Compartmentalizing Morality: ‘Christian’ Slave Owners and ‘Green’ Polluters
America took this to a new extreme. Why? Economics. Cost/benefit analysis. It cost a LOT of money to bring someone to these far shores. The trip from Europe was roughly 9 weeks, thus, 18 weeks round-trip. Thus, indentured servitude to pay one’s own passage. The trip from Africa was FAR longer. The investment far greater. Thus, permanent slavery.
Except that permanent slavery developed decades after the first Africans arrive on slave ships–and appear to have been treated as indentured servants when they first arrived in Virginia and Maryland. There is a statute passed in Maryland in 1664 that clarifies that Africans are slaves for life, and that the children of slave mothers are also slaves for life. (White women who marry slave men become slaves as long as their husband lives, and their children become slaves as well.) Virginia is less clear, but the 1639 and 1640 militia statute exclusions suggest that African servants are changing status from the equivalent of white indentured servants to some lower status.
Raising the children of slaves was equally as expensive. It is many years of feeding to make a child a worthwhile worker. Attrition rates are high. Thus, continued permanent slavery.
This is an interesting claim, but I have not seen any strong evidence for this. At least in America, slave children start working (although at fairly trivial tasks) at about eight years of age. Unlike the sugar plantations of the West Indies, attrition rates were NOT high in America. At least part of why African slaves eventually end up in high demand is that they are far less likely to die of malaria, because of the sickle-cell anemia gene’s protective benefits. (Malaria kills whites at astonishing rates on the Chesapeake into the 19th century.)
Slavery was on the way out by the time of the Civil War, as someone posted earlier. Why? Economics. It was becoming too expensive, when there were just so many immigrants available to do the labor (at less expense), seeking escape from their even harsher lives back home, and dreaming of a better life here, at least for their progeny.
This was a fashionable claim in some circles. Time on the Cross, for all the criticism it received (and deserved), does suggest that slavery remained economically viable right into the 1850s. For the most part, immigrants bypassed the South–because they perceived that they would be competing with black labor. A recurring complaint in the 1850s from the relatively small class of skilled white workers in places like Charleston was the number of slaves that were working cheap, and making their own contracts, giving a portion of their pay to the master.
