Slavery and Southern Economic Growth

Abstract

The first professional meeting I ever attended as a contributing participant was a joint conference of the Economic History Association and the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, held in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1957. The origins of the so-called new economic history, or cliometrics, are frequently dated to the Williamstown meeting, and for good reason.' The papers presented at the Income and Wealth sessions laid out, in Kuznetsian style, some of the principal quantitative features of the American nineteenth century economy, pushing backward in time series that had been developed at the National Bureau under the influence and direction of Simon Kuznets and Raymond Goldsmith.2 On the other side, the Economic History sessions were much enlivened by two papers presented by Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer.3 One was a methodological piece, plumping for the more liberal use of theory and econometric methods in economic history. The other demonstrated what they meant, by setting out and testing hypotheses they had drawn from the literature on Southern slavery. The conference did more than put the ball in motion, as it were. It also set the tone and style of the new economic history and even forecast the chief methodological and substantive interests that were to occupy cliometricians for the next twenty-one years.4 When I came to choose the subject of my address, naturally my thoughts turned to that early meeting, which so shaped the sub-discipline in which I have spent my professional life. It seemed to me that one could draw several themes from it, two of which were particularly congenial to me. On the one *Presidential Address delivered at the forty-eighth annual meetings of the Southern Economic