thenation | Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced
their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about “violations of the
Constitution of the United States” and “encroachments upon the reserved
rights of the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words
was money. So much goddamn money.
The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession.
The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be
forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their
property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day
political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks
and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be
eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that
approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the
Civil War.
Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves as
property. It was precisely this ontological question—property or
persons?—that the war was fought over. But suspend that moral revulsion
for a moment and look at the numbers: Just how much money were the
South’s slaves worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which
comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in 1860 by the
number of slaves and then using the Consumer Price Index to adjust for
inflation. But as economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue,
using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t really tell
us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there were no national
surveys to figure out what the average consumer bought.” In fact, the
first such survey, in Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.
In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in
bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the
percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by
that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16
percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the
entire country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion
.
Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to
comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely geographically
focused. According to calculations made by economic historian Gavin
Wright, slaves represented nearly half the total wealth of the South on
the eve of secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more than
all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together,”
civil war historian Eric Foner tells me. “Think what would happen if you
liquidated the banks, factories and railroads with no compensation.”
