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April 16 - December 30, 2019
Solomon Northup’s 1855 slave narrative described the fear that motivated him to accelerate his work. As Northup wrote, “A slave never approaches the gin-house with his basket of cotton but with fear. If it falls short in weight—if he has not performed the full task appointed him, he knows that he must suffer.” But the cost of success was high. As Northup reflected, if “he has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, in all probability his master will measure the next day’s task accordingly. So, whether he has too little or too much, his approach to the gin-house is always with fear and
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Short of killing enslaved people, planters enjoyed tremendous autonomy to extract obedience from the men, women, and children they owned.
fatal beatings were frequently excused in practice, though theoretically prohibited by law. In an 1860 Mississippi case, a master was initially found guilty of killing a slave named John, but an appeals court reversed the conviction on the grounds that the slave had been resisting his master’s lawful authority.
though they were themselves property, enslaved people often owned some property, and in some cases they defended this property in court—even against claims from free whites. That enslaved people sometimes managed to protect their property using a system that offered so little protection for their lives reflects the extent to which the law privileged property rights over enslaved lives.43
Between 1801 and 1862, the average amount of cotton picked per slave per day increased about fourfold, or 2.3 percent per year.51
By keeping careful records, planters could compare different seeds, select the best varieties, and recalibrate expectations for how much they could require workers to pick. They could then blend rewards with punishment to push enslaved people to achieve these maximums.
If planters seem to have cared about the last pound of cotton, they cared more about the last bale.
Account books not only helped monitor labor but also enabled planters to decide when to try new seeds or purchase equipment. Calculation and record keeping became flexible tools that helped planters reap productivity gains from all kinds of sources.
Southern planters were obsessed with cotton, but they were not monoculturists, as historians have sometimes represented them.
Because planters controlled the activities of slaves year round, they sought to smooth labor requirements from season to season. These efforts had been underway for decades. George Washington proposed growing wheat of different varieties to stagger the harvest. This would have obviated the need to hire additional labor to assist his slaves.
success in growing staple crops tended to be associated with success in growing food crops. The two activities were complementary because they kept enslaved laborers working at a constant rate while also reducing expenditures on food.63
For a merchant with many trading partners or a manufacturer with multiple product lines, the use of double-entry bookkeeping helped estimate and increase profits. By contrast, cotton planters knew where their profits were coming from: cotton.69 To earn greater profits, the key was to grow (and pick) more cotton. Thus, what is most remarkable among planters’ records is not their calculation of rates of profit—only occasionally attempted—but their analysis of labor output and the way it enabled them to grow more cotton and thus to earn higher profits.
Thomas Affleck’s sugar plantation account books reflect these circumstances. They included many more forms than the cotton journals. Where the cotton books included fifteen forms, lettered A–O, the sugar books included twenty-one, lettered A–U (see Table 3.2).
The comparative lack of standardization in sugar accounting should not be mistaken for a lack of sophistication. Rather, it reflects the exigencies of the crop: instead of minute productivity monitoring, planters focused on overall coordination and supervision.
In Follett’s analysis, it was “a punishing agro-industrial system that, at the very least, anticipated several aspects of modern industrialization.”74
planters could simply and quickly reallocate labor from day to day without renegotiation. On cotton plantations, this meant a secure labor force when the crop came in. On sugar plantations, this offered regimented control over the whole factorylike production process.
Slaveholders used the threat of sale to increase their power.
The plantation worked as a kind of human machine. As one commentator wrote in the Southern Cultivator, “A plantation might be considered as a piece of machinery; to operate successfully, all its parts should be uniform and exact, and the impelling force regular and steady; and the master … should be their impelling force.”87
Planters sought to allocate the labor of enslaved people of all ages and capabilities, and they distributed tasks according to strength and ability. The lightest tasks could be assigned to children or to those recovering from illness. Though the nature of work might change over the course of a day, a season, or a life, the expectation was always that labor would continue.89
planters could be far more intrusive than managers of wage laborers. Not only could they threaten punishment, but they could manipulate almost every aspect of slaves’ daily lives—from access to food to housing, clothing, curfew, and contact with children and family. Private and community life could be manipulated to improve production.
Frederick Law Olmsted observed that on one plantation the slaves seemed to have fewer grievances during the season of hardest labor. The “reason of it evidently is, that they are then better paid; they have better and more varied food and stimulants than usual.”94 But incentive schemes always paid planters better than slaves.
The language planters used to describe their efforts to improve labor productivity bears a striking resemblance to the late nineteenth-century language of scientific management.
The fundamental aim of scientific management was to discern and extract the maximum amount of labor from workers.
In 1848, this unnamed planter wrote two essays titled “A Day’s Work.” The articles enumerated exactly how much work a prime field hand could complete across an array of tasks. The prime hand could plow 20 to 24 miles (with allowances for turning the plow and team), open furrows for sowing 12 acres of cotton, drop cotton seed across 7 to 10 acres, and haul out 6 to 800 yards; in addition, three “good fellows” could “make a ditch 3 feet wide at top, 2 feet deep, and 2 feet wide at bottom, 220 yards long.”
Carefully kept records helped planters to increase their output through a variety of agricultural innovations ranging from new seeds to fertilizers.
Enslaved people sometimes slowed the pace of work in an attempt to thwart this speedup, but careful records limited their success.
The soft power of numbers complemented the intimidation of the whip and the threat of sale.
slavery also offered another kind of profit: capital appreciation. Slaves were, quite literally, human capital, whose value could appreciate through maturation, reproduction, and health or depreciate due to illness, age, and disobedience.
They began to speak the language of “depreciation” decades before it would become a common accounting technique,
the fundamental reality that property was political—especially property in people.
From a business history perspective, the calculation of depreciation may be the single most remarkable aspect of plantation accounting.
Affleck’s methods comprise a hybrid of what we now call “mark-to-market” and “straight-line” methods of calculating depreciation.
They adjusted the value of their chattel with swings in the market.
In modern straight-line depreciation, the value of an asset is marked down in equal annual increments over its useful life.
The railroad’s inventory of names very closely resembled—albeit in simplified form—the inventories of engines a few pages later.
Historians of accounting typically connect the emergence of depreciation with increased investment in complex, long-lived assets like railroad cars and tracks.
understanding enslaved people as complex, long-lived capital assets made owners aware of the complexity of measuring their value.
Thomas Jefferson calculated the supplemental income he earned from the reproduction of his slaves. In 1792, while recounting the profits of the prior year in a letter to George Washington, he relayed his estimates, explaining that—in addition to his usual business—he was earning a 4 percent profit through the birth of children. Jefferson later offered an even more generous projection of the possibilities for “silent profit,” recommending that a family in financial distress lay out “every farthing … in land and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per
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A rate of return that “almost amounts to the interest of the capital invested” made slave labor effectively “free.”
they calculated that reproduction would earn a profit in combination with other kinds of exploitation.
broader definition would account for the myriad ways that masters violated enslaved people, including rape, rules about marriage practices, and family separation.
Separated from their nursing children for extended periods, women quickly returned to fertility.
Female slaves on sugar plantations experienced a birth interval between nine and ten months shorter than that of enslaved women in cotton country.
Scholars who are critical of slaveholders’ business practices have sometimes pointed out that planters did not often calculate their annual profits. This is true, but it should not necessarily be seen as evidence of poor management. Rather, planters concentrated their efforts on tracking data that was immediately useful. Metrics like the amount of cotton picked and baled actually helped them to earn more money in the short term.
planters seeking loans could produce neatly kept books as evidence of careful business practices and past returns.
Mortgages secured by human collateral were common.
approximately 40 percent of mortgages from both the colonial period and the nineteenth century were secured by slaves.
Southern planters enjoyed an array of financial opportunities unavailable to northern farmers: “Slaves represented a huge store of highly liquid wealth that ensured the financial stability and viability of planting operations even after a succession of bad harvests, years of low prices, or both.”
Health and age were among the most common causes of lost value.
In Louisiana, Thomas Couch petitioned for damages after discovering that the sixteen-year-old girl he had purchased was afflicted with “syphilis” or “Gonorrhoea.” Couch argued that the seller concealed the illness and sought $500 compensation for the cost of a physician and the “depreciation” in her value.33
