A good example of this bias is the coverage given to the Year 2000 presidential race between Texas Governor George W. Bush (R) and Vice President Al Gore (D). Young students learning about this race in a freshman history class are likely to hear all the same talking points that Gore supporters were using back in late 2000 and early 2001. Students who are interested in hearing the other side of the story will have to resort to sources of information (like this website) that are as committed to a conservative point of view as college faculties are to their liberal agenda.

The Basic Facts

The 2000 race was extremely close. By the time the polls closed it was apparent that the candidate who won Florida’s 25 electoral votes would be the next President. To make matters worse, the voting in Florida was a virtual tie; the 1,784 vote advantage that Governor Bush had after the first vote count was well within the margin of error for anything as inherently sloppy as vote counting, in a state where some six million votes had been cast. This narrow margin triggered a re-count requirement according to Florida law. All six million ballots were run through the counting machines a second time, with the result that Bush’s margin of victory narrowed further, to a mere 327.

The absurd narrowness of this margin, in something as important as a Presidential election, was sure to frustrate the loser and his supporters, and it did. Vice President Gore decided to challenge the election results in court, demanding a hand recount of the votes in three carefully chosen counties.

 The Partisan Positions

Conspiracy theories blossomed in late 2000 as Gore supporters searched for ways to make their candidate the winner. One of the primary objections that Mr. Gore and his supporters raised was the claim that Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of candidate George Bush, had deliberately prevented black voters from casting their votes for Mr. Bush. Another objection, and the chief basis for Gore’s demands for a manual count of ballots in hand-picked counties, was that the physical design of certain ballots was confusing to Gore supporters. A third objection, widely and loudly voiced by Gore supporters then and now, is that the Electoral College, the mechanism for electing Presidents spelled out in the US Constitution, is inherently unfair. Each of these complaints shows up in mainstream history textbooks today.

Bush supporters had their own gripes about the way the Florida voting was conducted, but these are not mentioned in any of the widely used freshman history textbooks.

“Disenfranchising” Gore’s Voters

The textbook Nation of Nations opens its coverage of the 2000 presidential race by telling students that Mr. Gore was better qualified than Mr. Bush to be President:

Gore had written a book on the global environmental crisis, promoted federal support for the Internet, and given new stature to the office of vice president. Where Bush knew little about world affairs (he had traveled outside the United States only twice), Gore seemed better prepared to conduct the nation’s foreign policy.¹

After expounding on the relative merits of the two candidates, the book goes alludes to dark rumors of a racist conspiracy between candidate George Bush and his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush: “More serious charges alleged that the state had actively suppressed voting in heavily black counties. Those accusations were particularly sensational since George Bush’s brother was Florida’s Governor.”²  The book does not go into specifics, but this accusation may be based on complaints about a vehicle inspection traffic stop conducted by the Florida State Patrol, which supposedly intimidated Gore voters.

In his freshman textbook Give Me Liberty, Professor Eric Foner describes another of the mechanisms by which the State of Florida supposedly “actively suppressed” the black vote: “But the largest reason for Gore’s loss of Florida was that 600,000 persons – overwhelmingly black and Latino men, had lost the right to vote for their entire lives after being convicted of a felony.”³

Voting: Too Complicated?

Another partisan complaint faithfully repeated by left-leaning history profs is that the ballot formats used in several Florida counties were so hard to read and understand that they made voting an insurmountable challenge for thousands of Gore supporters. (Conservatives had fun with this claim when it was first made. One Bush supporter was photographed holding up a sign that said “Democrats: Too Dumb to Vote.”)

Nation of Nations describes the situation this way: “Some Florida counties had used ballots so complicated that voters with poor eyesight might choose the wrong candidate. Other counties used punch card machines so antiquated that they failed to fully perforate many ballots.”⁴

Give Me Liberty alludes to the so-called “Butterfly Ballot” used in Palm Beach County, and repeats a claim made by other Gore supporters then and now: “In one county, a faulty ballot design led several thousand Gore voters accidentally to cast their votes for independent conservative candidate Pat Buchanan. Had their votes been counted for Gore, he would have been elected president.”⁵

Objecting to the Electoral College

Another complaint common among Al Gore supporters is that the Electoral College system allowed Gore to lose the presidential race despite “winning the general election.” In other words, Gore was denied the presidency even though he got more votes than Bush on a nationwide basis. Professor Foner puts it this way:

Coming at the end of the “decade of democracy,” the 2000 election revealed troubling features of the American political system at the close of the twentieth century. The electoral college, devised by the founders to enable the country’s prominent men to choose the president rather than the ordinary voters, gave the White House to a candidate opposed by a majority of voters, an odd result in a political democracy.⁶

The Other Side of the Story: Allegations Refuted

When the authors of Nation of Nations state that “charges alleged that the state had actively suppressed voting in heavily black counties,” the authors choose not to tell their students is that these charges were investigated exhaustively by the US Commission on Civil Rights, which could find no evidence of such a thing.

According to the Commission’s report,⁷ the routine traffic stops that were conducted in three locations on election day were typical of the traffic stops the State Patrol had been conducting for years. (The State Patrol sets up roadblocks and briefly detains motorist to inspect their vehicles for safety, and confirm that each driver has a valid license.) Only one of the three was conducted in an area with a significant black population. Furthermore the State Patrol officers involved had arranged the traffic stop without the involvement of, or even the knowledge of, anyone in the Governor’s office or any other non-police government agency.

Criminals as a Voter Group

Even weaker is the accusation by history professors and other leftists that the State of Florida had engaged in some kind of sinister anti-Gore conspiracy by banning convicted felons from the voter rolls. The law in question pre-dated the 2000 election by many years, and had passed the Florida legislature with wide support among legislators of both parties.

Punishing criminal behavior is no more racist than it is sexist. While 91% of America’s prison inmates are male,⁸ no liberal has ever claimed that the prison sentences are some sort of sexist conspiracy against men. Yet leftists frequently claim that the disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics in prison represents a racist conspiracy.

The law punishes behavior, not race. Bank robbers are sentenced to prison for their robberies, not for their race; and in Florida they lose their voting privileges on the same basis. (And, of the two things under discussion, prison time would strike most people as a more severe punishment than the loss of voting rights.)

On those Challenging Ballots

Of all the charges that liberals have leveled against Florida Republicans, the most ridiculous is that Republicans were somehow responsible for the difficulties that many would-be voters had in filling out their ballots in Democrat-leaning counties. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For one thing, the pro-Gore counties were not alone in having ballots rejected for technical reasons. Several Bush-leaning counties had higher percentages of rejected ballots than any of the three Gore counties that became so infamous. The simple truth is that there is no perfect system for eliminating individual error when millions of individuals are filling out their ballots.

More to the point, the ballot design used in each county is chosen by that county’s Supervisor of Elections. In counties with heavy concentrations of liberal voters, the Supervisor is invariably a Democrat. Thus the person who designed Palm Beach County’s infamous “Butterfly Ballot” was a lifelong Democrat named Theresa LaPore.

On the Electoral College

The Electoral College system for electing US Presidents was written into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers. Whether it is a good or bad system is purely a matter of opinion. It is, however, the law of the land until such a time as the American people care enough about the issue to amend the Constitution.

And while it is understandable that leftists might complain about the system in general terms, it is disgraceful that a college professor would claim, as Eric Foner does, that the Electoral College was designed to “enable the country’s prominent men to choose the president rather than the ordinary voters.”

As Professor Foner must know, the College was a compromise between the larger and smaller states. It came about because the more heavily populated states were pushing, back in 1787, for the kind of presidential election system that liberals are calling for today, in which the candidate who gets the most votes on a nationwide basis is declared the winner. The smaller states wanted the President to be chosen by the states, with each state given an equal voice. The Electoral College, in which each state is given a number of electoral votes equal to the number of its senators and representatives, was the compromise finally agreed upon.

Dr. Foner’s misrepresentation of this important part of America’s history is a good illustration of the pervasiveness of bias in history texts.

Conclusion

It’s not surprising that liberals were frustrated with the outcome of the 2000 presidential race. And, given the partisan agenda of college faculties, it’s not surprising that some of that frustration would color the way history textbooks portray the events. The important issue for any student is to know that there is another side to the story.

¹Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff; Nation of Nations; (2006 edition) p. 983
²Ibid.
³Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty (2006 edition) pp. 961, 962
⁴Nation of Nations, p. 983
⁵Give Me Liberty, p. 961
⁶Ibid, p. 962
⁷USCCR Report, Chapter 2, under heading “Police Presence at or Near Polling Places
⁸Bureau of Justice Statistics website: Prison Inmates at Midyear 2009 – Statistical Tables
(click “spreadsheet”, then click “pim09st17.”

Two earlier HistoryHalf posts addressed the relationship between slavery and economic progress, or lack thereof, in the United States. One post makes the case that standard textbook portrayals of black slavery as an important underpinning of American economic growth are false. The other post describes the slave system as an economic liability that destined the South to lose the Civil War.

This week’s post is about the continued economic backwardness of the states of the old Confederacy during the Jim Crow era, and the explosion of productivity and profit that the Southern states have enjoyed since the Federal Government brought a forcible end to racial segregation.

State Mandated Segregation

From the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction, Southern states and cities passed laws discriminating against black citizens purely on the basis of race. In 1894 a black man named Homer Plessy sued to overturn a Louisiana law requiring railroads to carry white and black passengers in separate cars. His case, famous in the history books as the Plessy v. Ferguson case, went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled against him. For the next several decades Southern governments were able to claim Supreme Court backing for the segregation policies they imposed on Southern businesses.

The freshman textbook America’s Promise offers a fairly standard portrayal of the importance of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, saying that the decision cleared the way for “state-sanctioned segregation of public facilities.” But segregation policies like the one that prompted the Plessy v. Ferguson case were not just “sanctioned” by the states. It would be more accurate to describe the Jim Crow laws of that time as state mandated segregation. The laws were imposed by Southern governments, and for-profit businesses frequently resisted or ignored segregation laws, often for reasons that had nothing to do with a desire for racial equality or justice.

If all of the South’s business owners had been eager to segregate their employees and customers by race, there would have been no reason for white racists to resort to government power to force the issue. But businesses, unlike governments, have to earn a profit to survive. Most railroad managers would rather operate one passenger car, full; than operate one car half-full of black customers and another car half-full of white folks.

Chaffing at Segregation

Economist Thomas Sowell cites several examples of for-profit businesses resisting segregation laws in his book Preferential Policies, An International Perspective:

Segregation into smoking and non-smoking sections is significant because it was done on the initiative of streetcar companies themselves, while some of those same companies publicly opposed the imposition of racially segregated seating by law when such legislation was first proposed. Even after such Jim Crow laws were passed, the streetcar company in Mobile initially refused to comply, and in Montgomery it was reported in the early years that blacks simply continued to sit wherever they pleased. In Jacksonville, the streetcar company delayed enforcing the segregation seating law of 1901 until 1905. Georgia’s state law of 1891 segregating the races was ignored by the streetcar companies in Augusta until 1898, in Savannah until 1899, and in the latter city was not fully enforced until 1906. In Mobile, the streetcar company publicly refused to enforce the Jim Crow laws of 1902, until its streetcar conductors began to be arrested and fined for non-compliance with the law. In Tennessee, the streetcar company opposed the state legislation imposing Jim Crow seating in 1903, delayed enforcement after the law was passed, and eventually was able to get the state courts to declare it unconstitutional.¹

Being forced to provide separate facilities for black and white customers was not the only burden businesses faced in the Jim Crow South. Some Southern states banned blacks from holding certain kinds of jobs; others required segregated workplaces. Even when companies were theoretically permitted to hire blacks for high-paying jobs, finding qualified employees was made more difficult by government policies that blocked Southern blacks from getting a decent education in K-12, then barred even qualified black graduates from higher education.

Reaching the Fortune 500

A look at back issues of Fortune Magazine’s annual Fortune 500 issue offers an interesting insight into the difficulties that the Jim Crow laws imposed on Southern businesses, and the economic benefits Southern states have enjoyed since being forced to remove segregation laws from their books.

The eleven states of the old Confederacy² only boasted twenty-nine companies that had managed to grow their way onto the Fortune 500 by 1960.³ This was roughly six years after the Supreme Court’s famous Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregated school systems unconstitutional, and before any educational advances facilitated by Brown v. Board had had much effect on the overall educational level of the Southern workforce.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act signed into law by President Johnson on July 2nd of that year gave teeth to the Brown v. Board decision. It also explicitly forbad segregation in the workplace and in “public accommodations;” including restaurants, hotels, and transportation systems. A few Senate Democrats conducted a filibuster to block the Civil Rights Act, but the filibuster was eventually broken. Eventually 64% of Congressional Democrats voted for the Act. Congressional Republicans, being members of a traditionally pro-business party, supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act by a much wider margin. Fully 80% of Republicans voted for the Act.

It took a few years, a few court battles, and a few ugly scenes to put the principles of Brown v. Board and the 1964 Civil Rights Act into actual practice throughout the Southern states, but by the end of the 1960’s the era of government mandated segregation had pretty much been brought to a close.

In 1970 the Fortune 500⁴ still only included twenty-nine companies with their headquarters in Dixie, but that would change soon. The elimination of the old government-mandated racial caste system would unleash an entrepreneurial spirit in the South that would make it, at long last, an economic force to be reckoned with. Southern businesses would soon be achieving growth rates that would allow many of them to displace well-entrenched Northern competitors.

The 1980 Fortune 500⁵ included fifty-one Southern based companies; still not a representative number for eleven states in a nation of fifty, but definite progress. The 1990 list⁶ included eighty-nine companies headquartered in these states. The most recent Fortune 500 issue offers a handy state-by-state breakdown, which shows that no fewer than 139 of the nation’s largest corporations call Dixie home.

Conclusion

Aside from the obvious moral issues, institutionalized racism was bad for business. The foundation of America’s economic greatness has always been free people making free choices in a free market system. Today, as some of the more-liberal Northern governments are piling new restrictions on businesses, the business climate in the old South looks more and more inviting to entrepreneurs and workers of all races. The recent rate of growth of Southern-based companies gives testament to the advantages of a true free enterprise system.

¹Thomas Sowell, Preferential Policies, An International Perspective , William Morrow and Company, 1990, pp.20-21
²Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia
³Fortune, July 1960, pp. 132-148
⁴Fortune, May 1970, pp. 184-198
⁵Fortune, May 5, 1980, pp. 276-294
⁶Fortune, April 23, 1990, pp. 346-364

Last week’s post included quotes from several college history textbooks, all of which claim that America’s fantastic economic growth was achieved, during the nation’s first few decades, by the ruthless exploitation of slave labor. While it is certainly true that slaves were ruthlessly exploited in our nation’s early history; it is not at all true that the slaves, their white exploiters, or the lands they farmed were the real drivers of America’s economic growth.

From the time the nation was founded the real wealth creation happened almost exclusively in the Northern states, where slavery was never very common, and where it was made illegal early. The rapid growth in productivity and prosperity that made America the envy of the rest of the world was made possible by legal and cultural conditions unique to the Northern “free” states. The Southern states lagged behind (as did the rest of the world) because Southern culture was hostile to all the things that made the North thrive. It also happens to be true that many of the North’s leading entrepreneurs were passionate abolitionists.

A Clash of Cultures

In the anti-bellum South, the aspiration of every white man was to “be somebody.” Being somebody, as it was defined in that culture, meant having the power to command other people to work on your behalf. In the North, as Ben Franklin tells us above, the emphasis was on doing, not on being.

Franklin, who lived in Philadelphia, summed up the philosophy that drove American entrepreneurs like himself with a few well-chosen words in his unfinished but invaluable Autobiography:

My father having, among his instructions to me when I was a boy, frequently repeated a proverb of Solomon “Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men,” I from thence considered industry as a means of obtaining wealth and distinction, which encouraged me, though I did not think that should ever literally stand before kings, which, however, has since happened; for I have stood before five, and have even had the honor of sitting down with one, the King of Denmark, to dinner. (Italics in the original)

By 1861, the year the Civil War started, the North was not only far wealthier than the South, it was much more densely populated. The greater productivity of Northern farmers made it possible for fewer acres of land to feed more people, while the rapid expansion of industry created jobs and attracted workers. The population of the eleven Confederate states in 1961 was nine million people, of whom over a third were slaves. The Union states, with only a slightly larger total land mass, had a population that had, by this time, swelled to some twenty-two million. The disparity in population would not be the only advantage the Union gained from its free enterprise culture, but it was a significant advantage.

The Confederate army was able to fight a defensive war on Confederate soil, with the advantages of familiar territory, sympathetic civilian population, and shorter supply lines; yet it was the Union invaders that were always better armed, better fed, and better equipped than the home team. The Union army had huge advantages in transportation, communications, and weapons technology; and funding from wealthier and more numerous taxpayers. Agricultural technologies allowed Northern farmers to produce more food with fewer men, leaving more men available for military service. The affluence, technologies, and productivity of the Northern states allowed the invasion of the South to be successful, and those advantages all derived from free enterprise.

Free States, Free Enterprise

Businesses in America’s free states have always been able to create jobs and generate wealth at a world-beating pace. (Most of the Southern states did not fully join the ranks of “free” states until around 1970; but that will be the topic of a future post.) The real story of wealth creation in America is a story of entrepreneurial enterprise, and the most enterprising Americans were usually men who grew up in poverty and set out to build something better by their own efforts.

John Jacob Astor, for example, was the son of a hard drinking and less-than-prosperous German butcher. He immigrated to the United States in 1784, at the age of twenty, with the fifteen English guineas (about $2,000 of today’s money) that he’d been able to save up in the four years since he left his parents’ home.¹ He worked at odd jobs in New York for about a year, they set off into the wilderness to trade with the Indians for furs. By his thirtieth birthday he had a fleet of trading ships carrying his goods across both oceans, and he had established the first United States outpost on the West Coast (called, appropriately enough, Astoria). When he died in 1848 he was one of the richest men in the world.

Robert Fulton was born in 1765 on a small farm in Pennsylvania. When he was six years old creditors foreclosed on his family’s farm, and his father, penniless, moved the family to a small town and worked as a tailor.² In 1794 Fulton started working on designs for a steam-powered boat. In August of 1807 he put his first boat into commercial service. Like many other innovations in transportation and communications developed in the North, the steamboat made both its inventor and the nation richer.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in rural New York in 1794 to a family of modest means. In 1810, at the age of sixteen, he borrowed a hundred dollars from his mother, bought a small sailboat, and started a ferry service on the Hudson River. By 1818 he owned a fleet of boats, and was making the transition from sail power to the steam technology Robert Fulton had introduced. By the start of the Civil War Vanderbilt had a fortune of many millions, which he was using to buy and build railroads.³

John Deere was born in 1804 in Vermont. His father died when he was five years old, and he had to go to work at age eleven to help support his family. At seventeen he became a blacksmith’s apprentice. In 1837, while working as a blacksmith, he invented the steel plow that would, along with Cyrus McCormick’s harvester, vastly improve the productivity of American agriculture. He died in 1886, but the company he founded is still with us.

Most of the entrepreneurs who built this nation had similar rags-to-riches biographies. Samuel Morse was the son of a Calvinist minister; he was making his living as a painter before he changed the world by inventing the electric telegraph. Samuel Colt was an indentured servant as a child; he went on to become a millionaire after inventing the famous Colt Revolver. Andrew Carnegie had to work in a sweatshop at thirteen to help his parents put food on the table. He made his fortune in railroads, bridges, and then steel. John D. Rockefeller grew up in poverty and had to drop out of high school to go to work when his father abandoned the family; Rockefeller eventually replaced Carnegie as the “richest man in the world.” The list could go on for many pages.

Slave State Entrepreneurs

Very few of America’s great entrepreneurs started their careers in the anti-bellum South, only two come to mind; and both Cyrus McCormick and Eli Whitney Jr. had to move to the North to really prosper.  Amusingly, both of them ended up making major contributions to the Union side during the civil war.

Cyrus McCormick was born in Virginia, the son of a struggling farmer. After he invented his McCormick harvester he moved to Illinois to take advantage of a better business climate. His machine so revolutionized agriculture that Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War credited the McCormick harvester with making an indispensible contribution to the Union war effort.⁴

Eli Whitney Jr. invented and patented his famous cotton gin in Georgia in 1793, while working as a tutor. The cotton gin was a machine that separated cotton fibers from the cotton seeds, something that had always been so labor intensive as to make cotton cloth too expensive for widespread use. By making cotton a viable cash crop, Whitney gave Southern plantation owners a source of income they would depend on for decades. Unfortunately for Whitney, patent rights were hard to enforce in Dixie. Rather than using gins built by Whitney’s company, plantation owners would simply copy his design and process their cotton in home-made cotton gins operated in windowless factories, using slave labor. Because the Southern states did not allow slaves to testify in court, Whitney was generally unable to prove in court that plantation owners were violating his patent rights.⁵

Disgusted, Whitney moved up North to work on his next big idea. In Connecticut he developed machine tools that enabled him to mass-produce a product from interchangeable parts; something the world had never seen before. He called his company the Connecticut Arms Company, and the product he manufactured was military muskets. Eli Whitney Jr. was gone by the time the Civil War started, but by that time his machine tools and interchangeable parts concept had revolutionized manufacturing in the free states. And his arms company, under the direction of his nephew Eli Whitney Blake, was supplying the Union Army with mass-produced weapons.

When left-leaning scholars portray slavery as the basis of America’s economic power they are very far off the mark. To borrow a phrase from Tallyrand, slavery was “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” The slavery system de-motivated the black population of the South by denying black people the right to enjoy the fruits of their own labors, and kept the slaves ignorant by denying them access to education. It de-motivated the white population via a perverse social code that made indolence prestigious and hard work degrading.

Pay no attention to what tendentious teachers say about it. The real foundation of America’s greatness has always been free people and free enterprise.

¹John Upton Terrell, Furs by Astor, Morrow & Company 1963 hardcover, p. 22
²Kirkpatrick Sale, The Fire of His Genius, The Free Press, 2001 hardcover, p. 42
³Edward J. Renehan, Dark Genious of Wall Street, 2005 hardcover, pp. 100-102
⁴Ruby L. Radford, Inventors in Industry, pp. 45, 46
⁵Constance McL. Green, Eli Whitney, Harper Collins 1956, p. 80

From the day the America was founded, her economic growth was the envy of the rest of the world. Academics and other liberals are pretty consistent in the explanation they offer for this rapid early growth. The nation’s prosperity, they tell us, was built on the backs of black slaves. American capitalism, they say, is so closely linked to slavery that its achievements should always be viewed with shame. This negative portrayal of American enterprise shows up in textbooks, in classrooms, and even in publicly-funded “educational” broadcasting.

There is another side to the story.

 How It’s Taught in School

The prevailing view in academia is that America’s economic achievements were built on slave labor. A PBS-funded television series describes black slavery as “an indispensable feature of the American economic landscape.” In his textbook A People’s History of the United States, Professor Howard Zinn admits that slavery has existed in places other than the United States, but goes on to say that American slavery was “the most cruel form of slavery in history” because it was motivated by “the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture.”

The textbook America’s Promise states “much Northern guilt about slavery grew out of the perception that the entire nation owed its prosperity to the enslaved producers of cotton.”

Professor Eric Foner tells a similar story in his textbook Give Me Liberty. He quotes a like-minded earlier historian who said “The growth and prosperity of the emerging society of free colonial British America…were achieved as a result of slave labor.” Foner goes on to say that “Slavery’s economic centrality for the South and the nation as a whole formed a powerful obstacle to abolition.” (Italics added) The idea of abolishing slavery, he tells us, “aroused violent hostility from northerners who feared that the movement threatened to disrupt the Union, interfere with profits wrested from slave labor, and overturn white supremacy.”

The truth of the matter is very different. America’s economic and technological greatness were built by free individuals, allowed to work and create for their own benefit. The institution of slavery didn’t contribute to the process; it got in the way.

African slaves were imported to many colonies and nations other than those in North America, and none of the other slave-importing countries achieved anywhere near the economic growth seen in the United States. Within the United States, those states that banned slavery soonest created wealth fastest. And, of course, America’s prosperity continued to grow at a world-beating rate after the Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery nationwide in 1865.

The Ubiquity of Slavery

According to Wikipedia, some 645,000 African slaves were brought to what is now the United States before slavery was banned here; and about five times as many were taken to Brazil. Other historians have used similar numbers. If slave labor were the quickest path to national prosperity, one would expect Brazil to have outpaced America economically; but Brazil has not done anything remotely like that. The same could be said of other South American countries that imported large numbers of slaves prior to the late 19^th century.

And North and South America are not the only regions that imported large numbers of African Slaves. Over the centuries more black slaves were taken from Eastern Africa to the Islamic states of the Middle East and North Africa than were hauled across the Atlantic to the Americas.¹  Yet the estimated fourteen million slaves taken to the Islamic world did not produce anything like the economic miracle of the United States.

It should be noted that black Africans are not the only group of people victimized by slavery on a large scale. The word “slave” actually derives from “Slav,” because for centuries the European Slavs were so widely and often enslaved by surrounding groups of Europeans. In the words of economist Thomas Sowell “Slavs were so widely sold into bondage that the very word for slave was derived from the word for Slav in a number of Western European languages, as well as in Arabic.”²

Slave States and Free States

Within the US, the Northern states, all of which banned slavery early, far outpaced the Southern slave states in wealth creation. Next week’s post will go into this issue in detail, but the short version is that the culture in Southern slave-holding states attached a stigma to the virtues of hard work and self-reliance. The most admired lifestyle in the South was a life of indolence and luxury, built on the work of others. Any white man who worked hard with his own hands, for his own benefit, was looked down upon. 

In the North, by contrast, hard work and self-reliance were held up as the highest of virtues; followed closely by that brand of problem-solving inventiveness that came to be known as “Yankee ingenuity.”

In his famous and influential book Democracy in America, French bureaucrat Alexis de Tocqueville discusses the disparity of wealth between America’s slave states and free states. America had not yet gained her independence, he writes, when “the attention of the planters was struck by the extraordinary fact, that provinces which were comparatively destitute of slaves increased in population, in wealth, and in prosperity more rapidly than those which contained the greatest number of negroes.”³

Tocqueville goes on to describe in detail the differences he saw during his travels in the United States in the early 1830’s. During a trip down the Ohio River, with the slave state of Kentucky on his left and the free state of Ohio on his right, he observed that all the productive activity seemed to be going on to his right:

Upon the  left bank of the  Ohio labor is confounded with the idea of slavery, upon the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement; on the one side it is degraded, on the other it is honored; on the former territory no white laborers can be found…on the latter no one is idle, for the white population extends its activity and its intelligence to every kind of employment. Thus the men whose task it is to cultivate the rich soil of Kentucky are ignorant and lukewarm, whilst those who are active and enlightened either do nothing or pass over to the state of Ohio, where they may work without dishonor.⁴

First Lady Abigail Adams made similar observations in 1800, when the Capitol and White House were moved from Philadelphia to Washington, DC. Mr. and Mrs. Adams had lived in Massachusetts for most of their lives, and Washington was the first place where they were directly exposed to the institution of slavery. As construction on the new White House was going on she watched a team of twelve slaves doing their work each day, while the owners of the slaves stood around doing nothing. In a letter to a friend she expressed her contempt for both the slave owners’ character, and  amount of work that was getting done. “Two of our hardy New England men would do as much work in a day as the whole 12,” she opined.  She went on to say that she could not understand how a slave-owning white man could “walk about idle, though one slave is all the property he can boast.”⁵

America Without Slaves

In 1865, shortly after the end of the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment ended the institution of slavery in the United States. If, as many historians claim, the nation’s prosperity was built mostly on slave labor; the economic growth of the US should have slowed down to that of other nations at this point. The opposite is true, of course. America was just getting started. Yankee ingenuity and industry, fueled by the fierce competition for profits, would soon make America the world’s unchallenged economic powerhouse.

¹ Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures (1998 paperback), p. 111
² ibid, p. 191
³Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Bantam Classic paperback) pp. 416, 417
⁴ibid, pp. 418, 419
⁵ David McCullough, John Adams, 2001 hardcover, p. 553