American Capitalism by Sven Beckert

Author:Sven Beckert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Circulations of Labor

Dew’s Review drew a line under the argument over gradual abolition by answering conclusively the question left hanging by the state convention two years earlier. The convention’s slanted reapportionment and suffrage compromises had guaranteed slaveholders sufficient political resources to protect their interest, and the slave party had used them to wrestle the postrebellion bid for gradual emancipation to a standstill. But the damage had been severe—east and west equally embittered, the state brought to the edge of division, Floyd’s improvements scheme destroyed. Here was no foundation on which those who held in their hands a full half of Virginia’s “productive labour” might hope to see their particular interest acknowledged as an “interest of the whole Commonwealth.” Dew had provided the way back: his Review unreservedly endorsed internal improvements as the means to knit the sections together again, and set the commonwealth on a new path to wealth and prosperity; slavery, meanwhile, stood endorsed just as unreservedly as an interest of the whole; not a liability but the source of Virginia’s comparative advantage for as long as it remained a predominantly agricultural state. Emancipation was suicide. Instead let east and west “steadily unite in pushing forward a vigorous system of internal improvement.”43

Unite, at least in enthusiasm, they would. After the halting commitments and elaborate displays of legislative indifference of the 1820s and early 1830s, Virginia finally embarked on substantial infrastructure investment—canals, railroads, and banks. But the pattern of development did not bridge the state’s sectionalism. Improvement projects were privately managed and funded locally. Localities with capital to draw on prospered, but major interregional projects withered on the vine. In the mid-1830s, when the state government finally began to overcome the legislature’s reluctance to invest directly in internal improvements, it did so by pandering to those same local interests. By 1860, largely by deficit finance, the state had invested $40 million in internal improvements. Yet it had no central trunk railroad or water transportation network connecting east and west, Ohio and James Rivers, to show for it. Nearly 70 percent of the state’s funds had been expended on projects east of the Blue Ridge, and more than half of the remainder (18 percent) in the Valley. State funding of improvements in the Trans-Allegheny west lagged badly behind the rest of the state.44

The absence of real pan-sectional accommodation in improvement outcomes meant that antagonism toward the slave party continued to fester. But it had no further legislative expression. To that considerable extent, Dew’s other main purpose, the declaration that slavery was an interest of the whole, was substantially achieved. As important, however, was the direction to Virginia slavery imparted by his comparative efficiency analysis of the slave as human capital—commodified labor, shorn of customary or paternal obligation, expressible as a return on investment that might be realized either through work or, just as rationally, sale. Six thousand per annum was Dew’s estimate, earning more than $2.5 million—not an insignificant figure, given that the state’s total (nonhuman) exports in 1829 had amounted to less than $3.

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