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Related: About this forumThe New Abolitionism
http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionismBefore the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about violations of the Constitution of the United States and encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States. But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words was money. So much goddamn money.
The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the Civil War.
Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves as property. It was precisely this ontological questionproperty or persons?that the war was fought over. But suspend that moral revulsion for a moment and look at the numbers: Just how much money were the Souths slaves worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in 1860 by the number of slaves and then using the Consumer Price Index to adjust for inflation. But as economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue, using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesnt really tell us much: In the 19th century, they note, there were no national surveys to figure out what the average consumer bought. In fact, the first such survey, in Massachusetts, wasnt conducted until 1875.
In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assetsthat is, all the wealthin the entire country, which in todays terms is a stunning $10 trillion.
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The New Abolitionism (Original Post)
xchrom
Apr 2014
OP
Nihil
(13,508 posts)1. That was a fascinating read - thanks! (n/t)