Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management

by Caitlin Rosenthal

Slavery did not undermine management and accounting. To the contrary, by the end of the eighteenth century, practices on many plantations were becoming highly standardized, and by the early nineteenth century, planters could choose between an array of systems to record their data. This process of standardization is the subject of Chapter 2.

Below the “Negro Account” was a nearly identical “Live Stock Account,” recording the fate of horses, mules, oxen, cows, calves, sheep, pigs, and goats. The subcategories were, of course, different, but the method of taking an inventory, recording increase and decrease, and taking another inventory to carry to the next month was the same as that used for humans.

Similarities like this were not lost on slavery’s critics, who lamented the fact that human and animal “stock” were tracked using the same system.

Through these daily calculations, he would become “inured to all the horrors of the system.”

The neat report for Friendship paints an alarming picture of the state of human health and labor on the plantation. In August 1828, 43 of the 237 adults and older children on the estate were “In the Hospital.”

Three years later, on the form for October 1831, circumstances were no better. Of the 241 adults and older children on the estate, 43 were again “In the Hospital.”

The market for paper evolved to meet the needs of planters managing their holdings from afar.

West Indian stationers imported and sold a large selection of specialized paper goods, eventually producing some forms locally.

Where slaveholders could allocate and reallocate labor at will, those employing free laborers had to negotiate. And when negotiation failed, as it so often did, they had to learn to live with high turnover.

Early nineteenth-century factories were plagued with turnover. Various scholars have calculated that voluntary turnover often exceeded 100 percent per year, and that total turnover sometimes reached 200 percent or more.39

The first step toward managing turnover—and succeeding despite it—was to document and communicate changes in the labor force.

Slaves were, quite literally, the denominator against which sugar output was measured. In Cuba, sugar was packed into boxes, and output was measured in “arrobas per Negro.”53

Plantations operated as factories that consumed one commodity and produced another. But rather than pounds of cotton converted into yards of cloth in a textile mill, lives were converted into hogsheads of sugar and bales of cotton.

In an era when factory owners had grasped the theory of interchangeable parts but were struggling to put it into action, slaveholders had implemented a version of the system.56

Plantation records suggest that planters saw their operations as machines geared with human beings. Factory records show how manufacturers tended machines despite unstable workforces and high turnover.

Reports that might have been given verbally were sent across the ocean in standardized quarterly and annual reports. Bookkeeping practices developed as part of a trans-Atlantic print culture that included forms, manuals, and instruction books.

The circulation of forms, books, and magazines all contributed to the spread of plantation accounting practices.

Standardized plantation account books would soon make their way to the American South. American planters drew on West Indian expertise in their record keeping.

The abolition act included a provision for compensating slave owners for the loss of their human capital. In effect, Parliament bought them out, paying more than £20 million in total compensation to former slavers.

Macrae drew a precise diagram after which planters could format their books (Figure 2.5). His forms were adapted for one month, and he recommended binding twelve sets together to create “an authentic record” of all operations on an estate over the course of a year.

Absenteeism was much lower in the United States than it was in the Caribbean, but some owners left their plantations seasonally.

Accounting excelled as a technology of distance.

The decline of slavery in one location strengthened its hold in others.

By contrast to land and buildings, humans were a highly mobile form of capital that could be moved to new locations in pursuit of profit. And the paper technologies that planters, attorneys, and overseers had developed allowed for management at great distances.

Just as accounting made sugar plantations visible to absentee planters, reports and journals also put evidence of slavery’s brutality into the hands of abolitionists.

Because these records bound together information and violence, they could also make violence and destruction visible to slavery’s critics.

As planters and their brutal production methods came under fire, accounting also became a tool for controlling planters and overseers.

“William King’s Punishment Record Book of Plantation Friendship”

The archives that plantations left behind can help us to write their history, but as Saidiya Hartman writes, they also dictate “the kinds of stories that can be told about the persons cataloged, embalmed, and sealed away in box files and folios.”95 So much was recorded and also so little: birth, death, output, and consumption were diligently noted, but the details of so many human lives are lost between the lines.

Planters and overseers thought about enslaved people as abstract, interchangeable inputs of production.

In a sense they offered blueprints for machines made of men, women, and children.

standardized forms would have an even greater influence in the South than they had in the Caribbean.

Where West Indian planters had focused on labor allocation and on maintaining accountability over distance, American cotton planters would turn their attention to pushing up output per slave.

Capell and other “book farmers” in the American South paid close attention to how efficiently enslaved men and women picked cotton, frequently experimenting with new methods for maximizing output.

These plantations were distinguished not by their sheer scale but by their data practices.

Slaves confounded the last of these categories, at once labor and capital, and planters analyzed them in both ways, using accounting both to understand labor productivity and to estimate capital increase.

Instead of attracting and retaining labor, slaveholders acquired it and accelerated it, aided by the threat of violence.

Slavery became a laboratory for the use of accounting, because neat columns of numbers translated more easily to life on plantations than they did in many other early American enterprises.2

The Plantation Record and Account Book contained a preprinted, all-in-one system for planters wishing to improve their accounting practices.

Because many enslaved men and women were too young, old, or infirm to labor in the fields, the largest volumes targeted elite planters whose holdings could reach as high as 200 or even 300 total slaves.

The cotton journals contained fifteen different forms, labeled A through O (see Table 3.1).

These forms would save the planter “much vexation and loss” and the overseer “undeserved blame.”

Despite their complexity, Affleck’s journals required very little specialized knowledge of bookkeeping.

The detailed instructions and fill-in-the-blanks balance sheet meant that only basic addition and subtraction were required to strike a “true balance” and to determine “whether the year’s labors have resulted in profit or loss.”

Affleck’s journals appear to have sold well, remaining in print until the Civil War and running to eight editions.

Assuming Affleck’s—probably generous—estimate of three thousand was correct for 1860, he was still reaching less than 3 percent of all slaveholding cotton planters. However, most of these farmers had very small operations,

Planters used Thomas Affleck’s books unevenly, often leaving many forms incomplete. But almost without exception, they completed Form C, the “Daily Record of Cotton Picked.”

Thompson could add and write, but he had to conceal these skills due to laws against educating slaves. Nonetheless, his owner benefited from his ability.

Reward and punishment worked together, with one generating data and the other relying on it.30

Accounting practices allowed sophisticated systems of incentives and punishments to work together.32