The "conventional wisdom" of the century of progress (19th) held that labor given unwillingly (e.g., that coerced by the owner of slaves) was rarely if ever as productive as that given willingly by the worker in return for a wage. This was to overlook, however, both the extent to which the pace of wage labor was limited by the workers themselves and the ways in which slavery lent itself to efficient methods of extracting labor. The judgment of most economists and historians now is the reverse of that which prevailed over a century ago. This is not unusual. We do need to keep in mind that most people then (as now) acted on the basis of what *they* (not we) understood to be true, whether it was actually true or not.

Lyle asked whether writers at the time (ca. 1860) wrote on the question of agricultural productivity on the plantation and the family farm. The answer is yes. Probably the most controversial book, besides Uncle Tom's Cabin, during the 1850s was Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South, first published in 1857. Helper used mases of "statistics" from the 1850 census to try to prove that slavery had caused the southern states to lag behind the northern in nearly every category of economic productivity and social progress. Many of his comparisons between the regions and his arguments about differences were simplistic and flawed, as southern critics were quick to point out. What Helper could not see was that, in some ways, the apparent economic backwardness of the South could be used to illustrate the honor and idealism of the planter class, whose members were continually claiming that slavery was not about money, but about civilized values and stewardship. But most southerners--like good Americans everywhere--preferred to join the two "opposites" and saw no contradiction between their superior civilization and material progress. 

Anyhow, Helper is not to be read for the technical parts of his economic arguments, all of which were pretty shoddy, but instead for the debating points he scored, or tried to score, against the planters of the South and for the nonslaveholding white majority of the region (he was North Carolinian himself).

Doug Deal
History/SUNY Oswego

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