One of the leading economic historians of the American south, Stanford’s Gavin Wright, observes in a recent Journal of Economic Perspectives article that both 19th-century defenders of slavery and 21st-century critics of slavery credit it for the rise of modern industrial capitalism. Southern “King Cotton” was, goes the argument, the cheap ingredient that grew the critically important northern textile factories that propelled industrialization.
The 19th-century group claiming slavery’s necessity was trying to preserve the South’s “peculiar institution.” The 21st-century group, composed of “New Historians of Capitalism” and many writers on the Black experience (such as contributors to the New York Times “1619 Project”), is trying to show that American affluence today was built on the backs of slaves and, by extension, to show how much Americans today owe the descendants of those slaves.
Library of Congress http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a37040
Wright, while never underestimating the moral abomination of slavery and, later, serfdom, their long-lasting harms, and the complicity of Americans beyond the slave-owners themselves, objects: The proposition that slavery powered industrialization “has been rejected by virtually every economic historian who has examined the issue.” In the end, “slavery enriched slave-owners, but impoverished the southern region and did little to boost the US economy as a whole.” (Another historian of the South has a harsher rejection here.) Wright tip-toes around the connected reparations issue. But on this Juneteenth, the connection warrants more attention.
The Economics of U.S. Slavery
North America colonists were minor players in the Atlantic slave trade; 95 percent of African captives went elsewhere, mainly to Latin America and the West Indies. Efforts to enslave the Native peoples failed. Indentured European servants initially comprised most of the workforce in what would become the U.S. But as the supply of African captives multiplied in the 17th century and as their survival rates improved, farmers in the southern colonies increasingly bought slaves. Farmers in the northern colonies were less interested, not because of moral objections, Wright explains, but because, for them, “the marginal revenue product of farm labor was not high enough to warrant the high international price of African slaves.” The North largely participated in slavery indirectly by supplying the produce that fed slaves on sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
American slavery certainly enriched many merchants, South and North, as well as plantation owners. But did slavery fuel industrialization? Many other factors surely did, notably the financial stability provided by a stable national government and infrastructure improvements provided by both national and state governments. Rapid economic development followed in the Northeast and in what we now call the Midwest–just as the states in those regions were ending or forbidding slavery.
The South, in contrast, lagged. Farmers in the 19th century turned away from raising increasingly unprofitable tobacco and turned to cotton as a way to employ their sunken investments in land and slaves. “Cotton became a slave crop, not because of technological imperatives [the new cotton gin], but because the farmers looking for alternatives were already slave-owners.” Southern agricultural production fell behind that of the North; farmland in slave areas was worth considerably less than farmland in free states. By the eve of the Civil War, the South was already trailing in wealth, infrastructure, and education. Slave-owners did well, but other White southerners did poorly. The plantation elite had no interest in copying the changes occurring in the North and thus they condemned their region to backwardness.
Yet, the argument persists that southern slavery made northern capitalism by making cotton cheap. Wright explains that, in actuality, slavery was probably not needed to produce cheap cotton. After emancipation, small-scale southern farmers started growing cotton without slaves and brought its cost down to prewar levels. Also, southern cotton was probably not necessary for the industrial sector. Textile production accounted for only 10 percent of industrial employment and, anyway, cheap cotton could be gotten from elsewhere. Nor was the South a major customer of the farmers and manufacturers outside the South. Wright goes through these and other arguments for the centrality of slavery and dismisses each.
Wright also points to growing opinion among northern businessmen that slavery and the political power of slave-owners were impeding economic development. Lincoln was able, once the southern representatives had left Congress, to pass a long list of delayed major economic and infrastructure initiatives.
In the end, slavery did not even have the silver lining of contributing to the economic dynamism of America. It contributed to the wealth of only a relative few, while depressing the wealth of the vast majority. Does that mean, then, that slaves’ descendants are not owed “back pay”?
The Other Case for Reparations
Of course not. Wright concludes that:
Whether the role of slavery in US nineteenth-century economic ascendancy was major, minor, or negative, the historical facts would remain that African Americans labored involuntarily and were denied equal rights long after Emancipation. . . . The injustice of slavery was all too real . . .Calls for greater attention to this history should be applauded and encouraged . . . . [but] exaggerated or misleading claims for a central or decisive role for slavery in US economic development can only distract from the core mission.
As a matter of morality, justice, and social policy, there is much to recommend paying substantial reparations to the descendants of America’s slaves.[1] (When I edited Contexts magazine, I commissioned an article for its first volume on the case for reparations. The author, sociologist Dalton Conley, wrote that although “slavery reparations remain a remote dream. . . it is still worthwhile to do the math . . . at least for what the numbers reveal about race and equal opportunity in America.”)
In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates published an essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” a rich, passionate, and influential appeal. Although repeating the historical error linking slavery and economic growth that Gavin Wright corrects, Coates nonetheless makes a powerful case for the moral imperative of reparations, one compelling enough to convert centrist-right journalist David Brooks to the cause. No wonder that the discussion of reparations has accelerated in recent years.
However, Coates’s case for reparations (and that of others) is overwhelmingly about why the sordid history of slavery and Jim Crow makes the idea of reparations compelling, but quite little about its practical politics.
The Practical Politics of Reparations, However
As a matter of practical, realistic politics, pushing for reparations is a potential social justice disaster. For two reasons.
First, reparations are highly unlikely. Despite isolated instances here and there, no substantial or national reparations are forthcoming. Recent polling data shows about 25% to 30% support for reparations as an abstract idea. Set aside the African-American respondents in these surveys, however, and the support drops below 20%.[3] And this lopsided response exists even before any anti-reparations campaign has gotten under way.
But you don’t need a pollster to know which way the wind blows. This is a country in which voters in even deep blue states turn down modest affirmative action (e.g., here and here), in which guaranteeing Blacks practical access to the ballot is an uphill struggle, in which anti-poverty programs are resisted because they are seen as favoring Blacks,[4] in which just teaching the history of race gets immense “CRT” blow-back; and in which half of Whites say that Whites are discriminated against.[5] It takes messianic thinking to imagine that American non-Blacks will tax themselves to give significant sums of money to American Blacks.
Second, a futile effort to get more than token reparations (or even token ones) will undermine other efforts to narrow racial gaps in treatment and wealth. Some argue that, even if reparations do not result, just having a national debate about them would provide a “truth-and-reconciliation” national experience. I’m highly skeptical; it’s much likelier to bring an ugly national experience. More, it will hand conservative (and racist) forces a political wedge weapon so destructive it will make the “defund the police” wedge weapon look like a popgun.
You don’t have to be a campaign consultant to envision the political ads that will ensue: people from the upper Midwest objecting that their ancestors had nothing to do with slavery or discrimination, and that, indeed, their ancestors had fought for the Union in the Civil War; Americans of various backgrounds arguing that their Irish or Italian or Chinese or Mexican or Native, etc., ancestors had also been poor, faced discrimination, and even lynching, but now radicals were going to tax them to compensate someone else; thinly-veiled allusions to issues in the Black community like single motherhood and high rates of violence; and much more–all amounting to objections that radicals want innocent Americans to pay “undeserving” people simply for being born Black. (Certainly, there are rejoinders to such objections [e.g., here], but they are politically irrelevant.) Finally, let’s remember that most Americans want to create a more equal America but only by providing more equal opportunity, not by redistributing wealth. So, it will be extremely easy for opponents–even without sounding any racist dog whistle–to persuade people that reparations are unfair and un-American. A “truth-and-reconciliation” process will become a charges-and-recrimination brawl.
In political races all over the country, Democratic candidates will be challenged to declare their positions on reparations. (It may be already too late to forestall this.) If they say “Yes” they will forfeit big chunks of moderate White (and Latino and Asian) voters. If they say “No” they will forfeit many Black votes and activist organizational support as well. Either way, they will lose many elections. And the causes they would have championed had they won office, from child care and food stamps to criminal reform and climate responsibility, will lose big, too. However moral the case for reparations is, the cost to progressive causes of even a national discussion would be (will be?) huge.
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NOTES
[1] One of the arguments around this issue is whether Black Americans whose ancestors were not American slaves (e.g., descendants of West Indies slaves or of immigrants from Africa–e.g., Barack Obama) should qualify for reparations on the grounds that their ancestors and they themselves have suffered from racism anyway. That move would open a Pandora’s Box of complications. since virtually every immigrant group–Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Québécois, you name it–has faced some degree of xenophobia (including, for some, riots and murder). How much compensation is owed by whom to whom?
[2] Coate’s most extensive discussion of whether achieving reparations is even possible covers Germany’s payment of Holocaust reparations to Israel and individual survivors. This comparison is, however, strained and inapplicable. The West German government started the reparations process in the early 1950s, against German popular opinion, while occupied by Allied armies, seeking protection from Stalin, and pressured by the Americans. The German analogy fails. (To Germany’s credit, over the years what began as a realpolitik concession turned into a broader acceptance of national responsibility.) There have been instances of compensations paid in the United States–to some Japanese-American WWII camp interns, for example–but the scale of the money involved for and the debate that would ensue over Black reparations would be an order of magnitude greater.
[3] I am summarizing results from three different national surveys done in 2019 that I retrieved from the Roper Center’s iPoll. A 2019 Gallup Poll had similar results and shows the racial difference in answers. See, also, discussions by Gallup and the Brookings Institution.
[4] See, for example, the work of economist Alberto Alesina, such as Fighting Poverty.
[5] In a 2018 Pew survey, about half of Whites said there was discrimination against Whites; a 2021 NPR-sponsored poll (after George Floyd) found the same.
MADE IN AMERICA 