Aristotle can help explain the absence of innovation in slave based societies.

I’ve been interested about the viability of slavery in an industrialized society; I’ve heard it claimed that slavery could only profitably exist, as a significant part of the economy, in large agricultural settings. Thus it is argued that slavery was on the path to extinction, at least in America, as the country, and agriculture itself, industrialized. So the Civil War, and Emancipation, only accelerated the process.

One might look for examples of slavery in industrial concerns in the anti-bellum South. During the War itself, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, and the ironworks in Birmingham (and the mines upstream), were largely slave operated. Were these short term aberrations, possibly related to wartime labor shortages?

Charles Dew’s Bond of Iron chronicles William Weaver’s slave operated Buffalo Forge and various furnace operations in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, beginning 1815; he explores in passing similar operations across western Virginia. All used slaves for all “hands-on” jobs. (When whites were used, generally due to a shortage of slaves, they were determined to be shiftless and mostly drunk.) Ongoing, whites were clerks, overall supervisors, brokers and so on – exclusively. Never hands-on workers.

In iron, tilt hammer technology predated the Revolution; it was still in use throughout the South. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Southern forges came under increasing pressure from cheaper iron produced by the more modern rolling mill technology, used for years in the North and in Great Britain. Weaver and the rest failed to modernize their technology.

To quote (at length) Dew: “Why had William Weaver, a hard-driving Yankee entrepreneur if there ever was one [he hailed from Pennsylvania] largely ignored the technological innovations that had transformed the northern iron industry during the decades prior to the Civil War?

“Certainly part of the explanation lay in the nature of Weaver’s labor force. After he acquired and trained a group of skilled slave artisans in the 1820s and 1830s and had his ironworks functioning successfully, Weaver displayed little interest in trying to improve the technology. Weaver’s tendency was to keep doing things in old, familiar ways. The emphasis was on stability, not innovation. Slavery, in short, seems to have exerted a profoundly conservative influence on the manufacturing process…..This failure to modernize earlier at Buffalo Forge had absolutely nothing to do with the talents of Weaver’s slave artisans….highly skilled workers. ”

I suspect a reason explored by F. W. Walbank in his Decline of the Roman Empire in the West, as excerpted in Donald Kagan’s The End of the Roman Empire: the societal degradation of “hands-on” work, going back to the Greeks. “Because it was normal to associate manual labor with slaves, Greek culture began to draw a line between the things of the hand and the things of the mind [see Aristotle’s Politics]. ‘Certainly the good man and the good citizen ought not to learn the crafts of inferiors except for their own occasional use; if they habitually practice these, there will cease to be a distinction between master and slave^“‘.

Further, Cicero: “Public opinion divides the trades and professions into the liberal and the vulgar; the very wages the laborer receives are a badge of slavery.”

Weaver’s whites did not – in fact, to respect their society, could not – learn manual, hands-on skills.  Thus, they could not learn, and teach to the slave work force, new methods.  And Black slaves, society believed, could not learn intellectually, but only through hands-on apprenticeships.  So no feasible pathway existed for new technology to be adopted.