Thread by @arctotherium42

Thread with excerpts from economics Nobelist Robert Fogel's "Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery" (1989). Note: the first thread was much longer, but X ate it. Much of the book will not be in this one.

The slave trade was not dying in America; instead imports continued to rise until it was banned in 1808. US became the largest reservoir of slaves in the New World because of high rates of natural increase. Slaves were best suited (vs free labor) to sugar and cotton.

Slaves entered the workforce as children and were economically profitable to their masters from ~9 to ~70 on average.

Southern plantation slavery was flexible, with slaves quickly shifting between regions (mostly to the West) and crops (away from indigo/tobacco, towards cotton), as relative prices shifted, and slaves were priced according to market value (not sentiment or love of domination).

In TFP terms slaves were 35% more efficient than free labor, because of the highly specialized "gang system" prevalent on large (>15 slaves) plantations, which regimented field work like factory work, and Southern agriculture was more efficient than Northern.

The Antebellum South was prosperous, with a similar distribution of wealth to the North, and if you count slaves as property, just as wealthy on average. The difference: in the North, the richest were industrial or commercial magnates, in the South, plantation owners.

The South was not backwards. If treated as a separate nation in 1860, it would have been the 4th most prosperous in the world, exceeding all of Europe except England, and quickly growing, even faster than the North.

The South became backwards *after* the Civil War, because free black labor was so much less productive than slaves (60% lower!). This parallels the West Indies, where sugar production declined by a third after emancipation (abolitionists lied that they were richer than ever).

Both North and South were far less urbanized than Britain, but the North industrialized faster. However, the South was still (per capita) #2 in the world for railroads, #6 for cotton textiles, and #8 for pig iron, comparable to France or Germany.

Demographics: the high rate of natural increase of the American colonies worried English policymakers, who were concerned we would rebel once we were powerful enough (they were right) and so sought to limit American expansion (ironically provoking said rebellion).

Slaveowners promoted monogamous nuclear families and various pronatal policies (bounties for marriage and large families, better rations for pregnant women) among slaves to encourage population growth. This succeeded in the US, though less so in the Caribbean.

(I note that US slave pop growth being from a very high birth rate more than a low death rate, at least vs Jamaica, is something of a narrative violation, though the death rate was much lower than Brazil or Trinidad.)

"Slave breeding" that is, selective breeding of slaves, was not a thing, though abolitionists accused slaveowners of it.

Slave diets were quite good. Not as good as US free farmers, but better than US urbanites or farmers just about anywhere else in the world.

After abolishing slavery in the Caribbean, British abolitionists moved onto India, then to Africa.

The issue that destroyed the Whig/Democrat party system and opened the door to a Northern anti-slavery coalition was immigration, which starting ~1830 wrecked the living standards of northern urban workers (25-50% wage drop, 10 year drop in life expectancy).

The deterioration of American health. Height and life expectancy at age 10 didn't recover it's level from Washington's time until WWII! Primarily driven by immigration and urbanization, which immiserated Northern laborers in the 1840s and 50s.

The result of this immiseration: labor agitation and the Know-Nothing movement, which destroyed the Whigs and devastated Northern Democrats (who instead became the party of the immigrants), setting the stage for the Republican Party.

More immigrants arrived in the 1840s than in all of previous American history combined, mostly from Germany and Ireland. They overwhelmingly moved to Northern cities, which became big, crowded, sick, and poor as a direct result, proletarianizing urban Northerners.

Two things transmuted the Northern nativist/labor revolt into anti-slavery: a drop in immigration, which made it less salient and Southern opposition to homesteading, which Northerners hoped would relieve population pressure.

The well-timed drop in immigration let the Free Soiler faction beat the Know-Nothing faction for control of the Republican Party, which squeaked out a win in 1860 with only Northern states (only possible because of immigration leading to a much bigger North than South).

"Slavery was profitable, efficient, and economically viable in both the United States and the West Indies when it was destroyed."

I thought the book was quite interesting as a story of how immigration destabilized America over the pre-existing fault-line of slavery, leading to the devastating Civil War. Also that economists used to have no problem admitting immigration might be very bad.