Cost/efficiency of slavery?

Factual Questions
21

Slavery in American South was different than slavery the in Ottoman Empire, which was different from slavery in the Roman Empire, etc etc. And even in those places the lot of slaveowners differed in time and place.
I remember being at in Roman fort in Britain, the tour guide mentioned it was common for (the forbidden to marry) legionaries to have a (female) slave whose job was as he rather delicately put in, “cooking, cleaning and companionship”. One of the people in our group replied “so what we call a wife”.

So you cannot make such a sweeping statement about cost/efficiency sans rather detailed context.

22

Yes, if slavery were ended once it started. But the whole point was, slavery started in the colonies because of a need for labor that simply was not going to be organically fulfilled (which is one of the major impetuses for slavery existing anywhere at anytime.) Once slavery had begun, there were political and cultural reasons in the colonies, basically acting as “inertia” that kept it going long past it making economic sense. But in all reality it always made sense for the ruling planter class. They recognized that ultimately in a post-slavery world they could never politically and economically dominate the States they lived in any longer, and they were correct.

If we had never had slavery in the American colonies the labor pool you’re talking about would not exist. Even in the real timeline, where we had slavery and the planter class continued to exploit the same people after slavery ended you still eventually saw that original aristocracy of land owners slowly fade away. The former slaves didn’t really become rich or anything, but without the institution of slavery the planter class ultimately lost its power, and some level of industrialization started in the South. It wasn’t until the 20th century that the really large scale black migration out of the South and into Northern cities really hit full steam, but there was a good bit of black migration from the plantations they and their parents had worked in as slaves to the nascent manufacturing industry in the South. There’s a reason, for example, that while Virginia is 20% black the Newport News region is much moreso. It was an area of earlier industrialization and blacks started to move there from the rural agricultural parts of Virginia they had been living in since emancipation. In that specific region it started in the 1880s when Collis Huntington essentially converted the Newport News region from an ancient agricultural area to an industrial one, by building a railroad allowing coal from the Appalachians to get to terminals in the Chesapeake. This hot bed of industrial activity was an early opportunity for freedmen in Virginia to move away from the squalor of rural farming life that they were still in post-slavery.

23

Slavery in the Americas in the 1700s and 1800s was the legacy of slavery in the 1500s and 1600s.

Read the book 1493. It makes a credible case that malaria was the primary driver of the Atlantic slave trade.

The labor shortage in the New World was created by disease, and malaria was one of the most persistent. Native laborers (whether paid or, more typically, enslaved) died at incredible rates, and imported European indentured servants suffered about 80% mortality each year, something we don’t usually think about today. Most of that European mortality was from malaria.

There is one place on earth where the human population is highly resistant to malaria – the west coast of Africa.

While no one decided to go get slaves from West Africa because of malaria, the burgeoning sugar and tobacco plantations were labor-starved and used all three sources (Native American, African slaves, and European indentured servants). Over time, the African laborers remained alive, and the others died off and had to be replaced.

The cost and difficulty of constantly replacing and re-training labor put plantations that did NOT use African slaves at an economic disadvantage. The New World was turning out to be hugely profitable but deadly, and Europeans with get-rich-quick schemes and few moral scruples were competing intensely to dominate its destiny.

This of course in no way justifies or excuses the Atlantic slave trade, but sheds some light on its origins.

24

Martin has much of it right.

The problem is that there was a shortage of labour in the new world. This was true in the 1800’s, and it was doubly true in the 1600’s when slavery started. Every time new territories opened up, there was land for the taking. Restless workers would up and leave for open fields. Hey, a lot of them moved there from Europe, what’s a few hundred miles by foot or wagon? In a scarcity economy, wages were pretty good (relatively).

Then, as mentioned, picking cotton was hard work. Particularly, it was hard work for white people, who were likely to get sun burn if out in the fields all day every day. So it may have been cheap to hire help, but it would not have been cheap to hire Europeans who had a choice to work in the cotton fields.

Another problem was the locals. Not only did the natives who were around at first tend to die off from European sicknesses, but they also tended to die rather than work. There’s a particular mentality of hunter-gatherers… They don’t work day in day out but will go looking for food when it’s needed; they wait for the weather; they wait for right time. I read a far more eloquent explanation, but basically agricultural cultures (such as the west Africans) know they have to work all the time, don’t put it off. Basically, the natives would often die rather than work (Columbus and his successors resorted to torture and mutilation to force cooperation) while Africans would work with a little application of the whip. Add to that, they were adapted to the semi-tropical climate, and they were a labour source waiting to happen. The coastal Africans were delighted to trade their interior neighbours for a little spending money.

The trouble with using slaves for more complex tasks is that they are more complex. A bag of cotton, or stacks of sugar cane, are very simple products to eyeball in terms of quantity and quality control. Not so in an industrial factory. Machinery needs semi-skilled maintenance. A person misfeeding material can do a whole lot of expensive damage to your raw input - and so on. When the industrial revolution came to America, it was a self-feeding phenomenon that went where there were people able to work for it. The north where there had already been more work for free men had the workforce to feed the mills.

You have only to read the horror stories of early British industrialization - i.e. children horribly malformed by hard work by age 20 - to realize bad as things were, they were nowhere near as bad in the USA where the workforce had options on the frontier.

(The north also had a lot more of what the early industrial revolution needed - coal. )

If you remember your history lessons, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which sped up the process of cleaning the picked cotton tremendously (and so made processed cotton cheaper). This made cotton an excellent and in demand material for (British) textile mills as the textile phase of industrialization took off. What was a lesser plantation economy became the big money maker that also displaced other economic development to dominate the south. Richer plantation owners could bid up the price of slaves.

That was, IIRC, one argument against abolition; slaves were valuable and so treated well. Django or Mandingo notwithstanding, most slaves lived a pretty good life and were well treated (considering their position). However, as the abolitionists pointed out, owner could and sometimes did abuse or kill slaves. The fact that “it only happened occasionally” did not mitigate the basic insult to human dignity that slavery was.

The result was that for undesirable work, slavery was a lot cheaper than hiring scarce labour. Based on the millions of slaves and the few thousand that ran away each year, it appears that the cost of the slave retrieval and control was not a significant drain. Plus, the whole countryside was arranged to make successful escape difficult. Slaves could not easily “blend in”.

After the civil war, a lot of ex-slaves migrated to the northern cities to find work that was not available down south - this is likely what would have happened if the plantation had tried hiring instead of slavery. A decade of war and emancipation basically destroyed the cotton industry for a while.

I’m not up on what happened in the Caribbean or Brazil, but I assume once the British took it upon themselves to interdict the slave trade in the 1830’s, the value of healthy, living slaves went up quite a bit and they were treated better.

25

Race was also a factor. Not in the sense that black people were intended by God or genes as slaves but in the sense that slaves lived alongside free people. A Native American or a European settler had options - they could escape their servitude and hope to hide among free people. Black slaves didn’t have that option. A black slave could escape his or her plantation but where could they go? Anywhere they went for hundreds of miles, they would still be regarded with suspicion. Black people were cut off from free society much more effectively than Native Americans or Europeans were.

26

The southern cotton business never really recovered. When the cotton supply from America was cut off because of the Confederate embargo and the Union blockade, this created opportunities for other regions to step in and fill the void. By 1865, cotton was being grown in places like India, Egypt, and Central Asia and the South had lost a lot of its market even if it had the cotton to sell.

And then the boll weevils hit in the early part of the twentieth century. Which pretty much killed off whatever American cotton growing had survived.

The reality is the CSA was doomed to economic failure even if it had won the war.

27

I’m having trouble taking that claim at face value. I know apologists said it at the time, but it was propaganda when they said it. One telling factor is that NO free whites voluntarily entered slavery, no matter how poor or desperate.

28

Other than the fact that they were doing awful work that nobody else wanted to do.

29

Well, indentured servitude is sort of voluntarily entering slavery. But it is fixed duration. I would definitely not agree with md2000 saying most slaves had a good life. Conditions varied considerably, in the Mid-Atlantic States as the need for slaves went down some plantations became very unprofitable or even had heirs as owners who basically squeezed as much money as they could out of it and left the plantation to decay. That’s almost the State Robert E. Lee found the plantation in that his wife inherited and he had to fix up so he could comply with the terms of the will (which required all the slaves be freed within five years–but Lee had to get the plantation out of debt because he couldn’t legally sell the slaves while the bank still had claims.) Plantations like that were sometimes talked about as basically being “ran by indolent slaves” who didn’t really do much work and just turned the plantation into a place they happened to live.

That’s one extreme, the other extreme would be the sugarcane plantations which I believe were the worst in the post-Colonial era South. I think to the point they may have even relied primarily on replacement purchases to keep going as so many slaves were worked to death in them, whereas most tobacco and cotton plantations the slaves usually lived to some approximation of “old age” given the time and would usually have produced many children and thus replaced themselves.

Even the indolent slaves of a plantation with a lazy absentee owner didn’t have a great lot, though, as they could not leave and they were always at threat of being sold off down into the deep south to a cotton plantation. That’s in fact what happened to many Mid-Atlantic slaves, for generations they lived without much selling and splitting up of families, but as slavery became less economical in the Mid-Atlantic the slave owners there sold something like a million total slaves into cotton plantations in the deep south. This is when the largest amount of family breakups occurred, and almost always the slaves were going from “relatively” comfortable servitude to more physically demanding and unpleasant servitude.

30

In my question I’m not asking about hiring europeans. That would cost more. I’m saying why not take the slaves who are there, or import more, and rather than buying them for an expensive price, supporting them (however minimally), controlling them with overseers and slave catchers and all that trouble, don’t let them get any job except working on a plantation and rather than buying them, just pay them a really shitty wage. 10-20 cents a day at that time would be about what i’d expect.

Wouldn’t that be more cost efficient than slavery? They’d probably work harder knowing that they’re not slaves, it’s the only way they can make a living, so they convince themselves (as people are want to do) that they’re lucky to have the job, and there’s another black person who would take their job in a second. Work a hard job for practically nothing or be free and starve to death.

Would they all just flee to the north? The fact that they all didn’t after they were freed convinces me that the answer is no. Plus the south could have set up a system requiring blacks to have a pass to leave the state. Like East Germany, North Korea, etc.

I bet this would also have been good for smaller plantation owners who couldn’t afford a lot of expensive slaves.

31

I’ve been following this conversation with interest; don’t have the economic background to fully participate. (And this is not the forum for me to express my feelings about slavery being a “good” life.)

But I do know there is more to growing cotton than picking it. That is certainly hard labor–but happens once a year. Throughout growing season, cotton had to be “chopped.” That is, you took a hoe & went along each row, removing weeds. Row after row. And then do it again after new weeds have appeared–until picking time. My Texas History teacher in Junior High was white–he’d also grown up on a cotton farm. He gave us a very heartfelt description of the heat & the backbreaking labor & the sweat pouring into your eyes under the Texas sun. At times, as he considered the shortcomings of his profession, he probably reminded himself “it beats chopping cotton.” (Of course, planting also required many hours of stoop labor. Hey, I bet children were especially good at that!)

32

Another reason freed slaves stayed in the South was to remain close to their families. A man who had been freed might well be working to save enough money to buy the freedom of his wife, children, etc.

33

Let me see if I understand you…take the slaves who are already there (and thus owned by someone) and “instead of buying them”, paying them a wage? I’m confused about the mechanics of it. What would the slave owners who already owned slaves be doing, exactly?

Is what you’re saying, they would tell the slaves, “you are slaves no more, we’ll be paying you $0.10/$0.20 a day.” Two problems:

  1. How does the plantation owner deal with the fact he has most likely collateralized his slaves?

  2. How does the plantation owner adjust to the fact that instead of having a bound labor force that (like livestock) actually produces new slaves naturally he has a labor force that can up and leave en masse or go on strike?

If you’re saying the law would give blacks freedom but no right to purchase property or stake land claims, no right to work any job other than plantation jobs then you’re really just talking about slavery of another kind.

As bad as their conditions were as sharecroppers, they actually had an ownership interest in the operation of their small holding farms and thus probably felt an incentive to stay and try to make it work for them. These were people who had farmed all their lives, and were now being given the chance to farm (typically as tenants) land, and actually collect some portion of the profits from the sale of the crops. Now, the practical matter is most sharecroppers made barely any money. But they were still in business, in a sense, for themselves. They were free. It’s not at all the same as working master’s farm because he’ll beat you have to death or sell you away from your family if you don’t, in exchange for no wage.

The plantation owners typically were not capable of managing a free labor force. Much like English nobility adopted a tenant farming system because they recognized they really weren’t able to adequately manage farms. Sharecropping developed because it was probably the only realistic way the land owners (in a free society) could hope to keep the labor there and still squeeze some money out of the land. But sharecropping really wasn’t that profitable either, and most plantation owners and their families no longer owned that land by the 20th century.

Other things to consider:

I believe general laborers by the 1860s were making around $6/week, so your wage is very, very low. That’s for general, not specialty skilled, laborers. With such a big discrepancy between what you’re paying and the prevailing rate you’d probably see a lot more emigration North than you saw in practice. Sharecropping I believe was more effective at keeping freedmen in place because it appeals to a natural entrepreneurial spirit, and given their familiarity with the region, the land, the work etc they probably expected they would make a good life for themselves as tenant farmers. (A few actually did, rarely a sharecropper would work his way into prosperity.) But take away the tenant farmer relationship, where you’re just an employee…and the $6/week an unskilled laborer would be make elsewhere would easily be reason enough to move you and your whole family elsewhere. If you say there are laws to prevent blacks from actually working anywhere but plantations then I do not know what happens, but that’s akin to slavery in many ways.

Economically if you then say “well up the wage to $0.60/day or whatever” we have to look into the economics of cotton plantations and such. I’m not sure that economic setup is actually profitable, especially with competition from places like Egypt and India.

34

Sure, there are other reasons. But even today so many people stay in horrible places for no other reason than “it’s my home.” They happened to pop out of their mother on a certain geographic region many years ago, and the political boundaries of that geographic region are where they want to remain no matter how bad it is, no matter how much better it would be somewhere else. Their “ancestors” lived there, so they must live there too. Equally as mystifying to me are the ones that do manage to leave their horrible homeland for a better place, and then retain all loyalty to their former homeland. More talk of “ancestors” and “culture” and whatnot. It’s never made a bit of sense to me personally. No, i haven’t had the experience firsthand, but I know i’d leave a horrible place if i could and wouldn’t look back.

The one exception to this seems to be jews who were fortunate enough to get out of germany during the nazi years. You won’t see them in german pride parades. Though some did stay in germany because it was their home, refusing to leave even when they had the chance. Granted, only in hindsight do we know how bad things would get.

35

Look at where slave labor was most commonly used here in the United States. It was mainly used in agriculture and the two big crops were cotton and tobacco which were both labor intensive crops. Cotton only had two times during the year where they needed a large labor pool and that was during planting and harvesting (picking and ginning). The rest of the year there wasn’t a need for most of those laborers. So if you’re growing cotton and you want to guarantee that you have the labor necessary to plant and harvest what are your options? You can’t afford to play free laborers to sit around and do nothing most of the year. And if you’re only paying people as temporary laborers there’s no guarantee that they’ll be there in sufficient numbers when it’s time to plant or harvest. After all, those people have to do something to make a living during the rest of the year and what options were there for them in the South? Slaves had the advantage of being bought and paid for and provide security in that you would never have a labor shortage.

Please don’t read the above as a defense of slavery. I’m just pointing out that the system made economic sense from the perspective of the plantation owners. From what I recall of my history courses sometimes it’s really hard to figure out just how successful or unsuccessful a particular plantation was because of a lack of proper bookkeeping. For a plantation you might find an IOU written on the back of a letter and never find any paperwork showing that the IOU was paid.

36

I asked this same question of a college prof when I was a young whippersnapper.

He basically said what ftg said above:

The South fell into it gradually and once you start down that path it is hard to turn back because slaves did represent much wealth. They didn’t just want to give them up. This keeps them spiraling down using slaves more and more and makes it harder and harder to just free them and pay them crap wages.

There is also the concern of you just can’t have blacks running around free, for God’s sake!..to reinforce it.

37

That is one of the best F*** *** letters I have seen in some time. Classy and with a big FU at the same time. Well done.

38

“what we have heah is a failiah to commyoonicate…”

I’m never suggesting that the plantation life was Song of the South idyllic. But, this was one of the main points made even in Uncle Tom’s Cabin during pre-civil war. Slaves mainly got enough to eat and typically were not heavily beaten or whipped to an inch of their life as part of the daily routine. (I’d say “same as farmers treat their horses and cows today…” if that does not get taken the wrong way.)

The point is these slaves were an expensive investment. But we’ve all known people who’ve been careless or maliciously destructive with their property, and indeed, some people who inherit are less likely to appreciate the value of what they have. People with deep problems are often willing to take out those problems on the helpless.

The arguments going back to abolitionists were elementary and straightforward:
-just because the slaves are treated well - or rather more precisely, not abused - does not make the ownership of human beings any less evil.
-the fact that it can occur, and that it did occur from time to time - beating, mutilation, rape, murder - adds to the evil of the institution.
-a person who was enslaved and treated well all their life might still at any time find that they are arbitrarily sold to someone not so “benevolent”, thus nobody in that situation is safe.
-Breaking up families, with no rights attached to any members, was common and obviously in itself cruel.

39

But still, once Jim Crow sets in, big numbers moved north – termed the ‘Great Migration’ – a massive population movement. Before Jim Crow, Reconstruction gave blacks the hope they could make it in the south, so not as much incentive to move.

40

The amount of resistance slaves offered indicates they did not think they had a good life. Look at how much Southern society structures itself around the need to counter slave resistance (the beat system just one example of many). If the slaves had it good, none of that would have been necessary.