Your argument is essentially: cotton acreage expanded greatly after slavery so therefore slavery was not particularly relevant to cotton profitability before.
That is a classic non sequitur. A thing can be crucial at one stage of development and replaceable later under different conditions. Railroads expanded after canals declined; that doesn’t mean canals were never economically crucial. Horses were replaced by tractors; that doesn’t mean horses were never economically central. What you must show—but do not—is that cotton could have been grown profitably at Southern scale, in Southern conditions, without slavery, during the antebellum period. 1895 acreage proves nothing about that counterfactual.
The argument further confuses aggregate expansion with marginal profitability. Antebellum slavery mattered precisely because land was abundant, labor scarce, capital markets thin, and discipline costly. Later acreage growth occurred under national markets, surplus labor, railroads, and federal enforcement of contracts. One cannot infer nineteenth-century Southern labor economics from late-century national outcomes without committing a category error.
The comparison with grain is analytically empty. Similar rates of acreage expansion say nothing about labor regimes. Cotton and grain differ profoundly in labor intensity, mechanizability, and organizational form. Treating them as comparable because they both expanded is rhetorical, not economic reasoning.
Finally, the argument suppresses a decisive counterfactual: if slavery was not particularly relevant to profitability, then the chronic under-industrialization of the antebellum South becomes inexplicable. The concentration of capital in land and enslaved individuals distorted incentives and locked elites into an extractive agricultural equilibrium. The postwar transition did not refute this logic; it replaced personal domination with increasingly abstract forms of labor control.
What I think might be missing in your math is that nations compete for dominance in any given market and age. Example would be AI or energy. During the 19th century the game-on was textiles. The Northerners as we call them here in the South owned and operated all the textile mills and were competing with Britain for world domination. Well as you reported the South had the raw material and put it out for bid. England won the bid and the North threatened export taxes on the South's cotton. Fort Sumter happened and we started killing each other. The Northern family got tired of sending their sons to die in the battle fields for the wealthy business men so the politicians decided to make it an ethical war by Lincoln's Executive Order the Emancipation Proclamation in Sept 0r 1862. The rest is history. Falla tha dalla.
It's interesting to note that the pre-18th C Euro-N. Amer. thinkers were theists - which J. Barzun (at least) linked to humanism. Stripped down, they were those who knew or learned from cabalistic studies that e.g. God was supra-rational (as one way to put it) - as in, "so rational, we cannot understand Him (unless we keep praying and thinking)" vs. deists, who by contrast, were happy with God being a rational buddy by 1800. (Cabalism is called "mystical" - but what it is, is deep, thick text studies and writing, looking for insights as per talmudic scholars - of which Newton is BTW considered one.) The Spinozas/Boyles etc. knew e.g. that "physical laws" weren't God's - but ours, and I think somewhere the B. of Genesis backs this up. Obtaining them, on the other hand, is a bitch. God's not a human one to Newton: he calls Him "a Force" (Principia, 2nd edition intro.) This later makes him tantamount to a racist, but that's how Jews know God too. Cotton Mather, fellow Salem-ite, and much vilified, did science; when he studied spiders, one time, he followed all the modern paths you do now, only adding, when he did not know, "more insight from the Lord is needed." Today, strip this out for "more research." For theists, God guides us to know ourselves in His universe(s) and we cannot know Him .It is Judaic in a way (read E.A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, where he explains Boyle, Newton etc.) and the Spinoza-Descartes link stamps modern science as, indeed, Judeo-Christian (both gents paying for this crossover BTW - painfully too.). It is no surprise that the 18th C brings in the "ages": industrial, and especially, "romantic." (The German one's a beauty.) One gets the impression that in the 18th, it became, "Ok, ok...but traveling Boyle's and Newton's path is too hard (whether using prayer or calculations, the one sometimes to find the other!). Let's cut God down to size so we can understand Him better." Why the deists have the better rep than theists becomes clear when we think of the revolutionary times that came about. They assumed in later history that Newton - Boyle and their laws were inviolate, nearly. Not subject to the (ultimate) change their discoverers implied. Also, the quasi-Judaic path must've stuck in many a Roman Catholic/Lutheran craw on both sides of the lake. Anti semitism going back before the time the Roman Empire was led by Germans - you know, by actual Romans - is not new knowledge. Now, insert John's fine points about innumeracy...
Strong piece on innumeracy. The Malthus takedown is particularly sharp because it exposes how mathematical-sounding arguments can persist for centuries despite having no empirical basis. I've seen this same pattern in policy debates where people treat exponential growth projections as inevitable without understanding saturation curves. The calculus requirement for economics makes a ton of sens given how much modern econ relies on optimization problems.
Your argument is essentially: cotton acreage expanded greatly after slavery so therefore slavery was not particularly relevant to cotton profitability before.
That is a classic non sequitur. A thing can be crucial at one stage of development and replaceable later under different conditions. Railroads expanded after canals declined; that doesn’t mean canals were never economically crucial. Horses were replaced by tractors; that doesn’t mean horses were never economically central. What you must show—but do not—is that cotton could have been grown profitably at Southern scale, in Southern conditions, without slavery, during the antebellum period. 1895 acreage proves nothing about that counterfactual.
The argument further confuses aggregate expansion with marginal profitability. Antebellum slavery mattered precisely because land was abundant, labor scarce, capital markets thin, and discipline costly. Later acreage growth occurred under national markets, surplus labor, railroads, and federal enforcement of contracts. One cannot infer nineteenth-century Southern labor economics from late-century national outcomes without committing a category error.
The comparison with grain is analytically empty. Similar rates of acreage expansion say nothing about labor regimes. Cotton and grain differ profoundly in labor intensity, mechanizability, and organizational form. Treating them as comparable because they both expanded is rhetorical, not economic reasoning.
Finally, the argument suppresses a decisive counterfactual: if slavery was not particularly relevant to profitability, then the chronic under-industrialization of the antebellum South becomes inexplicable. The concentration of capital in land and enslaved individuals distorted incentives and locked elites into an extractive agricultural equilibrium. The postwar transition did not refute this logic; it replaced personal domination with increasingly abstract forms of labor control.
What I think might be missing in your math is that nations compete for dominance in any given market and age. Example would be AI or energy. During the 19th century the game-on was textiles. The Northerners as we call them here in the South owned and operated all the textile mills and were competing with Britain for world domination. Well as you reported the South had the raw material and put it out for bid. England won the bid and the North threatened export taxes on the South's cotton. Fort Sumter happened and we started killing each other. The Northern family got tired of sending their sons to die in the battle fields for the wealthy business men so the politicians decided to make it an ethical war by Lincoln's Executive Order the Emancipation Proclamation in Sept 0r 1862. The rest is history. Falla tha dalla.
It's interesting to note that the pre-18th C Euro-N. Amer. thinkers were theists - which J. Barzun (at least) linked to humanism. Stripped down, they were those who knew or learned from cabalistic studies that e.g. God was supra-rational (as one way to put it) - as in, "so rational, we cannot understand Him (unless we keep praying and thinking)" vs. deists, who by contrast, were happy with God being a rational buddy by 1800. (Cabalism is called "mystical" - but what it is, is deep, thick text studies and writing, looking for insights as per talmudic scholars - of which Newton is BTW considered one.) The Spinozas/Boyles etc. knew e.g. that "physical laws" weren't God's - but ours, and I think somewhere the B. of Genesis backs this up. Obtaining them, on the other hand, is a bitch. God's not a human one to Newton: he calls Him "a Force" (Principia, 2nd edition intro.) This later makes him tantamount to a racist, but that's how Jews know God too. Cotton Mather, fellow Salem-ite, and much vilified, did science; when he studied spiders, one time, he followed all the modern paths you do now, only adding, when he did not know, "more insight from the Lord is needed." Today, strip this out for "more research." For theists, God guides us to know ourselves in His universe(s) and we cannot know Him .It is Judaic in a way (read E.A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, where he explains Boyle, Newton etc.) and the Spinoza-Descartes link stamps modern science as, indeed, Judeo-Christian (both gents paying for this crossover BTW - painfully too.). It is no surprise that the 18th C brings in the "ages": industrial, and especially, "romantic." (The German one's a beauty.) One gets the impression that in the 18th, it became, "Ok, ok...but traveling Boyle's and Newton's path is too hard (whether using prayer or calculations, the one sometimes to find the other!). Let's cut God down to size so we can understand Him better." Why the deists have the better rep than theists becomes clear when we think of the revolutionary times that came about. They assumed in later history that Newton - Boyle and their laws were inviolate, nearly. Not subject to the (ultimate) change their discoverers implied. Also, the quasi-Judaic path must've stuck in many a Roman Catholic/Lutheran craw on both sides of the lake. Anti semitism going back before the time the Roman Empire was led by Germans - you know, by actual Romans - is not new knowledge. Now, insert John's fine points about innumeracy...
Strong piece on innumeracy. The Malthus takedown is particularly sharp because it exposes how mathematical-sounding arguments can persist for centuries despite having no empirical basis. I've seen this same pattern in policy debates where people treat exponential growth projections as inevitable without understanding saturation curves. The calculus requirement for economics makes a ton of sens given how much modern econ relies on optimization problems.