Thomas Piketty on the Radicalism of US Emancipation and the Inevitability of the Civil War
I’ve been reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, on and off, dipping in and out of the rather weighty tome. While the book has gotten mixed reviews, I rather like the various parts I’ve read since Piketty seems to come up with genuinely new things about areas of history I thought I knew. The book may well be one where the parts are greater than the sum of the whole - but the parts make the journey worthwhile for me.
So I’m going to use this space to discuss some of those pieces and hopefully engage with anyone interested in comments on those pieces.
So to start, on Piketty’s take on emancipation globally. I had absorbed the lesson that the US was embarrassingly slow to emancipate its slaves, dragging its feet as countries like Britain and France reached recognition of its evils decades earlier than the U.S. Not untrue in one sense, but Pikkety complicates the story for me by detailing (1) that emancipation came only with massive compensation to slaveowners in Britain and France - and often crushing burdens on the freed slaves themselves, so (2) the U.S. process of emancipation with no compensation for slave owners was in many ways a far more radical act in the 19th century and (3) that lack of compensation and therefore the Civil War itself was the only route to emancipation in the U.S., making the carnage of that war almost inevitable.
On (1), when the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, the government paid slaveowners the full market value at the time of their freed slaves. This amounted to 20 million pounds sterling, or 5 percent of the UK’s national income at the time, directly to some 4,000 slaveowners owning 800,000 slaves. As Piketty notes, this sum was equal to ten years of education spending by the British government of the time.
France would arrive at emancipation with the Second Republic in 1848. While slave owners got somewhat less compensation than their British counterparts, that seems to have been counterbalanced by the slaves being freed only into a semi-forced labor status tied to long-term work contracts for their former owners.
And one point Piketty emphasizes is that slave owners agreed to emancipation partly because they feared rising slave revolts throughout the Caribbean, so better to cash out at full market value backed by their governments rather than lose it all to rebellion: As Piketty argues, “the primary reason for the abolition of slavery [was] not the magnanimity of Euro-American abolitionists or the pecuniary calculations of slaveowners but the rebellions staged by slaves themselves and the fear of further unrest.” Piketty notes that the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 came less than two years after the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 in Jamaica.
The case of Haiti makes emancipation by the European powers look even worse in context. I know too little of Haitian history - and have CLR James BLACK JACOBINS on my to-read list - but knew it as the shining example of a black nation that had thrown off the chains of European domination earlier on. Again true at one level, but what Piketty detailed for me was that France did not let Haiti go unscathed. It demanded - and received - compensation for former French slaveowners. The former slaves of Haiti were coerced to pay for their own emancipation.
And not a small amount but a massive burden that would cripple the nation for its history. Charles X of France extracted a promise in 1825 that 150 million gold francs be paid to those former slaveowners - an amount equivalent to 300 percent of Haiti’s national income. This would have translated into Haiti paying 15 percent of its national income every year, forever, simply to pay the interest. Haiti never paid that much but French creditors did extract an average of 5 percent of Haiti’s national income from 1849 to right up until World War I in 1915- and other payments would be made off and on until as late as 1950.
The result was a Haiti whose whole history and economic development was sabotaged and subordinated to extracting indemnity payments to former slaveowners at the expense of public investments in education, health care, or industrialization.
Given those histories, it makes the U.S. pathway to emancipation without compensation far more radical, point (2) above. It sometimes surprises people that Karl Marx was a massive fan of Abraham Lincoln but he no doubt had a better sense than many later US “Marxists” how unique and radical was the American act of emancipation compared to the European context. As Marx argued in a letter on behalf of the First International back in 1865 in congratulating Lincoln on his reelection:
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
While that victory would be undermined ten years later as Reconstruction was overthrown and Jim Crow would descend on the South, there is no gainsaying that in the global context, the Emancipation Proclamation and the follow-up 13th Amendment abolishing slavery without compensation was unprecedented in its radical rejection of what Piketty calls the “proprietarian” ideology of the 19th century.
But then, Piketty also details the economic reality that made Civil War and uncompensated emancipation almost inevitable, point (3).
If the value of British slaves was 5 percent of the British national income, by 1860 the value of the 4 million slaves in the United States amounted to 250 percent of the annual income of the southern states and close to 100 percent of the annual income of all the states. The Civil War itself created a debt of $2.3 billion or roughly 30 percent of US national income - and it’s almost unimaginable that the Northern States would have transferred three to four times that amount to southern slaveowners to end slavey and impossible that the non-slave owning South could have marshaled that amount to eventually buy out slaveowners if the Confederacy had been allowed to secede.
Some have fantasies of slavery “withering” away if the Civil War had not been fought, usually pointing to Europe as a precedent, but the numbers and history Piketty lays out make the Civil War seem inevitable by any measure. The carnage and death of the Civil War was almost the only thing that could have eroded the fixed ideology of property rights to open the way to uncompensated emancipation - so that violence was essentially a precondition for freedom in the US context.
Piketty notes that back when the slave population was far lower at the beginning of the 19th century, Jefferson and Madison had contemplated a government buyout of the slaveowning class within the U.S. The only way to do so they calculated would be to hand over a third of all land owned by the federal government, likely much of the new Western lands obtained from the Louisiana Purchase. So the alternative history of peaceful emancipation would have been a country owned by the Southern plantation power extending its grip from the South to the midwest and far West. No homesteading opportunities, no small farms likely available for restless second sons looking westward- and so Madison and Jefferson could not see how to politically make it happen.
So it was left to a later generation to slide to the war that Piketty details was economically inevitable given the proprietarian ideology of the age.
Piketty has other fascinating details of the fights over slavery and emancipation in other nations like Brazil and comparisons to the struggle over ending serfdom in Russia.
One aspect of Piketty’s Capital and Ideology that I find quite interesting is that he often finds Europe wanting compared to the US in the 19th century. Instead of a story of a laggard U.S. failing to live up to the example of European abolitionists, he makes Lincoln out to be the most radical liquidator of established property in the 19th century.
Obviously, the failure of Reconstruction dims the celebration of that act - and a lot of pro-Confederate propaganda and versions of left economic history that pictured the Civil War as just a proto-Robber Baron operation have further limited the luster of the Civil War. But my takeaway from Piketty is that however bloody and awful the Civil War was, it was the price our nation would inevitably pay for its original sin of slavery.