[Jonty30]

Where did I say that they would have made more money by ending slavery and paying wages?

I didn’t say that, because that isn’t true. They would have had to pay a wage to keep workers and that would have cost the plantation owners more, but it’s unlikely the North would have paid more if they could avoid it. Food is cheap and the board was built in, because it was on the plantation. Paying wages would have meant paying enough to pay for the food and lodgings elsewhere.

According to you, paying for food and lodgings and clothes was more expensive than paying wages that would have covered plus taxation. That premise seems moronic to me.

[ifinnegan]

“ Where did I say that they would have made more money by ending slavery and paying wages?”

I said that.

Your premise that ending slavery would bankrupt plantation owners is ludicrous.

[Adder]

but it’s unlikely the North would have paid more if they could avoid it.

The North would have had no choice but to pay if that was in the cost of goods. They needed Southern cotton to keep their mills running.

The South could have used a “migrant” worker system such as developed in CA for example. They could have done alot of different things to work around slavery.
But they didn’t. Even Jefferson who wanted to declare an end to slavery in the Declaration kept his slaves...they all did.

[Excellent question, btw]

[Alberta's Child]

Paying wages doesn’t mean you make less money. Productivity is a far more important metric than cost.

This was what ultimately crippled the South. When Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery and fled to the North, he ended up working as a laborer in a shipyard in New Bedford, Massachusetts. One of the things that stood out to him was that even as a lowly laborer in a shipyard he had a better standard of living than his slave master in Maryland.

[Theophilus]

paying for food and lodgings and clothes was more expensive than paying wages

and then the industrialists invented "the company store"

You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

[Phlyer]

Paying wages would have meant paying enough to pay for the food and lodgings elsewhere.

Why? What is your evidence that would be the case? There was no 'minimum wage' let along a 'living wage'. After slavery was ended, there were lots of starving sharecroppers in the South. That's where a lot of what are now considered Southern dishes came from - making food out of the least desirable parts of farm animals.

The reality is that slavery was like socialism. There was no profit incentive for slaves to work hard or be productive. If they had a profit incentive (actual wages that depended on productivity) there is every reason to believe they'd have worked harder and more productively - leading to greater true wealth for both workers and employers.

However, until that was sorted out, there was a lot of starvation and malnutrition leading to lifelong handicapping of both white and black sharecroppers.