Considering Slavery – Word From the Hopeland

Capitalized Labor

I have been trying to get my head around slavery.

Not the humanitarian horror of it. That part is easy. Human beings were bought and sold. Families were separated. People were beaten, raped, worked, bred, and sometimes killed by people who claimed to own them. We know the pictures. We know the stories. We know who the bad guys are.

At least, we think we do.

I wanted to know something much more mundane.

How much did a slave cost?

In the years just before the Civil War, an average enslaved person might sell for something around $800. A healthy young male field hand could bring $1,200 to $1,500, perhaps considerably more.

Translate that into our money today (2026), and things get slippery. By simple purchasing power, $800 then might be as much as $35,000 now. Compare it to wages or accumulated wealth, and the modern equivalent becomes vastly larger.

But $30,000 will do for what I am thinking about.

Because nobody shells out $30,000 for something without expecting something in return.

Slavery was Capitalized Labor.

That is the phrase I have been looking for.

The slave owner did not merely buy the product of another man’s labor. He did not rent his labor by the hour. He bought the laborer.

The whole package.

Muscles, brain, skill, strength, years of useful life – and, in the case of an enslaved woman, the horrifying possibility (to us) that she might produce additional capital. Her children belonged to the owner as well.

There it is.

Capitalized Labor.

And it was immensely profitable. It had to be. You don’t build an entire civilization around something that doesn’t pay.

That is one reason I have become a little suspicious of our favorite picture of slavery: the vicious overseer.

Let’s call him Simon Legree.

Legree is wonderful for our purposes. He is a bastard. He beats slaves because he enjoys beating slaves. He hates them. I suspect he hates his wife, his children, his boss, most of his acquaintances, and himself. About the only blessing God bestowed upon poor Legree was a job where being a bastard was occasionally useful.

We know what to do with Legree.

Condemn him. Problem solved.

Except Legree is almost a distraction.

Consider Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin owned slaves for part of his life. He later became an abolitionist, which makes him particularly interesting. But earlier on, owning a slave was apparently not an enormous moral crisis for him.

It was convenient.

A slave was a labor-saving device. A toaster. A vacuum cleaner. An extra pair of hands that could carry things, clean things, fetch things, cook things, and generally make Benjamin Franklin’s life a little easier.

And think about the money. In today’s ordinary purchasing power, even a relatively inexpensive enslaved servant could represent something like $20,000 or $30,000.

The price of a new car.

Franklin wasn’t picking up some cheap appliance at Walmart. This was a significant purchase. But it could still be understood primarily as a convenience – a luxury purchased by somebody who could afford to have another human being do things for him.

I don’t mean that Franklin thought an enslaved human being was literally a toaster. I mean something considerably more troubling.

He didn’t have to think about it very much at all.

That is harder for us to understand.

The world before the modern age was class-conscious in ways we can barely imagine. There were lower sorts. Middling sorts. Better sorts. Servants. Masters. Aristocrats. Royalty. And at rock-bottom: slaves. Everybody knew where everybody else belonged.

It was in the air.

And if you had been born into that world, you would have breathed it too. That is the trouble with atmosphere. You gotta breathe.

So, consider George Washington.

Now things get uncomfortable. Washington was no Simon Legree. He was capable of affection, loyalty, sacrifice, dignity, generosity, and considerable personal courage. He loved his wife. He worried about his family. He thought about honor.

And he owned human beings. Lots of them.

Somewhere among the farm implements, acreage, buildings, livestock, debts, crops, and accounts – were people.

They had value. Financial value.

The planter didn’t have to hate them. That is the part I think we keep missing. He could ask about someone’s health because he genuinely cared about the person – and because a healthy slave was worth more than a sick one.

Both could be true, at the same time.

We want racism to require hatred because hatred is easy to identify. We can find the bastard. We can point at him. We can congratulate ourselves for not being him.

But slavery didn’t require everybody to be Simon Legree. It required an atmosphere in which owning another human being made sense. And by the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States had two increasingly incompatible visions of how that atmosphere should work.

The Civil War was about a lot of things because history is always about a lot of things. But at the center of the collision was a Southern social and economic order constructed around Capitalized Labor.

The North was hardly some racial paradise. Northern banks, merchants, and manufacturers profited from cotton. Northern white people could be spectacularly racist. Abolitionists could oppose slavery without particularly wanting a Black family living next door.

Everybody was breathing some of the same polluted air.

But one society had built its economic foundation upon the legal proposition that a human being could be capital.

Then the war came. The slaves were freed. Problem solved.

Well, hell.

We know better than that. And this is where I discovered that I need to be a little careful about pointing my finger at all those capitalists. Because I am one.

Ouch.

I spent most of my working life as a United Methodist preacher. I had more of an “honorarium” than a salary. This was presumably because I did not perform “labor.”

I preached. Apparently that was something else.

Still, every month the church treasurer gave my wife a check, and she put it into our bank account. So I didn’t argue the theological distinction too vigorously. We contributed about three percent of my compensation toward retirement. The church contributed something like twelve percent of my base salary.

And that money went off somewhere. I didn’t do anything with it. Other people did.

It grew.

Year after year, in its inevitable capitalist way, it compounded. When I finally retired, that accumulated money provided me an income that was actually a little better than my average wages during my working life.

Marvelous!

Then there was my grandfather. He bought Kansas land during the 1930s. He worked it. He was clever about it. He pulled perhaps five percent a year out of that land over a lifetime.

There! Capital and Labor dancing together.

Grandpa owned the land. Grandpa worked the land. Then my mother inherited half of it. Eventually I inherited part of that.

I didn’t plow anything. I didn’t plant anything. I didn’t stand out there in July wondering whether that cloud over the horizon was bringing hail to destroy all my work.

I inherited. Eventually, the land was returning only about one and a half percent of its value.

Well, that’s silly. So we sold it. We put the money into investments where it could work harder.

Notice that sentence: Where it could work harder.

I wasn’t going to work harder. The money was. And it did.

Last year, our return was technically around 5%. We even scraped off some of the extra growth to use for our family’s needs.

It is wonderful. I recommend having capital. I am not particularly a capitalist in spirit.

But I sure as hell am one in fact. And that forced me to reconsider another nice picture I had in my head: Capital and Labor doing a lovely little economic dance.

Capital needs labor. Labor needs capital. They negotiate. They agree upon a price. Everybody goes home happy.

Except Capital owns the ballroom.

Capital has accumulated resources. Capital has the building. Capital has the machinery. Capital has the lawyers. Capital has the contracts. Capital has access to government. Capital has the ability to wait.

Labor has Tuesday. And Tuesday’s rent is due. So the laborer does something rather interesting.

He rents himself out.

That sounds awful, doesn’t it?

Good. It is supposed to.

It isn’t slavery. That distinction is enormous and must not be blurred. The employer does not own the worker. He cannot sell him. He cannot own her children. He cannot beat him. There are laws concerning what he may demand. The worker can leave. The worst thing the employer can ultimately do is terminate the contract.

But, Capital says, “I give you money, and for eight hours a day, you give me a substantial measure of control over what you do.”

You are a rent-a-slave.

No.

Not really. But close enough to make us squirm a little. Because the nice theoretical distinction between purchasing labor and purchasing the laborer becomes less tidy when we remember that labor doesn’t arrive in a box.

It arrives inside a human being.

You cannot buy eight hours of my labor without buying eight hours of my life. Indeed, during those eight hours you rent my whole being.

Capital and Labor still dance. But let’s not pretend nobody has a hand on anybody’s ass.

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And now we are back to atmosphere.

Capitalism is not evil. That would be a wonderfully simple conclusion, but my retirement account won’t let me be a card-carrying Marxist.

Capital can do marvelous things. It preserves labor across time. My grandfather’s work in the 1930s can still provide something for his great-great-grandchildren nearly a century later. My own deferred compensation can support me after I have stopped producing anything anybody particularly wants to buy. Capital builds factories, funds inventions, constructs houses, finances farms, and lets somebody with a good idea try something stupid enough that it just might work.

Capital is a tool. But tools become institutions. Institutions become assumptions. Assumptions become atmosphere.

And atmosphere becomes invisible precisely because it is everywhere.

That is what happened with slavery. That is what happened with race. The Thirteenth Amendment could abolish slavery. It could not clean the air.

For generations Americans had been taught – not merely in books, not merely in laws, but by the entire organization of ordinary life – that there were white people and there were Negroes.

There. I said it.

That word jars now. It didn’t always. People had no problem with the Negro Baseball League, the United Negro College Fund. Negro spirituals.

And that is precisely the point. It was there in the atmosphere. Perfectly respectable people used it without hearing anything remarkable. It appeared in newspapers, government documents, polite conversation, and church meetings. It was simply the word in the air.

Then we began noticing the air.

And that, I think, is where our current arguments about racism so often go wrong. We look for Simon Legree. Find the racist! Did he use the word? Does she dislike Black people? Did he intentionally discriminate? Does she have Black friends? We examine the individual human being as though racism were some character defect that could be diagnosed with a blood test.

Positive. Negative.

Racist. Not racist.

Black? White?

And if everybody in the room passes the test, we declare the room clean. But we forgot to test the air.

A system doesn’t require anybody to hate. A bank doesn’t have to hate. A school district doesn’t have to hate. A corporation doesn’t have to hate. A real-estate market doesn’t have to hate. A law doesn’t have to hate. A retirement portfolio certainly doesn’t hate anybody.

They don’t have emotions.

They have outcomes.

That doesn’t mean every unequal outcome is racism. It doesn’t mean every institution is secretly plotting against somebody. It doesn’t mean every white person carries some invisible personal guilt inherited from George Washington. That is just another way of staring at the individual and forgetting the atmosphere.

We have to see both.

Which brings me, finally, to two statements that appear to contradict each other.

I believe both.

The danger begins when the ledger is the only thing we look at.

The ledger cannot see a person. It sees labor cost, productivity, assets, liabilities, and return on investment. An enslaved man becomes $1,500. An employee becomes $47,000 a year plus benefits. A retired preacher becomes a beneficiary drawing five percent.

The ledger isn’t evil. It just doesn’t know that those numbers are people.

But:

In slavery and racism, the danger also begins when the individual human is the only thing we look at.

Because then we can find the nice slaveholder, the kindly employer, the non-racist banker, the fair police officer, the compassionate politician, and the good white person. And because we cannot see Simon Legree anywhere, we conclude there isn’t a problem.

One eye sees the person, the other sees the ledger. Together, we catch a glimpse of the atmosphere. We need both eyes open.

It is the only way to get depth.

And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable thing about looking backward at slavery. We can see their atmosphere. It is easy from here. We can see the poison floating around George Washington and Benjamin Franklin because we aren’t breathing their air.

But we are breathing something.

Every generation does. Some of it sustains us. Some of it may be killing somebody. And somewhere, I suspect, one of our grandchildren is going to look back at something perfectly ordinary that you and I did without thinking and ask:

Good Lord! How could they not see that?

Easy.

It was in the air.

Addendum

This essay started with some ongoing assumptions about the past. But it now points rather insistently toward our current atmosphere.

I listen to a number of podcasts in which Millennials discuss old movies. I am sometimes buffeted by their consternation over the sexism embedded in the stories, the racial stereotypes in animated cartoons – the crows in Dumbo, for instance – or certain expressions of violence that went almost unnoticed by audiences at the time.

Quoting a line containing the “N-word” can be terribly difficult for them. Sometimes they will not even play the original audio from the film.

Our present atmosphere contains the rather silly idea, in my opinion, that merely breathing the word is itself the crime. Context can disappear. Quotation can become indistinguishable from usage. The very possibility of discussing one of these “politically incorrect” utterances becomes so fraught that considered philosophical, historical, or even scientific examination becomes “utterly” impossible.

But that is not really a criticism of Millennials. It is another example of the point of this essay.

They are breathing air, too.

So am I.

Every generation notices the pollutants in the atmosphere of generations past. We can look at a movie made in 1940 and immediately see the sexism its original audience hardly noticed. We can watch an old cartoon and wince at a racial stereotype that once sailed past millions of perfectly ordinary Americans. We can hear words that once appeared in polite conversation and wonder how decent people could possibly have spoken that way.

We can see their air because we are not breathing it.

The harder task is discovering what is in ours.

In the 1950s, you could look across Pittsburgh and see the black soot hanging in the air. You could smell it. It settled on buildings and clothes. Nobody needed sophisticated instruments to prove that something was coming out of those smokestacks.

Today the more consequential pollutant is carbon dioxide. It is colorless. Odorless. Invisible. We breathe it without noticing it.

And perhaps that is the final problem with atmosphere.

The most dangerous thing in the air may be the thing we cannot see.