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April 16 - December 30, 2019
When planters broke contracts, they were subject only to civil suit, but freedpeople also faced criminal suits and strict vagrancy laws.
The convict labor system that emerged in the late nineteenth century most explicitly reconstructed the circumstances of slavery.
Some prisoners worked directly for state and local governments, while a larger number worked for southern industrialists through the lease system.
the records of the Chattahoochee Brick Company, where managers’ practices look remarkably like those under slavery, with the dangerous modification that owners no longer cared to preserve their human capital.
Just as the horrors of slavery facilitated a form of scientific management, “the horrors of the southern penal system … played a central role in the evolution of the region’s race relations, forms of labor exploitation, and burgeoning capitalist development.”
Sociologist Martin Ruef estimates that cumulative exit rates between 1865 and 1870 may have been as high as 80 percent.
Planters complained about high turnover and workforce instability, but they did not pay higher wages. The South remained a dramatically low-wage region within a high-wage nation.
He illustrated his narrative with a diagram of a cotton screw, a plantation appliance used for pressing cotton into bales (see Figure C.1). Roper drew on the visual style of technical diagrams to show how this common device could become an instrument of torture. The illustration labeled the parts of the machine “a” through “e,” explaining the purpose of each. At the letter “a,” his master, Gooch, “hung me up by the hands.” A horse, “b,” circled the contraption, turning the screw, “e,” while Gooch followed behind, whip in hand. The turning of the screw lowered a block, “c,” down into a box,
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The history of slavery offers an opportunity to study the ways businesses benefit from coercion and control. And the methods of business history—using records to reconstruct management strategies and structure—can help us better understand what the slaves were up against.
In 1860, more millionaires lived in the slave South than in the rest of the United States.
Planters earned these fortunes not despite slavery but because of it.
Surveying cotton fields and seeing humans as inputs of production seems to have stimulated management innovation in ways that were difficult in free factories plagued with turnover.
Slavery enabled capitalists to build machines made of men, women, and children, and also to regear this machinery on command.
Inequality can drive innovation, and innovation can entrench inequality, particularly in highly unregulated labor markets that put everything—even lives—up for sale.
Planters and overseers surveilled enslaved workers, assiduously collecting data on their output. When compared to northern (and postbellum) books, this data reflects a remarkable level of control.
For decades, historians have focused on masters’ lack of control, publishing outstanding research uncovering the various ways enslaved people eluded their owners.
This book recovers the insights of older literature emphasizing domination without losing the insights of scholarship focused on enslaved culture and community.
indeed, evidence for resistance is embedded throughout the account books I have studied.
To offer an adequate account of chattel slavery, historians need to acknowledge the vitality of slave culture without romanticizing it or overstating its scope.
Slowing down the pace of labor, stuffing rocks and melons into sacks of cotton, and covering for one another when planters suspected something all disrupted management regimes.
When war began to open fissures in the system, enslaved people pried these fissures open, grasping freedom on the ground. Many of the same men, women, and children who had complied with their masters to survive suddenly made themselves unmanageable.
Plantation account books remind us how easy it is to overlook the conditions of production from the comfort of a countinghouse or the safety of a computer screen.
Quantitative records can help us to see farther, but only if we remember what the numbers make visible and what they erase.
Gantt acknowledged that the word “task” was “disliked by many men,” regarding it as a “principal disadvantage” of the method.9
As Gantt wrote, “The term ‘taskmaster’ is an old one in our language; it symbolizes the time, now happily passing away, when men were compelled to work, not for their own interests, but for those of someone else.”
Modern narratives of capitalist development often emphasize the positive-sum outcomes of many individual choices. They suggest that free, even selfish, decisions go hand in hand with growth and innovation.
The history of slavery’s capitalism warns against all these expectations.
The power of capital to control labor was rarely more acutely felt than where labor was capital.
