On a related note, you might find it interesting that several Japanese companies used slave labor drawn from the POW population held by the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII. “Supervised” by company employees, the allied slaves were frequently beaten. Underfed. Denied medical care. Many died from this treatment. None of the companies are willing to even acknowledge these events still today or to meet with the few still-living men who they used as slave laborers.
Yeah a raw deal for the men involved. But then colonial powers in the region had been using local labor as slaves or near enough for decades or even centuries so a bit of turnaround is nothing special.
In New Amsterdam, the Dutch West India Company owned slaves, as did some of the Dutch colonists individually. This is obviously well before there was such a thing as a “slave state”, but it must have set a precedent.
The history of slavery in the North is rather surprising in terms of how late it persisted, for instance until the 1820s in New York.
I’m not familiar with Americans using Japanese citizens as slaves.
But more to my point, there are people living in the US today who were slaves under the control of corporations. You don’t have to go back to the 19th century.
A lot of dockworkers and shipbuilders in NYC were slaves, though I don’t know if they were corporately owned or leased from individuals. They were apparently given wages of some kind as there were actually taverns that catered to (though obviously was not exclusively patronized by) their business. (Cite- there are others.)
Bumping the thread because I just noticed something interesting while reading the 1860 instructions to census enumerators for the white-skinned slaves thread: The instructions specifically recognize the possibility of corporate ownership.
So if anyone wants to search four million census records, we can get an exact answer to this question. Happy reading!
How about governments (in the U.S.) owning slaves? (No political wisecracks, please.)
The latter is highly unlikely since teaching slaves to read was illegal in much of the South.
My WAG is that while there were some institutional barriers to forming a corporation in the prebellum South, costs of monitoring and control drove the outcome. Corporations had good access to the capital markets - they could sell bonds - but hiring somebody to monitor and brutalize slaves 24/7, and monitoring the monitors as well seems difficult unless you are on site and highly motivated (i.e. you own the slaves yourself). In the 20th century, I could imagine franchise operations or financial intermediaries getting involved in chattel slavery though.
The scope of the corporation has been of interest to economists. As a thought experiment, you can imagine a factory floor full of independent contractors who trade goods among one another. But to lower the costs of transaction, we typically have a single owner of the plant and equipment who coordinates the production of a single product. But such economies of scope are not boundless. Otherwise GM wouldn’t have any suppliers: everything would be done in house. I suspect that owning a slave isn’t an arms length sort of endeavor, so it’s ill suited for a corporate structure. Renting slaves would be another matter entirely though.
Especially since the Bush recession, my city owns quite a few houses & buildings as tax-forfeited properties.
I would presume that back in the pre-Civil War times, some plantations went bankrupt and got forfeited to the local government for non-payment of taxes. So that government would also own any slaves on that plantation. At least temporarily, until they auctioned off the property.
I remember reading that one of the reasons Thomas Jefferson couldn’t free his slaves was because he owed so much debt to so many creditors, it would be giving away collateral. I assume some of those creditors were banks, and as such I would fully expect that banks owned slaves, if only through foreclosure and taking secured collateral.
As for the question posed above, I am almost certain that it would have cost less overall to hire a “free” black and pay him something akin to the minimum wage of the day (something far less than our minimum wage adjusted for inflation) than to pay several thousand dollars for a good slave - plus the cost of feeding/housing/caring for the slave and plus the losses due to the slave’s incentive to work as slow as possible. The reason they didn’t do this (i.e. move to the form of virtual slavery we have today with people living paycheck to paycheck, barely able to get by, and valuing their job as a positive thing they’d be horrified to lose) surely comes down to 90% pure racism and 10% lack of foresight. Plus nobody could do it if they wanted to. If one plantation owner decided to free his slaves and hire people to work his land picking cotton for 2 cents per day or even incentivized at 1 cent per 50 pounds picked (assume that’s about equal to what illegal migrant workers make doing similar work today), his neighbors would boycott him, call him n*gger lover, capture and re-enslave the slaves he’d freed, etc. Either nobody did it or everyone did it - just like ending segregation. They may all want to keep blacks enslaved or prevent blacks from eating at their restaurants, but as long as one person is going to refuse to do it, then everyone else is at a commercial disadvantage.
This is why we could get rid of the civil rights act today… no store is going to go back to refusing to serve black people - if they did they would not only go out of business but they’d make the national news and be the most hated business in america. And rightly so.
I recently read an article in the NY Times about exactly this - how a large number of Confederate slaves were held not by plantation owners but corporations and companies, including the railroads.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/been-workin-on-the-railroad/
ETA: “The Negro Fund”?!! I was trying to think of a tie-in joke between George Costanza’s “Human Fund” from Seinfeld and the United Negro College Fund but it was just too depressing to joke about.
Just the opposite; people did not server blacks at the Woolworths counter even though it was legal; because social pressure held them back. Hate was such that anyone serving blacks would be boycotted by whites, would be firebombed, etc.
The question is, if the laws were repealed, would the status quo hold or would some areas revert eventually the the way things were? After all, it’s not like you can shoot some unarmed black kid on the street for no reason, then claim self-defence and not get arrested… oh, wait a minute…
The problem is cooperation - when the Nazis used slave labour in factories, there were plenty of stories of sabotage through poor performance (swapping chewed bread for explosive in shell triggers…). The more complex the job becomes, the more likely a slave is a bad choice to perform this work. They might shovel the coal in the boiler but I bet they didn’t pilot the ship. Having a policy where education and world knowledge is forbidden or discouraged probably adds to this problem.