was slavery NEEDED in the U.S?

[Geiseric]

I know it wasn't, but I need an actual arguement for why it wasn't necessary to grow the country and all that shit.

[syndicat]

The question is, "needed" for what? It wasn't needed by the slaves.

Slavery existed in England before the Virginia colony was set up. The Virginia colony was founded as a capitalist venture, with investors. So cheap labor was an available way for them to make a profit. And it was hard to get people to freely agree to do hard labor for a pittance on someone's plantation way out in a wilderness. Enslavement in England helped the gentry to obtain a very cheap laboring population. Virginia was an extension of this idea. Since there were limited numbers of English slaves for this purpose, the Virginia gentry started buying Africans that Dutch and English pirates obtained by attacking Portugese and Spanish slave ships.

But slavery tends to discourage innovations to increase labor productivity since the labor is so cheap. And the products were mostly sold to British textile mills or the European market. This trade between Britain and the south tended to discourage the development of industry in the north since infant industry in the Northeast had a hard time competing with the more established manufacturing industries in England. On the other hand, a mass uprising of the slaves, seizing the land, would be an attack on large scale private property, which the northern industrialists would consider a threat to their wealth.

but the problem with your question is that it's not clear what it means.

[Geiseric]

That was exactly what I was looking for, thanks. Was there also a factor of competing with other cotton producers, like the ones in india? I know that cotton was the main crop in the south during slavery. so basically, in the independent U.S. slavery was a remnent of British rule, and technically since europe and england bought all the cotton, the U.S. was economically tied, thus was to an extent still subject to british imperialism, since the farmers would lose their buisness if the british didn't buy cotton? I mean at least partially tied?

[Rafiq]

It was necessary for those powers to become superpowers and Imperialist machines.

That's not a good ethical argument for slavery though.

[noble brown]

I think that slavery played an integeral role in the establishment of the u.s.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Was slavery needed in the abstract - no just like in the abstract we don't need wage-labor.

However... Historically, was slavery needed by the rulers of the US in order to keep their economy going (both north and south)? Yes.

The US was built on the trade that was inherently tied to slavery... even the most dumbed-down US history books talk about the importance of triangular trade. The new world was built by slaves and the trade that came about through slavery.

There's a connected part of this question which is why I think it's important to clarify what "necessary" means. There's an argument (actually a re-boot of an old argument) which has become more widespread and accepted recently and that slavery was soem kind of weird feature kind of sitting on top of US society and that if there hadn't been a civil war, slavery would have just gone away on its own. IMO that's a total myth and it ignores how central slavery was to the Southern planter system.

[WeAreReborn]

Slavery came out of a need (to maintain large profits) for increased labor. At the beginning of America, early half or so of pre-revolution, I forgot exact dates, slavery wasn't even a consideration. Due to the grueling work, the life span was low and slaves were simply expensive. It just didn't make sense. Plus due to a population boom in Britain, immigrants were flocking over. These immigrants would become indentured servants. Which is essentially free labor and in return after about 7 years they got land. Naturally this sounds appealing but often times the land they go was undesirable and near the Native Americans and unsuitable for crops. So the Plantation owner got free labor for crappy land he didn't even need. But the population boom only lasted for so long. Once that period was over the flow of indentured servants dramatically shot down. Thus came a new need for labor. Another cause was that the conditions were better (naturally still horrible but due to new inventions at least the slaves would live long enough to make a sizeable profit). Plus with the new cashcrop, rice, malaria was a problem. A lot of African slaves were much more equipped to fight malaria and some native tribes such as the Ebo tribe were able to harvest rice already, where most of the British had no idea how to. Slaves came out of material need for profits, which is the motivating factor of Capitalism and in this case Mercantilism. So quite frankly, slavery was needed for America to become America. If slavery wasn't an option, the cash flow might not have been enough for England and the trade companies to continue investing in it. Settlers might still have stayed but I'm sure it wouldn't have grown or turned out the same at all. Just speculation though. Hard to say for sure.

[WeAreReborn]

There's a connected part of this question which is why I think it's important to clarify what "necessary" means. There's an argument (actually a re-boot of an old argument) which has become more widespread and accepted recently and that slavery was soem kind of weird feature kind of sitting on top of US society and that if there hadn't been a civil war, slavery would have just gone away on its own. IMO that's a total myth and it ignores how central slavery was to the Southern planter system.
You're absolutely right. But that myth also comes from the same people who argue that the CSA seceded for "state rights". But if you actually look at the CSA constitution it actually gave less state rights in some regards. The whole war was based on slavery. And due to the way the American system is set up, as long as the South continued to want slavery, which they would, it would have stayed for quite a long time. The main reason they would continue to want it is the whole way of life was based around slavery. Even the poor supported it because to become wealthy they needed slaves. People looked up to the Great Plantation Owners and emulated it. It was deeply rooted in the South's way of life and even after slavery, that way of thinking didn't change for decades.

[Tommy4ever]

Wage slavery is much more profitable.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Wage slavery is much more profitable.I think you are right in the long-run; but the biggest complaint of the planter-class after the civil war and during reconstruction was wage-inflation and having to compete with other plantation-owners for labor. They constantly complained of a "labor shortage" but really the problem was that they couldn't force people to work as hard and under conditions completely of the planter's choosing. In fact, the southern ruling class didn't push freemen (and laboring whites) into wage farm-labor as in modern farming in both the north and south - they pushed a share-cropping situation that kept farmers in debt and it wasn't until after WWII that more modern factory-farming became dominant in the region and black people were more likely to work for wages in an urban area of the south than work as a small-farmer in rural areas.

[Die Neue Zeit]

In fact, the southern ruling class didn't push freemen (and laboring whites) into wage farm-labor as in modern farming in both the north and south - they pushed a share-cropping situation that kept farmers in debt and it wasn't until after WWII that more modern factory-farming became dominant in the region and black people were more likely to work for wages in an urban area of the south than work as a small-farmer in rural areas.

Aren't sharecropping and tenant farming for the big industrial food production companies still the norm in the Deep South?

[gendoikari]

I don't know if it was needed, but it certainly held back the advancement of agricultural technology for several centuries.

"oh, what's that we don't have FREE labor anymore..... time to get crackin on those combines" <--- shorthand of what happened after the civil war.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So cheap labor was an available way for them to make a profit. And it was hard to get people to freely agree to do hard labor for a pittance on someone's plantation way out in a wilderness. Enslavement in England helped the gentry to obtain a very cheap laboring population.


However... Historically, was slavery needed by the rulers of the US in order to keep their economy going (both north and south)? Yes.

The US was built on the trade that was inherently tied to slavery... even the most dumbed-down US history books talk about the importance of triangular trade. The new world was built by slaves and the trade that came about through slavery.


Slavery came out of a need (to maintain large profits) for increased labor. At the beginning of America, early half or so of pre-revolution, I forgot exact dates, slavery wasn't even a consideration. Due to the grueling work, the life span was low and slaves were simply expensive. It just didn't make sense. Plus due to a population boom in Britain, immigrants were flocking over. These immigrants would become indentured servants. Which is essentially free labor and in return after about 7 years they got land. Naturally this sounds appealing but often times the land they go was undesirable and near the Native Americans and unsuitable for crops. So the Plantation owner got free labor for crappy land he didn't even need. But the population boom only lasted for so long. Once that period was over the flow of indentured servants dramatically shot down. Thus came a new need for labor.

Even in the short-term, I say no, chattel slavery in agriculture was not needed in the US.

What was needed and has yet to be completed is a rapid transition away from all pre-wage economic relations and towards wage relations. As for cheap labour, well the broader Industrial Revolution occurred with lots of labour discipline and without minimum wage laws.

[WeAreReborn]

Even in the short-term, I say no, chattel slavery in agriculture was not needed in the US.

What was needed and has yet to be completed is a rapid transition away from all pre-wage economic relations and towards wage relations. As for cheap labour, well the broader Industrial Revolution occurred with lots of labour discipline and without minimum wage laws.
I'm arguing it was pre-revolution. I disagreed because the colonies were simply a business venture. If they couldn't produce enough then Britain and its investors simply would stop investing and give up. Especially due to the constant war with Native-Americans and later the French. Not to mention the harvesting of rice would be nearly impossible to due to the lack of knowledge about it and the high chance to get malaria. America started out as a business, and if it didn't make enough money then naturally it would get shut down. Same idea applies here.

[deadsmooth]

Most of what I know on this subject comes from Robert William Fogel, especially 'Without Consent or Contract' three volumes. 2 and 3 deal with technical issues and analysis, and vol. 1 is the most readable. His answer is no, so that would be mine as well. Basically I would be cribbing from him if I gave details.

[syndicat]

just to back up what J.H. says above, virtual servitude is still a feature of farm labor in the USA. consider the various cases of actual enslavement that have been investigated by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and which resulted in legal prosecutions. Growers use labor contractors who engage in illegal methods, and the growers can thus keep some sort of "plausible deniability." workers are routinely poisoned with pesticides. and because the great majority are undocumented immigrants, if people complain, the growers will turn them into the immigration authorities. from the '30s on farm workers were exempt from the 40 hour week, overtime rules, minimum wage laws, labor rights under NLRA. if you want to read about the widespread servitude in farm labor, read "Nobodies".

[Die Neue Zeit]

from the '30s on farm workers were exempt from the 40 hour week, overtime rules, minimum wage laws, labor rights under NLRA. if you want to read about the widespread servitude in farm labor, read "Nobodies".

Why the exemption?

[syndicat]

in the '30s about 40 percent of African-Americans worked in agriculture in the south. the Democratic Party in the south was controlled by the racist planter elite. because the south was basically a one-party state, they had the power in congress to ensure that African-Americans would be excluded from the New Deal programs. this meant that domestics and farm laborers were excluded from the programs of that era.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Why the exemption?That's a good question and I don't know the full answer. Most of the efforts to organize farm labor at that point had failed and in general agricultural production was suffering from both man-exacerbated natural problems (dust bowl) and the economic situation where family farms were just being eaten up by the banks as people were unable to pay. I don't know too much of this history and there's a few books about CP organizing of sharecroppers before WWII, so there were attempts, but I think the nature of sharecropping and lack of the ability to just pick up and move to a city for wage-work if forced to made it difficult for sharecroppers to negotiate or win reforms.

In California, the struggle of farm-workers brought farm-labor rights closer to the rights that industrial workers have to organize and strike etc. But in California, a main aspect of the fight was the modernized production of agribusiness, what farm-workers called "factories of the field". I think this probably was one of the biggest reasons workers at that point were able to fight and win concessions both as workers and increased rights for (largely) Latino and Filipino agricultural workers. Still very tough going though.


Aren't sharecropping and tenant farming for the big industrial food production companies still the norm in the Deep South? I'll have to look into that. My understanding is that the old system was basically modernized through a few reforms of the New Deal but mostly because of WWII. WWII brought industry into the South in a way it never could have before. Many rural poor blacks and whites moved to urban areas of both the north and south - first due to economic depression in the south - which began sooner than in the rest of the country and was deeper in a lot of ways and then due to job opportunities opening to more people through the war-time production. In this period of WWII, the main economic force and product in the South went from cotton to other crops and increasingly to industry. I think sharecropping was somewhere in the neighborhood of 35% of the Southern population prior to WWII and it has mostly vanished to my understanding now.

Most mainstream histories say that sharecropping died after WWII because of mechanization and this definitely increased after WWII with mechanical tractors becoming used more than horses for the first time etc. But many of these technologies were developed and used much earlier - I think it was probably the concentration of farming into larger "factory-farms" that brought in the mechanization, not the other way around.

Edit: Syndicat's points about the politics and rule of the south in that period are very important for understanding a lot of late-20th century US history. In fact because of the industrialization of the war years, the CIO tried to organize in the South but was pushed back because the CP and CIO didn't want to alienate themselves from the Democratic Party by inevitably confronting racism in any kind of serious southern organizing drive (and would have challenged the power of the rural southern elite as well as the rising urban southern capitalists). This failure basically set in cement the trajectory away from organizing by the main US labor unions and the legacy is still a chain around the neck of the US working class as the South remains a solid region of anti-union politics, racism (connected to that), and allows union busting in the north as industries either move south or threaten to do so.

[S.Artesian]

I know it wasn't, but I need an actual arguement for why it wasn't necessary to grow the country and all that shit.


Necessary for what?

[Jose Gracchus]

Why the exemption?

Because the nature of the country's social and geographic development. The bifurcation between North and South was unresolved through the 20th century until quite late. The "classical" period of industrialization matching the same in Europe in the 19th c. was primarily concentrated in Northwestern States and our side of the St Lawrence waterway corridor. As a result, by the 1930s, the U.S. Democratic Party was basically acting somewhat like a Popular Front in the white working class steel belt, while almost all of the New Deal legislation (including the Wagner Act creating the National Labor Relations Board which exempted farm workers [read: migrants and Southern sharecroppers in 1935]) was regional, and highly-biased in favor of white industrial labor against other groups, and geographically basically exempted the South (except for the Rural Electrification agency, which reminds one of a certain math equation by Lenin, and clues one in to the relative backwardness of the South).