DSJ: What role did Adam Smith’s economic thought play in US debates about slavery? I was, for instance, quite intrigued that Frederick Douglass was a reader of Smith. What did Douglass find attractive about his thought?
GL: Smith’s thought, and more generally the language of political economy, provided a way for American legislators to talk about slavery without talking about slavery. Debates about trade in the antebellum decades were debates about the constitution of the national economy. Appealing to the seemingly neutral causal logic of free trade—that the government shouldn’t direct how labor and capital should be deployed, and that free trade would benefit the whole nation, not just a particular region—allowed pro-slavery advocates to argue for the profitability of a system that relied on slave labor. At the same time, pro-tariff Northerners advanced their own idea of a national economy that was heavily dependent on slavery’s expansion, or at least its persistence.
Now, one notable departure from this pattern that I discuss briefly is the abolitionist Charles Sumner’s 1860 speech “The Barbarism of Slavery.” Sumner’s main argument was that slavery was fundamentally incompatible with civilization. Alongside people like Thomas Jefferson and John Locke, Sumner quotes Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as a “philosophical authority” to prove his point. So rather than arguing that slavery was bad on economic grounds, Sumner, like many abolitionists, is trying to mount the case that slavery is immoral. Using Smith as a philosophical rather than economic authority helps him do that. I don’t know how close a reader of Smith that Douglass was, but he was certainly familiar enough with Smith to quote him in a speech in 1864. Regardless, I think there’s something in Smith’s observations about slavery in The Wealth of Nations that Douglass probably found quite appealing. The persistence of slavery can’t be explained by economic forces alone; Smith argued that slave labor would never be as productive or as profitable as free labor (he also found it morally abhorrent). Nevertheless, “the pride of man makes him love to domineer,” and it’s this taste for domination that underlined people’s preference for slave over free labor. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that Douglass found a lot of power in that explanation.
