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In the District of Columbia , slavery was abolished in From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It may also refer to the kingdoms of the Slave Coast in Africa. By country or region. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. January Learn how and when to remove this template message. Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. This sentiment, added to economic considerations, led to the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery in six northern states, while there was a swelling flood of private manumissions in the South.
Little actual gain was made by the free Negro even in this period, and by the turn of the century the downward trend had begun again. Thereafter the only important change in that trend before the Civil War was that after the decline in the status of the free Negro became more precipitate. Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era Retrieved December 7, Archived from the original on March 7, Archived from the original on December 31, Archived from the original on October 8, The New Dominion, a History from to the Present.
Retrieved November 18, Archived from the original on April 25, Slavery Declared Forever Abolished". The New York Times. On April 16, , Lincoln signed a Congressional act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia with compensation for slave owners, five months before the victory at Antietam led to the Emancipation Proclamation. A New History of Kentucky. University Press of Kentucky.
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Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. The genders then switched places in terms of value. In the Old South, boys aged 14 sold for 71 percent of the price of year-old men, whereas girls aged 14 sold for 65 percent of the price of year-old men.
After the peak age, prices declined slowly for a time, then fell off rapidly as the aging process caused productivity to fall. Compared to full-grown men, women were worth 80 to 90 percent as much. One characteristic in particular set some females apart: Fertile females commanded a premium. The mother-child link also proved important for pricing in a different way: Fogel and Engerman Skilled workers sold for premiums of percent whereas crippled and chronically ill slaves sold for deep discounts.
Slaves who proved troublesome — runaways, thieves, layabouts, drunks, slow learners, and the like — also sold for lower prices. Taller slaves cost more, perhaps because height acts as a proxy for healthiness. In New Orleans, light-skinned females who were often used as concubines sold for a 5 percent premium. Prices for slaves fluctuated with market conditions as well as with individual characteristics.
Less than a decade later, slave prices climbed when the international slave trade was banned, cutting off legal external supplies. Interestingly enough, among those who supported the closing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were several Southern slaveowners. Why this apparent anomaly? Because the resulting reduction in supply drove up the prices of slaves already living in the U. Demand helped determine prices as well.
The demand for slaves derived in part from the demand for the commodities and services that slaves provided. Changes in slave occupations and variability in prices for slave-produced goods therefore created movements in slave prices. As slaves replaced increasingly expensive indentured servants in the New World, their prices went up. In the period to , slave prices in British America rose nearly 30 percent.
As cotton prices fell in the s, Southern slave prices also fell. But, as the demand for cotton and tobacco grew after about , the prices of slaves increased as well. Differences in demand across regions led to transitional regional price differences, which in turn meant large movements of slaves. Yet because planters experienced greater stability among their workforce when entire plantations moved, 84 percent of slaves were taken to the lower South in this way rather than being sold piecemeal.
Demand sometimes had to do with the time of year a sale took place. For example, slave prices in the New Orleans market were 10 to 20 percent higher in January than in September. September was a busy time of year for plantation owners: Prices had to be relatively low for them to be willing to travel to New Orleans during harvest time. One additional demand factor loomed large in determining slave prices: As the American Civil War progressed, prices dropped dramatically because people could not be sure that slavery would survive.
Burgeoning inflation meant that real prices fell considerably more. Data supplied by Stanley Engerman and reported in Walton and Rockoff That slavery was profitable seems almost obvious. Yet scholars have argued furiously about this matter. On one side stand antebellum writers such as Hinton Rowan Helper and Frederick Law Olmstead, many antebellum abolitionists, and contemporary scholars like Eugene Genovese at least in his early writings , who speculated that American slavery was unprofitable, inefficient, and incompatible with urban life.
On the other side are scholars who have marshaled masses of data to support their contention that Southern slavery was profitable and efficient relative to free labor and that slavery suited cities as well as farms. These researchers stress the similarity between slave markets and markets for other sorts of capital. This battle has largely been won by those who claim that New World slavery was profitable. Much like other businessmen, New World slaveowners responded to market signals — adjusting crop mixes, reallocating slaves to more profitable tasks, hiring out idle slaves, and selling slaves for profit.
One well-known instance shows that contemporaneous free labor thought that urban slavery may even have worked too well: Perhaps the most controversial book ever written about American slavery is Time on the Cross , published in by Fogel and co-author Stanley Engerman.
These men were among the first to use modern statistical methods, computers, and large datasets to answer a series of empirical questions about the economics of slavery. To find profit levels and rates of return, they built upon the work of Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, who in had calculated similar measures from data on cotton prices, physical yield per slave, demographic characteristics of slaves including expected lifespan , maintenance and supervisory costs, and in the case of females number of children.
They included in this index controls for quality of livestock and land and for age and sex composition of the workforce, as well as amounts of output, labor, land, and capital. Time on the Cross generated praise — and considerable criticism. A major critique appeared in as a collection of articles entitled Reckoning with Slavery.
Although some contributors took umbrage at the tone of the book and denied that it broke new ground, others focused on flawed and insufficient data and inappropriate inferences. The book also served as a catalyst for much subsequent research. Even Eugene Genovese, long an ardent proponent of the belief that Southern planters had held slaves for their prestige value, finally acknowledged that slavery was probably a profitable enterprise.
Fogel himself refined and expanded his views in a book, Without Consent or Contract.
But slavery was entwined with the national economy; for instance, the banking, shipping and manufacturing industries of New York City all had strong economic interests in slavery, as did similar industries in other major port cities in the North. The Southern overseer was the linchpin of the large slave plantation. According to Adalberto Aguirre, there were 1, slaves executed in the U. With emancipation a legal reality, white Southerners were concerned with both controlling the newly freed slaves and keeping them in the labor force at the lowest level. Shortly after the Elizabeth Key trial and similar challenges, in the Virginia royal colony approved a law adopting the principle of partus sequitur ventrem called partus , for short , stating that any children born in the colony would take the status of the mother. Southerners feared that unchecked slave abuse could lead to theft, public beatings, and insurrection. This book is the first comparative summary of the southern slave states from Colonial times to Reconstruction.
They also found that antebellum Southern farms were 35 percent more efficient overall than Northern ones and that slave farms in the New South were 53 percent more efficient than free farms in either North or South. This would mean that a slave farm that is otherwise identical to a free farm in terms of the amount of land, livestock, machinery and labor used would produce output worth 53 percent more than the free. On the eve of the Civil War, slavery flourished in the South and generated a rate of economic growth comparable to that of many European countries, according to Fogel and Engerman.
They also discovered that, because slaves constituted a considerable portion of individual wealth, masters fed and treated their slaves reasonably well. Although some evidence indicates that infant and young slaves suffered much worse conditions than their freeborn counterparts, teenaged and adult slaves lived in conditions similar to — sometimes better than — those enjoyed by many free laborers of the same period. One potent piece of evidence supporting the notion that slavery provides pecuniary benefits is this: In the early U.
As the demand for skilled servants and therefore their wages rose in England, the cost of indentured servants went up in the colonies. At the same time, second-generation slaves became more productive than their forebears because they spoke English and did not have to adjust to life in a strange new world. Consequently, the balance of labor shifted away from indentured servitude and toward slavery. The value of slaves arose in part from the value of labor generally in the antebellum U. Scarce factors of production command economic rent, and labor was by far the scarcest available input in America.
Moreover, a large proportion of the reward to owning and working slaves resulted from innovative labor practices. Masters found that treating people like machinery paid off handsomely. Antebellum slaveowners experimented with a variety of other methods to increase productivity.
Hand ratings categorized slaves by age and sex and rated their productivity relative to that of a prime male field hand. Masters also capitalized on the native intelligence of slaves by using them as agents to receive goods, keep books, and the like. Masters offered positive incentives to make slaves work more efficiently. Slaves often had Sundays off. Slaves could sometimes earn bonuses in cash or in kind, or quit early if they finished tasks quickly. Some masters allowed slaves to keep part of the harvest or to work their own small plots. In places, slaves could even sell their own crops.
To prevent stealing, however, many masters limited the products that slaves could raise and sell, confining them to corn or brown cotton, for example. In antebellum Louisiana, slaves even had under their control a sum of money called a peculium. This served as a sort of working capital, enabling slaves to establish thriving businesses that often benefited their masters as well. Yet these practices may have helped lead to the downfall of slavery, for they gave slaves a taste of freedom that left them longing for more.
Masters profited from reproduction as well as production. Southern planters encouraged slaves to have large families because U. But researchers have found little evidence of slave breeding; instead, masters encouraged slaves to live in nuclear or extended families for stability. Lest one think sentimentality triumphed on the Southern plantation, one need only recall the willingness of most masters to sell if the bottom line was attractive enough. One element that contributed to the profitability of New World slavery was the African heritage of slaves.
Africans, more than indigenous Americans, were accustomed to the discipline of agricultural practices and knew metalworking. Some scholars surmise that Africans, relative to Europeans, could better withstand tropical diseases and, unlike Native Americans, also had some exposure to the European disease pool. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Africans, however, was their skin color. Because they looked different from their masters, their movements were easy to monitor. Denying slaves education, property ownership, contractual rights, and other things enjoyed by those in power was simple: Using color was a low-cost way of distinguishing slaves from free persons.
For this reason, the colonial practices that freed slaves who converted to Christianity quickly faded away. Deciphering true religious beliefs is far more difficult than establishing skin color.
Other slave societies have used distinguishing marks like brands or long hair to denote slaves, yet color is far more immutable and therefore better as a cheap way of keeping slaves separate. Skin color, of course, can also serve as a racist identifying mark even after slavery itself disappears. Slavery never generated superprofits, because people always had the option of putting their money elsewhere. Nevertheless, investment in slaves offered a rate of return — about 10 percent — that was comparable to returns on other assets.
Slaveowners were not the only ones to reap rewards, however. So too did cotton consumers who enjoyed low prices and Northern entrepreneurs who helped finance plantation operations. So slavery was profitable; was it an efficient way of organizing the workforce? On this question, considerable controversy remains. Slavery might well have profited masters, but only because they exploited their chattel. What is more, slavery could have locked people into a method of production and way of life that might later have proven burdensome. Fogel and Engerman claimed that slaves kept about ninety percent of what they produced.
Because these scholars also found that agricultural slavery produced relatively more output for a given set of inputs, they argued that slaves may actually have shared in the overall material benefits resulting from the gang system. Other scholars contend that slaves in fact kept less than half of what they produced and that slavery, while profitable, certainly was not efficient.
On the whole, current estimates suggest that the typical slave received only about fifty percent of the extra output that he or she produced. Gavin Wright called attention as well to the difference between the short run and the long run. Although slavery might have seemed an efficient means of production at a point in time, it tied masters to a certain system of labor which might not have adapted quickly to changed economic circumstances. This argument has some merit.
Consequently, commercial and service industries lagged in the South. The region also had far less rail transportation than the North. Yet many plantations used the most advanced technologies of the day, and certain innovative commercial and insurance practices appeared first in transactions involving slaves. What is more, although the South fell behind the North and Great Britain in its level of manufacturing, it compared favorably to other advanced countries of the time.
In sum, no clear consensus emerges as to whether the antebellum South created a standard of living comparable to that of the North or, if it did, whether it could have sustained it.
As such, it was undeniably evil. Yet, because slaves constituted valuable property, their masters had ample incentives to take care of them. And, by protecting the property rights of masters, slave law necessarily sheltered the persons embodied within. In a sense, the apologists for slavery were right: But slavery cannot be thought of as benign. In terms of material conditions, diet, and treatment, Southern slaves may have fared as well in many ways as the poorest class of free citizens.
Yet the root of slavery is coercion. By its very nature, slavery involves involuntary transactions. Slaves are property, whereas free laborers are persons who make choices at times constrained, of course about the sort of work they do and the number of hours they work. The behavior of former slaves after abolition clearly reveals that they cared strongly about the manner of their work and valued their non-work time more highly than masters did. Even the most benevolent former masters in the U. South found it impossible to entice their former chattels back into gang work, even with large wage premiums.
Nor could they persuade women back into the labor force: In the end, perhaps slavery is an economic phenomenon only because slave societies fail to account for the incalculable costs borne by the slaves themselves. For studies pertaining to the economics of slavery , see particularly Aitken, Hugh, editor. The Economics of Slavery and Other Studies. Oxford University Press, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America. Cambridge University Press, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation.
The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. For accounts of slave trading and sales, see Bancroft, Frederic.