One of the great lies of the post-BLM left is that “black people built America”. This is not to say that black people have contributed nothing to the United States, but the idea that the US solely owes its wealth to black slavery is a-historical nonsense.
If, as ignorant loons like Nikole Hannah-Jones claim, the US was only enriched because of slavery, what would the US have likely looked like if it had never had slavery?
Slavery was certainly an important part of the 18th- and 19th-century economy, so much so that it led to the great crisis of the Civil War. But it’s worth contemplating an America without slaves.
Important, but not critical. After all, the economic powerhouse of the US in those centuries were the northern, free states. Which were free for a very simple economic reason: Africans tended to die in great numbers in the cold North. Blacks died at such high rates in the North — twice that of whites in Massachusetts, for instance — that race slavery was simply not viable.
My guess is that the tobacco industry in Virginia and North Carolina would still have been profitable paying a market wage for free white labor.
One reason for this is that importing slaves to the United States — the most far-flung destination of the trans-Atlantic trade, was still costly. This shows in the fact that, for all their undeniable brutality, southern slave owners tended to treat their slaves better than other slave-owning places. In the Middle East, male slaves were routinely castrated. In sugar-growing regions, closer to West Africa plantation owners frequently worked cheap slaves to death and just bought new ones.
No doubt many 1619 types will find this hard to believe. But the fact is that, until recently the black population grew faster in the US than in Africa, or in other New World countries.
Judging from the spectacular growth of the black population from about 400,000 imported slaves to 41 million today, American slave-owners tended to treat their property fairly carefully.
But what about the economic contribution of slavery?
Certainly, for about 15 years, cotton was a boom industry in the South. It didn’t last, mostly due to the hubris of the Confederacy.
When the Confederacy, assuming “Cotton is King,” announced its misguided embargo on cotton exports to encourage London to intervene on its side, it was quickly discovered that cotton was easy to grow in other hot places like India, Egypt, and Brazil. The American cotton business was never again the gold mine it had been before the Civil War.
Without slavery, cotton barons would have had to pay whites a lot to work in the cotton fields. But it sure seems as if in the long run paying an honest wage would have been a good deal.
But would the Deep South ever have developed without slavery? Wouldn’t it have crippled American economic growth? Florida says no. After all, Florida was practically empty until the early 20th century. Today, it’s the fourth-richest state in the Union.
In 1900, barely a half million people lived in the entire state of Florida, compared with 21 million today.
And yet, the failure of Americans to do much with the bulk of the Florida peninsula until the 20th century does not loom depressingly in contemporary thinking.
Similarly, if the cotton belt centered on Mississippi and Alabama had taken a few more generations to develop due to the requirement to either pay free white workers high enough wages or to develop better technology that could do without them, I doubt if Americans in our alternative 2019 would lament this history any more than Americans today mourn all the oranges that weren’t grown in Florida in the 19th century.
On the other hand, the benefits of not having slavery would have been immense.
To take just one obvious instance, America would likely never have fought a ruinous Civil War, which killed more Americans than any other. It wouldn’t have had the long economic and psychological depression which gripped the post-War South, and inflicts a bitter legacy to this day.
Plus, the Southern states would have been politically dominated by uplanders rather than by lowland plantation patricians, e.g., more nationalists like Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston […]
After the Southern states walked out of Congress in 1861, the Republicans passed a package of measures that had long been blocked by Southern planter power, such as a high tariff to protect infant industries, internal improvements including the transcontinental railroad, land grant universities, and free land for homesteaders.
Takimag
Much of the bitterly divisive racial trauma still being weaponised in America would likely have been nullified. There would be fewer US blacks, perhaps, but those would be the descendants of free immigrants, not slaves. They would undoubtedly have been racially discriminated against — but so were the Irish, Italians and Chinese, at times almost as brutally as the Africans.
All in all, then, it seems likely that America, and the victims of the slave trade, would have been better off without it.
