Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 91

23. Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Economic Cost of Slave-Holding in the Cotton Belt,” Political Science Quarterly 20 (No. 2, 1905): 257-75 (reprint, Boston: Ginn & Co., 1905).

Analysis of the economic viability of slavery in the ante-bellum South. The author concludes that “Because they were blinded by the abolition agitation in the North, and other historical developments which we cannot here discuss, most of the later generation of ante-bellum planters could not see that slaveholding was essentially burdensome. . . In the great system of southern industry and commerce, working with seeming smoothness, the negro laborers were inefficient in spite of discipline, and slavery was an obstacle to all progress.”