Material Conditions Matter: Slavery, the Fall of Rome, and the American Civil War

(c) by Mark Dempsey

A recent article about the fall of Rome cites the corruption and lack of civic consciousness of the elites as some of the causes of (Western) Rome's fall in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. However, it overlooks one important material cause of Rome's decline: food shortages. Material conditions matter.

Early Roman farmers practiced sustainable agriculture, maintaining soil fertility as they grew their crops. As more conquests produced more slaves, however, they abandoned those techniques to farm with slaves. Slaves don't care if they deplete the soil.

The depleted soil meant declining food production for Rome, which became more dependent on imported food, particularly from its North African colonies. The Vandals battled their way down the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa and shut off that food source. When the barbarians came to Rome, the hungry population opened the gates for them.*

One reason farming with slaves came to the New World in the American South was because Old World diseases like malaria and yellow fever decimated populations that might have otherwise supplied workers.** Africans had resistance to these diseases, so slavery made economic sense in a New World short of human labor, and was particularly necessary in the areas where the yellow fever and malaria vectors (mosquitoes) existed--roughly from the Mason-Dixon line to the northern border of Argentina.

Those diseases may also be the reason Napoleon's soldiers couldn't defeat a 1791–1804 slave revolt in Haiti. An army with too many deaths from illness is much easier to defeat.

Plantation operators solved the depleted soil problem in the New World not by planting soil-restoring crops like peanuts, but by moving to new territory and "mining" that soil. As the US expanded westward, the debate about whether the new territories would allow slavery was one of existential importance, at least to the South, where soils were degrading thanks to slave-based farming. The South's economic dependence on soil fertility trumped all the moralizing from abolitionists.

Farming cotton with slaves is perilous for other reasons too. Andrew Jackson's administration stole much of the Southeastern US from its native inhabitants despite Supreme Courts in Georgia and Washington D.C. confirming that the natives owned the land. Jackson dared the Supreme Court to enforce its order, and evicted the tribes from their land with a march called the "Trail of Tears." Note: Trump is not the first president to defy the courts.

This defiance made lots of new territory available for cotton farmers who occupied the land and borrowed to buy new slaves. But the income with which they expected to pay those loans did not materialize because they produced so much cotton that the price descended to new lows, even though they warehoused 60% of the crop.

Their difficulties were further compounded because, in 1835, Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt entirely and revoked the charter for the National Bank. That meant there was no public currency. People did their business with specie (monetized gold) and over 7,000 varieties of private bank notes of varying reliability. 

It was a business nightmare, and many planters lost everything because they lost their dollar savings and couldn't pay slave loans with either their cotton income or those savings. A wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures – the "Panic of 1837"– ensued.

These events set the stage for the American Civil War. That war impoverished the South even more since, after the South lost, all its banks failed, and its Confederate currency was worthless. 

The postwar period was full of predatory lending from suppliers – the "furnishing man" later shortened to "The Man" – and the Gilded Age of predatory capitalism met with populist resistance from the only partly successful Farmers’ Alliance and the People's Party.

Both Rome and the American South illustrate how social inequality leads to a deterioration of civic life and the danger of social collapse. Currently, the US is experiencing massive social inequality, and even echoes Rome's dependence on imported food.

"Sustainability" is a watchword for some public policy candidates, but there's seldom any interest in a comprehensive pursuit of that goal. Even the way the US builds its cities--"suburban sprawl" – means maintenance expenses grow faster than the tax base, so our particular Ponzi scheme is literally cast in concrete. 

The rhyme of history may not be the one we want to hear.

*This simplifies some complex history, but if you're interested in the details, read Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians.

**See Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus