Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: James Oakes on the 1619 Project (5) - Economics of slavery and claims of originality
In the James Oakes essay on The 1619 Project that we’ve been reviewing1, Oakes argues that the publication “is written with an eye toward justifying reparations.”
Reparations for slavery is a complicated issue, to put it mildly. The Guardian is currently publishing its own series on the history and legacy of slavery.2 In the introductory article to the series, Olivette Otele writes:
The idea of reparations is controversial, especially in countries that have failed to acknowledge that centuries of racial inequality have produced the stark social and economic inequalities of the present. Reparations start with this acknowledgement. The term “restorative justice”, which I use interchangeably with “reparations”, is usually associated with the legal system, as a method of dealing with crime. It prioritises repairing the harms suffered by the victim of an offence rather than punishing the perpetrator. It also seeks to understand the issues that caused the offence to happen.
When it comes to addressing the harms of slavery and colonialism, “restorative justice” is often a more palatable term than “reparations”. Perhaps the latter seems coldly transactional, nothing more than a transfer of cash, whereas “restorative justice” implies collaboration and healing. But whichever term they use, groups that advocate for reparations almost never seek only money. Their work is grounded in an understanding that the social, the political and the economic are bound together and must be addressed together, creating the possibility of a better world.3 [my emphasis]
Slavery and the larger American economy
James Oakes has been looking for a while at the complications question of the economics of slavery and its relation to the larger capitalist economy in the US and the world at that time. He wrote a fascinating 2003 essay on the argument made by classical economists that slavery was inefficient, noting that anti-slavery critics including the Republican Party made the argument that slavery was holding back the development of the US economy.4
And he addressed a thorny question: “But there was a problem. If slave labor was so inefficient, why did the slave economy grow so dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century?” In fact, slavery continued to be massively profitable to the slaveowners. And Oates noted there:
[A]fter the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, when he began to speak of slavery at length, Lincoln never claimed that free labor was economically superior, nor did he evince any faith in its inevitable demise. In this he parted company with his fellow Republican, Willia1n H. Seward. To be sure, Lincoln understood the profound difference between slavery and free labor, and he could articulate those differences with piercing clarity. But for Lincoln, the political economy of slavery was immoral not because it wrecked the southern economy, but because it took from the mouths of enslaved men and women the bread they had earned. For this reason above all others, slavery was simply wrong. Absent the power of classical political economy, Lincoln's argument would have carried no weight.5 [my emphasis]
In other words, Lincoln argued against slavery on the basis of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as he understood them and on the basis of the rights of labor.
In his 2021 Catalyst essay, he looks at the slave economy in the context of the larger American economy. While slavery was profitable for some Americans, the question of its larger role in the American economy is another question. Without going into much detail about his argument here, he criticizes The 1619 Project for overstating the role of slavery in the larger national economy and the notion it conveys “that slavery ‘fueled’ America’s exceptional economic development.”
On the subject of slavery, the distortions of the 1619 Project are numerous, and they are significant. It conflates the wealth of the slaveholders with the wealth of the United States. ... It betrays a stunning lack of familiarity with the basic facts of cotton cultivation. It stresses the expansion of the cotton economy but ignores the South’s relative decline in the national economy. Slavery consigned generations of Southerners, black and white, to poverty and economic backwardness. Its legacy is hardship and misery, not widespread wealth.
Particularly in the context of the larger reparations discussion, Oakes writes, “It makes a difference whether the wealth of the North depended on slavery or the prosperity of slavery depended on the North.”
The Originality of 1619
Oakes also criticizes the claims of the 1619 Project to originality in focusing on the centrality of the “1619” moment: “in some ways, the most startling thing about the project was the utter unoriginality of its claim to have discovered the historical significance of the year 1619. To anyone who earned a PhD in US history after 1965, this claim was almost risible.”
In Jake Silverstein’s Editor’s Note the opens The 1619 Project, he writes:
It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact date has been lost to history (it has come to be observed on Aug. 20), that was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. [my emphasis]
In explaining why historians find such a claim surprises, Oakes cites a number of works from well before 2019 that dealt with that history including:
Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972)
Carl N. Degler, “Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, no. 1 (October 1959)
Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin, “Origins of the Southern Labor System,” William and Mary Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1950)
Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968)
Reid Mitchell, The American Civil War, 1861–1865 (London: Routledge, 2001).
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975)
He also emphasizes that historians had long examined the relationship of slavery and white racism, including Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956) and The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (1965).
I myself recall being assigned The Peculiar Institution in a undergraduate history course in Mississippi in 1970 or 1971.
John Hope Franklin and Alfred Mose, Jr. wrote in 2003:
The twenty Africans who were put ashore at Jamestown in 1619 by the captain of a Dutch frigate were not slaves in a legal sense . And at the time Virginians seemed not to appreciate the far-reaching significance of the introduction of Africans into the fledgling colony. These newcomers, who happened to be black, and a few of whom were probably female, were simply more indentured servants. They were listed as servants in the census counts of 1623 and 1624, and as late as 1651 some blacks whose period of service had expired were being assigned land in much the same way that it was being assigned to whites who had completed their indenture. During its first half-century of existence Virginia had many black indentured servants, and the records reveal an increasing number of free blacks.
The also cite the following volumes:
Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the Southfrom 1619 to the Present (Cambridge,Mass., 1967)
Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619-1865 (Baton Rouge, La., 1990).
Peter Duignan and Clarence Clenclenen , The United States cmcl the African Slave Trade, 1619-1862 (Westport, Conn. , 1963)
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York, 1993)
Milton Meltzer, In Their Own Worcls: A History of the American Negro, 1619~1865 (3 vols) (New York, 1967)
John H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619-1865 (Baltimore, 1913).
George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (2 vols., G. P. Putnam's Sons)
An article in 2017 in the Smithsonian Magazine on the significance of 1619 in the history of slavery carried the subtitle, “The year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown is drilled into students’ memories, but overemphasizing this date distorts history.“ (my emphasis)6 Michael Guasco argued there, among other things:
Privileging that date [1619] and the Chesapeake region effectively erases the memory of many more African peoples than it memorializes. The “from-this-point-forward” and “in-this-place” narrative arc silences the memory of the more than 500,000 African men, women, and children who had already crossed the Atlantic against their will, aided and abetted Europeans in their endeavors, provided expertise and guidance in a range of enterprises, suffered, died, and – most importantly – endured. That Sir John Hawkins was behind four slave-trading expeditions during the 1560s suggests the degree to which England may have been more invested in African slavery than we typically recall. Tens of thousands of English men and women had meaningful contact with African peoples throughout the Atlantic world before Jamestown. [my emphasis]
Oakes, James (2021): What the 1619 Project Got Wrong. Catalyst 5:3, 6-47.
Cotton Capital: How slavery changed the Guardian, Britain and the world. The Guardian Special Series. <https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cotton-capital> (Accessed: 2023-09-04).
Otele, Olivette (2023): The Logic of Slavery Reparations: More Than Money. The Guardian 03/31/2023. <https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/mar/31/more-than-money-the-logic-of-slavery-reparations> (Accessed: 2023-09-04).
Oakes, James (2003): The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery. In: Jordon, Winthrop D. (ed.), Slavery and the American South, 29-48. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Silverstein, Jake (2019): Editor’s Note. In: Hannah-Jones, Nikole et. al., The 1619 Project New York Times Magazine 08/18/2019, 4.
Guasco, Michael (2017): The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History. Smithsonian Magazine 09/13/2017. <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/misguided-focus-1619-beginning-slavery-us-damages-our-understanding-american-history-180964873/> (Accessed: 2023-10-04).