It is not obvious that the racism of antislavery activists and politicians can account for the disastrous aftermath of slavery.
If there was a fatal flaw within the antislavery movement, it was one that radicals and moderates shared, and one that was closely related to the very nature of their bourgeois radicalism — an unquestioning commitment to the economic and moral superiority of free labor, a commitment that both inspired and deluded the opponents of slavery.
Even the most radical abolitionists betrayed a blind faith in the magical healing powers of a free market in labor. Scarcely a single theme of the broader antislavery argument strayed far from the premise. Sometimes it was front and center, as when William Seward claimed to have seen with his own eyes the supposed backwardness and irrationality of a southern economy impoverished, or so Seward thought, by its dependence on labor that was coerced rather than rewarded.
Other antislavery arguments were deduced from the premise of free labor’s superiority. The critique of the Slave Power, for example, rested on the assumption that the slaveholders had successfully hijacked the federal government to prop up a slave economy that, left to its own devices, should have shriveled and died on its own. The cruelty and barbarism of slavery likewise derived from the fact that slave labor had to be forced whereas free labor was self-motivated by the lure of remuneration.
Slavery’s enemies used language that delegitimized slavery by mystifying free labor. Dethrone the Slave Power, they claimed, and slavery would die a “natural” death. Lincoln’s own defense of free labor sounded less of economic efficiency than of scriptural injunction, less Adam Smith than the King James Bible. In the right to bread she earns from the sweat of her brow, Lincoln often said, the black woman is my equal and the equal of any living man. Statements of this sort make it difficult, not to say futile, to draw sharp lines between the “moral” and the “economic” arguments against slavery.
It’s hard to imagine what abolitionism would have looked like without its faith — for that’s what it was: faith — in the invisible hand of a free market in labor. In 1833, no less a radical than William Lloyd Garrison invoked its power in the founding charter of the American Anti Slavery Society. Immediate abolition would make the South more rather than less prosperous, Garrison believed, because free labor was more highly motivated than slave labor. Emancipation “would not amputate a limb or break a bone of the slave but,” he explained, “by infusing motives into their breasts, would make them doubly valuable to the masters as free laborers.”
Even Garrison’s later disunionism rested on the premise that northern secession would force the slave states to survive on their own, isolating them within a cordon of freedom, and causing the slave system to die its long-delayed natural death. The slaveholders themselves would eventually realize that a free market in labor power would make their farms and plantations more profitable than ever.
Frederick Douglass put the matter succinctly during the Civil War. When Democrats asked, “What is to be done with the Negro?” once slavery was abolished, Douglass’s one-word answer was: Nothing. Leave the former slaves alone, free them from the restraining hands of their masters, and they would be fine. This was bourgeois radicalism at its most blinkered, narrowing freedom down to formal civic equality and letting the “market” do the rest of the work.
Only after the Civil War, when it became clear that leaving the freed people to fend for themselves was a recipe for disaster, did Douglas repudiate his former faith in the miraculous workings of the free labor market. Like many radicals in the late nineteenth century, Douglass came to see that libertarianism was not enough, that the state would have to actively intervene in the economy if capitalism was to preserve even the semblance of justice and decency. Formal civic equality and contract labor had brought little freedom and less prosperity to the postwar South. Doing “nothing” was doing too much damage.
