Slavery Wasn’t Simply ‘Capitalism Run Amok’

Roland Fryer’s “The Economics of Slavery” (op-ed, June 18) draws attention to several lessons that economists and historians have brought to light by studying the institution of slavery. Mr. Fryer correctly notes that the plantation system was immensely profitable for the wealthy elite of the antebellum South and that there is a long tail of poverty left in the practice’s wake. These economic realities demonstrate the exploitative nature of the institution as well as its moral abominations.

Yet Mr. Fryer doesn’t broach another dimension of slavery’s economics: namely, that the institution largely depended on government support. Fugitive slave patrols, military expenditures to fend off the threat of slave revolts and censorship of abolitionist materials by the post office were necessary to secure the institution’s economic position. These policies transferred the burden of enforcing the slave system from the plantation masters on to the taxpaying public. Many of the Confederate states cited the feared loss of these public expenditures in their secession declarations of 1861.

Those who mischaracterize slavery as a case of “capitalism run amok” would do well to remember Lord Mansfield’s ruling in Somerset v. Stewart (1772), the landmark abolitionist case: Slavery is “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” Take away its legal sanction and subsidy, and slavery’s entire economic edifice crumbles.

Phillip Magness

The Independent Institute

Oakland, Calif.