Southerners Fought A War For Slavery Because Slavery Made Them Much More Money
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
I think that the single worst mistake the people of the United States ever made was allowing the importation and ownership of slaves.
The Massive Damage To America From Slavery
That decision caused massive suffering and a civil war that killed approximately 670,000 people out of a population of about 31.5 million or over 2% of the entire U.S. population.
Add in the accompanying costs, strife, and pain of racism, segregation, discrimination, and poverty and we begin to get an idea of the massive damage the importation and use of slaves did to this country.
And America is still suffering from its heritage of importing African slaves.
Why Was Slavery So Vital To Southerners? — Money.
Why did Southerners so badly want to own slaves that they were willing to start a bloody civil war in order to be able to continue to own slaves?
Money.
Slavery wasn’t a philosophical choice, a religious choice, a decision driven by scientific ignorance or mistaken beliefs. It was purely and simply an economic choice.
Slavery was by far the most profitable business model for Southern agriculture.
Why Slavery Was The Most Profitable Business Model
By weather and geography the Southern States were amenable to large farms that required a great deal of labor. It takes a lot of humans to grow and harvest plantation crops like cotton and tobacco. In 1860 that translated to about 4 million slaves in the United States.
In 1860 about 12½% of the entire U.S. population were slaves.
As long as slavery was legal, slaves were the most profitable labor force available to grow plantation crops.
So long as slavery was legal, Southern landowners had no interest in expending the time, effort and money that would have been required to encourage the immigration of millions of free men from Europe to work their land.
How Much Money People Made From The Slavery Business Model
I’ve included the math at the end of this column, but the relevant numbers are that in 1860 a semi-skilled worker like a blacksmith would make about $2/day. A farm laborer would earn about $1.50 per day, but he would get room and board with that.
At pre-war cotton prices, the owner of an 800 acre cotton plantation could get about $110,000 gross per year from raising cotton, not counting other income from farm animals or other non-cotton crops.
The landowner would need about 400 slaves to work that 800 acre plantation and those slaves would cost him about $9,600/year to feed and clothe. The amortized cost of horses and plows would be about another $400/year.
That would leave the landowner with a net income of about $100,000/year.
There were no property taxes, income taxes, utilities, insurance or other major costs of operation beyond interest on any loans that the landowner took out to finance the initial purchase of his slaves and maintenance of his life style.
In 1860 a prime field slave cost about $1,200 so those 400 slaves would represent an investment of about $480,000. If all that money had been borrowed on a ten-year loan amortized at 5%, the annual loan payments would have been about $61,000.
That would have left the landowner with a net income of about $39,000/year at a time when a semi-skilled worker like a blacksmith earned about $625/year.
In short, slavery made landowners a HUGE amount of money.
Who Would Work The Land If There Were No Slaves?
Hired Workers
But if slavery had been illegal, where would the landowner have found 400 people to work his fields and what would they have cost him?
There were millions of poverty-stricken people in Europe who would have voluntarily come to the New World for the right incentive. In the 1820s the cost of passage from England to the United States was about $30 so there was no financial barrier to getting immigrants here.
Compared to the cost of $1,200 to buy a slave, the cost of shipping free Europeans to Virginia or Georgia would have been trivial.
If a free worker were hired to grow cotton at the prevailing wage for farm labor it would have cost about $105/acre in wages and food to produce about $138 worth of cotton. Of course the worker would have needed a way to survive for the rest of the year.
The landowner would have had to let him continue to live on the property after the harvest and would have had to subsidize his living costs until the next crop.
You could feed a slave on corn for about $1month so the landowner would have had to pay the free worker at least another $7 raising the cost to about $112.
Subtracting the cost of a horse, plow and tools, the landowner would have netted about $32/acre or about $25,600/year profit for an 800 acre plantation.
That’s real money in an economy where skilled people worked six days a week for less than $1,000 a year, but it’s far less than the $39,000 or more that the landowner would have made from the slavery business model.
The slavery business model was about 50% more profitable than hiring free men to work the land.
It’s also very possible that a large enough number of immigrants would not have been willing to come to the U.S. if they were only going to be paid $1.50/day for about five months out of twelve and then would have had to survive on corn and game for the rest of the year.
Tenant Farmers
But there was another business model that the Southern landowners could have used if slavery had been illegal — tenant farming.
At a split of 67% for the landowner and 33% for the farmer, the tenant farmer would have earned about seventy cents/working day over a period of about five and a third months.
That probably would not have been enough to lure enough free men to America.
But what if the landowner could promise the immigrants a roof over their heads, a vegetable garden, access to fish and wild game and also a hundred and fifty or even two hundred dollars a year cash money?
Considering a peasant’s standard of living in Europe, I don’t doubt that hundreds of thousands or more would have jumped at the chance.
With 20% of the crop going to the landowner and 80% to the tenant farmer the owner of an 800 acre plantation would have netted about $22,000/year for no work.
The tenant farmer would have received about $220/132 working days or about $1.67/day (about $42/month) which is more than the $1.50/day that free farm workers were paid at that time. From that $42/month the farmer would need to spend $1 to $2 per month for food and clothing.
The worker would have lived on the land, been able to grow vegetables, raise chickens, and supplement his family’s diet with fish and wild game. This was generally more than the masses in Europe would have had available to them back home.
It Was All About The Money
So, instead of buying slaves, why didn’t the Southern landowners bring in impoverished Europeans in the beginning and lease the land to them in exchange for twenty percent or even ten percent of the harvest?
Had slavery been illegal, the owner of an 800 acre plantation could still have made a substantial income, $22,000 or more, for no work, by importing free, European, immigrant, tenant farmers to work the land on a 20%/80% or better split of the crop.
But, the owner of an 800 acre plantation who borrowed all the money to buy his slaves could net almost $40,000/year. If he borrowed half the cost of purchasing his slaves or if he was able to quickly pay down half of his loan, he could make $70,000/year just from cotton, not counting the income from other crops and livestock.
The slavery business model was at least two to three times more profitable than an immigrant tenant-farmer business model which is why Southern landowners chose to own slaves.
At a time when skilled people worked hard for less than a thousand dollars a year, the landowner’s ability to receive an extra twenty thousand dollars or more each year through slavery versus free tenant farmers was irresistible.
The Numbers
If you’re not interested in checking out the arithmetic, you can skip to the end of this column.
Slave Plantation Costs & Income
The Southern plantations were generally between 500 and 1,000 acres.
You would need about a dozen horses to plow 800 acres in a month. A dozen horses would cost about $1,800 and a dozen steel plows would cost about $150 so it would cost about $2,000 for horses and plows for the first harvest. Assuming a lifetime of five years that would mean an amortized cost for horses and plows was about $400 per year or about $.50/acre.
Growing Cotton
A bale of cotton weighed 500 pounds and non-irrigated land produced about 2 ½ bales per acre or about 1250 pounds of cotton per acre. Irrigated land produced more.
It took about 5 1/3rd months, about 22 weeks, about 154 calendar days, to grow and harvest a cotton crop. Assuming that people worked six days per week that’s about 132 working days.
Cotton Income & Expenses
In 1860 cotton sold for about $.11/pound so the yield was about 1,250 X $.11 = about $138/acre. There was approximately one slave for every two acres of cotton.
The cost to feed and clothe a slave was probably somewhere between $1 and $2/month and one slave worked two acres so it cost the plantation owner about $12/year ($1/acre/month) to feed and clothe the slave who produced about $138 worth of cotton. $138 — $12 = $126 — $.50/acre for a horse and a plow and — $.50/acre for miscellaneous costs = $125 net per acre X 800 acres = $100,000 net plantation income.
In 1860 a prime field slave cost about $1,200 so those 400 slaves would represent an investment of about $480,000. If all that money was borrowed in a ten-year loan amortized at 5%, the annual loan payments would have been about $61,000
$100,000 — $61,000 = $39,000 net profit in 1860 with cotton at $.11/pound.
The smaller the loan, the more money for the landowner.
Hired-Labor Numbers
One man could grow about two acres of cotton.
If a free man had to be hired to do the job it would have cost about 132 days X $1.50/day or $198 in wages and another $6 in food and lodging or about $204 to produce about $275 of cotton. That would have left the landowner with about $71 — $1 for the horse and plow = $70 for two acres or a profit of about $35/acre X 800 acres = $28,000.
$39,000 profit with slaves. $28,000 profit with hired labor assuming that those laborers were available.
Tenant Farming Numbers
Tenant farmers supplied their own tools and mules. Sharecroppers got a smaller portion of the crop and the landowner supplied the plow, mule and tools.
If the landowners had used a tenant-farming business model instead of a slavery or hired-labor business model and assuming the same 1860 cotton price of $.11/pound then the numbers would have been as follows.
1250 pounds of cotton/acre X 2 acres X $.11/pound = $275
33%/67% Farmer/Landowner Split
- 33% to the tenant farmer = $92/132 working days = $.70/day
- 67% to the landowner = $184 X 400 = $73,600
67%/33% Farmer/Landowner Split
- 67% to the tenant farmer = $185/132 working days = $1.40/day
- 33% to the landowner = $92 X 400 = $36,800
80%/20% Farmer/Landowner Split
- 80% to the tenant farmer = $220/132 working days = $1.67/day
- 20% to the landowner = $55 X 400 = $22,000
90%/10% Farmer/Landowner Split
- 90% to the tenant farmer = $248/132 = $1.88/day
- 10% to the landowner = $28 X 400 = $11,200
Why Southerners Could Not Give Up Slavery
Imagine you’re the owner of that 800 acre plantation and you’ve borrowed half a million dollars to buy your slaves. You’ve made hundreds of thousands of dollars of loan payments because those slaves are vital to getting the money you need to live and to meet your loan obligations.
As some of the slaves die off you’re going to have to buy more slaves in order to be able to continue to bring in all those dollars. And if those dollars stop coming in you won’t be able to pay your loans and the bank is going to take your land and you will be left with NOTHING.
If you lose your slaves, if you lose the right to buy replacement slaves, you will lose EVERYTHING when the bank forecloses on your loans.
Now some people you don’t know, living hundreds or thousands of miles away, tell you that everything you’ve done was for nothing, that you’re going to have to let those slaves go without you getting back one cent of all that money you’ve borrowed to buy them, that you’re going to have to go broke and see the bank take your land, and that even if you can somehow keep your plantation going with tenant farmers you’re going to see your income cut by 50% or 75%, all because these strangers have gotten it into their heads that slavery is morally wrong.
Are you going to just roll over and lose everything because of their ideas of morality?
Hell no.
What are you going to to?
You are going to make up any phony-baloney argument you can to justify keeping your slaves. You’re going to claim that
- these black people aren’t really human
- these black people are a savage sub-race, too primitive to be anything other than slaves
- these black people are happy being slaves,
- these black people want to be your slaves,
- these black people like growing your cotton for a life of living in a shack and eating cornmeal mush.
It doesn’t matter what’s true. Nothing matters except your keeping those slaves working and keeping the money rolling in because otherwise you will go broke, the bank will foreclose and you will lose everything.
Because of all the loans the landowners needed to buy the slaves and finance their luxurious plantation lifestyle, slavery became a trap from which the landowners could not escape.
At its core, slavery was always all and only about the money.
And, by the way, once you’ve started and lost a war that killed 670,000 people based on the claim that these black people weren’t really human beings but rather were just a savage sub-race, too primitive to be anything other than slaves, you’re going do everything possible to hang on to those lies because at that point you can’t bear to admit that you enslaved millions of human beings just to make more money.
To save face, to justify what you’ve done, you have to hold on to the lies no matter what and your new motto becomes: Segregation Forever.
Summary
If slavery were illegal from the beginning, an immigration-fueled tenant-farmer business model likely would have been profitable for the landowners but not nearly as profitable as a slavery business model.
Once Southerners had committed to the slavery business model and imported several million slaves, they could not go back.
Once millions of slaves were already here, what was done could not be undone.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
