Not really. The African labor was loosing its luster when compared to the North. Slave labor wasn't cost efficient. Asians provided little slave labor to the US. It provided cheap, expendable labor to the US; but so did poor whites at the time. Native Americans were never useful laborers to the whites. We ended up confining them to the shittiest parts of our territory at the time. Then we'd move them to shittier parts later.
Slave labor was too expensive to use because you risked losing your valuable capital. Instead new immigrants were used such as Irish (East Coast) or Chinese (West Coast).
It came close. Shortly thereafter, slavery was replaced with Sharecropping. I don't remember much about that from my US History classes, but I'm under the vague impression that it wasn't much of an improvement.
Cherry-picked, out-of-context quote from wikipedia: "Though the arrangement protected sharecroppers from the negative effects of a bad crop, many sharecroppers (both black and white) were economically confined to serf-like conditions of poverty."
Just because the South didn't reap the benefits of it's massive free labor pool, doesn't mean that those benefits didn't exist. Both the North (and even England!) benefitted from slavery even if they didn't directly own the slaves.
The abolition of slavery was economically good - if not for the fact you freed up a massive labor pool out of what was essentially farming into working in factories. But that initial suppression, combined with with the continued discrimination that led to plenty of African Americans (and Natives, and arguably the earliest asian settlers) to be regularly robbed of whatever the could build contributes directly to the reason that we are still circling around the reparations concept today.
Even if you don't believe slavery was "that bad", the effects of slavery prevented the entire demographic from building wealth; and a lot of was stolen in a government sanctioned manned, e.g. the Tulsa bombings in 1921, 50 years after the abolition of slavery.
This is what doomed blacks in America actually. They had a tendency not to die at the rate that natives and immigrants did. We know that on northern canal projects... thousands of immigrants and natives might die in a single season from malaria... but blacks didn't seem too affected at all by these sorts of environments. (Look it up... even with the Erie canal, which was really well run medically speaking, 1,000 men could die every season from malaria. The southern canals didn't suffer these kinds of casualties. Why?) Well today, of course, we KNOW about the sickle cell and how it helps a human with respect to malaria. But put yourself in the shoes of a camp doctor in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries... I'd be willing to bet that the survival rate of the blacks would have seemed nothing short of miraculous to you.
This is the, not so politically correct, reason that blacks were doomed to slavery. They didn't die doing work that most other people DID die doing. This is WHY they were more economical. Immigrants would never have been able to complete the canals that the slaves completed in the South. Because, since it was the South, the mosquito problem would have been even more acute. The death rate even higher. And on top of all of that... the geography was agitating against them. It would have been a catastrophe to even attempt those canals with immigrants or natives.
Not to sound racist or anything... but that's the whole reason we HAD the blacks. To put it all into dollars and cents... S-O-A was going to be about 60 some odd miles long and cost just $500,000. And the geography was actually FAR tougher to build a canal on than the geography along the Erie. By comparison the Erie was 5 or 6 times longer... but cost 14 TIMES as much. Largely down to the use of waged labor that died easily. If they had used blacks... even if they paid them the same wages... due to the difference in death rate... the cost would have been only 9 to 11 times that of the S-O-A. If they had used slaves... it would have been cheaper per mile than the S-O-A.
These financial realities did not go unnoticed by northern elites. And the animosities these realities created exploded into civil war eventually.
No it wasn't. It doesn't even pass the sniff test.
Why do you think the slave-free north was much richer than the south, before the civil war?
If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich?
Why wasn't Brazil, which imported ~4 million slaves (compare to ~200k for USA) significantly richer than the USA?
Native Americans had slaves:
> "An exhaustive search of some 725 late 18th/early 19th century ethnohistoric sources and 20th century ethnographic works indicates that predatory warfare, or preying on other groups for plunder and captives, was engaged in by virtually all Northwest Coast societies."
> "Source after source notes, either through specific instances or in general terms, and with almost monotonous iteration, that within this large area a prime motive for raiding was to gain captives for enslavement."
If you think slavery was instrumental to any rich nation getting rich, I suggest you read a lot more history, and look at who had the most slaves in history, and who has the most slaves today.
I think you're actually making OP's point: free laborers were capable of doing the same work that unfree laborers had been forced to do.
This isn't my field, but I have read a few papers about the question of how profitable slavery was. Most of the debate seems to be over how profitable it was to the plantation owners, and whether they personally would have made larger profits by investing their money elsewhere (e.g., by hiring wage laborers to work their plantations, or by investing in manufacturing).
The question of slavery's impact on the development of the economy as a whole is completely different from that. Given how backwards the South remained, while the half of the country that abolished slavery surged ahead economically, it's difficult to see how one could argue that slavery caused the US' economic development.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this in Democracy in America. It's well worth reading, to see a contemporary Frenchman's impressions of the stark difference in economic development between the Southern slave and Northern free societies: https://www.tota.world/article/1860/
I have no doubt being taken to America was beneficial to some African slaves. I also do not doubt it would have been far more beneficial for far more of them if they had been able to do it as freemen and were treated like human beings.
School textbooks also often make the case that Native Americans didn't make good slaves because they were native to the area and just walking away and vanishing was relatively easy for them. That's very different from asserting genetic racial differences were the factor at work.
Blue collar workers in the North definitely benefited from slavery in the form of lower cost of living as many items were imported from the South to the North. Also cheaper imports for northern manufacturing increased the value of norther labor.
You can't really use slavery or sweatshops as an argument one way or the other here. Sweatshops were by no means limited to the US.
Nor was slavery, for that matter. The main differences is that US slavery was domestic (and mostly contained to the south)[0]. Whereas European imperial powers (England, France, Belgium, etc.) outsourced their slavery, practicing forced relocation of people within their colonies and engaging those colonists in forced labor with the threat of violence[1]. That continued well into the 20th century.
[0] Though not as much as people like to think - the North was very happy to make money off of the slave trade, as long as they didn't permanently hold those slaves.
[1] One can try to engage in the abstract argument of, "well, is it philosophically better to enslave people within each others' native lands, rather than to bring them all to the seat of the empire and enslave them there", but that's a hair that's not worth splitting, and a far cry from the original statement.
The problem is that to go from point A to point B, the white had to enslave the black to use them as scaffold. As far as I remember black slaves didn't just volunteer to come to America and do the hard work, did they?
Not necessarily. Slavery might have indirectly assisted the north's industrialization in at least a couple ways. (1) Accumulation of financial capital in the hands of an investment class (2) Cheap cotton gave northern factories a competitive advantage.
Yes, the thing about a plantation was that because the slaves were already purchased and their labor could be used for agriculture only part of the time, if you needed something, having a slave make it made a lot of economic sense. A lot of the large plantations had nearly everything made by hand, by a slave or group of slaves.
And this impeded trade, manufacture and automation.
Slavery was awful for economics in the US, because it delayed automation. Humans are simply inefficient at farming compared to machines, and slavery served to artificially decrease the cost of human labor to the point that machines and automation processes could never compete.
There's a big difference to saying in strict economic terms that slavery was a net negative to the US and that slavery was not profitable.
Slavery was a disaster for US economic progress. Without slavery, automation would've happened much sooner and by now we'd likely have fully autonomous farming (we're only partially to that stage).
Are you arguing that slavery did not contribute significantly to the wealth of the North, first by using slaves directly, then by integrating advantageously with the South’s economy and the slave trade?
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