Lyle Browning argues that technological change would have inevitably killed slavery.  The implication is that the Civil War was a tragic mistake--that the politics of the slave debate, which culminated of course in war and bloodshed, was unnecessary.

This turns out, however, to be at best a partial truth.  Without developing this claim to any large degree, let me point out two facts which complicate the picture of technological determinism.

First:  agriculture in the United States mechanized at differing rates.  Share cropping (the post-emancipation form of racial and economic control) died not because of mechanized agriculture, but because of the policies of the federal government in the New Deal.  California, where agriculture was most capitalized, mechanized agriculture in the first decades of the 20th century.  You can chart this by looking at the distribution of mule ownership in the United States--in the 1940s, the only part of the US in which most farmers still owned mules was the South.  By contrast, the only part of the US in which most farmers did not own tractors was the same region--the South.

Second:  Slavery proved quite adaptable to factory manufacturing.  Charles Dew has written two very fine books on Virginia iron foundries which demonstrate that under the right conditions, slaves could be quite profitably used in heavy manufacturing industry.

Together, these two facts suggest that technological change is thoroughly mediated by cultural, legal, and institutional factors.  Over very long periods of time it may well be determinitive--although even this is debated by historians of technology.  Over shorter periods of time--the 20-30 year span that Lyle Browning suggests--technological change is far more ambiguous--and politics far more important.

Slavery ended because of political processes.  This is true not just for the United States, but (to my knowledge anyway) everywhere that plantation slavery died.  Its death was political, and certainly not inevitable.

All best,
Kevin

---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:29:06 -0500
>From: "Lyle E. Browning" <[log in to unmask]>  
>Subject: Re: And Now Nat Turner in a Politically Correct Light  
>To: [log in to unmask]

> Mechanization is to me the death  
>knell of slavery. Boulton & Watt's steam engine, Eli Whitney's cotton  
>gin and Cyrus McCormick's reaper were the nails in the coffin of an  
>institution that didn't know it was dead. Maybe it would have lasted  
>another 30 years but eventually the economic reason for it, which  
>seems to have been the driving force, would have disappeared. The  
>steam engine, once it was set on wheels, and then once it had an  
>adapted mill technology for auto-motion, was the device that would be  
>the major determinant. Why? because one slave could tend about 10  
>acres per year in the "system" and that was a driven efficiency.  
>Mechanized farm equipment evolved from equalling human output to  
>steadily stopping it in the late 29th century and was able to top that  
>by 200 times in the 1990's.
>
>Lyle Browning
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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