The Cost of Slavery – And an Important Lesson
Slavery is not the path to success, and once we see that, our history reveals an important lesson for us all.
[It is the last week of July 2020. At the beginning of the month I started writing about race and current events (see “Black Power & Little Micah,” “Measuring The Problem,” and “Profiled”) with the goal of encouraging thought and out-of-the-echo-chambers conversation. I won’t get everything right or say everything right, but I hope at the end, we all will have a better perspective of what is both true and good. Our society depends on people who disagree being able to discuss ideas and perspectives with humility, respect, and a desire for the truth. This is my small contribution to a better future through conversation.]
Despite some popular misconceptions, slavery did not make America prosperous or successful. To believe otherwise is not only inaccurate, but morally troubling.
In the same way that individuals look to other individuals for success formulas – how someone accomplished something impressive – in order to replicate that same success formula in their own lives and hopefully arrive at similarly successful outcomes – nations, cultures, and societies can and should do the same thing.
If the story of the United States’ success – our success formula – is to buy a half million slaves from Africa and exploit them for their cheap labor in an economically viable industry, then we have a problem. It is clearly a narrative that says, “If you want to achieve what we have, if you want to create a society with one of the highest standards of living ever experienced on the planet, then you need to get busy enslaving and exploiting people.” And this success formula also suggests that if we want to explore the stars and create new wonders, we achieve our great tomorrow the way we achieved today – by enslaving people. To put it in contemporary phrasing, this abhorrent success formula suggests that when American slave masters where doing the devil’s work, they were actually in the very act of “making America great.”
Thank God this success formula is not only devastatingly immoral, but also inaccurate.
Slavery always makes the rich richer, the poor poorer, curtails upward mobility, and slows innovation. Economic historians like the University of Chicago’s Deirdre McCloskey, Harvard’s Nathan Nunn, UC Davis’ Alan Olmsted, and others tell us that slavery was the same wet blanket to the United States economy as it has been everywhere else. Nathan Nunn found that the more dependent on slavery a nation was in 1750, the poorer it was in the year 2000.
Then, as now, the exploitation of people made a few wealthy people and corporations even wealthier at the expense of everyone else and the society at large. In the American South, slavery depressed wages of free people – both laborers and trades people – by forcing them to economically compete against slave labor. This system also made it difficult for free people to get a foothold on the economic ladder and made it incredibly difficult to move up and form a middle class. America was made poorer and economically stunted because of slavery.
On top of all that, the wealthy slave holders had their grip on both the political systems and media narratives. They had laws passed that externalized some of the significant costs of owning slaves. For example, wealthy slave owners had laws passed in their states that mandated free whites participate in slave patrols, externalizing the costs of retaining their slaves to the larger population. Then, through their ownership of most of the newspaper companies, they could shape what sorts of viewpoints get shared and which ones don’t, which narratives are reported and which ones aren’t, which questions are asked and which ones are taboo. This grip on politics and media by the wealthy slave holders added to the economic oppression of the “free” person. The wealthy slave holders’ grip on politics also made free people less free in their bodies while their grip on media made free people less free in their minds.
If any of this sounds familiar to a modern American – it should. Read “The Love of Power” or “Our Inadequate View of Slavery.”
Slavery doesn’t just oppress the slave but also makes almost everyone else less free and less prosperous.
You would think that a system that enslaved some and economically and politically oppressed others would be universally resisted, but it wasn’t. In fact that system was guarded and fought for mainly by the free people it oppressed.
There are a number of reasons Southern soldiers fought in the War of Northern Aggression/ War of Southern Rebellion, but a majority of the Southern states’ declarations of succession along with Alexander Stephens’ “Cornerstone Speech” make clear that an overwhelming reason was to preserve the institution of slavery.
How can this be? How can it be that economically and politically oppressed people would march off and die to defend a system that economically exploits them and uses the power of government to force them to serve the economic interests of super wealthy individuals and corporations?
How could they be so manipulated and misguided? How could they not see that the injustice of slavery hurt them too? Because they are just like us – human beings made vulnerable to propaganda by our fears, our egos, and our capacity for contempt of “the other.” We are susceptible to being manipulated, pitted against each other, and ruled – even when we think we are free and informed.
Our propensity for blindness, to be led astray, is one of the many reasons we need God to save us – to save us from ourselves. Learning to love our neighbor as ourselves isn’t just for the good of our neighbor. Learning to love and pray for our enemy isn’t just for the good of our enemy. Seeking justice for the oppressed isn’t just for the good of the oppressed. These teachings of Jesus are the way to freedom and prosperity for all of us. They are the way we guard our hearts, our souls, and our societies.
They teach us that an injustice against a police officer or a citizen, a Republican or a Democrat, a white person, black person, or a brown person is an injustice against all of us. They teach us that we really are “all in this together.” They teach us that when we play “us vs them” games, we all end up losing.
I hope we can learn from Jesus and our past, and do better in the future.
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