What would U.S. history have been like without slavery?
As I mentioned last week, The New York Times has become obsessed with what it portrays as America’s mounting slavery crisis, with its use of the word “slavery” quadrupling in its columns over the half-dozen years of the Great Awokening.
The Times’ 1619 project to portray blacks as the very foundation of America affords us an opportunity to imagine an alternative America that had resisted the temptations of importing Africans.
Would the U.S. have been impoverished without blacks, as the 1619 spin implies?
Slavery was certainly an important part of the 18th- and 19th-century economy, so much so that it led to the great crisis of the Civil War. But it’s worth contemplating an America without slaves.
The northern United States was attractive to subsistence farmers looking for cheap land. But there wasn’t all that much worth exporting to Europeans at similar latitudes other than lumber. The British Isles could grow wheat and even that exotic Peruvian import, the potato. Before the steamship and the removal of British tariffs in 1846, exporting grain across the Atlantic was a modest business.
Race & Economics: How ...
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But Britain couldn’t grow several warm-weather crops, most famously, tobacco, cotton, and sugar. Hence, exporting these across the Atlantic could pay.
Blacks were quite useful in raising these crops because Africans were genetically better adapted to resisting hot-country diseases. South of Virginia, mortality rates were higher for whites than for blacks. Plantation owners in the South were averse to paying white workingmen a fair wage to compensate for the health risks they took on.
Conversely, slavery fizzled out in the cold North in part due to blacks dying at such a high rate—twice that of whites in Massachusetts—that slavery was less profitable there. Historian David Hackett Fischer wrote in Albion’s Seed:
So high was mortality among African immigrants in New England that race slavery was not viable on a large scale, despite many attempts to introduce it. Slavery was not impossible in this region, but the human and material costs were higher than many wished to pay.
We still aren’t fully aware of the specifics of why blacks tended to be healthier than whites in the South, but at least four warm-climate ailments deserve attention.
Almost all West Africans possessed the Duffy negative gene variant that improves resistance to debilitating vivax malaria, which was common in the South. As German scientist Johann David Shoepf observed in the 18th century, “Carolina was in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital.”
Similarly, a sizable fraction of West Africans had one copy of the sickle cell mutation that offered resistance to the lethal falciparum malaria sometimes found in the hottest places in the South.
Blacks likely had some genetic resistance as well to the African disease of yellow fever, which tended to strike American cities in summer, discouraging urbanization in the South. During yellow fever epidemics, whites were several times more likely to die than blacks.
