By 1840 the South grew more than 60 percent of the world’s cotton and supplied not only Britain and New England but also the rising industries of continental Europe, including Russia. Throughout the antebellum period cotton accounted for over half the value of all America’s exports, and thus it paid for the major share of the nation’s imports and investment capital. A stimulant to Northern industry, cotton also contributed to the growth of New York City as a distributing and exporting center gust drew income from commissions, freight charges, interest, insurance, and other services connected with the marketing of America’s number one commodity.”

As an independent nation, the plantation South could have supplied the world with cotton while easily growing its own food and relying upon Britain for manufactured goods and financial services.

About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

50 Comments

  1. The South was rapidly industrializing in the 20 years prior to the Civil War; very likely at a greater pace than in the North. Being from a Southern steel, coal, iron, and railroad center you should know this.

  2. I have a way to end BRA.

    Make a film about Lincoln, MLK take your pick. Show them to be sex crazed maniacs. Rapists whathaveyou. See the blacks chimpout. Polarize the existence of the first amendment. Let the country fall. Attack their gods and they are defeated.

  3. I suspect that once enough capitalization was accumulated that automation would have still been acheived. Additionally, were there any prisons in the south? Was there any black crime? Not much.

  4. Whether slavery was efficient or not, those that benefitted from it left the rest of us with a shitpile of violent, worthless baboons that drain OUR wealth and decay the nation. The wise man never brings strangers into his home. And, race is an extension of family!!!

  5. If for some freak reason slavery were to return to this land, What-ah-mallans would make for great slaves. If you’ve ever seen them work you would understand. Africans aren’t worth much when you factor in overseeing to keep them from shenanigans.
    I’m sure one hundred mestizos could pick a section of cotton in a week (just kidding, I’ll have to ask gramps for more realistic time).

  6. The trouble with libertarianism is that in large part it depends on or lends itself very readily on the blank slate theory. It generates propositions based on its accepted maxims and holds the propositions generated out of its syllogisms to be a priori true. But people are not blank slates and what is valued by one group is not valued by another to the same extent. Whites and Negroes both favour productivity and leisure but not the same. What appears rational to one will not be rational to another because of different ranking of values. Individuals are individuals but they are also members of groups and form their identities and ranking of values to a very great extent on group identification.

  7. This blog has gone down the tubes.

    Anyone who makes repeated defenses of an institution as repulsive and suicidal as nigger slavery in white countries, even with the full benefit of hindsight, is simply beyond reason.

  8. Excellent, Mr. Wallace–and when the economic historians present their cases about the efficiency of the New Deal and socialized medicine, you’re on board with that, too, right?

  9. There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.

    Robert E Lee, 1856

  10. Adam Smith could only see what he could observe, and for the narrow window of his observation(IE an all white Britain in the best possible place to capitalize on trade) his ideas were undoubtedly on the money. But conditions and assumptions can change.

  11. Show of hands. Does anyone here believe Robert E. Lee to be infallible?

    Not me. He obviously was mistaken about some things. Pickett’s charge comes to mind.

  12. 313Chris says:
    ‘This blog has gone down the tubes.
    Anyone who makes repeated defenses of an institution as repulsive and suicidal as nigger slavery in white countries, even with the full benefit of hindsight, is simply beyond reason.’

    They are so adamant in defending slavery that they cannot even condemn the abhorrent history of White slavery or show any compassion to the unfortunate victims who suffered terribly.

  13. Compassion? Obama: He displays great “compassion” for Ambassador Stevens, a white boy who bled a lot in the desert. Stevens had compassion for Libyans mass yearning to be free.

    F-ck compassion. It’s fake.

  14. “After the South was annihilated, the slaves were emancipated, and freedom and equality triumphed, the subsequent impoverishment of the South was cited as proof by Yankees of the backwardness of slavery.”

    Typical yankee perversion and dissociative sociopathy. After pillaging the South, they then brazenly proclaimed that poverty they created was caused by the Southern economy itself. Yankees are the most preposterous people on the face of the planet.

    Negro equality is a most preposterous idea. Let alone the idea of being ruled over by a negro. BRA is a preposterous form of government. Where do all these preposterous yankee ideas come from?

    “Show of hands. Does anyone here believe Robert E. Lee to be infallible?”

    Robert E Lee was a man of impeccable character, but I suspect that only a halfwit would answer in the affirmative. Knowing what we know now, perhaps Lee’s biggest mistake was in not taking the remnants of the army into the mountains and waging a guerilla war against the yankee invaders and despoilers of everything decent and good.

    Deo Vindice

  15. “Knowing what we know now, perhaps Lee’s biggest mistake was in not taking the remnants of the army into the mountains and waging a guerilla war against the yankee invaders and despoilers of everything decent and good.”

    Lee considered that to be a dishonorable way to oppose the Union Army and said as much.

  16. Efficiency had little to do with economics in terms of US chattel slavery. Slavery or more accurately the keeping of slaves was tied to status, I am a Free White (or I suspect occasionally Freed Black in some areas ) Man of some means and therefore I own Slaves.

    This economy also had the advantage of maintaining the Aristocratic tradition stronger.

    This being status and class driven was something that would have been defended no matter what.

    Too the Poor Whites had a stake in it too, they were after all better than the Blacks both socially and in many to most cases, intellectually and morally. Thus even a lowly Free White sharecropper or in some case Black Freedmen thought it worth defending Confederate culture.

    However the increase in the complexity of machinery inevitably would have made slavery far less useful. No number of slaves can outperform machines in the longer term.

  17. Some ejjit from Vermont is going to fight a robot liberation war against humans. Some Jewish director will make idiot films about it all. Plus ca Change.

  18. Sorry for the Part 2 here. I hit a hotkey

    I want to be clear that this ignores a moral dimension, slavery is perfectly Christian but I personally find it abhorrent . Its not a disclaimer, this blog holds the opposite view but as C.S. Lewis put it

    Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

    As a White man I am probably better than most Blacks but its moot, I am not that much better.

    No back on topic, in terms of efficiency though domestic services are something of an exception, we are a long way away from good domestic machines and no machine can do better save perhaps in safety to your family.

    However with machines like refrigerators, easy to use stoves, microwaves vacuum cleaners and the like , none of which are especially complex and can be sustained, the number of hours required to keep comfort is a lot lower and as such a gain beyond a status symbol the cost benefit analysis is low

    Of course this could often lead to well in the long term the only descendent’s of Thomas Jefferson being Black which as someone who abhors race mixing is rather distasteful.

    In reality, slavery in useless in a 1st rate nation save perhaps as a punishment for crimes. In such a case were this the case and I could afford a comely White girl I might be tempted but I’d still have to say its a bad idea.

  19. What-ah-mallans would make for great slaves.

    You mean, green on the outside, red on the inside? It would be the first time they ever actually worked. . .

  20. “Adam Smith could only see what he could observe, and for the narrow window of his observation(IE an all white Britain in the best possible place to capitalize on trade) his ideas were undoubtedly on the money. But conditions and assumptions can change.”

    Adam Smith is excused, but the followers of Alisa Rosenbaum, who can see better, are not.

  21. Sam,

    That’s because English indentured servants and convicts were not slaves. Indentured servants were not chattel, worked for a limited period of time in exchange for transportation to the New World, their children were born free, and they usually received land or some form of payment at the end of their indentures.

    If you want to talk about White slavery, it certainly existed in North Africa, the Middle East, the Greece, Rome, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. The Italian city states were engaged in the White slave trade in the fifteenth century in the Balkans.

    “White slavery” disappeared in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Except in Spain and Portugal under Muslim rule.

  22. The British could have observed Haiti whose swift economic collapse turned into a boom in Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana, the destruction of their own colonies which set off another sugar and coffee boom in Brazil and Cuba, and finally the brilliant rise of the Cotton Kingdom in the South during the antebellum era followed by its collapse during Reconstruction.

  23. In hindsight, we can see that abolition was one of the first devastating Yankee ideas that was inflicted on us through the Union. After the abolition of slavery, the Yankee reform impulse immediately shifted to the new causes of anti-racism and civil rights and consolidating all power in the central government.

    It wasn’t enough though to destroy our prosperity, make blacks into citizens, and transform blacks into our rulers to pillage our states. “Progress” also required the destruction of patriarchy and “women’s rights.” Now the definition of marriage itself has similarly come under attack for excluding homosexuals.

    Now we are drowning in a sea of Third World immigrants because the entire world has been invited to join our “Nation of Immigrants.” We voted against that too but were outvoted because of the Union.

  24. One discussion this topic invites, and one that is too often negleted, I think, is a discussion regarding a direct comparison of the quality of life between the Southern black slaves and the “free” blacks in the North. Personally, I do not hesitate to assert that the Southern slaves were better fed, clothed, housed, and cared for, than their “free” black Northern counterparts. Fogel and Engerman adressed this issue, but in a limited way, making only a general comparison between Southern slaves and unskilled laborers, both black and white, in the North. But because the Northern blacks suffered terrible discrimination, they usually held the absolute lowest position in the employment hierarchy, and were often simply unemployed. The “free” Northen black typically lived in utter poverty and squalor, far, far below the standard of living of a typical Southern slave. Aside from Leom Litwack, whose scholarship on the subject is over 50 years old, I am unfamiliar with any others who have addressed the matter.

    PS-Because everyone today is trained, like Palovian dogs, to recoil in horror and hysterically run from the room upon hearing the word “slavery”, I propose that henceforth, “slaves” be refered to using the constitutional term of “persons held to service”. Or perhaps “black agricultural laborers”.

  25. Those morons over at Daily Kos don’t even have their facts straight. The vast majority of Forrest’s troops were mounted infantry not cavalry. They tied up their horses and fought on foot as infantry in most engagements. He used them to, as he put it, “get there first, with the most men.”

    In 1869 he dissolved not fully successfully his first incarnation of the Klan and in 1871 gave over 50 pages of testimony over several days as to its activities to a Congressional Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

    He was a military genius of the first rank and excelled in quarter-mastering supplies to his mobile forces in addition to engaging in battle. His tactics and strategies are still studied world wide as classic battles of maneuver and concentration of force at the critical point.

  26. Re: “comparison of the quality of life between the Southern black slaves and the ‘free’ blacks in the North”:

    Agricultural machinery needs to be, and generally is, maintained properly, to continue to work efficiently and not break down.

    From a white perspective however, WE would rather be free and poor, and even a bit hungry, than to be well-fed and controlled.

  27. “Portuguese emigrate to Africa for work.”

    No, a certain class of Portuguese is emigrating to Africa (technical cadres, businessmen, people with degrees in Media, Martketing, Advertising, etc). I think the more Appropriate term is “brain flight”.

    Not working out too well I’m afraid. 5 Portuguese business men murdered in Angola this year alone and dozens of rapes on white tourists and immigrants. The local authorities’ answer? “The lifestyle of European women facilitates this type of occurrences.”

    Apparently being a white woman in Angola and driving a car in broad daylight by yourself is a “cultural difference” that can get you raped. I kid you not, that was among the things they claimed.

    The other face of the story, which of course is not reported, is that for over 30 years Portugal has been flooded with negroes from Angola, Mozambique and all the ex-colonies. Here is the south there’s blacks everywhere. In Lisbon it is even worse, as my brother-in-law commented a couple of weeks ago after spending a weekend there: “God forgive me, there’s niggers everywhere!”

    And of course, these creatures get access to juicy government aid, funded by the government stealing from the white natives, which doesn’t even exist in their beloved Africa. And all this happening while we are being saddled with “austerity measures” so their banker friends can get away scot free from their criminal actions.

    So, we get to serve as the toilet down which the west Africans flush their rejects while our entrepreneurs flee the toilet to serve their emergent economies.

    And of course, the massive corruption, unemployment and inequality over there fuels the massive fortunes of the ruling families. Who then come to Portugal their millions and in collusion with our traitorous government acquire assets here for pennies on the Euro. Our traitor government does not even have the wisdom and decency of East Asians, who demand business set there by a foreigner be done with a national partner who must hold majority share.

    You can be sure that if it was not for our traitor government actions, if they demanded full value for purchase and established national-control clauses, the african blacks would not be buying so much over here.

    As for Portugal becoming a “colony” of Angola like that douche said on the article? That would be the day…a negro with a property deed isn’t invulnerable to shotgun shells.

  28. “That would be the day…a negro with a property deed isn’t invulnerable to shotgun shells.”

    An interesting legal theory on property rights. More apposite to the 14th Century than our time though. Contract enforcement would have been with broadswords and siege engines rather than shotguns as I understand it.

  29. LOL bringing niggers overhere was a GOOD IDEA? if you hadn’t brought them over then all those yankee wops, mc’s and krauts would show up to your “ulster” anglo party. absolute reactionary tripe, once machining took over agriculture (again ignoring the development of an industrial economy) how long would it have been till your dixie got nat turnered? how long before the south was a mulatto republic, a creole brazil? the war between the states would have been alot more final then though

    YANKEE PRIDE , HUZZAH http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f22Z4Kuq6NU&feature=related

  30. Only a people debased and degraded in their own minds could willingly accept infanticide (abortion) and sodomy while endlessly obsessing over the morality of providing negroes food, shelter, and gainful employment in exchange for taking away their freedom to rob, kill, and rape whites.

    This yankee obsession is even stranger when you consider that slavery has been gone for almost as long as it existed in the US. Aside from the obvious homoerotic component, what else is there that makes the yankee so solicitous on behalf of the negro?

    C.S. Lewis might not have wanted to admit it, but just about any white man is a fit enough master for negroes. The same pretense of moral superiority Lewis demonstrated in the above quote is at the heart of the yankee problem. Such pretense has no place among those who actually value the truth. We should be able to call a spade a spade, quite literally as well as figuratively.

    Portuguese are fleeing Portugal. Interesting…

    Now we know what that Portuguese family was doing in South Africa before they were brutally murdered by negro savages.
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/amaro-viana-drowned-boiling-water-robbers-_n_1706508.html

    Oh well, at least yankees can be happy that apartheid, segregation, and slavery are gone. The negro savages are free to create as much mayhem as their hearts desire.

    I guess these things make yankees feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. They must say to themselves, “Just look at the newly liberated negroes of whom we are so proud!”

    Deo Vindice

  31. “LOL bringing niggers overhere was a GOOD IDEA?”
    The yankee slavers from Rhode Island sure thought so. It made them very wealthy.

    “how long would it have been till your dixie got nat turnered?”
    Don’t be so ignorant, Dixie was “Nat Turnered” in 1831.

    Negro dysfunction is yankee pride, huzzah.
    Obama is the apotheosis of yankee pride.

    Not much to be proud of…

    Deo Vindice

  32. Libs must be proud of their dark gods. Boiling white boys alive! What did the white man To ever fight any war for on behalf of these monkeys?

  33. @John

    LOL, is somebody bitter? Thanks, but I’ll be voting the home-town boy who looks and sounds like me. And when Romney wins both the state of Michigan and the whole damn election, you can watch the celebration on satellite tv. YANKEE PRIDE! HUZZAH!

  34. I’ll still bet you a six pack of beer and a kick in the ass as to where yankee pride winds up on election day. Don’t be coy, Obama’s your boy. He’s the one who makes the thrill go up the legs of yankee men.

    Romney certainly won’t win his home state of Massachusetts, largely due to the excess of yankee pride found there. And the thrill, of course…

    Huzzah…er…

    Deo Vindice

  35. Chris is ideologically indistinguishable from the morons on Dkoy as per the confederate issue. He’s obvious done sort of self flagellating white liberal or a Nig.

  36. Re: conchobar

    (1) The South didn’t bring niggers over here. We didn’t have a navy or merchant marine. The vast majority of slaves (around 600,000 in total) that were imported to the North American colonies arrived on British and Yankee slave ships during the eighteenth century.

    (2) The slave trade was abolished in 1808 … in the United States. Yankee slave trading operations didn’t finally come to and end until the Anglo-American Treaty of 1862. For half a century after the end of the slave trade in American ports, Yankees brought countless thousands of slaves to Brazil and the Caribbean.

    (3) There never would have been an “industrial economy” and in the North or Britain were it not for slavery. Until the 1820s, the British West Indies was Britain’s leading trading partner, and the South was the North’s leading trading partner until the twentieth century.

    (4) “Industrialization” began in the West Indies on the sugar plantations. It was also cotton that fueled Britain’s textile mills.

    (5) Dixie was “Nat Turnered” … by the Union Army, which armed 200,000 negroes to destroy the South to preserve the Union.

    (6) Dixie was turned into a multiracial republic … specifically, after 1867 during Military Reconstruction, when the South was forced at gunpoint by the Radical controlled Northern Congress to ratify the 14th Amendment.

  37. @Apuleius

    I already linked that one some time ago, for Bill Yancey. 🙂

    Success to the old-fashioned doctrine, that men are created all free!

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