Ta Nehisi Coates cites Yale University professor David Blight:
To get a hint of why it's nonsense consider the first line of The Wealth of Nations:
Okay then, you say, so why is the good professor able to cite figures establishing so much more value to the slaves as an asset than to all the factories of the north? (And let's take it as given that his numbers are good.)
Well, consider marijuana prices. Marijuana is a weed that will grow pretty much anywhere a weed will grow. It should have no significant value and it wouldn't except that it is so closely regulated by governments. This regulation drives the cost of the asset way up. Jason the Stoner pays top dollar for his weed because most of that price is to cover overhead costs created by laws restricting the growth, transport, sale and possession of marijuana.
Now it's obscene to talk about human beings in terms of market value but that is the way the world was in 1860 and slaves were a heavily regulated market. Considerable efforts had been made, for example, to make it difficult to import more slaves. This added a lot of overhead cost to the market. And all that was needed for that value to collapse was for conditions to change radically. And there are few things that will alter conditions quite so radically as a civil war.
Now that does not, as I am sure Coates would correctly insist, change the psychology of the issue any. The market price reflects what people were willing to pay and the cited price for slaves really was the market price for that era. And that tells us something about the reasons the South went to war. However, a huge component of that price derives from there not being many slaves on the market in the first place. And that should lead us to doubt the aggregate number cite by Professor Blight. You can't really compare the combined value of slaves with other assets.
In the end, the South was fighting to defend a way of life. The very high price of slaves was a reflection of their determination to do so.
Consider how you might feel if you bought something at a flea market for fifty cents and later discovered it was worth many times what you paid for it? Would you turn around and sell it immediately for the profit? You might not. You might decide that owning this valuable thing was worth more to you than it asset price even though it had no real value to you when you bought it. When I keep my Moorcroft vase and put it on my shelf that tells you much more about the way of life I treasure than it tells you about the asset price.
And my Moorcroft only has value because other people also want to hold onto theirs. If a plurality of Moorcroft owners noticed the going price on eBay and sold them all at the same time, the price would collapse. Again, it's obscene to think of human beings in these terms but if Southerners had decided to assess value that slaves represented to them purely in terms of their ability to generate wealth, there probably wouldn't have been a civil war.
It would be nice, by the way, to say that the North saw more value in the slaves in human rather than economic terms as compared to the South but I don't think we can do that. I suspect opposition to slavery was driven more by what white Northerners wanted to believe about themselves than what they believed about black Americans.
In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America's manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself...I suspect that there is a factual sense to that claim. But it's also nonsense.
To get a hint of why it's nonsense consider the first line of The Wealth of Nations:
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.The real wealth of a nation is not the net value of its assets but it's capacity to produce. Why is that important? Because on that measure there is simply no doubt that the North's ability to generate wealth greatly exceeded the South's. On that measure, the manufacturing capacity of the North was worth much, much more than the slaves. That more than anything else explains why the North beat the South. The North was not just wealthier than the South, it was much, much wealthier.
Okay then, you say, so why is the good professor able to cite figures establishing so much more value to the slaves as an asset than to all the factories of the north? (And let's take it as given that his numbers are good.)
Well, consider marijuana prices. Marijuana is a weed that will grow pretty much anywhere a weed will grow. It should have no significant value and it wouldn't except that it is so closely regulated by governments. This regulation drives the cost of the asset way up. Jason the Stoner pays top dollar for his weed because most of that price is to cover overhead costs created by laws restricting the growth, transport, sale and possession of marijuana.
Now it's obscene to talk about human beings in terms of market value but that is the way the world was in 1860 and slaves were a heavily regulated market. Considerable efforts had been made, for example, to make it difficult to import more slaves. This added a lot of overhead cost to the market. And all that was needed for that value to collapse was for conditions to change radically. And there are few things that will alter conditions quite so radically as a civil war.
Now that does not, as I am sure Coates would correctly insist, change the psychology of the issue any. The market price reflects what people were willing to pay and the cited price for slaves really was the market price for that era. And that tells us something about the reasons the South went to war. However, a huge component of that price derives from there not being many slaves on the market in the first place. And that should lead us to doubt the aggregate number cite by Professor Blight. You can't really compare the combined value of slaves with other assets.
In the end, the South was fighting to defend a way of life. The very high price of slaves was a reflection of their determination to do so.
Consider how you might feel if you bought something at a flea market for fifty cents and later discovered it was worth many times what you paid for it? Would you turn around and sell it immediately for the profit? You might not. You might decide that owning this valuable thing was worth more to you than it asset price even though it had no real value to you when you bought it. When I keep my Moorcroft vase and put it on my shelf that tells you much more about the way of life I treasure than it tells you about the asset price.
And my Moorcroft only has value because other people also want to hold onto theirs. If a plurality of Moorcroft owners noticed the going price on eBay and sold them all at the same time, the price would collapse. Again, it's obscene to think of human beings in these terms but if Southerners had decided to assess value that slaves represented to them purely in terms of their ability to generate wealth, there probably wouldn't have been a civil war.
It would be nice, by the way, to say that the North saw more value in the slaves in human rather than economic terms as compared to the South but I don't think we can do that. I suspect opposition to slavery was driven more by what white Northerners wanted to believe about themselves than what they believed about black Americans.
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