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CHAPTER 10
THE TRADITION OF SLAVERY*
I. Economic Exploitation
To the ante-bellum South slavery was, of course, a tremendous moral
burden. Human slavery, in spite of all rationalization, was irreconcilably
contrary to the American Creed. The South had to stand before all the
world as the land which, in modern times, had developed and perfected
that ignominious old institution.
But, in a sense, exploitation of Negro labor was, perhaps, a less embar-
rassing moral conflict to the ante-bellum planter than to his peer today.
Slavery then was a lawful institution, a part of the legal order, and the ex-
ploitation of black labor was sanctioned and regulated. Today the exploita-
tion is, to a considerable degree, dependent upon the availability of extra-
legal devices of various kinds.
Moreover, slavery was justified in a political theory which had intel-
lectual respectability,** which was expounded in speeches, articles, and
learned treatises by the region’s famous statesmen, churchmen and scholars.
The popular theories defending caste exploitation today, which have been
exemplified in the previous chapter, bear, on the contrary, the mark of
intellectual poverty. Even a reactionary Southern congressman will abstain
from developing the detailed structure of those theories in the national
capital. Hardly a conservative newspaper in the South will expound them
clearly. The liberal newspapers actually condemn them, at least in general
terms. The change in the moral situation, brought about in less than three
generations, is tremendous.
If we look to actual practices, however, we find that the tradition
of human exploitation—^and now not only of Negroes—has remained
from slavery as a chief determinant of the entire structure of the
South’s economic life. The observer is told that a great number of
fortunes are achieved by petty exploitation of the poor, a practice some-
times belonging to the type referred to in the region as ^^mattressing the
niggers.” As contrasted with the North, there is less investment, less
market expansion, less inventiveness and less risk-taking. Sweatshop labor
* This chapter is the first of a set of three on Southern agriculture.
^
See Chapter ao, Section 4.
220
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