No shortcut to the millennium

There’s a common phenomenon in political polling. An unpopular incumbent is matched against an unspecified candidate of the opposition party. The opposition candidate shows a substantial lead. The opposition party grows excited. It nominates a candidate it expects will sweep to victory. Suddenly the race tightens up. The incumbent appears to have become more popular.

In reality, it’s not the incumbent who has changed. It’s the opposition candidate. Specifically, the opposition candidate has gone from being an abstract alternative to the unpopular incumbent to a flesh and blood individual with baggage of his or her own.

The principle generalizes. Something is never replaced by nothing. It’s replaced by something else. The existing something has drawbacks. Any replacement will have drawbacks too. It’s just that you don’t know what they are until you specify what the replacement is.

Britain’s parliament in 1833 passed legislation outlawing slavery in the British empire. This was a blow for freedom for which the British had a right to feel proud. But not as proud as they often seemed to people in other countries who were on the receiving end of lectures to follow the British example.

Eliminating slavery didn’t eliminate the need for labor on the plantations of the West Indies and other British colonies. In some cases that labor was supplied by former slaves now being paid. But another source of labor was soon discovered. India contained many poor people willing to sell themselves or their children into indentured labor. Conditions of recruitment were not closely regulated, and a traffic less brutal than slavery’s middle passage from West Africa but plenty harsh developed. The indentured laborers had few enforceable rights. Their contracts could be bought and sold, in much the way slaves had been bought and sold. The indenture contracts were time limited, and indentured labor was not hereditary the way slavery was. But on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis, the indentured workers were hardly better off than the enslaved workers had been.

Something similar happened in the United States after 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, but it didn’t abolish the need for labor to tend the crops of the South. Nor did it abolish the necessity for the former slaves and their dependents to eat and be clothed and housed. And it didn’t immediately convert the semi-feudal economy of the South into a cash-based modern economy.

What emerged in the wake of emancipation was the system of sharecropping. Landowners provided seeds, tools and acreage to the workers in exchange for the harvested crop, of which the workers received a share, typically a third to a half.

In terms of personal freedom, sharecropping was a dramatic improvement over slavery. Day by day, the sharecroppers’ time was their own. They couldn’t legally be bought and sold and abused the way slaves could be. They had rights that could be defended in court, albeit at times with difficulty.

In practice, sharecroppers were often tied to the land by debts that accrued from year to year. It might or might not have afforded comfort to the former slaves to observe white sharecroppers, who outnumbered the black sharecroppers across the South, in much the same predicament. Indeed, their common misfortune inspired early populists in the South to preach an alliance between white and black farmers and workers. Briefly the alliance appeared to gain traction. But the white landowners and employers engaged in race-baiting that caused the alliance to fall apart. Blacks were left to fend for themselves.

Don’t like something? By all means campaign against it. But bear in mind that something else will replace it. If you’re confident the something else will be better, go ahead. But if you don’t know what the something else will be, take a second look.

At the least, the exercise will temper your disappointment when your reform doesn’t deliver the millennium at once. Indentured labor and sharecropping left a lot to be desired. But in their day they represented progress.

That’s how change comes in human affairs: one painful step at a time.