The whole point of plantation slavery, Johnson explains, was this chain of capitalist mutations: from “lashes into labor into bales into dollars into pounds sterling.” Above all, the slaveholders of the Cotton Kingdom were rapacious-and highly effective- masters of the essential capitalist process of converting labor into commodities.
They were early adopters of technology, avid consumers of financial data, expert manipulators of legal arcana and aggressive speculators in everything, including not only human chattel and cotton but also unstable paper money and exotic credit arrangements. As the Harvard historian Walter Johnson explains in his bracing new history of slavery and capitalism in the Deep South, River of Dark Dreams, the slaveholders were the quintessential American capitalists. Two-thirds of all Americans who owned estates worth more than $100,000 lived in the South in 1860 Mississippi and Louisiana boasted more millionaires per capita than Massachusetts and New York and more capital was invested in enslaved African-Americans than in railroad and industrial assets combined.īut the Southern slaveholders were more than just rich. If, however, wealth is assessed the way most white people calculated it at the time-by counting enslaved African-Americans as valuable property rather than as victims of the desperate poverty that slaveholders imposed on them-the South was the nation’s wealthiest region before the Civil War. Even today, the states that had very large slave populations in 1860 tend to have low per capita incomes, with Mississippi perennially at the bottom.
After the war, and largely because of it, the South was the poorest region of the United States. On the Southern side, the stereotype has permitted a misinterpretation of the war’s economic circumstances and consequences.
Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.
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