Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[Liz Rosenthal]

(05-01-2013 05:04 PM)william l. richter Wrote:  The historical debate on slave profitability has been long and hard. But in the end, slavery returned 14% as an investment. And contrary to what used to be "fact" slave labor has recently been called more efficient than free labor. The discrepancy was in the slaveholders' own account books. They often counted assets as liabilities. These historians that find slavery profitable are often called Cliometricians, historians who rely on mathematics.

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As for HR Helper, he was an anomaly. Most Southerners wanted to get into slave ownership, not avoid it. Those areas that did not like slavery became the Benedict Arnolds of the Confederacy, led by Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's second vice president.

Regarding the "efficiency" of slave labor, if we must address such a notion at all, it's funny how the slaves were nevertheless called "lazy" by their owners and by whites in general at every opportunity.

While southerners like Helper were rare, I think calling him an anomaly is a bit of an exaggeration. My reading of the book, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, by 20th century southerner Clement Eaton, is that while southern society successfully clamped down on dissent, there were numerous attempts at publishing writings critical of the institution of slavery.

There were plenty of court cases throughout the South in which individuals were prosecuted for speaking or writing critically of slavery. A poor, white woman was even prosecuted for teaching a small group of black slaves to read and write. For that, she received a month in prison.

But, by far, it was the Upper South where most of the anti-slavery publications tested the tolerance of the courts and the public. (It's interesting to note that the Upper South, which, for the most part, stayed in the Union during the Civil War, or, in one case, broke off from a seceded State to become a new state to join the Union, also provided a formidable amount of the manufacturing existent in the slave states.)

Clement Eaton devotes an entire chapter on the point of anti-slavery speech in the Upper South, concentrating on Kentucky, where most of the anti-slavery press seems to have been situated. He writes extensively of Cassius M. Clay, an abolitionist whose paper, True American, was eventually suppressed.

Eaton says of Clay: "[An object of True American]... was the organization of the non-slaveholders as a class against the wealthy slaveholders. In this attempt, Clay was a forerunner of Hinton R. Helper, the author of The Impending Crisis."

While it's true that the general belief among poor whites in the South was that someday, they, too, might own a slave or two, they acquired this notion from the ruling aristocracy - the planters. It was a clever way to keep poor whites from resenting the state of economic opportunity in the South, and the concentration of almost all of the wealth of the South in the hands of a very few.

Here is an interesting little observation by Clement Eaton about the poor whites: "The poor whites of the ante-bellum South bore a remarkable resemblance to the Connecticut bumpkins of the eighteenth century, who had been denied the privileges of education and of a normal intercourse with society. Indeed, the most deplorable effect of isolation on the ante-bellum South was that it prevented the education of the masses."

Ignorance tends to breed acquiescence.