Economic Contradictions of Slave Law

Sentiments of humanity and economic self-interest were expressed in powerful contradictions that ultimately worked to the detriment of the southern economy. John Archibald Campbell, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from Alabama, who resigned to join the Confederacy, appreciated the tension between paternalism toward the slave and the imperatives of the market. "The connection of husband and wife, and parent and child," Campbell explained in discussing the law of slavery, "are sacred in a Christian State." But in the business world practical considerations necessarily limited the emotional energy that a master could expend on his slaves. The law was supposed to keep such sentiments from developing. "[T]he liability of the slave to change his relation on the bankruptcy of his master, and the frequency with which [it] occurs," Campbell observed, "has . . . deprived the relation of some of its patriarchical nature."²⁵ Maintaining legal control over the slave as property was the essence of the southern law of slavery, regardless of the contradictions it raised, both within the region and in the nation as a whole.

The emerging market economy of the nineteenth-century United States bore down upon the law of slavery. Even the closest human bond was subject to market pressures, and the law did nothing to ameliorate this reality. The recognition of the market realities of slavery did not mean that the economy of the South matured in the same ways as that of the free states. The opposite may well have been the case. A myriad of social relations was necessary to the maintenance of the peculiar institution; sanctioning these by law hindered the construction of an economy competitive with the North. Political and social stability "were maintained at the expense of efficient economic arrangements." ²⁶

Masters needed slaves, and the South's legal system, as an extension of the social system, protected and perpetuated slavery. An aggressive slave system went unchallenged from within by a legal system wedded to a dispassionate rule of law founded on virulent racism. Outside the South, however, a different cultural ethic prompted a different legal response to human bondage.

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Date: 2015-01-29; view: 791