America Was Not Built On Slavery

 ... because not much of anything can be built on slavery.

Goofing off with AI (read: ChatGPT) recently, working on a silly alternate history idea, one of the biggest drawbacks to slavery finally sunk in to me. I knew that Southern planters used slaves as loan collateral, locking themselves into the institution financially, but I never really understood how anti-free market capitalism it was.

In short, slaves are a terrible way to invest capital. You can get the slaves, you just can't get rid of them if they are no longer useful. Slaves are like a tar pit for your capital.

Imagine you've got a spread in east Texas. You can either raise cattle or grow cotton. You decide to grow cotton and buy some slaves to tend and harvest the cotton. Thanks to Eli Whitney, you make decent money. A decade later, some kind of mineral deposit is found underneath your property. To exploit it, you've got to ditch the cotton.

Oops. It's not the use of the property that's the problem, it's the slaves. You can't get rid of them because no one will buy that many. You can't free them because your mortgage is backed by them. You can't kill them because, despite what foam-at-the-mouth abolitionists might say about you, you're not a monster. You may be a full-blooded eugenicist, but the slaves are still human to you. The slaves don't have the engineering skills you need to work the minerals.

You're trapped in cotton.

If you had chosen to raise cattle and foregone the slaves, when you found the minerals, you could slaughter the herd, sell the beef and move on to the better opportunity.

In a way, the Deep South trapped itself in a get-rich-quick scheme. Eli Whitney's cotton gin made cotton a tremendously valuable crop and slavery made the labor costs relatively low. Agriculture circa 1850 was very labor intensive. Once the land owners made those decisions, there was no easy way out.

The rest of the country, nay, the rest of the Western world, was moving on to better industries, but the South couldn't follow along because slavery had trapped them.

There was another problem that affected the whole region at the time. Europeans with valuable skills and ambition were emigrating to the US. Almost none of them went to the South. An immigrant was destined to start at the bottom and have to work his way up to success. In the South, he'd have to compete with slave labor so his initial fortunes were likely to be fairly desperate. The South missed out on the advantages European immigrants offered.

Historians like to point to the lack of factories, railroads and population for the reasons the Confederacy was not able to win its independence. Nah. It was slavery.

Good Lord, I'm trapped in this infernal cotton!