We Were All Slaves - The Going Business Of The World’s Oldest Institution

David Brion Davis, writing in the New York Review of Books has written a review of Seymour Drescher’s book Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery.  The book argues that contrary to current popular opinion, slavery would not have collapsed on itself,  and only the various social, religious, political, and economic movements against it, ending in cataclysmic Civil War, could have stopped it.

Slavery, the institution that perhaps most defines American history, that precipitated a catastrophic Civil War,  and whose legacy lives on today, was not an American one and was well known long before its establishment in the New World.

In view of the gradual disappearance of slavery and serfdom in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages, it is easy to forget that free labor was virtually unknown in the rest of the world during most of human history.

In the preceding three centuries [prior to 1492), slavery in the Christian Mediterranean had been identified with so-called Slavs, many of them from Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, who had been purchased by Italian merchants and sold in both Christian and Muslim markets (and the Western European words for “slave”—esclavo, escravo, Sklave, esclave, schiavo—stem from the Latin for Slav, sclavus). 

In 1670 or 1710, an Englishman would almost certainly have referred to fellow white countrymen who had been seized on the English coast or on ships by Barbary corsairs and transported to Muslim North Africa for heavy labor or sometimes ransom. For some three centuries Muslim raiders, often aided by European renegades, enslaved English, Irish, Scottish, French, Iberian, American, and even Scandinavian and Icelander captives, who joined other slaves from Russia, Italy, the Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa in the Maghreb. From 1600 to 1750 at least 20,000 British and Irish were held as slaves in North Africa.

 

Regardless of its longevity or acceptability as an economic system, there is no way to underestimate its corrosive consequences.  As early Americans soon found out, there was no way to simply free the slaves.  The formal abolition of slavery in 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment was only the first official step to functional abolition, and the country had to wait a hundred years until the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 for a true dismantling of the institution to begin.

In the hundred years between the two important dates, blacks in the South were little better than slaves, working as tenant farmers at best under a strict apartheid-style system of segregation.  

Reconstruction, initiated in principle to restore the defeated South and to make it fit for re-inclusion into the Union, only resulted in the further alienation of the region; the ultimate establishment of a de facto system of modified slavery – segregation; and a the creation of a determined, entrenched, and politically powerful elite that perpetuated hatred of the North, and a passionate defense of its own ‘way of life’. 

The legacy of slavery is with us today; and to travel through an inner-city neighborhood – black, segregated, poor, and dysfunctional – can only remind us of our past.   

It is perhaps because of this living legacy that our vision of slavery has become one-dimensional - a deprivation of human rights, the mistreatment of the enslaved, and the degradation of the individual.  

While this is no doubt true, it overlooks one of the most important aspect of American slavery - the economics of the ‘peculiar institution’ and the fact that it was a strong, productive, and viable system.  

The slave represented both labor and capital, and thus had to be managed in a way that would produce the greatest return on investment.  Records taken from antebellum plantation homes show that many, if not most slave owners carefully managed their investment, assuring that slaves would be strong, healthy, and reproductive.  

Given the above-mentioned legacy, it is hard for most Americans to accept that slave owners were business men and had more to gain by treating slaves well than poorly.  This Slavery was a going business, a successful economic model.

This long-dominant mythology seemed to draw some confirmation from the fact that slavery was often associated with soil exhaustion, indebtedness, and low levels of literacy, urban growth, industry, and immigration. 

Drawing on Adam Smith’s arguments on the superiority of free labor, or on Marxist concepts of alleged irreversible material progress, or on racist views that American slavery, while an anachronism, helped civilize so-called African savages and would have soon died out on its own without a needless Civil War, countless historians, novelists, politicians, and others misrepresented an institution that served as the crucial basis for New World settlement and expansion for over three centuries. 

It was a system, moreover, that anticipated the efficiency and productivity of factory assembly lines while also leading the way to the first stage of a globalized economy. 

As the croplands of the Deep South opened up and the demand for labor increased, plantation owners were even more interested in assuring the fertility and reproductive health of their slaves.  

Thomas Jefferson among other slave owners understood the economics of the institution as well as anyone else, and although he was morally and philosophically opposed to slavery, he knew that his wealth increased with the growing demand for his slaves. 

Drescher – like Fogel and Engerman in Time on the Cross– conclude that because slavery was indeed a productive and profitable system and that it would not have collapsed upon itself, it was only because of the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements which drew their argument from philosophy (the Enlightenment’s concept of free labor and the rights of Man), religion (in particular the Quakers but later the Methodists), and economic competition (the industrialized North vs. the agricultural South) that created the pressure to go to war against an equally determined South, convinced of its own rights and ready to fight to defend them.  

What makes the success of that movement especially amazing is the extraordinary strength, vitality, productivity, profitability, and transferability of racial slavery in the New World. By the late 1600s the sugar-producing Caribbean colonies had created the most profitable economy, per capita, in the world. 

Their exports were worth two and a half times those of the partly free-labor economies of North America, and colonists with the highest incomes now lived in the West Indies. And despite the emergence of liberal and radical ideologies in the Age of Revolution, despite the rise of antislavery organizations in Britain, America, and France, despite the disruptions of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, the African slave trade reached its peak between 1783 and 1793 and could hardly have been more vigorous and profitable when outlawed in 1807 by Britain and the United States.

The value of British West Indian exports to England and of imports in the West Indies from England increased sharply from the early 1780s to the end of the eighteenth century. Drescher also demonstrated that the British West Indies’ share of the total British overseas trade rose to high peaks in the early nineteenth century and did not begin a long-range decline until well after Parliament deprived the colonies of fresh supplies of African labor.

After assessing the profitability of the slave trade, which brought rewards of around 10 percent on investment, and the increasing value of the British West Indies, Drescher contended that the British slave system was expanding, not declining, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Much of Drescher’s book, then, focuses on the factors which led to abolition.  Since slavery was an economically productive system, both for Britain and the United States, and there was no economic self-interest in destroying it, it was left to the non-economic forces of society to demand its cessation.

No theme in Drescher’s book is more striking than the extraordinary success of abolitionism in mobilizing public opinion in Britain and then in the northern United States (with a very different outcome), as well as the failure of such efforts on the Continent.

He convincingly underscores the importance of representative government and the tradition of public petitioning as well as the fact that newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, voluntary societies and associations, and a common-law tradition created in Anglo-American societies a degree of public participation unmatched in the rest of the world. He also briefly notes that by the 1780s, British culture had long been saturated with appalling descriptions of the cruelties of the African slave trade.

British abolitionists’ [enjoyed] extraordinary success in mobilizing public opinion and influencing government policies. In 1787, when reformers in London founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, a separate society emerged in the industrial center of Manchester with 68 women among its 302 subscribers. 

From the very start women had a prominent part in the British movement as writers, public speakers, leaders of campaigns to boycott slave-grown sugar, and by the 1820s as signers of petitions and influential advocates of “immediate,” as opposed to gradual, slave emancipation.

Although Drescher underestimates the central force of evangelical religion in motivating Anglo-American abolitionism, he convincingly underscores the importance of representative government and the tradition of public petitioning as well as the fact that newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, voluntary societies and associations, and a common-law tradition created in Anglo-American societies a degree of public participation unmatched in the rest of the world. He also briefly notes that by the 1780s, British culture had long been saturated with appalling descriptions of the cruelties of the African slave trade. 

There are many additional factors which influenced the course of events in the United States.  The defense of ‘free labor’ – a philosophical principle derived from the Enlightenment and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – was made even more compelling because of our colonial history.  

Americans were slaves of a sort to their colonial masters, unable to profit from their own labor, and therefore philosophy grew practical, political teeth.  The fact that the concept of ‘free labor’ as a strictly economic system was flawed did not matter.  It had such strong philosophical and nationalistic roots, that it persisted despite the evidence:

Abolitionists were encouraged by the prevailing conviction regarding the economic superiority of free labor and the belief, shared even by many New World slaveholders, that slavery, like medieval serfdom, was destined by history to be extinguished. Yet they were forced to deal with the repeated limitations and failures of free-labor ideology, for example the discovery that freed plantation workers were not as productive as slaves, even after periods of “educational” coerced apprenticeship.

The role of religion in America was even more important in abolishing slavery for the same reasons.  Disaffected and subjugated members of religious minorities in England fled their imperial masters and were passionately committed to any kind of freedom.  

Not surprisingly religions proliferated in America, and in the South Methodists in particular were responsible for slave literacy (to be able to read the Bible) and inclusion in religious worship.  Although these religious groups were not directly or necessarily contributing to the demise of slavery, they nevertheless were important actors in the movement.

America, as a new nation, was feeling its muscle early and often.  America was expansionist and industrializing early in the 19th century.  The cotton gin revolutionized Southern agriculture and made a productive crop even more so; but at the same time threatened the economic interests of the North.  

As anti-slavery movements gained momentum in the North, the South turned increasingly to Britain as the major buyer of cotton – enriching a former enemy and a potential new one.

In short, although slavery was indeed a viable and productive economic system, it could not withstand the onslaught of what was becoming a perfect storm, a confluence of factors which precipitated its demise.  

Because the South had its own perfect storm – an economic model which produced wealth; a plantation society based on the old English Cavalier tradition and one prized for its ‘higher values’ of social grace and propriety; and a growing defiance of ‘foreign intervention’ (the precursor to ‘states’ rights’.  War was inevitable.

It is not surprising that even in defeat the South was determined to salvage as much of its own legacy as possible.  The successful fight to reject Radical Republicanism, to establish Jim Crow, to create an economic system of tenant farming which was little different from slavery, and to coalesce political forces into a strong political force, made the South once again an enemy, but this time within the Union.   

Given the North’s many justifications for war and the destruction of the South’s economic and social structure, the continuing antipathy towards it was also not surprising. 

Lincoln of course, as a consummate politician trying desperately to save the Union, found the Abolitionists more of a problem than an ally.  He knew that compromises would have to be made to ensure that the South would not secede, and he felt that their harsh and inflexible positions would make this difficult.  

The more Lincoln resisted complete abolition and emancipation, the louder their cries became and the more determined the South became.

In conclusion, slavery was a successful, productive, and viable system which for centuries had produced great returns and it would not have collapsed on its own.  It was not the universally brutal and exploitative regime portrayed by the Abolitionists and modern day ‘Progressives’.  

It was a business to be managed like any other.  The fact that it was so unique, combining labor and capital in each slave, slave owners’ attention to individual productivity (economic and reproductive) was paramount.

As the development of the Old Southwest continued apace and new cotton lands were developed, the value of slaves rose, as did the desire to protect investments.  Because it was viable, growing, and expanding, it took a concerted effort from the North to eliminate it.  

Unfortunately war was inevitable and Lincoln was assassinated.  Had he lived, Reconstruction would certainly not have been so draconian and unreasonable, the integration of former slaves into American society accomplished more easily, and a more perfect re-Union realized. 

Doing Good In A Dump With Oil - The Happy Demise Of Foreign Aid

PETER Bentley was an international development consultant.  In his retirement years he always put quotation marks around ‘development’, for in his many decades in the bush he never saw any such thing.  There could never be such a thing in countries rich in resources but governed by tribal chieftains who had made good and who had to repay those who sacrificed to move them up the ladder of post-colonial chiefdom. 

The end to his years of rational assessment of enabling factors, socio-economic variables, historical consequences, and cultural influences came when he was sent on a mission to an endemically backward, hopelessly corrupt, impossibly unpleasant African country.  

The country had oil, diamonds, and rare earths, and to cover for his sponsor's desire to secure these resources before the Chinese made offers the dictator could not refuse, Bentley was there to do good - a national health project aimed at the poorest of the poor which, according to World Bank estimates, were over 90 percent of the population. 

The Minister of Finance greeted Bentley and his team warmly, hoped they had a pleasant trip and were well settled into the new five-star hotel the President had built for deep-pocketed guests like him. The man was all cheery bonhomie, but Bentley knew him as the country's Rasputin, a savage killer who sat at the right hand of the President and who each year rounded up thousands of political prisoners to spend indefinite years in dark dungeons of rot and filth. 

 

The rare earths were the jewels in the crown - essential elements of modern electronics without which  cell phones and computers would not work, and as such they had become the blood diamonds of international trade.  Countries were willing to give anything and to overlook everything for a chance at these minerals. Rich oil reserves were merely the frosting on the cake. 

And so it was that Bentley entered into an agreement for a health project which would have no benefit whatsoever except for providing the President with window dressing, a pretty display of good works for his people.  He and his government would have to do nothing for the generous grant Bentley would provide.  He would take the money, send it to his various offshore accounts, and let the development workers which came with the money soldier on in the country's Paleolithic villages. 

The mission was Bentley's last hurrah of a career marked by deals such as this one - projects of every presumed social benefit imaginable, all non-starters and empty shells from day one.  Every Mercedes, Land Rover, and Humvee on the rutted, foul streets was a tribute to the President's international savvy, knowhow, and canny ability to snooker the white man. 

The opening dinner hosted by the Minister was a banquet of French wines, lobsters and oysters from Brittany, the finest New Zealand lamb, and tribal delicacies from the Minister's constituency. Musicians played traditional music while beautiful Fulani girls danced to its strains - girls, which Bentley knew, would be gifts to the members of Bentley's team. 

The Minister was an impressive man, a tribal prince whose roots went back to the great Gao Empire of Mali, acquired great wealth through the Saharan slave trade, and became a rich man thanks to his business canniness.  “I repay my debts and carry out my responsibilities in order of priority”, the Minister related, explaining the African system of 'noble largesse'. "I first repay my family, then my tribe, then my region, and finally to my country”. 

It was a lesson that Bentley had learned in every country of Africa, a hard lesson for those who still, despite millennia of history, let alone the recent chaotic years of Big Men, civil wars, and tribal conflict, believed in rational progress and responsibility.  

No one but the African autocrats seemed to get it.  We are dumps with oil, shitholes of corruption, violence, pathetic ignorance, and venality, the Minister said in so many words, but as long as there are cobalt, rare earths, diamonds, emeralds, gas and oil in the ground,  we will continue to be.

The Minister was proud of his twenty-five room mansion overlooking the Atlantic, his Bentley, Maserati, two classic Mercedes, and his TR-4 reconstructed runabout. 

The Minister spoke perfect English, but spoke French to Bentley and his mission for fun.  If his Saturday evening was to be spoiled and his assignation with his youngest and most beautiful wife delayed, why not perform?  His linguistic virtuosity, seamlessly woven historical and cultural references, his allusions to Greece and Ghana were all part of his vaudeville act. 

The dinner, too, was part of the side show – elegant china, Baccarat crystal, foie gras, filet de sole, fines de claires, all served impeccably by white-liveried, practiced servants. 

The Minister was a man among men who had used his intelligence, tribal heritage, and will to rise to power, wealth, and influence.  Because in such a corrupt administration in such a corrupt country no high official was occupied with anything official, and that leadership was more a matter of show than substance, the Minister had time on his hands; so other than a few hours delay before bedtime with his Fulani green-eyed mistress, the evening was enjoyable.  

The corruption, venality, and greed of African dictators is endemic to the continent.  From east to west, north to south, Africa is a sinkhole of poverty, misrule, and shameless financial ambition. 

East African presidents and presidential pretenders have been called before international tribunals for crimes against humanity. New countries like South Sudan, entities that never should have been created but for the racial idealism of America, are failed states.  South Africa since the end of apartheid and the transitional rule of Nelson Mandela, has become a crime-ridden, politically unstable, corrupt place.

The Big Men stay in power because of three things: 1) they are canny manipulators of Western intentions; 2) they are considered by many to be the representatives of the noble African, a native of tribal roots with profound respect for the forest and the environment, and heir to society's favor; and 3) thanks to the hundreds of millions of look-the-other-way international grants, they can pay off the police, the military, and the secret police and assure longevity and political protection. 

Bentley was looking forward to retirement and a graceful exit from a profession which had done absolutely nothing for the 'beneficiaries' intended - the poor, the marginalized, and the desperate - and served only to enrich the powerful.  If it hadn't been for his own Fulani lovers, the foie gras, and five-star luxury afforded him, he would have quit long ago; but in accepting the perks of the trade, he felt unashamedly akin to the leaders who neutered his development interests.  Life was indeed a measure of self-interest embedded in a marvelously produced melodrama.

 

In his earlier days he justified his engagement with Africa by doing his best.  Even though the projects had been designed with only political interests in mind, and even though project funds were reduced to a trickle thanks to unofficial siphoning, if he tried, tried really hard, some incidental, peripheral advantage to the poor might result. 

It didn't take long for that fantasy to vanish, and a deliberate procedural approach to replace it.  Even in an operatic melodrama there is at least a tinselly glitter of life.  'Don't get too philosophical on me', he said to himself over coquilles de poisson and a fine Sancerre. 

The Donald Trump Years - Pure Musical Comedy, A Truly American Idiom

Musical comedy is a very American idiom with its roots in vaudeville. The form was born on Broadway in a series of shows produced between 1878 and 1884 and featured characters and situations from New York's lower classes.  The term 'musical comedy' was first used to describe American shows in 1893.  The popularity of shows like 'Evangeline' and 'The Brook' led to a new fashion in New York theatre, and musical comedy was born. 

The producers of Broadway and Hollywood have been geniuses at creating myth - wonderful fanciful stories of adventure, love, romance all with happy endings, all perfectly tailored to provide a happy sanctuary away from the humdrum,  Hobbesian 'solitary, brute, nasty, and short' life outside.

The great musical comedy epics of the Golden era - Oklahoma! and South Pacific - left no doubt as to the iconic Americanism of the genre.  The productions were big, outsized versions of an America that never existed but could, exceptional stories of heroic adventure, ambition, family and community.  Later shows like West Side Story reflected the zeitgeist of modern America, but never retreated from the genre's basic principle - love conquers all and America is a great country. 

The musical comedy's fundamental civility helped preserve the ethos of the Fifties - a patriotic, post-war optimism and belief in family, community, and faith.  Ordinary lives became those of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, My Fair Lady, High Society, and Hello Dolly. The men wore tuxes and the ladies long dresses.  They spoke well, behaved mischievously, and all ended happily together. 

What more suitable musical comedy for the Trump years than 'Oklahoma', a show that tells the story of love and rivalry in the early 1900s, Oklahoma territory, focusing on the relationships between a farm girl and a sinister farmhand. 

The musical follows the lives and loves of farmers and cowboys as they navigate love and rivalry, all set in the context of coming statehood. The story is about jealousy, love, and the struggle for acceptance in a changing society. 

 

There is nothing shopworn or commonplace about Donald Trump.  A man of glitz and glamour, tinsel and sequins, arm candy, yachts, and mansions; a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and New York.  This is a man who not only embodies America but is America.  He is our ambition, our bourgeois taste, our commonfolk sensibility, and above all our love for image, show, and the impossible dream.   

Hollywood is not just a reflection of Americans' desire for what never can be, but the very heart and soul of the dream that it can be.  It is also the venue for righteousness and hard-won honor.  America is the land of Gunfight at the OK Corral were good triumphs over evil - not in the resolution of great armed conflict, but at 100 paces, man to man, an individual struggle for what is good and right. 

Trump's press conferences remarks are pure Borscht Belt - he is Jackie Mason, Shecky Green, and Rodney Dangerfield all rolled into one.  His remaking of Washington - striking the set of bureaucratic government, building the most grandiose, baroque, flouncy ballroom only imagined in a 40s Hollywood period piece - his courting of movie stars, wrestlers, and football players; his going from one public arena to another, all with marching bands, fireworks, and flyovers are things to behold.  

This is America, Iowans and Kentuckians say.  Donald Trump is the first real American president, one who is either like the people or what they want to be.  He is as exaggerated, oversized, self-assured, and armed with an insouciance and indifference to criticism no different from the great shoot-'em-up heroes of Westerns, riding into town, tall in the saddle, six-gun on his hip, dusty from the long ride across the prairie, but here to set things straight. 

He is neither a patrician JFK, all Harvard, Boston, Pablo Casals and Robert Frost - Camelot as Edwardian romance - nor a simple man like Harry Truman showing his mettle at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor LBJ, all cowboy but without the white hat and the romance.  He didn't ride at the head of the herd fighting Indians who had surrounded his men, whooping and hollering and killing, but dragged America into a needless, bloody, endless war in Vietnam. 

No, Trump is America - he is loud, showy, full of beans, and ready to burst into song, just like Rosanno Brazzi on the Broadway stage. He is our president, not Europe's or Asia's.  Donald Trump could be on no other world stage than this one. 

Which is why the Left hates him so.  It is not just his politics - his radical conservatism and promise to undo each and every progressive, cant-filled, absurd and venal policies - nor his unrestrained use of executive authority, nor his challenges of the courts - it is who he is.  Progressives cannot stand such a man, such a showman, a tummler, a clown.  

Worst of all, they cannot stand that he is a lowbrow rube, a man remaking America in an unconscionable image.  If he has his way, the country will be a blonde, blue-eyed, white jamboree. The Bible will be back, women will be homemakers, men will be men. 

Of course it will, and who ever had any doubts?  The country, even after one year of the Trump presidency, has already turned its back on the hysteria of the Biden era.  The circus freak show, the hall of mirrors, the bearded ladies and two-headed babies, are gone, dismissed, ignored as though they never existed. 

Looking at the past few years of progressive 'reform', they don't seem real.  The black man was never meant to be put on any pedestal let alone atop the human pyramid. The gender spectrum is nothing but the dream of gay men in peacock feathers and sequins on Mardi Gras floats. Illegal aliens are not asylees, refugees, and needy newcomers.  There is no such thing as a free lunch, giveaways are entitlements, socialism is other people's money. 

Enjoy three more years of the Greatest Show on Earth - enjoy the fanfare, the trapeze acts, the operatic solos, the best musical comedy to be played in Washington since 'Stars and Stripes' in 1852. 

Progressives may be crying in their beer, but most Americans are throwing their hats in the air, cheering for an encore.