246 / PARADOXES or FORCED LABOR

not in the United States but abroad). It is of some interest
to note that the pecuniary benefits of gang production were
much more widely diffused than the losses suffered by
slaves. For every slave working in the cotton fields, there
were hundreds of consumers of cotton. This means that the
average annual gain to a consumer was quite small. Indeed,
for every dollar gained by a typical consumer of cotton cloth,
there was a slave laboring somewhere under the hot south-
ern sun who would lose at least $400.

Some antebellum critics of slavery recognized that the
system was being perpetuated by the greed of consumers.
Robert Russell, one of the most acute of the British travelers
to the South, believed that slavery was “a necessary evil
attending upon the great good of cheap cotton.” How in-
dignant Olmsted was at this charge. That claim, he re-
torted, was sheer nonsense. He devoted a full chapter in The
Cotton Kingdom to the refutation of Russell, arguing that
slavery raised rather than lowered the price of cotton. How
widespread this self-delusion was, is difficult to ascertain.
Certainly not all of the antislavery politicians who railed
against southern bondage, while they continued to consume
cotton and resisted attempts to tax it, were naive. At least
some of these politicians thought that a totalboycott of south-
ern cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice would have brought an
end to slavery. Russell was not the only one who held this
view. While Senator James H. Hammond undoubtedly over-
estimated how far the South could go before it provoked
war, he clearly understood the hypocrisy in the position of
many critics of the South when he proclaimed:

No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares
to make war upon it. Cotton is king. Until lately the Bank of
England was king, but she tried to put her screws as usual, the’
fall before the last, upon the cotton crop, and was utterly van-
quished. The last power has been conquered. Who can doubt,
that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme? .

-v

ECONOMIC GROWTH IN THE SOUTH, 1840-1860 / *247

The Course of Economic Growth
in the South, 1840-1860

The construction of regional income accounts for the
nineteenth century, like the estimation of regional eificiency
indexes, is an arduous task. Work on these accounts for the
census years between 1840 and 1860, which was launched
in the early 1950s, is still going on today. Table 4 presents
the regional income estimates which have now been in use
for about half a decade. A recent paper has suggested that
the estimate of southern income for 1840 may be too low;
the same criticism may also apply to the figure for 1860.
If these proposed corrections hold up, it will be necessary
to alter some of the details of the analysis that follows, but
the main thrust of the argument will not be affected. Rather,
the proposed corrections will merely serve to strengthen the
argument.

Table 4 shows that in both 1840 and 1860 per capita
income in the North was higher thanin the South. In 1840
the South had an average income which was only,69 per-
cent that of the North’s. In 1860 southern pericapita in-
come was still only 73 percent as high as in the North.

These figures might appear to sustain Helper’s conten-
tion that the South was a poverty—ridden, stagnant economy
in the process of sinking into “comparative imbecility and
obscurity"; that under the burden of slavery the South had
been reduced to the status of a colonial nation — “the de-
pendency of a mother country.” No such inference is war-
ranted, however, merely because of the existence of a 25
percent gap between the North and the South in the level of
per capita income in 1860. Before any conclusion can be
drawn, it must first be determined whether the gap means
that, by the standards of the time, the South was poor or
that the North was extraordinarily rich.

Progress toward the resolution of this issue can be made