One, as has been mentioned above, plantations were extraordinarily cash-poor. Farms always are. You are always borrowing against the crop that is currently in the ground in order to eat today. Plantation owners were wealthy, but they didn’t have the cash to pay wages.
Second, the hours slaves worked simply can’t be replicated without violent force or very attractive incentives. Slave hours, especially on plantations, were intense. They walked to the fields in the dark so as to be ready when the sun came up and they walked home only after it was too dark to work. They worked six days a week and only took off the week between Christmas and New Years, which is a pretty useless week on a farm anyway. Any wage that makes that life worthwhile is far higher than “just enough to survive” they were currently costing.
Third, you’d have to do it all at once, and that’s too big of a social change to coordinate. If Plantation owner A freed his slaves and offered them a pittance, those particular slaves would not take it. Many of them would leave, to find family members that they had been separated from. Others (because they would be a drop in the bucket as a proportion of the economy) would find other, more profitable work–go into a trade or something. If even 25% of Plantation owner A’s former slaves dissipated, he’d be screwed, because he would have no other population to exploit economically.
yes I agree in fact this sounds like one of my posts I posted on city-data.
slavery made the slave owners wealthy but made the country poor.If they had paid the slaves even a small amount, now you have an economy, paid slaves could spend that money on clothes food housing,creating enormous amounts of jobs in those trades, and you can also tax them which means the taxes on the wealthy could go down, those taxes also would create jobs in road building and maintaining, and so on.the south would have been much wealthier if they just paid the slaves.I have always argued that slave ownership was more of a status symbol, owning another human being was just a big ego trip .
I worked for while in a large industrial plant. It hired people with minimal education, and paid them a fantastic wage for hard work. Men without Grade 12 could make the equivalent today of $50,000 and up . Yet still, there was turnover despite the odds they wouldn’t find equivalent work elsewhere given the economy.
If people can’t be happy with voluntary work that pays really well, would you really expect people in slavery to be happy? The point of* Uncle Tom’s Cabin* was, even a slave in a very nice position could suddenly find themselves sold down the river (!), things could change in a day from good to bad, from tolerable to lethal.
I don’t say that slavery was sweetness and light for most, or even a few. My point is the daily whippings and torture, starvation and other horrors, were likely not 100%, or even 50% common. But still, as the abolitionists pointed out, 10% is not acceptable. 1% is not acceptable, even 1 is not acceptable, when it involves the “right” to restrain, beat, rape, torture, mutilate, or kill another human being.
There was a book on this topic, “Time on the Cross”, published during the mid 1970s. It tried to quantify production of various types of farms and it found that gang labor on plantations was the most efficient way to pick cotton. It has its critics, but anyone interested in this area might do well to read that book.
Well, we may just differ on worldview. I tend to estimate the number of “people with deep problems” higher than you apparently do; I hear so many, many stories of physical abuse in peoples’ own families these days. Of course slaves would be treated significantly worse than family members.
And I’m of the considered opinion that slavery warped the emotional state and psychology of slaveholders fairly severely. I would expect various levels of abuse, indignity and cruelty to be widespread, but soft-pedaled by Southern apologists, politicians and even sympathetic historians. But there would be plenty of tales of bad behavior if one looked outside those sources. And I think I see pretty much that when looking at the historical record, despite how much must have been covered up or flushed down the memory hole.
Frederick Douglass, in his autobiography, wrote about the appalling inefficiency of slave labor – hoe it required multiple overseers, and the fact that the slaves didn’t have a lot of incentive to work quickly or efficiently at all. His descriptions of work under slavery make you wonder why the system worked at all.
Of course, he had a real incentive to make it sound bad. But he also had lived under the system, and could see its problems at very first hand.
There were other costs to slavery as well. As James Loewen points out in his Lies Across America, the system of slavery also required inner city jails and holding points for slaves in transit, and the creation of enforcement societies and slave-catching groups. To live in a slave-holding society was to live in a partial police state, and under the constant fear of uprisings. It’s not surprising the Southern states came down hard on abolitionists – they weren’t merely do-gooders, they could be viewed as treasonous.
The arguments about slavery being easily replaceable cheap labor lose a lot of their vigor by Douglass’ time. The slave trade had been halted, and it wasn’t so cheap or easy to replace slaves.
If it were possible for hired labour cotton plantations to compete with slavery, the result would have been trumpeted up and down the country by abolitionists. I don’t recall hearing about any such “enlightened version” of southern enterprises.
That’s an interesting question and probably a whole separate topic.
Of course, people like Douglas had a vested interest in portraying the horrors of the system and not mentioning the “good” slave owners. No abolitionists started their arguments with " more than theree quarters the slaves were beaten less than once a year …" (Okay, I made up that statistic). Dredd Scott, IIRC, was left alone by his owner to run the business for a while. Of all the criticisms levelled against Washington or Jefferson, one does not hear that they beat their slaves severely. (Keeping in mind that heavy corporal punishment was considered acceptable, even for one’s own children -the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there).
I’m not trying to defend slavery and I don’t want to look like I am. I don’t estimate the number of warped individuals as high as others might; consider people who own pets or livestock - same idea, sort of . They can beat, mutilate, and kill those animals, they just have to ensure the authorities don’t find out; disposing of an animal carcass is not as hard as with a human body. You hear some real horror stories about people with problems and how they mistreat or neglect their animals - yet if I had to guess, the number of pet owners who mistreat their pets is very low overall. (Again, yes, I know slaves are not animals, I am making an analogy not a comparison)
Even allowing that that time and society was different, that slavery would warp some people, I still suggest the majority of people are not maliciously cruel even when they are not socially constrained. Maybe I’m wrong. I will re-restate my main point - all the passably decent treatment in the world does not make up for the condition of enslavement.
As for the police state analogy - not necessarily. The US sourth was distinct in having a very visible arrangement. Slaves looked very different. you didn’t need Gestapo stopping everyone looking for papers - any unknown person of color roaming about was simply grabbed and returned to whoever owned them. If they accidentally rounded up the odd freedman (or they were deliberately enslaved 12 Years a Slave) in the days before photo-ID and fingerprints, well, I’m sure it did not bother anyone in the slaveholding class that such mistakes happened occasionally. The local sherrif probably knew all the freedmen, and of course travelling was done at your own risk.
Too simplistic – especially in large cities, How do you know who the owners are? In Richmond you can’t count on the sheriff knowing all the slaves by their appearance. What about Free Negroes? What about those who are pretending to be Free Negroes? Read the descriptions in Loewen about the city slave-holding depots and the island health organizations that were really slave-catching socities under a different name. It had all the trappings of a police state.
I have multiple relatives that as young people picked cotton by hand. Of course they hated it. Why did they do it? It was freakin’ hard times and you didn’t want to starve to death. When you need to eat something today, you’ll take any job.
The idea that tossed around here that no one would ever voluntarily pick cotton when there were better jobs elsewhere (there were?) is silly.
Whereas Wikipedia has this to say about one of his other books:
I looked for discussions of the treatment of slaves that would give rough estimates of how badly, on average, they were treated. I couldn’t find much off hand. Suffice to say, some were treated very very badly and none likely had an “enjoyable” life.
There are a lot of things to remember about slavery in America. First, it was not identical across either time or space. It was not identical across a single community, or even across a single household. It encompassed poor and rich alike. Slaves were freed continuously throughout the Antebellum period. And further, the slave population multiplied over and over again, which indicates they were getting pretty decent meals. Scholarship generally suggests the worst issue of malnutrition was due to the lack of medical knowledge of the age, rather than neglect.
Slaves in poor households often lived with few differences from their masters. And in wealthier ones, the household servants were much better treated than the field slaves. In any case, any slave might be able to obtain his freedom if he were lucky or had a kindly master. And, it should not be forgotten that many were. It’s easy to say that slavery is bad when it’s gone. It’s much harder to say that slavery is bad when it’s perfectly normal and everyday. (One might say the same about abortion, or the Death Penalty.) To the people who lived it, slavery simply was.
Which is not to say that slaveowners were entirely sanguine about it. Many wrote about the unease they felt over it. Some even opposed it privately while supporting it publicly. More than a few did manumit their slaves or just sold them. And most southerners never did own slaves in the first place. They didn’t fight in the Civil War necessarily out of love of the institution, but out of sectional loyalty.
If I can say something which is going to sound really, really dumb, the big problem with being a slave was that you weren’t free. It had nothing to do with the material circumstances, but that you couldn’t better your materials circumstances. The issue of regional economic vitality can be argued; the issue that you weren’t free to see your own children when you wanted couldn’t be. People then and now wonder about whether slave agriculture was efficient; it’s unlikely that convinced many or any (aside from Hinton Rowan Helper). But the damage to family life and human decency most certainly did.
Thank you for saying what I was trying to say, but much better.
Yes - Dredd Scott, if I remember the issue, was even left alone to run his owners’ business for a while. Obviously one of the better-treated slaves, yet he sued to try to get his freedom.
Perhaps the closest analogy today would be - in the military with no option to quit for life.
Literature is also full of stories about masters who promised their slaves their freedom, only to renege when it came to the crunch (or the master died). Presumably, this is because it happened frequently and tossing away a large sum of money often is contrary to human nature.
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Literature is also full of stories about masters who promised their slaves their freedom, only to renege when it came to the crunch (or the master died). Presumably, this is because it happened frequently and tossing away a large sum of money often is contrary to human nature.
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One of the worst real-life cases of this was William Clark all Lewis and Clark fame. He promised his famous slave York, who accompanied them on the expedition, his freedom upon return, and promised it to him in front of witnesses. He not only reneged, but admitted in a letter to beating York when he tried to make him honor his promise. By most accounts he did eventually free York, but this is not certain.
I misread. Emerson hired Scott (and his wife) out to work for others at Ft. Snelling. When he went down to Louisiana to get married, he left them behind; then sent for them, and they travellled (apparently, by themselves) down to Louisiana. Scott’s daughter was born on the river between Missuori and Illinois. When Emerson died, Scott offered the widow $300 to buy his own freedom (she refused).
Also, when Scott met and fell in love with and married his wife, the woman’s owner transferred her ownership to Emerson; just the opposite of what we expect from those days.
So even as a slave, he had a much larger degree of autonomy and self-direction than the typical view of the field hands as the equivalent of cattle. The situation of slaves in the various states was more complex than the simple “whip 'em all” view we might have today.
Of course, Scott’s life and treatment seems to have been an outlier exception compared to most slaves.
One thing that’s interesting if you look at slave narratives is how often the word “grateful” comes up. A persistent theme was that slaves that ran away or otherwise resisted slavery were “ungrateful”; Huck even describes Jim that way. While it is true that not all slaves were daily beaten, raped, or starved, it really does seem that nearly all of them were constantly exhorted to be “grateful” if that they weren’t being subjected to all these things. The subtext was always that masters had the absolute right to do these things, and failure to exercise that right was something a slave should be grateful for. There were plenty of cases of enslaved skilled craftsmen who were allowed to live semi-free: they just had to pay a significant fee each year to their master and also entirely support themselves and their family. This is the sort of thing a slave was supposed to be grateful for.
So in addition to the whole “not free” thing, the omni-present threat of terrible violence was very much part of the life of most slaves, near as I can tell. And while the threat of violence is certainly preferable to the incidence of it, it still does carry a heavy toll.
Slavery 'worked" when a special set of circumstances applied, including:
-one crop agriculture (like cotton, tobacco)
-low availability of alternative labor
-low cost of replacement (like Haiti under French rule)
It could not last when farming began to become automated, as even cheap labor cannot compete with machine labor. That is why the pre-Civil war tension-many of the big slaveowner estates were bankrupt, and had to move to the west to survive. Eventually, slavery kept an obsolete social system alive, long past the time when it should have. Ironically, it was replaced by an even worse system 9sharecropping) which kept most of the Deep South in poverty, till well into the 1950s.
Oh yes, it is so similar. It really is just appalling. I could go on and on and on about how similar it is, but the details and the similarity would be so apparent I’m sure I wouldn’t have to because the situations are so similar, you can just see it the situation, the first so, so, unique, of pre and post Bellum South and the one with the migrant illegal Mexican migrant workers in 2013 America, so similar it’s really amazing. Who do I write to about it, sometimes I get really worked up that I feel it necessary to compare the two situations every time I can and point out how uniquely similar they are. Oh, and the 1 percent. True, undoubtedly, yeah, I see what you mean.
For anyone interested in this topic the WPA collected interviews with former slaves during the mid 1930s and those can be read at this site.
Most of the people interviewed were children so the perspective is skewed but it is still interesting. Most of them said that they were treated relatively well, but still wanted to be free. They really did not like the lack of freedom of movement, since any slave away from their plantation would be captured and beaten by the slave patrols. They also objected to the long hours of work, the lack of education, and the lack of religous freedom. Many knew about plantations where slaves were treated poorly.
This was the problem of industrialization, too. The more complex the task, the more you need cooperation from the workers. Slavery is not a good model when you ned specialized workforces. When skilled trades are needed, (i.e. to maintain the equipment) those are best served by a system which self-selects for better skilled and motivated workers. So industrialization went where the available workers were, and that fed more industrialization. The economies of the north and south started to diverge, and all the military incompetence in the world could not prevent the better-supplied better-manned north from eventually winning.
however, see my earlier quote from Loewen. He claims the southern economy was NOT in decline that the plantation system was doing well and even thriving as the mills of England took as much cottn as the south could produce, and thanks t the cotton gin, the productivity was way up.