Ten Reasons Not to Abolish
Slavery
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
by Robert
Higgs
[This article originally appeared in the Freeman, December
2009.]
Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all
parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an
extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to
oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and
therefore people should get rid of it. Such advocates generally elicited
reactions ranging from gentle amusement to harsh scorn and even violent
assault.
When people bothered to give reasons for opposing the proposed abolition,
they advanced various ideas. Here are ten such ideas I have encountered
in my reading.
- Slavery is natural. People differ, and we must expect that those who
are superior in a certain way for example, in intelligence, morality,
knowledge, technological prowess, or capacity for fighting will make
themselves the masters of those who are inferior in this regard. Abraham
Lincoln expressed this idea in one of his famous 1858 debates with
Senator Stephen Douglas:
There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I
believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of
social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while
they do remain together there must be the position of superior and
inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the
superior position assigned to the white race.
Slavery has always existed. This reason exemplifies the logical
fallacy argumentum ad antiquitatem (the argument to antiquity or
tradition). Nevertheless, it often persuaded people, especially those of
conservative bent. Even nonconservatives might give it weight on the
quasi-Hayekian ground that although we do not understand why a social
institution persists, its persistence may nonetheless be well grounded in
a logic we have yet to understand.
Every society on earth has slavery. The unspoken corollary is that
every society must have slavery. The pervasiveness of an institution
seems to many people to constitute compelling proof of its necessity.
Perhaps, as one variant maintains, every society has slavery because
certain kinds of work are so difficult or degrading that no free person
will do them, and therefore unless we have slaves to do these jobs, they
will not get done. Someone, as the saying went in the Old South, has to
be the mud sill, and free people will not tolerate serving in this
capacity.
The slaves are not capable of taking care of themselves. This idea
was popular in the United States in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries among people, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,
who regarded slavery as morally reprehensible yet continued to hold
slaves and to obtain personal services from them and income from the
products these "servants" (as they preferred to call them) were
compelled to produce. It would be cruel to set free people who would
then, at best, fall into destitution and suffering.
Without masters, the slaves will die off. This idea is the preceding
one pushed to its extreme. Even after slavery was abolished in the United
States in 1865, many people continued to voice this idea. Northern
journalists traveling in the South immediately after the war reported
that, indeed, the blacks were in the process of becoming extinct because
of their high death rate, low birth rate, and miserable economic
condition. Sad but true, some observers declared, the freed people really
were too incompetent, lazy, or immoral to behave in ways consistent with
their own group survival. (See my 1977 book
Competition and
Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914.)
Where the common people are free, they are even worse off than
slaves. This argument became popular in the South in the decades before
the War between the States. Its leading exponent was the proslavery
writer George Fitzhugh, whose book titles speak for themselves: Sociology
for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All!,
or, Slaves Without Masters (1857). Fitzhugh seems to have taken many of
his ideas from the reactionary, racist, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle.
The _expression_ "wage slave" still echoes this antebellum
outlook. True to his sociological theories, Fitzhugh wanted to extend
slavery in the United States to working-class white people, for their own
good!
Getting rid of slavery would occasion great bloodshed and other
evils. In the United States many people assumed that the slaveholders
would never permit the termination of the slave system without an all-out
fight to preserve it. Sure enough, when the Confederacy and the Union
went to war set aside that the immediate issue was not the abolition of
slavery but the secession of eleven Southern states great bloodshed and
other evils did ensue. These tragic events seemed, in many people's
minds, to validate the reason they had given for opposing abolition.
(They evidently overlooked that, except in Haiti, slavery was abolished
everywhere else in the Western Hemisphere without large-scale violence.)
Without slavery the former slaves would run amuck, stealing, raping,
killing, and generally causing mayhem. Preservation of social order
therefore rules out the abolition of slavery. Southerners lived in dread
of slave uprisings. Northerners in the mid-19th century found the
situation in their own region already sufficiently intolerable, owing to
the massive influx of drunken, brawling Irishmen into the country in the
1840s and 1850s. Throwing free blacks, whom the Irish generally disliked,
into the mix would well-nigh guarantee social chaos.
Trying to get rid of slavery is foolishly utopian and impractical;
only a fuzzy-headed dreamer would advance such a cockamamie proposal.
Serious people cannot afford to waste their time considering such
farfetched ideas.
Forget abolition. A far better plan is to keep the slaves
sufficiently well fed, clothed, housed, and occasionally entertained and
to take their minds off their exploitation by encouraging them to focus
on the better life that awaits them in the hereafter. We cannot expect
fairness or justice in this life, but all of us, including the slaves,
can aspire to a life of ease and joy in Paradise.
Let's Abolish Government
At one time, countless people found one or more of the foregoing reasons
adequate grounds on which to oppose the abolition of slavery.
Yet in retrospect, these reasons seem shabby more rationalizations than
reasons.
Today these reasons or very similar ones are used by opponents of a
different form of abolitionism: the proposal that government as we know
it monopolistic, individually nonconsensual rule by an armed group that
demands obedience and payment of taxes be abolished.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether the foregoing
reasons are more compelling in this regard than they were in regard to
the proposed abolition of slavery.
Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy for the Independent
Institute and editor of The Independent Review. He is the 2007 recipient
of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of
Liberty.
http://mises.org/daily/5076/Ten-Reasons-Not-to-Abolish-Slavery
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