250 / PARADOXES OF FORCED LABOR

leaders during the 18505. As sectional tensions mounted
Southerners became increasingly alarmed by federal policies
which they thought were giving economic advantage to the
North. They also became increasingly impatient. with what
they thought was an insufl-lciently active role by their state
and local governments to promote internal improvements
and to embrace other policies that would accelerate the
southern rate of economic growth. To generate a sense of
urgency southern newspapers, journals, economic leaders,
and politicians continuously emphasized every new eco-
nomic attainment of the North and every unrealized objec-
tive of the South, every northern advantage and every
southern disadvantage. The abolitionist critique on the issue
of development was lifted — lock, stock, and barrel — from
southern editorials, speeches, and commercial proclama-
tions, sometimes with acknowledgments (as in Olmsted),
sometimes without (as in Helper).

Table 5

The Relative Level 01 the Per Capita Income
of the south in 1860

(Southern per capita income level : 100)

Australia 144 Belgium 92 Italy 49
North ,~lfl.0._.. France 82 Austria 41
Great Britain 126 Ireland 71 Sweden 41
South .100. Denmark 70 Japan 14
Switzerland 100 Germany 67 Mexico 10
Canada 96 Norway 54 India 9

Netherlands 93

_ The myth of southern backwardness and stagnation thus
arose not because of any lack in the southern economic

 

ECONONLIC GROWTH IN rm: scorn, 1840-1860 / 251

achievement but because the northern achievement was so

remarkable, and because the continuous comparisons be-

tween the North and South were invariably unfavorable to
the South. Compared with any country of Europe except
England, however, the South’s economic performance was
quite strong. That comparison was never invoked by the
abolitionists because it made the wrong point. It was rarely
invoked by the Southerners because it would encourage com-
placency when urgency was called for.

Table 4 also shows that far from stagnating, per capita
income was actually growing 30 percent more rapidly in the
South than the North. The South's rate of growth was so
rapid (1.7 percent per annum), that it constitutes prima
facie evidence against the thesis that slavery retarded
southern growth. Since few nations have achieved a rate of
growth as high as 1.7 percent per annum over sustained
periods, those who continue to advance the retardation
thesis are implying that in the absence of slavery, the
progress of the antebellum South would have exceeded
virtually all recorded experience over the past 159 years.
France, for example, experienced an-averagelgrovvth rate
of 1. 55 percent per annum over a 103-year period ending in
1960. Over similar periods the growth rate of the United
Kingdom was 1.2 percent and Germany’s was 1.43 per-
cent. The long—term annual growth rate for the U.S. as a
whole has averaged 1.6 percent. Only Sweden and Japan
have been able to sustain long-term growth rates substan-
tially in excess of that achieved by the antebellum South
between 1840 and 1860.

When one disaggregates the southern rate of growth by
subregions, it turns out that growth within each of the three
subregions was less than the growth rate of the South as a
whole. This is because part of the South’s growth was due
to the redistribution of southern population from the older

‘states to the newer ones, particularly to Texas and the other

rich states of the west central subregion. It will be noted that