Quotes about Slavery Economics

Frederick Douglass

Money is the measure of morality, and the success or failure of slavery as a money-making system, determines with many whether...it should be maintained or abolished.

Greg Grandin

Slaves were at one and the same time investments (purchased and then rented out as laborers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital.

David Davis

The market value of slaves in 1860 exceeded that of the entire nation’s railroads and factories put together … it was, relative to the gross national product in today’s economic values in excess of $9.6 Trillion.

After the civil war there was a concerted effort to shape American opinion away from the notion that the Civil War has mainly about slavery which we now know was a false notion. Slavery was the only significant issue for both sides. This quotation is cited by many who argue that the prospect of the end of slavery was tantamount to economic confiscation and impoverishment for the slave owning minority and hence it drove them to rebellion. Also, Davis and others argue that the value of the slaves was so great that there was no possible economic way to compensate the slave owners for emancipation at fair market value which was why that “compromise” never went anywhere.

Andrew Young

What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.

Abraham Lincoln

Less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head?—that eighty-seven days cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price?

Essentially, the case of moral hazard was made against paying the slave owners. Lincoln took a pragmatic approach. However, not only was Northern opposition too strong for this proposal, but the Southern slave holders would never agree to selling their slaves. What Lincoln and most “pragmatic” Northerners did not realize is that even if the slave owners would get a fair market price for the slaves, they would be left with land and no way to work it. Their families would have no servants. They might have to work themselves like Northern farmers did, and their entire standard and style of living would be destroyed. Their sons were not well educated as many Northern young men were and were brought up to be gentlemen, politicians, and occasional soldiers—not work with their hands. They could not compete. And the slaveholders were right as the whole history of Reconstruction and backwardness demonstrated for more than 100 years.

John Coleman

The South was at the point where the scale was tipping against slavery. It was slowly dawning on the plantation owners that slave labor was not economic, besides being morally wrong. Slavery was destined to be abolished, whether for economic reasons or moral reasons matters not, but the international intriguers were not going to wait for voluntary abolition to rob them of their trump card.

Kerry Washington

The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn't have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river.

Kevin Phillips

[In early Colonial America] ironically black slaves, selling for roughly 3 times as much [as indentured servants], often got better treatment because they were a lifetime investment. With indentured servants, an employer’s optimal return lay in obtaining as much sweat and output as possible over 4, 5 or 7 years. ]

depending on the term of the sentence Many criminals in England were sentenced to indentured servitude in America for a number of years depending on the crime.

Henry Clay

The third impediment to immediate abolition [of slavery] is to be found in the immense amount of capital which is invested in slave property. The total value of slave property then, by estimate, is twelve hundred millions of dollars. And now it is rashly proposed, by a single fiat of legislation, to annihilate this immense amount of property! To annihilate it without indemnity, and without compensation to the owners.

By not dealing with the issue of slavery early in America’s history when it was a very small economic factor in American society, our ancestors delayed action to the point where the economic factor was the overwhelming practical impediment to abolition.

Slavery Economics Quotes