Slavery and King Cotton
Alex AndersonECON-1740December 5, 2013Slavery and King CottonThe Great Antebellum South Money MakersSlavery is a touchy subject. The ownership of another person seems incorrect. The actual thought that someone could own something that could think, and live out its own life if it wasn’t in servitude is staggering. That being said, it happened a lot in the past. There has to be a reason for the ownership of human being. The reason was that slavery was lucrative. Paying for something that worked all its life and did just exactly what the owner wanted it to do sounds delightful and cost effective, especially if the slave owner needed something labor intensive done. This is the main idea behind slavery. Why pay “someone” to do “something” when you could just buy the “someone” and make him or her do the “something”. The greatest slave-produced crop was cotton. Slavery had a hand in all of this. Slavery benefitted many different aspects of the World economy, American economy, and cotton production.Slavery was a major player in a vast amount of the economies around the world. One of the biggest slave trades was called the trans-Saharan Slave Trade. It supplied slaves to the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, Brazil, and the Iberian Peninsula. Brazil was a big exploiter of slave labor. Slave labor was used to farm sugarcane for sugar. This was a lucrative business for many countries including Brazil and Haiti. In the 18th century, Haiti imported a great number of slaves into its country and became the number one exporter of sugarcane. This shows that slave labor does have an impact on crops and the exportation of these crops. One thing to note about Haiti is that the slaves that worked on the crops revolted and Haiti became the first Black Republic in the Americas. This type of slave labor also had a hand in colonial and antebellum America as well.America used slave labor extensively as well. Before the cotton gin and during the colonial period, tobacco was the leading slave-produced crop in the US. After the American Revolution in 1775, European tobacco markets were cut. This almost led to the abolishment of slavery as there was no crop that was lucrative enough to exploit slave labor. The invention of the cotton gin saved slavery in the Antebellum South. This made cotton production viable and the South took advantage of that. Of the 6.5 million immigrants who settled in the Western world between 1492 and 1776, only 1 million of these were of European descent. The rest of the 5.5 million were of African descent. Of those 5.5 million, around 80% were employed. Of the 2.5 million slaves in agriculture, 1.8 million of them were employed on cotton plantations. This excluded the sick, elderly, and children under 6 years old. This begs the question, slavery was prevalent in Antebellum US, but was it profitable.In a study by Alfred Conrad and John Meyer titled “The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South”, they calculated that the slave capital earned equal or more returns than other forms of investment including railroad bonds and steamboats. The rate of return on slaves was as high as 13 percent. That was incredible compared to the yield of 6 to 8 percent for railroad bonds. This was plain and simple. Slavery paid slave owners as much, or more than they could have earned from any other employment of their capital. Slavery was immoral and inhuman, but it paid well. Besides the yield owning slaves, there also was the business of the slave trade in America. It was a booming business. There were about 70 thousand slaves transported each year. This made some people ridiculously wealthy just dealing with slaves. They made their money selling, transporting, and financing slave capital. Some controversial economists like Robert Fogel and Stanly Engerman, authors of the book Time on the Cross, have suggested that slavery was a great thing for slaves. This meant that slaves were more productive because of the great working conditions. This ideology was widely criticized as being completely unsubstantiated. Slavery was profitable, but when it was combined with the highly labor intensive cotton crop, it became extremely lucrative.Cotton became a profitable crop after the introduction of the cotton gin. It was and still is a primary export in the US. Not only was it profitable for the South, it was also profitable for the North. The South did not export cotton. It was sent to New York and from there, it was sent overseas. The British textile industry was also dependent on slave-cotton. Most of cotton exported from the South was imported by Britian. Even though cotton and slavery had great benefits, some economists think that there still are some disadvantages to slavery in the Antebellum South.There are many possible disadvantages to slavery. John Elliott Cairnes, an economist, suggested that reluctant workers depleted the soil and that scientific agriculture was impossible. Slaves were not interested in new farming techniques or scientific discoveries pertaining to agriculture. They were interested in not getting whipped and beaten. They worked as hard as they could in order to please their masters; their concern was not about profits. The South was also behind on innovative farming technology. The North was able to find better ways to farm the land because “necessity is the father of innovation”. They needed better ways to maximize earnings, and since they couldn’t use slave labor, they invented machines to do the work of many.Slavery was in every facet of Antebellum America. Slavery was tied in with a great majority of American finances. Slaves were property, and could be used as collateral and commodities as well as an inexpensive source of labor. Not only were slaves commodities, they could be used to vote for state representation in U.S. Congress using the 3/5 compromise. Slavery was integrated into a great number of businesses in America. In conclusion, the truth is plain and simple and it irrefutably denies the opinion that slavery wasn’t profitable. Southern plantation owners exported cotton and used slave labor because it was cost effective. If it weren’t, they would have found a different method. Plantation owners and crop-exporters around the world were businessmen first and foremost, and businessmen were all about maximizing profits while minimizing costs. Most of the world was using slave labor so it stands to reason that the same principle applies to other countries that benefitted from slavery. ................
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