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Comment by purespark2 | Hacker News Reader

Where can I read more about the claim that many of the founders believed that slavery was bad from an economic perspective because slaves are not consumers? Is this supported by modern economic thought? Was this view held by southern founders?

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Two years prior to the invention of the cotton gin the US (as it was at the time) as a whole produced only 900 tons of cotton a year. With the invention of the cotton gin production increased greatly as one of the major limiting factors had been removed by the invention of the gin. This lead to a land rush for cotton cultivation; the Alabama Fever. Now the limiting factor was farm hands; this lead to a big increase in the slave trade.

Obviously there was a slave trade prior to the invention of the cotton gin (1793, well after the Declaration of Independence (US)), but the significant growth of the slave trade in the US occurred after the invention of the cotton gin (which lead to the massive growth of the cotton trade; especially in the US southern states as they had a better climate for cotton growth).

It's just depressing reading this that the solution to a labor shortage was to buy bonded slaves.

I know it's something certainly not unique to the american south and it's still going on today. I guess the contrast to the declaration of independence and slavery is so telling. Most other slavery occurs under the watch of despots.

The problem with the labor shortage was less that there was insufficient free labor available, but rather that the wages that would be demanded by free labor under these circumstances would be much higher than the subsistence level required by slaves, which would reduce the profitability for the upper-class plantation owners.

Evsey Domar wrote a famous paper in 1970, arguing that slavery/serfdom may be instituted when there is a lot of available land and few available workers, citing episodes in Europe in the Middle Ages, Russia's eastward expansion, and the US South.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domar_serfdom_model

The primary cash crop -- cotton -- required so much manual labor, prior to the invention of the cotton gin, that cotton producers, even with access to slave labor, could only really operate on a small scale.

The cotton gin changed that, making large-scale cotton production profitable and drastically increasing the demand for slaves (and thus creating an incentive to find justifications for and defenses of the practice of slavery).

This is an instance of Jevon's paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox): making a process more efficient in terms of resource requirements (in this case labour), causes the process to become more profitable and grow, therefore using more rather than less of the resource.

This is assuming sufficiently elastic demand (i.e. there is unfulfilled demand at the old price).

It's bad from that PoV because slaves can't reach their productive potential as if they were free. Literacy is forbidden, they can't switch jobs and can't advance their skills beyond manual labor, their families are frequently broken up and they're subjected to tremendous physical, psychological and often sexual abuse.

The die for sectional tensions was cast pretty early on. The South was a de facto British colony, arguably, until the Civil War (almost all Southern cotton was destined for British mills). The rapidly industrializing North represented a radically different future for the country, and the political conflict between North and South over economic and trade policy took shape very early on, particularly over tariffs. To people in the North, it made sense to protect burgeoning domestic industries from foreign (British) competition. Southerners, on the other hand, had no interest in manufactures and generally saw tariffs as taxes falling disproportionately on them, as they preferred cheap goods from Europe (Britain).

Alexis de Tocqueville famously noted the differences in industrial development between slave and free states. But Southerners (at least those with slaves) generally defended slavery as an institution and equated the plantation system with the "Southern way of life". And, by all accounts, even if they hadn't, white supremacism was so deep and broad it's unlikely any kind of economic concerns would have been able to overcome it in any policy debate.

Slavery was a economic issue at this time for the monied or land owning classes. Money trumps morals.

West Africans had resistance to malaria (including sickle cell anemia) and the Southern landowner with slaves made more money than the landowner with European indentured servants where anywhere from 40-70% would be dead or otherwise not working due to disease.

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