send comments to D.
Hodgson
Paper presented at the session on "A History of Social Thought
and the Social Imaginary: Race, Class, and Population in American Popular
Thought from the Antebellum Period to the Current Day." 1995 American
Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Monday, August 21, Washington,
D.C.
Thomas Robert Malthus used America, with its scant five million people
and immense frontier, to gauge how rapidly a population could increase
when faced with no resource constraints. One might assume that Americans,
confronting a geographic and social landscape quite unlike Malthus' cramped
Europe full of displaced peasants and wary nobility, would be little interested
in the population debate his Essay on Population (1798) initiated. This
assumption, though, would be wrong. Americans did consider certain population-resource
questions pivotal to the Republic's future, and found much of interest
in European writings on the subject.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, when thanking Jean Baptiste Say in 1804
for sending his two-volume Traité d'Economie Politique, related
(pp. 1-3): "These found me engaged in giving the leisure moments I
rarely find, to the perusal of Malthus' work on population, a work of sound
logic, in which some of the opinions of Adam Smith, as well as of the economists,
are ably examined."(1) Jefferson proceeded
to contrast Old and New World demographic conditions: "There, for
instance, the quantity of food is fixed, or increasing in a slow and only
arithmetical ratio, and the proportion is limited by the same ratio. Supernumerary
births consequently add only to your mortality. Here the immense extent
of uncultivated and fertile lands enables every one who will labor, to
marry young, and to raise a family of any size. Our food, then, may increase
geometrically with our laborers, and our births, however multiplied, become
effective." This fortunate situation posed a new question for Jefferson:
did the immensity of land mean that America should be a nation of farmers?
He mused that for Europe "the best distribution of labor is supposed
to be that which places the manufacturing hands alongside the agricultural;
so that the one part shall feed both, and the other part furnish both with
clothes and other comforts. Would that be best here?" Already a participant
in an ongoing debate, he argued that while "egoism and first appearances
say yes" to such a mix, "the moral and physical preference of
the agricultural, over the manufacturing, man" made a nation of farmers
his choice. He closed by commenting that if Say did not address his questions
it is because "you wrote for Europe; while I shall have asked them
because I think for America."(2) Obviously
Jefferson found European reflections on population valuable, but also in
need of broadening to address American concerns.
The great divide in Europe was between the classes. When Malthus related
the power of population to the existence of scarcity, this fissure insured
an ongoing debate. In antebellum America the great divide lay between the
regions, and issues of expansion, not scarcity, provoked discussions of
population. The Republic began with population and political power evenly
split between a South whose prosperity flowed from plantations and slave
labor and a North in which free labor was gravitating toward trade and
manufacturing. No American doubted the desirability of expansion -- territorial,
economic and demographic. Each region, though, had a different vision of
the future Republic and different designs for sculpting expansion. Should
manufacturing be fostered with tariffs, or agriculture with free trade?
Should the frontier be tilled by freemen on farms or by slaves on plantations?
With publication of Malthus' Essay subsistence-oriented population assertions
became commonplace in American policy debates. Contending that the laws
governing population dynamics required a particular resolution to a policy
impasse was a tactic that appealed to all, even to those holding decidedly
anti-Malthusian beliefs about the perfectibility of mankind. Critics of
Malthus' axiom that a naturally excessive reproduction led to competition
for subsistence and eventual checks on expansion felt compelled to expound
new "correct" laws of population. Although antebellum American
treatments of population were usually couched as either refutations or
affirmations of Malthus' Essay, they can best be understood as arguments
that regional advocates constructed to champion policy positions.
American theorizing about population did not originate with the regional
chauvinism of the antebellum period. During the sixty years prior to 1800
American thinking about population underwent several transformations, all
closely associated with changes in political status. During colonial days
an absolute endorsement of population growth was the norm. All colonists
knew of settlements that had perished, and some lived in ones that were
languishing. Success meant numbers increasing, more people coming than
going, and especially more being born than dying. The mercantilist endorsement
of population growth that then dominated the thinking of European elites
made sense to the common man in the New World.
By 1750 the colonies and Britain, though, began to have separate demographic
agendas. Colonists still considered expansion essential for their continued
prosperity, but Britain became ambivalent. Was colonial emigration depopulating
Britain? Would a sizable colonial population make moves toward independence
more likely and more difficult to thwart? Would there be much commercial
benefit to opening up areas west of the Alleghenies, where the likelihood
of trade diminished and the cost of control increased? In the midst of
these diverging agendas Benjamin Franklin emerged with his ingenious population
theory, intent on influencing colonial policy makers with persuasive theoretical
argument (Hodgson, 1991). Central to Franklin's Observations Concerning
the Increase of Mankind (1751: 233) was a subsistence-based axiom quite
similar to that later expounded by Malthus: "There is, in short, no
Bound to the prolific Nature of Plants or Animals, but what is made by
their crowding and interfering with each other's Means of Subsistence."
He used this axiom to argue for the inevitability of expansion and for
the futility of any British attempts to contain it. However, it also contained
a demographic etiology of Old World problems. Long before Ricardo integrated
Malthus' principle of population into his political economy, Americans
were presented with the vision of increased population density bringing
with it declining wages, poverty, and misery.(3)
During the struggle for independence, population growth again became
a measure of viability. When Lord Sheffield (1783) contended that with
independence the population of the colonies would stop increasing and that
numbers would begin to shrink as emigration accelerated, Trench Coxe (1791)
rushed to disagree. Both George Washington (1791) and Jefferson (1801)
heralded early census figures documenting population growth as signs of
the nation's strength.
Yet late eighteenth century events were laying the foundation for the
next century's regional population debates.(4)The
process of emancipating slaves began in the New England states soon after
the Revolution and was moving southward as the century ended. The Northwest
Ordinance, banning the further introduction of slavery north and west of
the Ohio River, was passed in 1787. Slavery was being isolated as the peculiar
institution of the South. At the Constitutional Convention George Mason
recommended that the importation of slaves be prohibited. Oliver Ellsworth
of Connecticut employed population theory to sidetrack the suggestion (1787:
154-155): "As slaves also multiply so fast in Virginia and Maryland
that it is cheaper to raise than import them, whilst in the sickly rice
swamps foreign supplies are necessary, if we go no father than is urged,
we shall be unjust toward South Carolina and Georgia. Let us not intermeddle.
As population increases, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves
useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country."
Well before that happened, however, westward expansion continued, "free"
states were continually added to the Union, Northern cities and industry
rose in prominence, and the South, with its peculiar institution, came
to feel increasingly threatened. Early in the nineteenth century a remarkable
episode in the history of American demographic thought began. Southerners
adopted a pessimistic Malthusianism to aid in the construction of an intellectual
defense of slavery.(5) Northerners rejected
that Malthusian ideology, but attacked slavery by interpreting racial population
data within a Malthusian analytical framework that accentuated slavery's
damaging impact on white demographic supremacy. Of course, many Southern
defenders of slavery turned to scripture, biology and law to argue their
case, not Malthusian population thought. Likewise, religious sentiment,
humanitarian concerns and belief in universal human rights moved many Northerners
to oppose slavery, not concern over differential racial population growth.
Political economy was but one arena in which proslavery and anti-slavery
forces contended. The instrumental manner in which Malthusian population
thought was handled by regional advocates, however, does warrant examination.
It provides an early illustration of social science's inability to resolve
policy debates within a divided body politic.
Malthus' Essay on Population makes its appearance just when region assumes
its central role in US history. The Essay was quickly incorporated into
the Ricardian economic system that came to be the centerpiece of political
economy. Any American wanting to use this new discipline to address policy
issues had to deal with Malthus' theory of population.
Southern scholars were attracted to Malthusianism, especially as expounded
by Ricardo, because it allowed them to project a bleak future for the "free-labor"
system: since the supply of workers will inevitably increase faster than
the demand for their services, the mass of mankind is destined to live
at the edge of subsistence.(6) Against such
a foil, the slave system could appear as a humane alternative. As early
as 1819 Southern proslavery advocates (Walsh, 1819: 424) were unfavorably
contrasting the living conditions of the "white slaves" of British
factories with those of the black slaves of Southern plantations.(7)
In the slave system the capitalist actually "owned" labor, and ownership made the interests of the two groups cooperative, not competitive. Unlike in the free-labor system, competition could not force the slave-owner to give his workers a less-than-subsistence wage since this would entail destroying his own capital (Cooper, 1835: 191): "A planter lives by the labor of his slaves: he must therefore keep them in a condition fit to labor." Furthermore, the slave-owner could control his charges' reproduction to prevent overpopulation ("R. E. C." , 1858: 12-13):
"The Southern slave-holder is able to support all his slaves in comfort, because he keeps no more than can be profitably employed; but if you force him to keep ten times as many, will not master and servant come to starvation? It is this very self-protecting power against over-population existing in slave countries, which is wanting in free society. This is our safe-guard..."(8)
For Southern scholars Malthus had laid bare the fundamental flaw of the
free-labor system, and allowed them to posit that widespread prosperity
would only be possible within the controlled community of a slave system.
The pessimistic Malthusianism embraced by proslavery advocates did contain a prediction that should have made them less than sanguine about slavery's future: as population size and density increased in the free-labor North, wages should approach subsistence levels and the cost of "free" workers should fall below that of slaves. In Thomas Dew's (1836: 277) apocalyptic vision of a teeming America, for example, there was no room for slavery:
"But the time must come when the powerfully elastic spring of our
rapidly increasing numbers shall fill up our wide spread territory with
a dense population -- when the great safety valve of the west will be closed
against us -- when millions shall be crowded into our manufactories and
commercial cities -- then will come the great and fearful pressure upon
the engine -- then will the line of demarkation stand most palpably drawn
between the rich and the poor, the capitalist and the laborer -- then will
thousands, yes, millions arise, whose hard lot it may be to labor from
morn till eve through a long life, without the cheering hope of passing
from that toilsome condition in which the first years of their manhood
found them..."
Scenarios such as this were exactly what Oliver Ellsworth had in mind in 1787 when he argued against the need to outlaw slavery. Fifty years later George Tucker, congressman from Virginia and professor of political economy at the University of Virginia, was advancing the identical argument (1837: 48):
"it cannot exist in the most advanced stages of society, where the utmost degree of industry and economy are required in the great mass of the community to provide the means of subsistence, and where, if labour can earn a support, it leaves no surplus. Long before that stage is reached, it is found that the labour of the slave does not repay the cost of rearing him; and, consequently, as slavery at that period would be a tax on the master, it cannot exist..."
Of course, such predictions of slavery's future demise did help preserve
its present existence. Tucker, just as Ellsworth had done before him, used
Malthusianism to "prove" that no legislation was needed to end
slavery. Patience and population growth, abolitionists were told, would
bring slavery to a gradual and peaceful end.(9) Thus
Southerners used Malthusianism both to cloak slavery in moral superiority,
and paradoxically, by predicting its death, to shield it from an abolitionist
onslaught.
Few Northern intellectuals embraced pessimistic Malthusianism, even
though it foretold an end to slavery. Its prophecy of a densely settled
America filled with impoverished industrial workers repelled those whose
blueprint for America entailed expanding manufacturing. Early in the century
Mathew Carey noted (1815: 373) that the soil of Northeastern states was
relatively "sterile" and that "the comparative density of
their population render manufacturing establishments indispensably necessary
to them." If pessimistic Malthusians were correct, this region had
a bleak future and should already be the new nation's center of poverty.
The opposite, however, seemed true to Northerners, and they adopted anti-Malthusianism
on empirical grounds that had a regional underpinning. Alexander Everett
constructed a comprehensive treatment of population, New Ideas on Population
(1823), that turned Malthus' theory on its head. All empirical evidence
showed, according to Everett (1827: 138), that both population growth and
increasing density were directly related with rising prosperity, not poverty:
"the increase of population has a natural tendency to produce a comparative
abundance of the means of subsistence at the time and place of its occurrence."
Henry Carey, Mathew's famous son, expressed (1840: 53-64) his anti-Malthusianism
in similar terms: "with the increase of population and the extension
of cultivation over the inferior soils, there is a constant increase in
the return to labour, enabling men rapidly to improve their physical and
moral condition..." He later elaborated (1860: 301) a theory that
rising density would "naturally" bring about a decline in fertility
and thereby prevent overpopulation.
As the century progressed, the economic success of the North gave little reason to Northerners to change their stance. The unequal progress of the two regions was so evident in 1850 census figures that Southern scholars felt compelled to offer explanations (Wish, 1960: 25). They routinely ascribed its cause to unfair tariff laws (Southern Quarterly Review, 1851: 535): "the rise of New-York, and the proportional fall of Charleston, date from the enactment of the laws favourable to Northern capital, invested in manufactures and other industries!" Some (Fisher, 1849) produced valiant, if strained, "proofs" that wealth was actually greater in the South.(10) James D. B. DeBow, the superintendent of the 1850 census, contrasted the economic progress of the North with its moral degradation (1851: 361-362): "Does the increase of its aggregate wealth and population denote a more general diffusion of individual plenty; more happiness; a higher refinement, and a superior religious and moral tone of public sentiment? No man can doubt that in these things the North has retrograded." DeBow's focus on distributional issues and morality became the most common Southern rejoinder to Northern prosperity.(11) Although the free-labor system of the North might be outproducing the South's slave system, its abundance was only experienced by the rich (Holmes, 1855: 571):
"It is, however, preposterous to find the moderns inveighing against
the servitude of either an inferior or congeneous race, when the whole
tendency of their doctrines, their practices, and the social organization
of free-labor communities, is to make the mass of the laborers and even
of the educated classes, subject of capital, circumstances, and machinery;
to render them slaves of the ring and of the lamp; and to degrade and brutalize
in the name and by the arts of commerce, manufactures and financial speculation."
Malthusian population theory was used to "prove" why such maldistribution
was inevitable ("W," 1843: 740):
"If population -- that is labor -- is, by a fixed principle, always held at the utmost point of repletion at which it can sustain itself, with a tendency still to press on in a geometrical ratio of increase, which tendency is only checked by a want of the means of subsistence, is it not obvious that if you furnish the means of subsistence you remove the only obstacle to its almost infinite production? ... Subsistence is all that labor receives out of its own products, because, with subsistence, any amount of labor may be commanded."
As tensions between the two regions increased during the 1850s, Southern
depictions of Northern circumstances grew more unrestrained. George Fitzhugh
(1854; 1857; 1850: 3,7) combined Malthusian theory and class warfare rhetoric
to illuminate free-labor conditions:
"Crime and pauperism have increased. Riots, trades unions, strikes for higher wages, discontent breaking out into revolution, are things of daily occurrence...
Self-interest makes the employer and free laborer enemies. The one prefers to pay low wages, the other needs high wages. War, constant war, is the result, in which the operative perishes, but is not vanquished; he is hydra-headed, and when he dies two take his place. But numbers diminish his strength."
By contrast the South, with no population problem, was peaceful and free of poverty (1850: 12):
"At the slaveholding South all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment....
Population increases slowly, wealth rapidly. In the tide water region of
Eastern Virginia, as far as our experience extends, the crops have doubled
in fifteen years, whilst the population has been almost stationary....
We have enough for the present and no Malthusian specters frightening us
for the future. Wealth is more equally distributed than at the North, where
a few millionaires own most of the property of the country."
With America splitting apart, one's view of the world was ever more
determined by place. Whether one saw prosperity or poverty, progress or
regression, depended on locale. Southerners enthusiastically adopted pessimistic
Malthusianism because it legitimized their particular vision of the world.
They could predict poverty for an increasingly prosperous North and present
slavery as a more equitable and humane institution than the free-labor
system and have these visions appear as consequences of natural laws, not
simple reflections of regional prejudice. Given its utility, eschewing
pessimistic Malthusianism would have been difficult for a Southern scholar.(12)
Malthusianism gave Southerners a powerful ideological weapon with which
to fight regional policy conflicts. Yet when those battles were fought
with data rather than ideas, Malthus' analytical framework became a problem
for Southerners. Malthus' axiom that the availability of subsistence ultimately
determines human population size and density implies that a specific number
of "places" exists for humans in a given territory. Each person
filling a place in a sense "displaces" all others. In the analysis
of subpopulations, this framework assumes that the presence of one group
displaces other groups, and that one group's growth diminishes the potential
growth of other groups. For chauvinists the policy implications of such
Malthusian compositional analyses were clear and compelling. In fact, such
"Malthusian" arguments opposing slavery appeared in America well
before Malthus' essay. Franklin concluded (p. 234) his 1751 treatment of
population with just such an argument: "...why increase the Sons of
Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity,
by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and
Red?" That the large number of slaves in the South displaced whites
was an often made observation, and the reason frequently given for the
paucity of immigrants in the South (Rush, 1773: 25; Rush, 1806: 121; M.
Carey, 1830: 218-222).
During the antebellum period analyses of racial population growth statistics
were central elements in important policy debates: whether new states should
enter the union as slave or free; whether American blacks should be expelled
to colonies in Africa or elsewhere; and whether emancipation should be
legally required. Interestingly, Northerners, many of whom were ideological
anti-Malthusians, commonly employed a Malthusian analytical framework in
their studies of racial population dynamics to arrive at conclusions inimical
to Southern interests.
For example, the Northern political economist Daniel Raymond framed
(1819: 8-9) the issue of admitting Missouri into the union as a slave state
in starkly demographic terms: "the questions for politicians to decide,"
he asserted, is "whether that policy is best which promotes the increase
of a free white population, by restraining the increase of a slave population,
or that which promotes the increase of a slave population, by restraining
the increase of a free white population."(13)He
explicitly employed (1819: 20) a Malthusian analytic framework to argue
that slavery not be permitted in Missouri: "whatever portion of the
product of the earth be consumed by slaves, in the same portion will the
means of subsistence be taken from a white population, and in the same
proportion will the increase of the white population be limited or restrained."(14)Allowing
a territorial expansion of slavery also would increase (1819: 32) the demand
for slaves and stimulate their production in the Old South,(15)thereby
doubly enlarging America's slave problem.
Raymond's solution (1819: 26) to the demographic problem he posed was
"manumission" of all slaves "as fast as possible."
His analysis of comparative rates of population growth found (1819: 8-9)
the following patterns: the free black population increased more slowly
than the white population in free states; the free black population increased
more slowly than the slave population in slave states; the white population
of slave states increased more slowly than white population of free states;
and the white population increased more slowly than the slave population
in slave states. The slow rate of increase of the free black population
hinted at a solution. It convinced Raymond (1819: 12) that blacks in freedom
"are not so industrious, enterprising, and provident as the whites,
and do not marry and raise so many children." Manumission would transform
a rapidly increasing slave population into a much more slowly increasing
free black population (1819: 26) and "the white population will increase
in a greater, and the black, in a smaller ratio, until this eldest curse
shall be eradicated."
Raymond dismissed (1819: 7) another possible solution to the demographic
problem he posed: expelling blacks to colonies in Africa or elsewhere.
None of the colonization plans then being discussed contemplated sending
close to 40,000 blacks back to Africa each year, his estimate of black
natural increase. Even if fully implemented, slave populations would continue
to increase. He also sowed seeds of discord among Southern whites by claiming
that the presence of slaves lessened the fertility of landless whites (1819:
20): "A large portion of the white population in the southern states,
are neither slave owners nor land owners.... not having property enough
to raise families without their own manual labor, [they] prefer living
single, (and as they call it respectably) to marrying and raising families,
which they would be obliged to disgrace by manual labor."
Horace Bushnell, a distinguished New England theologian, analyzed (1839: 14) census statistics and told the "masters of the South" that only emancipation could rid them of the growing security threat of their burgeoning black population: "every year adds both to the danger and the difficulty, as it adds to the numbers of the slaves." He concluded (1839: 12) that blacks flourished in America only because of slavery:
"At present they are kept from a decline in population only by the interest their masters have in them. Their law of population, now, is the same as that of neat cattle, and as the herd will dwindle when the herdsman withdraws his care, so will they."
Arguing that the "African race" would not be able "to
maintain the competition" with whites in freedom, he predicted that
emancipation would lead to their "premature extinction," following
a path similar to that of the American Indian. To document this point,
he calculated (1839: 13) the very low population growth rates of the "colored
populations" of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey
and New York from 1820 to 1830. Bushnell later (1860) foresaw the end of
the frontier, and forecast that an increasing white population in search
of land would take over plantations and bring slavery to an end.(16)Indolence,
improvidence, crime and vice among the emancipated black population would
lead to its early demise, an eventuality he considered (1860: 12-13) progress:
"since we must all die, why should it grieve us, that a stock thousands
of years behind, in the scale of culture, should die with fewer and still
fewer children to succeed, till finally the whole succession remains in
the more cultivated race?"
Northerners more supportive of blacks still interpreted demographic
statistics in ways similar to Bushnell. Jesse Chickering, a writer on statistical
subjects from Massachusetts, analyzed sixty years of census data and found
the slave population of the South consistently increasing at a more rapid
rate than the white population. He foresaw a demographic Armageddon developing
for Southern whites (1853: 137): "...the time must come when the slave
population must outnumber and overpower the whites; and whenever a leader
rises up among them, there is likely to be between these antagonistical
elements, violence of the most awful kind."(17)He,
too, found the natural increase of the "free colored population"
to be stagnant (1853: 142-143): "there is a tendency in them, living
in the midst of the whites and of the slaves, to degenerate, to dwindle
away, and to become extinct as a race." He attributed this not to
racial inferiority, but to the severe discrimination they experienced from
whites in every region (1853: 135): "they seem to be doomed to perish
in a state of freedom, falsely called, among a people whose feelings and
whose prejudices loathe fellowship with them, and where the whole structure
of society is set against their equal participation in the blessings of
the land." Chickering recommended that slaves be set free, but that
all efforts be made "to aid in their colonization in Africa"
so that the race could be saved.(18)
Northern analyses documenting an inability of free blacks to compete
successfully with whites convinced few slave owners to emancipate their
slaves. Changing blacks from property to citizens promised too much political
upheaval, especially in regions where slave owners had succeeded in producing
high ratios of slaves. Emancipation followed by colonization, though, was
a demographic solution to America's racial problems that many Southerners
had long considered. In 1787 Jefferson recommended (pp. 137-143) freeing
slaves and sending them to colonize "such place as the circumstances
of the times should render most proper." Madison, a fellow Virginian,
voiced support (Jordan, 1968: 552) for African colonization schemes a year
later, and actively endorsed them until his death in 1836. Jefferson and
James Monroe, who as Governor of Virginia put down a slave revolt in 1802,
helped establish the American Colonization Society in 1817. The Society
established the African colony of Monrovia (named after Monroe) five years
later. During the 1820s the movement gained strength (Williamson, 1986:
8), although comparatively few blacks were actually relocated. When Nat
Turner led a band of rebel slaves and slaughtered fifty-seven whites in
Southampton, Virginia during the summer of 1831, however, the fears of
yeoman whites of western Virginia did force the Virginia legislature to
consider a colonization scheme for Virginia's 470,000 slaves (Kaufman,
1982: 85). The plan envisioned the state annually purchasing and shipping
to African colonies a portion of the slave population equal to its yearly
natural increase. This, it was believed, would keep the slave population
constant in size while the white population would continue to increase.
During the Virginia legislative debate Thomas Dew, a professor at William
and Mary College,(19) came to the slave
owners' defense with a Malthusian analysis of black population growth quite
reminiscent of Raymond's. Referring to "the principle of population"
of "Dr. Malthus" he contended (1832: 53-54) that the proposed
plan would actually increase the slave population of Virginia. The state,
by paying the market price for six thousand or more slaves each year,(20)would
increase the demand for slaves and stimulate their production: "each
master would do all in his power to encourage marriage among them -- would
allow the females almost entire exemption from labor, that they might the
better breed and nurse." Slave owners in other states would scheme
to ship slaves into Virginia to avail themselves of this market. The white
population, their taxes substantially increased to fund the plan, either
would leave the state or find themselves less able to marry and start families
(1832: 57). Colonization schemes would not work, and immediate emancipation
would devastate Virginia's economy. The continuation of slavery, Dew concluded,
was necessary for Virginia's prosperity.
Ironically, Dew was able to convince the legislators of Virginia to
abandon their plan to "whiten" the state by emphasizing the selfishness
of a slave-owning class who would breed slaves like cattle (1832: 56) in
pursuit of individual profit rather than limit black reproduction in pursuit
of racial hegemony. Southern ambivalence about slavery had engendered a
plan to gradually displace blacks from Virginia. Dew demolished that plan
and proceeded unequivocally to endorse slavery (1836: 279): "...let
us cherish this institution which has been built up by no sin of ours --
let us cleave to it as the ark of our safety... the day will come when
the whole confederacy will regard it as the sheet anchor of our country's
liberty." With all acceptable ways of withdrawing from slavery blocked,
Southerners stopped looking at slavery as a "problem" and began
extolling it as a positive good.
From the beginning, Malthusian analyses of differential population growth
pushed Southerners to adopt unrestrained proslavery positions. Within a
Malthusian framework slavery necessarily decreased the number and proportion
of whites in a region. Southerners, committed Malthusians, could not dispute
this. When Northern analysts contended that enlarging slavery's territory
would check white expansion, Southerners accepted this as fact and were
forced to find in slavery a purpose more virtuous than propagating the
race. When Northern analysts highlighted the low population growth rates
of freed blacks and announced emancipation to be an effortless way of "whitening"
America, Southerners accepted this as fact and were forced to reject such
a racial agenda.(21) The high growth rates
of slave populations that Northerners decried, Southerners had to praise.
They hailed the rates as proof of slavery's beneficence, and declared that
the institution was needed to protect the interests of a dependent race.
This proslavery argument, this "weirdly beautiful flower" of
Southern intellectual culture (Williamson, 1986: 15), was a response to
Northern Malthusian analyses of racial population dynamics that attacked
the racial fidelity of Southern whites. Southerners, never repudiating
their Malthusian principles, contrived to use the population trends that
for Northerners established Southern racial perfidy, to celebrate their
racial altruism. Support for slavery became a mark of Southern humanity,
not Southern whiteness.
This is clearly seen in Southern responses to Raymond's Malthusian arguments
against admitting Missouri as a slave state. William Smith, Senator from
South Carolina, interpreted (1820: col. 268) Raymond's arguments as a despicable
call for black genocide: "Raymond [has] the opinion, that it was better
to condense these people within the limited space of the old States, and
by that means reduce their numbers by a state of starvation and oppression.
Heap cruelties on them to destroy the race." So did William Scott,
proslavery delegate from Missouri, (1819: 1202): "What, starve the
negroes, pen them up in the swamps and morasses, confine them to Southern
latitudes, to long scorching days of labor and fatigue, until the race
becomes extinct, that the fair land of Missouri may be tenanted by that
gentleman, his brothers and his sons." The more rapid increase of
slaves than whites that, according to Smith (1820: col. 268), Raymond found
to be "an evil of great magnitude," he found to be "uncontrovertible
evidence that they are well fed, well clothed and supremely happy."(22)
As the century progressed, these sentiments were voiced with increasing frequency. The slow rate of growth of the free black population that Bushnell heralded as evidence of the black's inability to compete with whites under freedom, Frederick Grimke contended (1848: 435) should make "philanthropists... cry out against the cruelty and injustice which would be done to the blacks by emancipating them." With whites no longer "maintaining a guardianship," the fate of blacks would be a sorrowful "extinction." Van Evrie (1853: 10) equated "the cry of no more slave States" with the cry of "death to the negro." Fitzhugh offered (1857: 633-634) "the unexampled increase in the number of our slaves" as proof that slavery was "kindly, patriarchal, and protective." Abolitionists, Grayson argued (1860: 57), could see free blacks "vanishing" from Northern states and yet did not even "pretend to devise any scheme for escaping this monstrous result of the manumission they are recommending."
Northerners were never convinced of slavery's benevolence and finally
forced emancipation on the South. Immediately, the regionalism that had
marked American discussions of population receded. With slavery no longer
dividing the nation's whites, the consensus that most students of population
shared about black inferiority quickly extended to policy. Some had adopted
Darwinian notions about the efficacy of competition and called on a new
authority when making recommendations. While Bushnell saw (1860: 16) the
hand of "the Almighty Himself" in the replacement of the "inferior"
by the "superior," Julian Sturtevant (1863: 606) discovered "the
law of competition." Nonetheless, both God and science recommended
that the progress of the race required such a succession not be impeded.
Few voices of concern were raised when Joseph Kennedy, superintendent of
the 1860 census, predicted (1864: xi-xii) that emancipated blacks were
"doomed to comparatively rapid absorption or extinction."
Although American antebellum students of population contributed little to the canon of demography, their arguments and counter-arguments did help widen the regional fissure until fracture ensued, and America is still attending to the aftermath of that breakup. Their works also delineate the primal nature of much population analysis. Dividing populations into categories, assessing population change, formulating "laws" of growth and decay are activities that necessarily reflect on the relative vitality of groups. Chauvinists engage in them to further group interests, and individuals observe the results with partisan eyes. In a world where region, ethnicity, and race are reemerging as core identities for individuals, reviewing the works of an era when factions formed along regional lines and contested the peopling of a nation, might serve as but a preview of twenty-first century population deliberations.
1. In his January 29, 1804 letter to Joseph Priestley, Jefferson offers this positive assessment of Malthus: "Have you seen the new work of Malthus on population? It is one of the ablest I have ever seen. Although his main object is to delineate the effects of redundancy of population, and to test the poor laws of England, and other palliations for that evil, several important question in political economy, allied to his subject incidentally, are treated with a masterly hand."
2. The English translation of Say's treatise, appearing in 1821, actually proved to be the very influential, "dominating the United States textbook market until after 1837" (Conkin, 1980: 28).
3. There is in fact a pre-Malthus Malthusian tradition in American population thought (Spengler, 1935a). For example, in 1791 James Madison produced (p. 454) a population theory reminiscent of Franklin's and quite similar to Malthus': "Both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms every species derives from nature a reproductive faculty beyond the demand for merely keeping up its stock... Man, who preys both on the vegetable and animal species, is himself a prey to neither. He too possesses the reproductive principle far beyond the degree requisite for the bare continuance of his species." Madison's list of the consequences of redundant human reproduction is strikingly similar to that Malthus would enumerate seven year later: infanticide, starvation, war, disease, and emigration. Madison, though, used his theory to argue for unrestricted emigration, both international and internal. He argued that since the "places" left by emigrants would quickly be filled by a greater number of infants surviving, the regions losing emigrants would suffer no loss of population; and emigrants always would chose as destinations regions that can use their labor.
After the publication of Malthus' Essay, Madison (1823: 350) did question its originality: "But he has not all the merit of originality which has been allowed him. The principle was adverted to and reasoned upon long before him, though with views and applications not the same with his."
4. Fogel (1989: 116) sees this continuity: "Given the strong connection between population and politics in the decades leading up to the Revolution and the way that population was tied to politics in the Constitution, particularly in the compromise in the counting of slaves for representation, its is not surprising that population issues were at the center of the struggle against slavery throughout the antebellum era."
5. Antebellum American responses to Malthus have been examined from a variety of perspectives. J. J. Spengler argues (1935b, 1936) that Southerners adopted Malthusianism and used it to help construct a defense of slavery. Eugene and Elizabeth Genovese (1984) are not as convinced as Spengler that Malthusianism is at the root of proslavery thinking. Cocks relates (1967) antebellum American attitudes toward Malthus more to political party differences than to differences on the slavery question. James R. Gibson, Jr. contends (1989) that Americans became increasingly anti-Malthusian as they came to embrace the goal of an industrial society. Edmond George Cady (1931) compares antebellum American reactions to Malthus with those of Europeans. C. Van Woodward (1971; especially Chapter 3, "Southern Slaves in the World of Thomas Malthus") and Robert Fogel (1989, especially Chapter 5, "The Population Question") examine the American response to Malthus in light of relevant demographic trends. Allen Kaufman examines (1982) the American political economy texts of the period and identifies their significance in contemporary policy debates. Eugene Genovese examines (1986; 1992) the work of Thomas Dew and a number of other relevant Southern figures, including their reactions to Malthus.
6. In 1858 a three-part series entitled "The problem of free society" appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger with "R. E. C." listed as the author. It contains the most elaborate Malthusian argument against the free-labor system and for the slave system, although many pieces of this argument can be found earlier. Spengler (1936: 386) believes that the "R. E. C." is R. E. Colston.
7. Thomas Cooper (1835: 190) used the term "white slave" in this context: "Look at the operatives in the factory system of England, and among the manufactories generally, or the servants put out to farmers in England under the present poor laws. To talk of these people bettering their condition, who are condemned for life to at least twice the labor of our slaves, and to the workhouse when they can work no longer -- to hear of the dreadful condition of our black slaves in this respect, from persons who know, or ought to know the condition of the white slaves in Europe, is neither more nor less than to listen to gross and willful misrepresentation."
8. How did slave masters control the number of their slaves? They could manipulate the sex ratio. Seybert (1818: 27) argued that prior to 1808, when it still was legal to import slaves, slave masters purchased few females "because refined calculation had taught the masters, that it cost less to buy grown up slaves than it did to raise them." Dew (1832: 55) noted the sudden increased prolificness of Louisiana slaves that occurred after the slave trade was abolished and the price of a slave increased. He noted (1832: 54) that if slave masters were so motivated they could double the number of their slaves in fifteen years by encouraging marriage and exempting females from labor.
9. He repeated this argument (1843: 115-118; 1860: 88-89) until his death in 1861. Ironically Tucker constructed child/women ratios from census data and uncovered early evidence of fertility decline that led him to question whether populations would actually increase until checked by the availability of subsistence (1843: iii; 1860: 80-82). "Prudence and pride" seemed capable of checking growth well before subsistence levels were reached. Although this finding had clear implications for his theory about slavery's inevitable end, he never considered them.
10. He counted slaves as property, added their value to Southern wealth totals, and calculated wealth figures on a "per free white" basis.
11. Such rejoinders became increasingly needed after non-slave owning whites (Helper, 1857) began to use such regional growth disparities to question the value of slavery.
12. An example of this difficulty is Thomas Cooper. An immigrant from England, he first settled in Pennsylvania and became a judge. While there he wrote (1806) a defense of theorists advocating the perfectibility of mankind, Malthus' original nemeses. He expressed grave doubts (1806: 342) about the validity of Malthus's theory, pointing out that the "natural evils" which Malthus outlined had a simple "natural remedy": one could always "check births in marriage." He later resettled in South, became president of South Carolina College, adopted (1829: 276-277) a Malthusianism that preferred high rates of infant mortality to the practice of "prudential restraint within marriage," and actively defended slavery (1835).
13. Raymond was not the first to frame the issue this way. Earlier Patrick Henry had asked (Jordan, 1968: 544): "Our country will be peopled. The question is, shall it be with Europeans or with Africans?"
14. Ideologically Raymond was a staunch anti-Malthusian. In his text, Thoughts on Political Economy, he considered (1820: 277) Malthus' Essay to be an essentially partisan document that favored the rich: "It is very convenient and very palatable for those who have all the property, to preach up the inutility of making provision for those who have none; and with them a theory of population, or a system of political economy, which establishes such a doctrine would be likely to be very popular, and by taking half views of a subject, or one branch of a system of political economy, as Mr. Malthus has done, there will be little difficulty in establishing almost any doctrine on almost any subject."
15. He estimated (p. 32) that planters in the old South, with a ready export market for slaves in Western states, would be able to double their slave populations every fifteen years.
16. Although his 1860 analysis employs a Malthusian analytical framework, he explicitly states (1860: 4) that "I do not believe in the principle, or supposed law of Mr. Malthus..." In this 1860 article Bushnell follows a demographic argument quite similar to that in George Weston's The Progress of Slavery in the United States (1857). Weston presented the relative population growth of free states and slave from 1790 to 1855 as being a war between two systems. He, too, felt that whites and the free-labor system would be the inevitable winners of this conflict.
17. This article appeared in DeBow's Review, the major commercial journal of the South. In a preface to the article J. B. R. DeBow, the editor, labeled (1853: 129) the dangers Chickering outlined as "entirely chimerical."
18. By this time approximately 10,000 American blacks had emigrated to Liberia (1853: 142).
19. He later became president of the College.
20. Since Virginia was already exporting 6,000 slaves a year to other states, Dew thought (1832: 149) that this was the minimum that the plan had to accommodate. He also estimated the annual cost of the plan, using $200 as the average market value for a slave.
21. With respect to slavery's influence on white immigration and white fertility, Southerners also saw virtue where Northerners saw only vice. For instance, Smith (1856: 270) praised slavery for protecting the South from the scourge of Irish and Chinese immigration. Dew found (1832: 129) the lower fertility of Southern whites a reflection not of their degeneracy, but of their "high degree of civilization"; unlike Northerners, they refused to marry "unless there is a prospect of maintaining their families in the same style they have been accustomed to live in."
22. Theodore Weld was one abolitionist who took such "population growth" proofs of the beneficence of slavery seriously. He considered and refuted (1839) a number of these arguments in great detail.
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