"The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

[Wild Bill]

The book is Hugh G J Aitken, Did Slavery Pay? The Problem is that a good accountant can look at the business records of plantations and see that they often listed income as outgoes and vice versa. Rebalancing the books reveals that slavery returned about 14% per year while the best investment in the North, namely railroads, returned 6% per year.

If you don't believe this take a tour among the Mississippi River in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Even the wrecked plantations show unbelievable wealth, as do the homes of the industrial magnates in the North. Wade Hampton's family owned plantations in SC, Miss, and La, malling one plantation an inaccurate measure of income.

Of course the average Southerner owned around 5 slaves--Mary Surratt owned 10, I believe--but the real problem was standard of living. Those slaveholders all too often lived like kings. George Washington lived as well as or better that the King of England in his day (the book is George Washington's Expense Account). Southern apologists often cried about their poverty but this covered another fact about slavery--it was a social system that kept blacks and whites in their "proper" places. No one illustrates all of this better than Thomas Jefferson.

The real shocker is to see town many slaveholders in Louisiana were black. They owned more blacks than their own families, too. Slavery was a way to riches. A recent book on slavey and the growth of American capitalism is Edward Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told. And then, there is the time honored 2 volume set, Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross.