Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management

by Caitlin Rosenthal

To borrow a twenty-first-century business buzzword, slavery and quantitative management were synergistic.

From the perspective of slaveholders and other free whites, the freedom to enslave was an economic freedom. They feared abolition because of the ways it would restrict their rights to control labor and property.

From the comfort of the countinghouse—or a basement conference room—it is perilously easy to render human figures as figures on paper, and to imagine men, women, and children as no more than hands.1

Though modern practices are rarely compared to slaveholders’ calculations, many planters in the American South and the West Indies shared our obsession with data.

Many kept extensive records—account books and reports that reflect their experimental and often brutal management practices.

slaveholders built large and complex organizations, conducted productivity analysis akin to scientific management, and developed an array of ways to value and compare human capital.

slavery encouraged the development of sophisticated management practices.

slavery was central to the emergence of the economic system that now goes by that name.4

We know that the amount of capital invested in slaves was massive, by some measurements as large or larger than the amount of capital invested in factories.10

Slavery became a laboratory for the development of accounting because the control drawn on paper matched

the reality of the plantation more closely than that of almost any other early American business enterprise.13

Even the most remarkable intrusions into free workers’ private lives bear no comparison to the minute manipulations of lives perpetrated by slaveholders.14

Slaves resisted, sometimes employing the same strategies that wage workers used in factories. They slowed the pace of work, took supplies, and shared resources.

Though Taylor marketed his system as new, even revolutionary, slaveholders using scientific agriculture had already experimented with many of the same techniques.

Despite this, slavery plays almost no role in histories of management. Even business histories that consider plantation slavery tend to be constrained by the assumption that innovation occurred despite slavery, not because of it.

Cooke charges management scholars not with ignorance but with “denial” because evidence of slaveholders’ management practices was readily available in published historical literature.

these are the histories of exceptional businesspeople who, but for the nature of their business, would already be included in canonical business histories.28

We live in a global economy where the labor of production is often invisible. Distance and quantitative management facilitate this erasure, and assumptions about capitalism and freedom help conceal it. Neither “free” trade nor “free” markets have any necessary relationship with other kinds of human freedoms. Indeed, the history of plantation slavery shows that the opposite can be true.

The losses were large: enslaved people died at catastrophic rates, not just on plantations like Island Estate but in every stage of the Atlantic labor supply chain.

In the British Caribbean, some estimates suggest that as many as half of “New Negroes” died within three years of arrival.6

Only in the mid-nineteenth century would the largest factories begin to approach the scale of late eighteenth-century plantations.

These slaveholdings most closely approximate the hierarchies typically associated with nineteenth-century capitalism, which combined central offices with multiple geographic and product-based divisions.

From an accounting perspective, Shickle saw these simply as two kinds of stock.

A mere 745 properties managed by two hundred attorneys were worked by 42 percent of all Jamaican slaves.

Each slave always had a job to do, and every unit of labor was accounted for. The slaves did not labor on Sundays or the annual Christmas holiday, but for every other day of the year, the allocation of labor across the tasks matched the number of slaves in each gang.50

Disruptions in labor or an uptick in sickness would have been immediately apparent.51

the book of rats, designed to prevent slaves from tricking planters into paying rewards for the same dead rat more than once.56

Head slaves were absolutely critical to successful plantations.

Children’s labor fit strategically into the overall choreography of plantation production. Planters considered their tiny hands superior for the performance of certain tasks. Thomas Roughley claimed that the “supple hand of the negro child is best calculated to extract the weeds and grass.”

Perhaps most important, sending children into the fields introduced them to the strenuous patterns of labor that would govern their lives, accustoming them to constant work.

Planters sought out tiny implements for the youngest children. One Barbadian planter was disappointed to be informed by a supplier that “we have no Children hoes made smaller than No 0.”71

Incorporating slaves into managerial hierarchies was an essential strategy both for organizing production and also for maintaining control.

Parnassus records describe most of the drivers and head workers as able bodied, but the inventory also suggests that planters made use of the injured to supervise other slaves. Abbo, one of the drivers, had lost his hand, as had Shadwell, the head watchman.77

One of the most vexing historical questions about the West Indian plantation complex is how a small number of free whites maintained power over so many enslaved Africans.

The imbalances that made slavery so profitable also made it perilous.

The most basic included maintaining control over weapons and horses.

Tool accounts were therefore tallied up frequently.

planters could curtail access to religion: in Barbados, following a plot by enslaved Africans to overthrow their masters, planters sought to restrict access to literacy and Christianity.87

West Indian planters used horrific and outlandish punishments to terrorize the men and women they owned: branding, slitting the nose, removing ears, gelding, and whipping and pickling—literally rubbing salt in wounds.88

punishment and the tyrants who executed it were “the glue that held the plantation system together.”90

Plantation records helped slaveholders count and control bodies, organize them for labor, and protect them as property.

Account books show both the complexity and sophistication of the system faced by enslaved people and the moments when that system gave way. Enslaved men and women, forced to maintain the system that bound them, were transformed into instruments of their own control.

Bound by both the threat of violence and the power of information, enslaved men and women were forced not only to labor together but also to manage one another.

By 1775, about a quarter of the approximately 775 sugar estates on the island of Jamaica were managed by someone other than their proprietor, and this number was rapidly increasing. By around 1825, more than three-quarters of Jamaican planters were absentees.97

absentee proprietorship can be seen as an early case of the separation of ownership and management.

Proprietors and attorneys who never encountered individual slaves nonetheless knew about them. They could reflect on each day’s labor from the comfort of an office, or query a chain of managers about the success or failure of day-to-day operations.

Distance created obstacles to control in a society where control was paramount, but accounting helped overcome these obstacles.

The managerial hierarchies made visible in plantation accounts look remarkably similar to those of multidivisional corporations more than a century later.

What distinguished plantations—and made them look so much like large industrial corporations—was the way they combined attention to operations with strategic oversight, blending the two in pursuit of profit.115

Account books are studded with evidence of enslaved people’s heroic efforts to resist and escape, but they also show how planters successfully managed these disruptions, even forcing enslaved people to manage one another.