A lot of “mechanized” things were developed around WWII . . . it helped having a huge cash investment from the gov’t for its development (which was sorely lacking in those earlier attempts at most of these mechanized things).
Your story is familiar. My wife’s uncle had a good sized family and dairy cows. He sold the cows when the last kid left home.
If this were an independent Southern farmer, the kids would have worked with him on the cotton. Slave labor required overseers, punishments, chasing after escapees. An independent farmer working form himself does not have that overhead.
There’s a famous passage in De Toqueville about traveling down the Ohio river
Upon the left bank of the Ohio, labor is confounded with the idea of slavery, while 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, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the Negroes, — all the work is done by slaves; on the latter, no one is idle, for the white population extend their activity and intelligence to every kind of employment.
Of course, De Toqueville’s observations were colored by his prior opinions about slavery. But it seems to me that slavery has a large principal-agent problem. I’m not convinced that the total amount of cotton raised on that land would have been materially lower if self interested free people had done the farming.
Okay, if there are benefits from trade, you need exports to pay for your imports. The land seems so well suited for cotton that the US could grow 60 percent of the world total. The question is open whether slavery significantly increased the productivity of that land.
I don’t think either of us can prove what system would have produced the greatest wealth in the cotton trade. Thus I would just say that slavery created wealth and that wealth was not shared with the slaves to any meaningful extent.
Dude if independent farmers could compete economically with slave plantations, they would have.
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I think that a significant part of the story of the growth of America is driven by the availability of cheap labor. The industrialization of the northern states was fueled by immigrants needing jobs. The south’s plantation engine was fueled by slaves.
I don’t know if there’s a good answer to the question of how the south’s development might have differed without slavery. It’s probable that the perceived wealth of the upper crust of southern society wouldn’t have been quite so great, as a significant portion of that wealth was measured in “human capital”. There’s a chance that the south might have become industrialized a bit faster, but beyond that… 
I don’t think that this was the issue of the conversation; it is whether or not if slavery were abolished that the economic status of the US would’ve been materially impacted.
I don’t think there’s any disagreement that slavery generated more wealth than an independent farmer; but the discussion of where that wealth went is what’s being considered. Some say that it just went to individuals (or their family); others say that there was residual impacts this “added wealth” that improved other industries.
I think that looking at the modern migrant worker to get an idea of what this scenario could look like.
Sorry mistyped. I didn’t know that book was about Watergate. Probably because I didn’t know anything about Watergate. I still don’t. I probably need to read something nonfiction to correct that though.
John Dean has a book called “Blind Ambition.” The movie “ATPM” is based on a book of the same name by two WaPo reporters that covered Watergate and the subsequent two-year coverup that I’m trying to find (surprised neither my local library nor my family library has it).
Short version: Five men broke in to the Democratic National Committee Headquarters to plant (or replace) bugs. They were hired by people connected to the President, who wanted dirt on his enemies, because he was a petty, insecure person who thought anything he did as President was legal (his own words, after the fact, in a famous interview with David Frost). If these “burglars” started talking, there would be trouble, so starts the coverup.
The wiki is also a good spot.
I doubt that’s a good analogue. A big difference between then and now is the viability of homesteading for much of the 18th and 19th century.
A challenge in capitalizing on cheap immigrant labor would have been keeping that labor (or keeping a steady supply of labor) in the face of that labor being tempted by cheap land further inland in the continent. Why do agricultural work for someone else once you have the ability to relatively inexpensively get agricultural land of your own?
Presumably, plantation owners would have faced higher labor costs because of that (not that having slaves wasn’t expensive). Between the potential bottom-line impact of those higher costs, and the impact of not having slaves to offer as collateral to secure/reduce the cost of borrowing… Cotton would most likely still have been king in the south, but I suspect that antebellum Vicksburg wouldn’t have been the fabulously wealthy place it actually was in history.
It’s also an interesting mental exercise to ponder how the cultural and political development of the US might have been different had the agrarian bias of much of the first half of the 19th century been reduced due to the potentially reduced influence from the plantation system.
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Slow Burn is an excellent podcast about Watergate if you would like an audio version.
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Thanks, that’s a good option for me
Perhaps the audio novelization of the book based on the movie “All the President’s Men” based on the book of the same name? cuz, bookworm?
Ok that’s not the book I thought I listened to. But I had an errand and started listening to the podcast.
The problem is, all of these things seem to start from the assumption that a person knows what the whole thing was actually about. Guess I’m gonna have to read the wiki page.
Slight nitpick… if a plantation owner hires 100 paid workers, they may have been just as productive as 100 slaves (possibly even more so if they were treated better) so it may have generated just as much cotton / just as much total wealth.
It’s just that less of the wealth (probably significantly less) would have gone to the owner and more would have gone to the laborers. The distribution of wealth would have been extremely different, but the total wealth might not be.
In fact it may have been higher if the US was flooding the market with cotton, driving down prices. If cotton farming was less lucrative for land owners, maybe fewer owners would have done it, and with lower supply maybe the price would have been higher. And those other owners would have produced something else on their land. Maybe.
It’s hard to say with certainty, I think.
Except that the plantation owners certainly would have been materially less wealthy.
On the one hand, there is some good evidence that the workers will be more productive than the slaves.
On the other hand, that “evidence” comes from experience in 20th century america comparing less well paid factory workers to better paid, better treated factory workers. So who knows how applicable it is.
This points to some of what i struggle with about this question. How much imagination do we give these colonists? If they can hypothetically see slavery is wrong, can they also see to offer cash incentives for africans to homestead land?
A related question for high schoolers to discuss might be “would total wealth in the US be greater in the future if the wealth was shared more equally now ?” That is, would the resulting increased purchasing power of the lowest 10% more than offset the loss of incentive and spending by the top income group if income was distributed more equally. That income redistribution could be in the form of higher minimum wages, more social programs targeting the poorest groups such as subsidized daycare, employer profit sharing programs and/or higher taxes on the wealthiest.
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Interesting question, but I’d replace “total wealth” with “median after tax income” or “25th percentile after tax income”.
There is a spectrum of successful capitalist systems in place around the world and I would think it would be beneficial for students to be aware of them?
The US system is often described as brutalist capitalism whereas Denmark would be in the Nordic model. I think students should be aware that there are not just the extremes of US-style capitalism and communism but rather that there are a lot of systems in between that provide good standards of living to a broader population.
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