American black slavery was brutal, profitable, and central to much of the Southern economy. But it was not capitalist. Calling it "capitalist" is like saying feudalism was a free market because lords sold grain.

Black slavery was actually pre-capitalist. In the United States of the time, the Northern states were capitalist. The South was pre-capitalist or even mercantilist, and their economy worked quite differently.

In the antebellum South, if you owned a cloth factory, you yourself were a tailor. Your workers were apprentices, indentured workers, or slaves. They could not readily leave your employ. No one would hire them, nad you could legally beat them if they tried to leave.

In the antebellum North, what you needed to hire a cloth factory was money - i.e., capital. You invested in a factory, then you hired competent foremen and managers to run it. They could leave your employment when they pleased. Basically, a Northern worker would leave you if he found a better salary elsewhere, so you had to pay your people enough to keep them around. This is how capitalism benefits workers - freedom of labor.

Of course business owners hate "freedom of labor" and "freedom of competition" and are always looking for ways to lock in their workers. This is where NDAs, contracts, and not-yet-vested stock options come from. And worse things - company towns, strikebreakers, and monopolies, all designed to stifle capitalism in the business owner's favor. I.e., NOT capitalist ideas, but anti-capitalist ideas, which reached their full fruit in socialism and fascism.

But when capitalism was brand new it worked pretty good, and here were the results: the average Northerner was worth about half as much as the average Southerner. The Southerner owned stuff. He owned land, a house, perhaps slaves. The Northern worker didn't own any land. He had no slaves. He often lived in a rented flat or townhouse. If he was to cash in his wealth, he'd seem much poorer than a Southerner.

BUT the average Northerner had an annual income about three times as much as the Southerner. This is partly because slaves weren't paid much, but also because wages were massively depressed because you literally couldn't change jobs, so why should your boss pay you more?

When Northern armies marched South this became obvious. Soldiers' letters were appalled at living conditions in Dixie. The not-capitalist nature of their economy affected their farms. The guy who bought the cotton & tobacco you raised usually had a local monopoly, so paid you a pittance. The same guy might control the local drovers who carted your crops off your farm. He may even have an interest in the tiny local Southern railroad in your area (there were over 100 of these).

In the North, a farmer sold to a variety of dealers, and could negotiate better deals. The much reviled "Jewish merchants" went from area to area offering such deals, to the profit of the locals. The railroad companies were bigger, but fewer, so not beholden to a local despot. Later the Northern railroad companies got too big for their britches and established their own monopolies but this hadn't become common by 1860.

So why didn't the North have slaves? Because they earned far more money by having skilled workers, even if they paid them more too. The South accused the Northern men of being "wage slaves", and their propaganda said they had to work hard for bosses for their salaries. In the first place, this wasn't true at all - Northern workers changed jobs all the time. In the second place, even if it was true (which it wasn't) the Southern way of "don't switch jobs or massa will hit you with a stick" was hardly morally superior.

The South made propaganda points by saying capitalism was evil and the paternalistic Southern system superior. They didn't use the word "capitalism" but they talked about the evils of trusts, shopkeepers, and their posltion is clear.

The American Civil War wasn't just slavery vs. freedom. It wasn't just region vs. region. It was the triumph of capitalism over the last vestiges of feudalism and I am proud of my ancestors who helped destroy this great evil.

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