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W Leggett
In focusing upon the evolution of Leggett's antislavery beliefs and their importance to his contemporary reception, it is not my intention to constrain the ensuing discussion to this infamously intractable problem of antebellum America. Leggett was a complex thinker whose interests included a sophisticated assault upon the mercantile economic program of Henry Clay, the Bank of the United States, and the proliferation of graft and favoritism to the friends of political figures. He united these beliefs in a common critique against the government's role in the allocation of special privileges and monopolies, its perpetuation of political power through bribes from the public treasury, and its exercise of force to sustain unjust products of political favor. To Leggett the state was an agent of enrichment for the politically empowered and depredation against the impoverished – a tyranny of:
CONCENTRATED MONEY POWER; a usurper in the disguise of a benefactor; an agent exercising privileges which his principal never possessed; an imposter who, while he affects to wear chains, is placed above those who are free; a chartered libertine, that pretends to be manacled only that he may the more safely pick our pockets, and lord it over our rights.[11]
The significance of this formula is its articulation of a common thread between what might otherwise appear as disparate and eclectic spaces of policy – the protective tariff, the bank, state charters and monopolies, land grants, internal-improvement subsidies, and the slave system were all legal instruments of allocating privilege to the politically connected and extracting wealth and rights from the masses. Such practices chafed with the basic democratic sentiments of Leggett, constituting a violation of a natural equality in the public sphere of political participation. They converted the state from a representative body to an agent for the dispersal of favor and the reallocation of wealth.
By positing this common thread, Leggett established a consistent intellectual link between his articulation of free-market and antislavery principles. That link placed him in opposition to many of his own contemporaries, and indeed the rancor he encountered in his lifetime likely reflected his uncommon ability to detect and call attention to the inconsistencies of his critics. Slavery and trade represented one such inconsistency. The political landscape of the 1830s, and particularly the fallout of the Nullification Crisis, had curiously positioned John C. Calhoun as the country's most prominent opponent of the protective tariff at a time when he was also its foremost defender of the slave system.
While modern historians have pointed to this juxtaposition as evidence that the former serviced the latter (an import tariff, after all, imposes its domestic burdens upon exporters as per the Lerner symmetry theorem, and the plantation south was an export economy), Leggett recognized a base example of political opportunism hiding behind appeals to principle. Calhoun's antitariff stance of 1828 only serviced his quest for the political power of allocating favor, and the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which disentangled the confrontation, only "delighted [him] with so capital an excuse for postponing his plan of nullification to a more favourable opportunity" that simultaneously permitted arch-protectionist Henry Clay to claim personal sacrifice of his protectionist "friends on the alter of Union." Their mutual de-escalation, Leggett maintained, amounted to "absurd pretensions" in which Calhoun executed a "cunning" if convenient retreat to a problem of his own creation, and Clay "only assented to what he could not prevent."[12]
Leggett's free-trade rigidity and general laissez-faire disposition on economic matters further belie an increasingly common assertion of modern scholarship. A currently fashionable strain of the historical literature holds that chattel slavery is a direct derivative or even a defining feature of "capitalism," by which the claimant usually means free-market or noninterventionist economic policies of the very same type that Leggett championed. A burgeoning literature on the "New History of Capitalism" advances this claim at its core, even going so far as to rebrand mercantilist policies as "war capitalism," as per Harvard historian Sven Beckert, or "racial slave capitalism," as per his colleague Walter Johnson.[13]
The overarching aim of this ongoing historical rebranding is to shed a notion common in the economic literature since Adam Smith: that slavery and markets existed in oppositional tension due to the unfree labor system it fostered, due to the associated economic retardation that plantation agriculture imposed upon industrial development, and perhaps most importantly due to the severe political distortions that came from the legal enactment and sustenance of the slave system. This last point is perhaps the least developed in modern historiographical discussions about slavery but was also the central theme of several biting abolitionist commentaries in the American Civil War era. In addition to its corrupting ethical nature and related economic distortions, slavery incubated a powerful political class that was invested in its perpetuation and that directed the full energy and treasury of the government toward its enforcement. The predatory existence of this political "slave power," as J.E. Cairnes dubbed it in 1863, explained why solving the problem of slavery would require overcoming decades of entrenched political interests and why political abolitionism met with such ferocious resistance, backlash, censorship, and even violence.[14]
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