Selling Slavery: Conflating Profits with Prosperity in the Early Republic

The continued enslavement of human beings was by no means assured in the young republic's first few decades but neither was abolition in Middle Atlantic states like New Jersey and New York. Largely absent from early arguments on both sides of the issue were claims about the overall economic effects of the peculiar institution. Most early abolitionists did not aggressively attack slavery's negative effects on economic development because they did not yet clearly perceive them. Instead, they conflated the profits of enslavement with prosperity by assuming that profits naturally led to economic development. Proslavery thinkers agreed, though they often downplayed the profitability of enslaving others for rhetorical and competitive reasons. So early slavery debates were about religion and property rights rather than the effects of slavery on the overall economy and hence the economic prospects of the sundry poorer classes. That gap in public understanding of the slave system allowed slaveholding elites to effectively sell the non-slave poor on slavery until the 1850s. Ironically, some historians have recently returned to the mistaken view that slavery aided economic development.