Well, here’s your explanation:
In 1974, there was a fad of applying economic models to historical events, including slavery. This was not and is not bad in itself. After all, slavery was an economic institution. And there are lively discussions continuing to this day on the sociological and economic background of the war and of the slavery system.
The ”bourgeois” economic understanding of slavery
The arguments over whether American slavery was a capitalist institution or some kind of feudal leftover embedded in capitalism has been one of the more interesting ones. But not free of polemical considerations, either. If slavery was not a capitalist institution but a backward historical holdover, it means that normal capitalist development would have eventually eliminated slavery as a benign result of the fable Invisible Hand. Not unlike the famous End of History theory of the post-1989 era that establishing neoliberal capitalism would more-or-less automatically produced liberal democratic governments on the Western model.
This argument about capitalism and slavery can be articulated to dovetail with the common Lost Cause argument that slavery would have benignly faded away on its own if the Yankee Abolitionist fanatics hadn’t insisted on oppressing Southern slaveowners.
James Oakes has noted an interesting twist in this capitalist economic-determinism, which is that Karl Marx also thought that slavery was inherently a drag on capitalist development because free labor was more efficient. Oakes in his essay calls that view the “bourgeois” view of slavery:
Nowadays the bourgeois critique of slavery is kept alive primarily by Marxist historians. This is not as odd as it may first seem. Marx was, after all, the last of the great classical economists, those who concerned themselves with how wealth was produced and therefore, how labor was organized. We do not think that way anymore, especially not after the revival of market ideology in the 1980s. Hence our retrospective bemusement at the intellectual struggles of the nineteenth century. (2)
Gunderson’s approach
I used that formula of Gunderson’s to open this post because it to illustrate why economic-determinist explanations of particular events have to be approached carefully.
In graduate school, I took an excellent class on forecasting which was immediately helpful in my work as a finance professional. But the professor was also a fan of an econometric fad of the time of using economic models to predict Presidential elections.
But the single most important thing he drilled into the students was, “If a forecast looks wrong, it probably is.” This was meant to illustrate the importance of reality-checking the results of a forecast with experts familiar with the subject matter of the forecast.
But this particular econometric model on Presidential election outcomes was based on historical calculations. And it proved conclusively that not only had Hubert Humphrey had won the 1968 Presidential election, but also that the Vietnam War had no influence on that outcome whatsoever. But I couldn’t get the professor to even acknowledge that this indicated the model might be missing something. He really like that model!
The basic problem with that kind of approach is also something one needs to keep in mind about retroactive economic models. Because statistical models – even whatever AI versions may be out there now – have a strong bias toward quantifiable data. Things like demographics or economic data lend themselves to quantification. Political passions, moral convictions, the structure of political systems, and the anger and hope that provoked slave resistance to the system are not so precisely quantifiable.
And even the economic and demographic data available for the United States period prior to 1960 aren’t nearly so detailed as what is available today.
And when you take careless or erroneous general assumptions as the framework for evaluating the numbers, that can also cause problems. For instance, Gunderson describes one of his assumptions about the institution of slavery: “Slavery, like most other institutions codified by government, functions reasonably smoothly when its operation can be enforced through recourse to the legal system.”
So do prisons. But nobody really wants to spend their entire lives in prison, either.
Gunderson’s assumptions about the Peculiar Institution (slavery) sound drearily similar to the Lost Cause argument that there was nothing so wrong with the slavery system that the evil Yankees had to come and destroy it. As he puts it, “the institution of slavery which formerly enjoyed the relative serenity of local consensus [i.e., among Southern whites] was now tom by interregional divisiveness.”
In a second post, I’ll discuss a bit more of his argument.
Notes:
(1) Gunderson, Gerald (1974): The Origin of the American Civil War. The Journal of Economic History 34:4, 915-950. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2116615>
(2) Oakes, James (2003): The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery. In: Jordan, Winthrop D. (ed): Slavery and the American South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
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