...This graph [may tell a different] story behind the South’s secession: the value of the South’s “slave stock”—the property of the ruling class — soared as secession approached, reaching an almost 90-degree angle in those final years before Harper’s Ferry.
[Did] the South’s ruling class seced to protect their riches [?]
...if you didn’t know that human “slave stock” was the asset being charted, you could easily mistake this graph, and its parabolic trajectory, for one of the many destructive asset bubbles this country has suffered right up through our own time.
...it [may reveal] the historical revisionism that falsely ascribed the South’s “cause” to an almost selfless, tragically romantic attachment to “tradition” and “culture”; it [appears to] give lie to the myth that slave owners kept their slaves to the detriment of their own bottom line.
[Did] the Confederacy’s one percenters seceded and fought in order to continue profiting from their most valuable investment properties — their human slave stock [?]
...slavery produced huge profits for southerners who invested in slave capital — to the detriment of all other portfolio investments, as the value of slaves soared in the mid-19th century.
By that time, by far the largest cotton-growing states’ wealth was in slave stock, not in real estate or other investments.
The slave trade was outlawed in 1808; but the slave population quadrupled from 1 million in 1800 to 4 million in 1860 — encouraged by slaveowners who “bred” their human stock, thereby multiplying their profits as the value of each slave rose.
Slavery is often portrayed by revisionist historians as somehow antithetical to market capitalism; in reality, slavery was a winning portfolio investment, the very incarnation of just how evil “free-market” capitalism can be.
“If slaves … were an investment
included in the asset portfolio of the planter/entrepreneur,
they helped satisfy the owner’s demand for wealth.
But unlike most other forms of capital, which depreciate with time,
the stock of slaves appreciated.
Thus, the growth of the slave population
continuously increased the stock of wealth.”
As with slave stock in a Southern investor’s portfolio,
...a corporation learns to successfully extract rent from its employees,
the more employees it extracts rent from,
the greater its aggregate profits.
...the mindset of “the 1 percent” then, as now, is eerily consistent.
[Many may] view the rest of us not as human beings with rights,
but as livestock whose meat is “rent” to be extracted.
This is the language of plutocratic capitalism,
a brutal system totally incompatible with democracy
and antithetical to republican government and civilization.
It is the language of misery..."
Mark Ames
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