Slavery gives power in only one significant way, and that's political.
A long takedown of why slavery is always economically a poor plan is probably a bit inappropriate, but Thomas Sowell covers it fairly well in "Black Rednecks & White Liberals". I'll summarize it as: to the larger economy, it works quite similar to mass migration: regulated and imported people colonize areas, are made economically dependent on the slave owners (so that even being freed is a poor individual economic choice for them), but they also depress wages from the domestic population, and cut off entire industries to the general population. Worse, slaves are actually wildly expensive, not only to purchase, but to maintain. Slavery is inherently inferior to "capital investments", which make your systems more efficient by automating something (even without computers). Economically, slavery is a bad idea UNLESS you have the government step in to prop it up. The reason the government wants to step in is because slave-owners can effectively maintain absolute control over portions of the economy by keeping domestic workers and competition out of the market. This means that the government no longer has to accept the economy as it is, but can manipulate it through a handful of slave-owning aristocrats.
This benefits the slave-owners because it brings them tremendous political power & influence within the government, since they are effectively keystones in an economy. Slavery inherently pushes out small business farmers and competition, but the government protects the extreme expense of keeping and owning slaves. If we look back to American history, this is one of the reasons why abolitionists and anti-slavery activists actually thought the equivalent of a political revolution or war would be necessary. Slavery was extremely heavily regulated. It's one of the reasons slave owners weren't allowed by the state to free their slaves. Effectively, they would only tolerate slave owners transferring slaves over to other slave owners, so that the state could maintain it's control over the economy. This is why the American south was so slow to industrialize, and when slavery ended, it faced an economic collapse as literally none of the whites were prepared to pick cotton or farm yams. Share cropping was invented to basically try and keep a dead slave system going.
More than that, this problem of a plantation aristocracy having total control over the economies and governments of southern states was the literal basis of the 3/5ths compromise. The Left complains that the compromise meant that "blacks were only considered 3/5ths of a person", but the compromise explicitly doesn't mention race, because free blacks were still counted as "freemen", or simply: non-slaves.
In the constitutional conventions, the House of Representatives was always designed to create a legislative body based off of population NOT NUMBER OF CITIZENS (nobody really knew what a US Citizen even was yet). All the delegates understood that more population gave them more power. However, the New England states that opposed slavery understood that all the slave states had to do to increase their power in government was to just import population at will. The rest of the country wouldn't be okay with letting in literal hordes of foreigners, but the slave states could import hordes of slaves, and so long as they had them in their plantations' records (whether or not they were alive), they'd basically be able to give themselves infinite power, when they were already the central pillars of power in both the economy and government in southern states. So they proposed that slaves be NOT counted into the population.
The slave states through an absolute fit, and the constitutional convention nearly ended right there. The slave states were going to walk completely the fuck out because they knew that their strongest political advantage was being evaporated. The slave states demanded that literally every person in the country be counted, slaves, women, foreigners, infants, criminals, everyone. (They didn't realize how badly that strategy would go as the northern states were going to have a population boom). If the government is to be truly representative of all people, then it must include literally everyone. The anti-slavery states said it would be ridiculous to count slaves since they are explicitly deprived of any political rights, and are effectively just incarcerated foreigners. The government shouldn't be representing them at all. Worse, if slaves are property, why not count cattle, and sheep, and trees?
Nobody budged when an offer of counting them as 1/2 was made, but 3/5ths is slightly better than one half, and the anti-slavery states were never gonna get 0, but the slave states were never gonna get 1. So: 3/5ths compromise.
Let's look at how serious a political problem this would have been by the time of the civil war. The population of the northern states was somewhere around 20 million. The population of the southern states was 9 million... 4 million of that were slaves. If the anti-slavery states had gotten their way, slave state representatives would have had somewhere around 1/5th of the house. They had slightly more than that, thanks to the 3/5ths compromise. This is why Senate control was so fucking dire, and why the slave states sent militias into "Bleeding Kansas" to make Kansas a slave state.
I hope that kind of explains why slavery is politically useful to slave-owners.
Ah... thanks for this response. The last half of your first long paragraph was particularly illuminating. I've become so cold to the value of politics that I'd forgotten that there was a time where there really were differing opinions and outlooks on life.
I guess it's time to actually read some Sowell, rather than just casually listening to his Hoover Institute interviews, and thinking that he's just basically re-iterating a common sense that the world seems to have lost.
Sorry for the delayed reply back.
Slavery gives power in only one significant way, and that's political.
A long takedown of why slavery is always economically a poor plan is probably a bit inappropriate, but Thomas Sowell covers it fairly well in "Black Rednecks & White Liberals". I'll summarize it as: to the larger economy, it works quite similar to mass migration: regulated and imported people colonize areas, are made economically dependent on the slave owners (so that even being freed is a poor individual economic choice for them), but they also depress wages from the domestic population, and cut off entire industries to the general population. Worse, slaves are actually wildly expensive, not only to purchase, but to maintain. Slavery is inherently inferior to "capital investments", which make your systems more efficient by automating something (even without computers). Economically, slavery is a bad idea UNLESS you have the government step in to prop it up. The reason the government wants to step in is because slave-owners can effectively maintain absolute control over portions of the economy by keeping domestic workers and competition out of the market. This means that the government no longer has to accept the economy as it is, but can manipulate it through a handful of slave-owning aristocrats.
This benefits the slave-owners because it brings them tremendous political power & influence within the government, since they are effectively keystones in an economy. Slavery inherently pushes out small business farmers and competition, but the government protects the extreme expense of keeping and owning slaves. If we look back to American history, this is one of the reasons why abolitionists and anti-slavery activists actually thought the equivalent of a political revolution or war would be necessary. Slavery was extremely heavily regulated. It's one of the reasons slave owners weren't allowed by the state to free their slaves. Effectively, they would only tolerate slave owners transferring slaves over to other slave owners, so that the state could maintain it's control over the economy. This is why the American south was so slow to industrialize, and when slavery ended, it faced an economic collapse as literally none of the whites were prepared to pick cotton or farm yams. Share cropping was invented to basically try and keep a dead slave system going.
More than that, this problem of a plantation aristocracy having total control over the economies and governments of southern states was the literal basis of the 3/5ths compromise. The Left complains that the compromise meant that "blacks were only considered 3/5ths of a person", but the compromise explicitly doesn't mention race, because free blacks were still counted as "freemen", or simply: non-slaves.
In the constitutional conventions, the House of Representatives was always designed to create a legislative body based off of population NOT NUMBER OF CITIZENS (nobody really knew what a US Citizen even was yet). All the delegates understood that more population gave them more power. However, the New England states that opposed slavery understood that all the slave states had to do to increase their power in government was to just import population at will. The rest of the country wouldn't be okay with letting in literal hordes of foreigners, but the slave states could import hordes of slaves, and so long as they had them in their plantations' records (whether or not they were alive), they'd basically be able to give themselves infinite power, when they were already the central pillars of power in both the economy and government in southern states. So they proposed that slaves be NOT counted into the population.
The slave states through an absolute fit, and the constitutional convention nearly ended right there. The slave states were going to walk completely the fuck out because they knew that their strongest political advantage was being evaporated. The slave states demanded that literally every person in the country be counted, slaves, women, foreigners, infants, criminals, everyone. (They didn't realize how badly that strategy would go as the northern states were going to have a population boom). If the government is to be truly representative of all people, then it must include literally everyone. The anti-slavery states said it would be ridiculous to count slaves since they are explicitly deprived of any political rights, and are effectively just incarcerated foreigners. The government shouldn't be representing them at all. Worse, if slaves are property, why not count cattle, and sheep, and trees?
Nobody budged when an offer of counting them as 1/2 was made, but 3/5ths is slightly better than one half, and the anti-slavery states were never gonna get 0, but the slave states were never gonna get 1. So: 3/5ths compromise.
Let's look at how serious a political problem this would have been by the time of the civil war. The population of the northern states was somewhere around 20 million. The population of the southern states was 9 million... 4 million of that were slaves. If the anti-slavery states had gotten their way, slave state representatives would have had somewhere around 1/5th of the house. They had slightly more than that, thanks to the 3/5ths compromise. This is why Senate control was so fucking dire, and why the slave states sent militias into "Bleeding Kansas" to make Kansas a slave state.
I hope that kind of explains why slavery is politically useful to slave-owners.
Ah... thanks for this response. The last half of your first long paragraph was particularly illuminating. I've become so cold to the value of politics that I'd forgotten that there was a time where there really were differing opinions and outlooks on life.
I guess it's time to actually read some Sowell, rather than just casually listening to his Hoover Institute interviews, and thinking that he's just basically re-iterating a common sense that the world seems to have lost.