What Effect Did Slavery Have on the Economy of the South?

It is argued that slavery had a negative effect on the economy of the South and there are those who argue that is had a positive effect on the economy.

On the one hand, F.L. Olmsted in his book “The Cotton Kingdom”, argues that slavery “destroys self-respect”, and therefore decreases “their capacity of usefulness to their country and the world”. This would mean that the slaves lose any ambition they have and therefore cease to be useful and not work. Although it is important to note that F.L. Olmsted was a Northerner and thus by nature will have biased thoughts towards slavery. This is because the North was more industrialised than the South and did not need as many farm labourers.

However, George Fitzhugh in his book “Sociology For The South”, argued that slavery was a good thing and had a positive effect on both the economy and the slaves. He says that there is “no rivalry, no competition to get employment”, so everyone has jobs and also the nature of slavery forces a symbiotic relationship between slave and master “the master’s interest prevents his reducing the slaves allowance or wages in infancy or sickness”, because he might lose the slave. Then the slave works hard, grows and picks cotton thus making profit for the master and creating a healthy economy. However G. Fitzhugh did advocate slavery for whites and blacks declaring that they only way any good will arise if the war of competition ceases.

This is at odds to what F.L. Olmsted said because he said that slavery destroys ambition and you need ambition for a healthy economy, whereas G. Fitzhugh states that people do not want to think for themselves and would work more if they didn’t have to.

H.R. Helper states that “Slavery, and nothing but slavery has retarded the progress and prosperity”, his reasons for this are that slavery is driving blacks out of the South and into the North, depopulating and impoverishing the cities. This is a problem because if the South has no workers then obviously it cannot make any profit. H.R. Helper goes on to describe how the South’s foreign immigration laws prevent immigrants from entering the South and therefore strangling the economy, which made the South a “tributary to the North”. This is interesting because even though Hinton Rowan Helper if from the South he still criticizes slavery, because it hurts the economic prospects of nonslaveholding whites.

In the last source it is easy to see that in 1828 the price of a slave was $700 whereas in 1860 the price is $1800, which is a growth of over 100% therefore it is impossible to deny that slavery did not pump money into the economy. Although on the other hand, I agree with H.R. Helper and believe that if slavery continued then all the nonslaveholding whites of the South would move to the North because there they can compete in business without moral concerns. Which means there will be less and less people in the South so their economy would have eventually have crashed.