Slide 2. Power point… Slavery differed in the North and the South
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POWER POINT 7
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- Conrad and Meyer’s problem Was slavery profitable An old tradition maintained
- The historian Ulrich Phillips (1905) argued that slavery was not viable.
| Civil War and emancipation
• 1860 presidential election: The electorate split four ways. 1. The Southern Democrats supported slavery, 2. The Southern Republicans denounced it. 3. The Northern Democrats said democracy required the people to decide on slavery locally, state by state and territory by territory. 4. The Constitutional Union Party said the survival of the Union was at stake and everything else should be compromised. -Lincoln, the Republican, won. -Many slave owners in the South feared that the real intent of the Republicans was the abolition of slavery in states where it already existed, and that the sudden emancipation of 4 million slaves would be disastrous for the slave owners. -Secession of 7 southern states followed by other 4. -Southern forces attacked a U.S. Army installation at Fort Sumter, the American Civil War began. -American Civil War: April 12, 1861 – May 9, 1865: fought between the Union (states that remained loyal to the federal union or ‘the North’) and the Confederacy (secessionist states, ‘the South’). -On 1 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in areas in rebellion during the American Civil War. -The Thirteenth Amendment (abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude) was ratified in December 1865. Conrad and Meyer’s problem Was slavery profitable? An old tradition maintained: -Slavery was economically irrational. -Slavery inhibited economic growth. -Slavery was unprofitable and unviable, so it would have died out even without the Civil War. -These issues were addressed in a great research trajectory featuring Conrad & Meyer (1958), Yasuba (1961), Fogel & Engerman (1974), and other works. -These studies used the new cliometrics approach. The historian Ulrich Phillips (1905) argued that slavery was not viable. • Slavery was only established because wages were very high. • Slave labour was unproductive and worth using only when slaves could be cheaply imported. • After the abolition of the slave trade (slave were scarcer), slave prices rose relative to cotton prices and that meant that slavery was not profitable. • Slaves were kept only as status symbols—not because they were economically valuable.
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