Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Class conflict and the American Civil War
- Part I Context
- 1 Slavery, sectionalism and the Jeffersonian tradition
- 2 Free labor, slave labor, wage labor
- Part II Slavery versus capitalism
- Part III The second party system
- Conclusion: Economic development, class conflict and American politics, 1820–1850
- Appendix: A review of some major works on the economics of slavery
- Index
2 - Free labor, slave labor, wage labor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Class conflict and the American Civil War
- Part I Context
- 1 Slavery, sectionalism and the Jeffersonian tradition
- 2 Free labor, slave labor, wage labor
- Part II Slavery versus capitalism
- Part III The second party system
- Conclusion: Economic development, class conflict and American politics, 1820–1850
- Appendix: A review of some major works on the economics of slavery
- Index
Summary
Slavery and free labor: The traditional view
On visiting the South, William Seward, the leading figure in the Republican party before the election of Lincoln, recorded his impressions:
It was necessary that I should travel in Virginia to have any idea of a slave State. …. An exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement, distinguish the region through which we have come, in contrast to that in which we live. Such has been the effect of slavery.
By the 1850s many northerners shared Seward's view of the South. According to Republican Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, free labor was so utterly superior to slavery that it could entirely offset the natural advantages of the South. “Freedom”, he told the Senate, “took the rugged soil and still more rugged clime of the North, and now that rugged soil yields abundance to the willing hands of free labor”. By contrast “slavery took the sunny lands and the sunny clime of the South, and it has left the traces of its ruinous power deeply furrowed on the face of your sunny land”. Since slaves had no incentive to work well, their labor was of poor quality and reluctantly given. Since they performed the menial tasks and were a degraded class, the tendency was for all manual labor to be despised.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic , pp. 80 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996