A peculiar silence: The Scottish Enlightenment, political economy, and the early American debates over slavery

Abstract

This paper explores the economic critique of slave labor that emerged from the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment and the general failure of these ideas to influence American debates over slavery in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. While the Scottish school of political economy was quite influential in revolutionary America, neither antislavery advocates nor economic writers chose to follow the Scots in analyzing the deeper economic ramifications of the “peculiar” institution. Indeed, Americans who discussed slavery generally framed the issue in terms of morality, religion, legal principles, or humanitarian sensibilities. They rarely focused on slavery as a system of labor, or its effects on commercial growth. This tendency represented a peculiar feature of the late eighteenth-century debates over slavery in America. In other parts of the British Empire and Atlantic world, the discourse of political economy became one of the primary lenses through which contemporaries viewed the institution. And as historians of antebellum America have long noted, the supposed economic limitations of slavery was key in driving public anxiety over the future of the institution. This paper seeks to explore the historical roots of this “free labor” ideology in the Scottish discourse of political economy; how this critique of bondage was connected to a larger pattern of philosophical and commercial suppositions; and how this constellation of ideas took on different meanings when Americans grafted their own priorities onto the economic agenda of the Scots. Ultimately, the piece aims to reveal some of the tensions and dissonances which historically shaped the transmission of ideas from one distinct context to another.