If our understanding of the Civil War weren't so distracted by the importance of the freeing of the slaves, we might be more likely to recognize the similarity between the first experiment in industrialized agriculture in the South and what's happening to our industrial economy now.

The common explanation we've been given and accepted for why the pre Civil War plantation economy couldn't compete with competition from overseas and failed is that slaves just weren't very productive because they weren't free to decide for themselves what they wanted to do and where they wanted to be. Free people, it is argued, work harder, so there's no advantage to keeping slaves.

The evidence, we are also told, can be found in the fact that the pre-Civil War agricultural plantations were riven by a constant stream of bankruptcies. Which is correct. Indeed, it was most often because the plantations went bankrupt that slaves were sold off and (one of the most onerous characteristics of the system) families were broken up.

At the same time, the African population that was imported to North America, as opposed to those that landed in South America and the Caribbean, thrived and flourished in the sense of reproducing themselves and increasing the population to such an extent that the importation was able to be halted without much economic detriment. How could that be?

Moreover, if the human capital was reproducing itself, how did it happen that the plantations themselves kept falling into bankruptcy?

If one inspects the accounts and records of some representative plantations objectively, the answer to the first question can be found in the fact that, though they were not free to come and go as they liked, the slaves were obviously quite adept at negotiating what we would now call "favorable working conditions" for themselves and their kin, including provisions for time off (one and a half days a week), minimum and maximum age for employment, access to tools, clothing, housing and medical care as needed. In other words, the slave population increased because they took good care of themselves and their off-spring.

Now, it's possible that this work ethic and the attention to familial interests was restricted--that slaves were lazy lay-abouts when it came to laboring on the plantation and energetic in the pursuit of their own interests--but not likely, if only because their over-seers could easily requisition any abundance to make up for a short-fall in what the plantation produced. Besides, there's no evidence that trade foundered because of reduced quantities; it was reduced prices, keeping them from satisfying debts, that brought about recurring bankruptcies.

Then, as now, the owners of capital likely argued that the cost of labor was too high (sustaining a work force and assuring its regular replacement with off-spring is expensive), but the more rational explanation, also easily substantiated from the records of foreign travel, import of exotic treasure and the pursuit of "amusements," is that instead of investing in the future, the first American industrialists indulged their pleasures and borrowed too much.

In addition, and what very likely prompted a radical solution, the slave population of the agricultural South set a bad example for the labor that was required for nascent industrial enterprises up North. How could industrialists get filthy rich if they had to pay fair wages, educate the young and provide pensions for the old?

They couldn't. Moreover, freedom has an unanticipated benefit. Once people are free to move around, they're even easier to exploit as one group is set against another or the industrial enterprises themselves are moved. And that's still going on. Indeed, as long as populations can be restrained (the point of immigration limits) it's proven easier to just relocate the physical facilities of an enterprise to take advantage of cheap labor whose reproduction, education and retirement is paid for by someone else. That's what the global economy means.

And that's what the global community is about to bring to a halt, whether we relocate the dollar debt or not.

Although these thoughts are my own, I want to credit Herbert G. Gutman with inspiring my musings and clearing up some confusions.