Linh is a peeler on the shrimp line I own outside Beaufort, South Carolina — on the same coast where the slave ships docked, which I mention not as history but as procurement geography. Her hands work 8 hours in a brine solution that eats the skin below the nail bed, and the chemical-resistant gloves that would protect her cost $0.04 a pair, and I don’t buy the $0.04, and I haven’t bought it for three seasons. You’ll eat the shrimp. You’ll eat it at the Fourth of July party your aunt is putting together, the ring she picks up at the warehouse store for $7.99 a pound, and the $0.04 I keep by not buying Linh the gloves is the smallest line item on my margin sheet and the one I am least likely to surrender. The Lord finds the arrangement productive. The shrimp will be deveined and ready.
Freeman, in the Journal, reminds us this week that Jefferson’s original Rough Draught of the Declaration contained a passage the Congress cut — a denunciation of the slave trade as “a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him.” Freeman draws the arc from that passage through Emancipation, the Bill of Rights, and Reagan at the Wall. The arc is correct. He stops one sentence early. The sentence he won’t write is that the paragraph was cut because the colonies couldn’t afford it — because the tobacco and the rice and the cotton depended on a labor model the paragraph priced as a crime. That isn’t a failure of nerve. It’s a cost-benefit analysis, and it’s the same one I run at six every morning before I open the processing floor.
Stay with me. I want you to hold the arithmetic.
The slaveholding colonies had, at the time of the Declaration, roughly 500,000 enslaved people. Their labor was the capital base of the Southern economy — the asset against which the loans were secured, the crop was financed, and the planter class maintained its posture. Jefferson’s paragraph wouldn’t have freed a single one of them. It would have named the procurement mechanism — called it a crime against nature — and the slaveholding colonies understood, before the ink dried, that a name is the first step toward a price, a price is the first step toward a cost, and a cost is the thing that makes you set down your quill and look at the ledger.
So they cut the paragraph. Not because it was wrong. Because it was expensive.
Now.
Do you see what happened? The Congress kept the poetry — “all men are created equal,” “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” — and cut the one passage that made the poetry specific. The poetry costs nothing. The paragraph would have cost everything. 250 years later, we celebrate the poetry on the Fourth of July and eat the shrimp, and the paragraph is still missing, and Linh’s knuckles are the reason it was always going to be missing.
Thornton Stringfellow, a Virginia Baptist pastor, published in 1841 what the Continental Congress had refused to:
“The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.”
—Thornton Stringfellow, A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery (1841)
Stringfellow named the divine mandate that Jefferson’s Congress declined to write into law. Jefferson tried to indict the trade; Stringfellow blessed it. I read the blessing every morning, and I find it remunerative.
The Founders, we are told, created a nation of equals. The Founders created a nation that said it was equal and then priced the inequality so carefully that it could be maintained, century after century, without ever calling it by its real name.
The slave code became the Black Code. The Black Code became the convict lease. The convict lease became Jim Crow.
Jim Crow became what I run — the permatemp classification, the staffing-agency shell, the $0.04.
The name changes. The arithmetic does not.
Linh makes $11.25 an hour. I pay her through a labor broker who takes $1.50 for the placement fee. She financed that fee at 22%, because her credit is what 11 years of $11.25 an hour produces. Her effective wage is $9.75.
The $0.04 gloves would cut into a margin I’ve calculated to the hundredth of a cent. Her Medicaid application was approved in March — the state of South Carolina now covers the dermatological treatment for the chemical burns on her hands. You pay for the treatment. I keep the $0.04. I’ve arranged the arithmetic so that both halves are true at the same time.
Say it back to me.
A woman peels your shrimp for a Fourth of July party. The gloves that would save her hands cost 4 cents. I keep the 4 cents. The state treats the damage. You fund the state. The shrimp is $7.99 a pound. The Declaration says she was created equal. The payroll says she’s worth $9.75. I run the payroll, not the Declaration, and in 250 years this Republic has never once reconciled the two.
I’m told the 250th anniversary is a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come. I have reflected.
The quarterly number is strong.
I haven’t checked the other one.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.