So does your mocking actually have any point relevant to the thread? Or do you just mock when you don’t have anything intelligent to add to the conversation?
I think you are quite right. The South fought for an institution that was ruining them. and the system you mention would be alot better for everyone, including those hired for crappy wages. At least they would get on the bottom rung of the economic ladder and be in a better position to work their way up it. That’s a huge advantage for them. Slavery was bad for the slaves and bad for their owners.
I most definitely have something to say when I mock. In fact I post mockery snark relatively rarely, as far as these things go, but put my reputation on the line in doing so. (I probably can correctly guess where my reputation stands with you, though.) My post’s relevance to the thread is that it was an attempt to whoosh away a stinky fart. kaltkalt’s comment was meretricious, explicitly using a slogan, jingoistic contemporary political rally cry with a veneer of “seriousness because it’s got math.” The post as a whole used a lazy rhetoric for maximum impact. Bullshit detectors are designed for this.
It added nothing to the thread except that we should think about the poster’s political message, that he has brought the good news of his concern for a labor and social problem with only the slightest points of agreement with the topic at hand, and only with tortuous explanations could it be worked in eventually to a decent drift to a clear and focused thread on history.
Drift happens all the time. But usually after the people who are paying attention to OP are basically through, and, hardly ever, with predictable results, when a hobby horse of politics is introduced.
Occupy Wall Street! We are the 99%! No Capitalist Slavery! Remember Santayana!
There’s a piece you are missing. Slaves were worked very hard under a gang labor system. There were attempts to set up such plantations after the civil war, but they couldn’t get the labor. Beatings and threats to sell off your family are powerful motivators. We can measure the extent of this by observing the decline in labor following the civil war: Ransom and Sutch (1975) estimate that free blacks reduced hours worked by between 28 and 37%. Some of that was exit from the labor force (eg children 10-15), some was reduction in days worked, some was reduced hours per day. All involved blacks working with an intensity closer to whites.
To be fair, there’s also the confounding factor of a collapse in world cotton prices, for reasons mostly unrelated to the Civil War.
It certainly does have its critics. Here’s the takedown of that work.
Those who want a textbook treatment of the OP can go here: Amazon.com
The 1979 version would work as well.
Farming began to be automated in the late 1700s: I’m referring to the cotton gin. This made the vast expansion of cotton agriculture possible: capital was a complement for labor, not a substitute at that point in time. (Later developments would produce substitutes for labor: I’m just elaborating.)
Your post reflects a confusion that afflicted historians before about 1950: the profitability of slavery is an entirely different topic than the viability of slavery. If slaves can be used more profitably in the West, we’d expect migration to the West. If cotton is harvested more profitably in the West, we’d expect business failures in the East. That’s just the market at work.
But for slavery to become nonviable, you would need to see the price of slaves drop to zero. As pointed out upthread, nothing like that happened even remotely. This isn’t surprising as the US in general was short of labor and abundant in land and natural resources like timber relative to Europe.
The idea that slavery would have collapsed of its own accord due to economics has been thrashed soundly in the academic literature. I suppose that if you extend the timeline to 1920, that we might at least enter GD territory. The key factor you would have to study is the amount of work potentially available that could be closely monitored. The other consideration would be the South’s militarist inclinations: there was serious discussion of extending slave power (to use the 19th century phrase) into Central America.
In other contexts that were not quite slavery serious whippings/floggings were not all that common. Naval crews and even serfs could be legally flogged throughout much of Europe for laziness or malingering, on the order of the local noble issued through a manor court. (In Central and Eastern Europe this was true into the 1700s, but there are accounts of the rare noble who tried it being whipped by the serf–at that point the power dynamic between nobles and serfs had dramatically changed.)
But anyway, the reason you don’t just flog people all the time, whether they be slaves or sailors, is it reduces their ability to work for sometimes a few days and can sometimes even kill them. It’s something you use to make an example of people who have crossed the line in order to keep the rest of the crew (or slaves) in line, but it makes no practical sense to be whipping slaves on a regular basis just out of spite or meanness. Plantation ownership was often enough a failure economically so there isn’t a great incentive to hurt your output by keeping your slaves injured on a regular basis.
Flogging not just reduces their time to be able to work - it also encourages the rest of the crew not to be there. there’s a reason why it was serfs and sailors. Serfs were pretty much slaves tied to the land and generally did not have a lot of options. Naval “employees” were effectively slaves; striking the captain or a senior officer was mutiny, a hanging offense. The problem was stopping the sailors from deserting - unless the port authorities were eager to help, off they went at the frst opportunity.
And… that’s the problem with slaves vs. free men - if you abuse free workers, they simply stop showing up to work, they leave to go elsewhere. Your discipline options are more limited.
The trouble in an industrial society is that more and more of the jobs require skills or self-direction. The steamboats on the Mississippi might have used slaves for the more basic tasks - shovelling coal, toting bales and loading barges; but the guy in charge of the expensive ship, the guy repairing and running the machinery, probably even the guy at the front calling the depth soundings - you want them to have a bit more invested in the job than fear of whipping. You hire a mechanic or pilot based on skill, and pick the ones who work out best. As another nonselective process has shown (nepotism) selecting simply on warm body rather than skill factor can have disasterous consequences, even if the candidate should be motivated.
We have heard horror stories of the old days of unionized assembly line work at the Detroit plants, and the quality that came out of there. Imagine a workforce even less motivated than that.
Slavery works for only certain basic functions - and bit by bit, mechanization replaces drudge labour. (When I was a kid, my mother used to threaten me with “If you don’t study, you’ll be a ditchdigger”. Well ditchdiggers today are heavy equiipment operators making a premium wage and producing 100 times more ditch per hour than 50 years ago; but entrusted with a machine that could get very expensive if they misuse it. So goes all drudge work.)
Hanging would have been merciful; the penalty for striking an officer was often to be “flogged round the fleet”- a sentence of slow death.
On another note, I wonder if there was a connection between slavery and cash crops such as cotton, tobacco and sugar. Presumably only such crops earned enough cash to allow a plantation owner to invest in more slaves. Although I’m sure it happened, you don’t usually hear of slaves raising corn or hogs.
In the case of Haiti (France), the slaves were worked to death. It was cheaper to replace the dead ones with fresh ones imported from West Africa. This lead to Haiti becoming France’s most profitable colony-plantation owners there became hugely wealthy. It all came to an end when the slaves revolted.
Bear in mind that treating slaves one way or another out of rational self-interest or economic good sense may run afoul of human irrationality and lack of good sense, even where money is involved.
In the right lands, plantation agriculture was highly profitable, so slaveowners didn’t have to apply the optimal amount of rewards and whips. So we’d expect considerable variation of treatment.
I’ll quote from Lee and Passell 1979, p. 193, regarding perceptions of slave punishment among economic historians:
[QUOTE=Lee and Passell]
Fogel and Engerman… cite the diary of Louisiana planter Bennett Barrow. Over a two year period 45 percent of the slaves were never whipped and another 19 percent were whipped just once…
Herbert Gutman and Richard Sutch take exception to both the Barrow data and the implied benevolence of plantation discipline. The frequency of whippings was actually much higher, they note, because the number of field slaves on the Barrow plantation was lower and the recorded number of whippings higher than Fogel and Engerman report. By Gutman-Sutch reckoning, only 22 percent of Barrow’s slaves escaped the lash…
More important that the numbers revision is the revision in how they should be interpreted. Gutman and Sutch argue that successful punishment systems operate through deterrence… one might wonder about the quality of life in a slave quarters in which, on average, one public whipping was administered every fourth day. …Barrow also “jailed, beat with a stick, threatened with death, shot with a gun, raked the heads of and humiliated” his slaves.
[/QUOTE]
Bennett Barrow, I might add, was plausibly a bit of a weirdo. Most slaveowners didn’t take copious notes of their whippings and I’m unaware of evidence that Barrow’s records of punishment were necessarily comprehensive. Interesting, sure, but it’s not like the guy was going to be audited.
The question, too, is what did Barrow mean?
First, the implication is that over half the slaves were whipped at least once in a two year period.
If slaves worked on a gang labour system, odds are more minor corporal punishment was the job of the overseer, not the master (unless it was a very small plantation.) So the slaves may not have been tied to a post and scourged, but it’s very likely they would get daily cracks across the head, back, hands, whatever - whenever the overseer thought they were slacking off even a bit.
The overseer’s job, too, likely depended on results. He got brownie points (sorry) from the master for results and the appearance of strictness, but no reward from either side for being nice to field hands - classic divide and conquer strategy by the master.