Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management

by Caitlin Rosenthal

In Josephine Brown’s account of her father’s life in slavery, she reflected on the relationship between freedom and depreciation: “As the slave becomes enlightened, and shows that he knows he has a right to be free, his value depreciates. A slave who has once ran away is shunned by the slaveholders, just as the wild, unruly horse is shunned by those who wish an animal for trusty service.”

Enslaved people were well aware of the ways they could influence their own prices, and some sought to augment or undercut their own value in order to influence sales.42

Enslaved people wore the evidence of escape on their bodies.

for slave traders, inventory was meant to be turned—that is, the faster they could buy and sell, the more quickly they could use and reuse their capital.

on January 5, 1861, “Extra Men” were being sold for $950–$1,000, while boys 4 feet tall were priced at $275–$300.

Near identical language was used to categorize slaves and agricultural crops like grain and cotton. For example, in labeling men and women as “Extra,” “No. 1,” and “No. 2,” the auctioneers followed conventions that were being used for other commodities.

Sellers did not always know the precise ages of the children they put up for auction, but heights were relatively easy to measure and to verify at the moment of sale.

escaped slave John Brown recollected his master striking a deal to sell him according to his weight. The purchaser, Starling Finney, weighed his own saddle to confirm the accuracy of the scale, and then Brown sat in a rope looped from the scale’s hook. The two men struck a deal for $310, and the ten-year-old Brown was “marched off” without time to bid his mother good-bye.51

Slave traders’ carefully calibrated punishments reflected their proximity to the market. They stood to benefit immediately from manipulating the enslaved without leaving a mark.

Under slavery, the whip was a technology that could be used in many ways depending on slaveholders’ needs.

The same planters who rated the elderly and infirm at zero on their own inventories would not have “purchased” these men and women for free.

the sale of slaves in family groups sometimes kept slaves with their loved ones. But it also had a pecuniary upside because it bundled the elderly and infirm with their more valuable kin.

At least since the colonial period, legal restrictions in many locations prevented masters from emancipating the elderly and infirm. In some jurisdictions, masters were forbidden from freeing their slaves simply to spare themselves the cost of food and shelter.

Short of barring a master from killing, neither statutes nor case law generally placed many limits on owners’ use of force to secure obedience from the enslaved. However, the law did offer masters protection if their property was injured or killed by others.

When planters rated the enslaved as one-quarter, one-half, or three-quarters of a prime hand, they were in some ways attempting to benchmark their output—to figure out how much work each man or woman ought to be able to perform if he or she could be spurred to maximum efficiency.

By rating the enslaved as fractions of a person, slave owners translated the infinite diversity of humanity into a parade of prime hands. Through calculation, they rendered the incommensurable abstract and equivalent—as a unit of labor that could be compared to other units of labor without reference to individuals.

Through accounting, human figures became figures on paper, and men and women appeared as no more than hands.

As Steven Deyle observes in his study of the domestic slave trade, readers of southern newspapers could scan tables with the current market prices for cotton, rice, hogs, and the like, but they could not find corresponding data for people.

If not for the closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and the coming of the Civil War in 1861, futures markets might well have emerged.82

Unlike other commodities, the sold strove to shape the course of the sale.83

Planters buying labor could choose from many slaves, but a slave seeking freedom sought something singular, and he or she had to negotiate with a monopolist.

the power of planters to shift between different genres of valuation when it benefited them to do so. They could sort the enslaved into commodity categories, but they could also sing their praises as luxury goods.

Their ownership of capital gave them the power to commodify as they chose.88

Economists have estimated that the nearly four million slaves who lived in the United States on the eve of the Civil War had a combined market capitalization of between $3.1 and $3.6 billion.

On January 29, 1861, the state of Georgia offered a statement explaining its reasons for leaving the Union: “Why? Because by their declared principles and policy” the northern states had “outlawed $3,000,000,000 of our property in the common territories of the Union.”

They seceded to prevent “the loss of property worth four billions of money” and to “secure this as well as every other species of property.”

The price of slaves reached record highs on the eve of the Civil War—and with good reason: the harvest of 1860 had yielded large profits. But as political fortunes turned, prices plummeted and then ricocheted wildly.

when George Washington conveyed Thomas Jefferson’s calculations of “silent profit” to British agricultural expert Arthur Young, Young was critical. As he wrote, “I cannot admit of it: he reckons 60£. a year increasing value of negroes … to have a considerable value invested in slaves, is a hazardous capital.”

The rising tide of abolition meant that slaveholders needed to preserve their capital not just through their management practices but also in the halls of government.

Though the commodification of enslaved people was far from complete, law and calculation combined to make enslaved people a flexible asset from which slaveholders extracted substantial wealth both as labor and as capital.

Though it often seems like slaveholders pushed for commodification and enslaved people struggled against it, the reality was more complex and pernicious.

Emancipation broke down the systematic processes that had enabled exacting agricultural management.

The freedpeople negotiated more successfully during the subsequent years of Radical Reconstruction, but they still found themselves economically subordinate.

Records of cotton picking disappeared: planters no longer measured and monitored labor with exacting precision.

July 1865, Capell signed contracts with his former slaves, and work seemed to proceed as usual. That November, Mississippi would pass the first, and probably the harshest, of the southern black codes.

After Christmas, however, the freedpeople asserted their independence, refusing to resume work.

Another former slave, Jennie Kendricks of Georgia, recalled that “after the war ended and all the slaves had been set free, some did not know it, as they were not told by their masters. A number were tricked into signing contracts which bound them to their masters for several years longer.”

the vast majority could not read or write.

Contracts and plantation records reflect planters’ disproportionate access to information.

any freedpeople who missed work without his permission were charged for unexcused time at double wages.

lost-time systems charged additional penalties simply for not working, and the rates at which freedpeople had to pay typically exceeded what they might be paid for the same time.

planters’ ability to charge their former slaves for time when they did not work shows their enduring economic power.

planters deployed a whole array of contracting possibilities to secure labor at a low cost.

Affleck railed against what he saw as lackadaisical, unpredictable work habits. He resisted breaking up large plantations into small plots, unwilling to abandon the systems he had once promoted in his plantation record books. So, instead of raising wages or embracing new work patterns, he decided that the best course of action would be to replace the freedpeople altogether.

Attempts to bring bonded Chinese labor to the South were more successful.

Employers were not attracting immigrants; they were considering the “importation of coolies.”

Campaigns of violence and the intimidation of black voters helped to bring additional Redeemer governments to power. After the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, the last federal troops left South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, unleashing violence against the freedpeople and assuring the success of Redeemer governments there as well.

As southern planters regained political control, they enshrined their efforts to control the freedpeople’s lives and labor in law.

New arrangements substituted one form of control for another: the power of debt for that of ownership.

Debt peonage made debt forgiveness a powerful strategy. Planters forgave or reduced debts in order to entice the best to stay or the weakest to leave.