I will only make one point about the New York Times’s “1619 Project”. For the rest I’m in general agreement with Robert Cherry’s observations at RealClearPolitics:
Cotton, while an important product, was never central to American economic development, and at its peak in 1850 it accounted for about 6 percent of GDP.
Here’s my point. Nothing is ever neutral. It is either helpful or harmful. Things either get better or worse. They do not stay the same.
IMO the NYT’s project is intentionally divisive. It will not lead to greater racial understanding or amity. Quite the opposite.
I haven’t read it and probably won’t, so I’ll reserve judgement. I did read Steven’s post at OTB and a few other pieces on it elsewhere. It’s remarkable how much of the arguments in support of it resemble “original sin†doctrine, especially among what I call old-testament Christians.
I don’t think it’s too early to render a judgment. It’s either moving things in a good direction or a bad one. It’s not moving things in a good direction.
I guess I don’t see yet where it’s moving things at all. I haven’t seen any takes that are unexpected or new. To me it looks like SSDD -just another transitory “debate†that will be forgotten in a week or two.
Since 2014’s publication of “The Half Has Never been Told: Slavery and the History of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist of Cornell, segments of the American Left have embraced a radical revisionist history that claims American capitalism is founded on slavery. A lot of its influence is based quantitative claims that appear at best to be erroneous or at worse academic misconduct. A summary with links here:
https://necpluribusimpar.net/slavery-and-capitalism/
If you read history of the nineteenth century, it should be understood that a large amount of the population is isolated from larger market networks, and while this is starting to change by the 1840s, by the early 1860s the entire plantation economy was destroyed in one of the most costly wars in world history.
Right up to the 1920s the contact that most white Americans had with black Americans or the economy they supported, whether a slave economy or the sharecropper economy that succeeded it, was extremely limited. The percentage of blacks remained roughly the same, indeed, roughly the same as now but they lived almost entirely in the states of the old Confederacy while most of the whites lived in the Union states and the new states in the West.
That is not foundational material. It is as it has been taught since WWII—an important side story.
I think Tanner Greer’s latest is relevant to this discussion:
http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-brief-model-of-extremist-politics.html
Thank you, Andy. Yes, that’s highly relevant.
Slaves were only used for cotton? Really? So Cherry has nice conservative credentials, but I am not seeing much that would indicate expertise on the economics of slavery. It looks to me like he is citing a low end number, looking only at cotton when slaves were clearly used for other purposes. (Gotta love his justification of slavery because they got treated better than there Irish. Didnt conservatives used to value freedom at some point?) I have seen other numbers suggesting that the value of slavery, looking at replacement value put their value well above the value of the banks in the country, or the value of northern industry. I suspect that means we dont know for sure, but I do think that we should at least start with a meaningful effort, and the effort should look at the value of slavery from multiple POVs and include all available data, not limited to just cotton.
Steve
Well over half of all black slaves were used in the cotton trade so it’s not an unreasonable proxy.
So about 60%, meaning that if you were trying to figure out the value of slavery looking at output number, slavery would account for about 11% of economic output. Or if you look at it based upon replacement value, your cited article says slaves were selling for $1800 in 1860. GDP in 1860 is kind of hard to figure, but several sources cite numbers in the $12 billion range. There were roughly 4 million slaves then so the sale value of slaves was $7.2 billion, or over 60% of GDP. It kind of looks like they could have been the single largest category of economic wealth in the country. (Manufacturing accounted for about 10%-20% of GDP from what I can find. So if you include all manufacturers, not just looking at sectors like textiles, manufacturing might have been a greater value than slaves. Need better data.)
Steve
You’re making some pretty strong assumptions in that comment. I think the greater likelihood is that the total output was somewhat less.
And I said we need better data. If only we had national publication that was willing to put in the time, resources and effort to dig out the numbers for us, looking at it from many different angles to try to give us a really good and accurate picture.
Steve
If that’s only what they were doing. What they are going is digging up every discredited source that supports their editorial position.
Cherry links to economic numbers from here, among other places:
http://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2018/06/was-slavery-central-to-american.html
The importance of cotton is in that it is the theory by which manufacturing in the North is developed and thus the basis of capitalism. Economist aren’t the ones make claims based on cottons, its leftist revisionists.
I seem to be having some sort of deja vu all over again. Rewriting history to fit the party line, there are more and more things you can’t say, things you must say, the daily two minute hate of Donald Goldstein. Seems like 1984 all over again.
PD- And in his (Hansen’s) numbers, if Dave is correct, he only accounts for about 56% of all slaves. If we want to know the value of slavery to the economy I think you should account for all of them. Yet when I say this I am accused of wanting to rewrite history.
Steve
@steve, I don’t think you have the ability to rewrite history and I don’t think you are familiar with the underlying dispute you’re trying to take positions on. One of the elements of the NYTimes piece is to embrace the “New History of Capitalism” theory that slave-produced cotton was essential to the rise of American capitalism and its economic hegemonic power. It does this by focusing on cottons connections with Northeastern manufacturing and finance and claims about Midwestern agriculture. They are aware that slaves served other functions, but the broad scope of the claim necessitates making national connections. Sugar wasn’t a factor in manufacturing the way cotton was, and in any event, the U.S. was a minor international player.
Matt Yglesias discusses this in the Weeds podcast on the 1619 project:
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdGhld2VlZHM%3D&episode=OWI1MzQ0YmMtZmYxNy0xMWU4LTg5ZTgtM2Y3ZDNlMjdhNTFh&hl=en
Matt wrote favorable views of some of the books in this area, but recanted after historical economist published their rejoinders. He admits that on retrospect, the centrality of cotton, being a major assumption during the Civil War, was proven false after the war when the Southern economy crumbled and Northern manufacturing took off.