The Political Economy of Slavery

“The Political Economy of Slavery”
Throughout this novel a multitude of different, yet very well analyzed and supported facts are presented. Slavery gave the south a social system. The economy of the south grew rapidly and was in a way shown and developed within the capitalist world market. Due to that fact, slavery developed capitalist features. For example, banking, commerce, and credit. This affected the South in ways different from the North. Although the South was developing faster than the rest of the nation, these factors contributed to a closed system.
Slave labor; looking at each case individually, is usually more slow and ineffective than the labor of a free man. The free man is more likely to perform more work in a short time. This is because he understands that what he will receive more in his reward earnings if the amount of work he does in a shorter time span is grand. He is more likely to exert himself in more vigorous work then the slave. The slave will receive the same support in food, clothing, and other wages whether he works with all that he has or whether he wastes an entire day of hard work. A slave will do bare minimum without drawing himself an awful punishment. So overall the labor of a free man is more productive than that of a slave. In the South, the low productivity of slaves had put not only a pause to southern economic development, but it back tracked. In reference to the novel, it was because “negroes were only good for one task at a time” and they were careless and wasteful. This caused them not to produce as much goods as needed to flourish successfully.
Although the soil was full of riches, soil exhaustion was such a problem for planters because they lacked precision on techniques as well as a handful of other factors. One other major problem was that they focused mainly on one crop, then they planted remaining crops on the worst land. Making it hard for any other crop to become successful. So even though the land was good,...