Were slaves cheap laborers? A comparative study of labor costs in the antebellum U.S. South

Abstract

What was the rationale of exploiting slave laborers instead of employing non-slave laborers? The question has given rise to a long-standing debate among historians. One key controversy in this debate is whether it was economically cheaper to obtain labor from slaves than from non-slaves. This article contributes with the first quantitative estimates comparing the cost of slave and non-slave labor, empirically studying the critical case of the antebellum Southern United States. The findings suggest that the cost of obtaining slave labor was much lower than the cost of obtaining non-slave laborers in this case, and that the difference was large enough to have had important consequences for the production involved, primarily of cotton.