# Profitability of slavery vs. sharecropping **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 7, 2016, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213 "2016-05-07T20:47:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2016, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/21 "2016-05-08T19:31:18Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > The overseer is in the owner’s employ. If he is using harsh tactics which diminish the value of the slaves, then that dude is fired and another one is hired. > > Even if I own 100 cars, that does not mean it is profitable to abuse all 100. You seem to be having a hard time grasping a basic fact: You don’t have to abuse all 100. All you have to do is be brutal towards one–the one who dares to slack off due to sickness or exhaution–and make the brutality a public spectacle. Watch as suddenly everyone on the plantation catches a second wind and pushes through the pain. Maybe a couple will keel over in the process, but the plantation’s profits were big enough that the loss was always negligible. Just the cost of doing business. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2016, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/22 "2016-05-08T19:38:15Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > You seem to be having a hard time grasping a basic fact: You don’t have to abuse all 100. All you have to do is be brutal towards one–the one who dares to slack off due to sickness or exhaution–and make the brutality a public spectacle. Watch as suddenly everyone on the plantation catches a second wind and pushes through the pain. Maybe a couple will keel over in the process, but the plantation’s profits were big enough that the loss was always negligible. Just the cost of doing business. Exactly. I don’t know if every single slave was frequently brutalized, but I’m sure virtually every single slave frequently witnessed brutality, and frequently experienced fear of the possibility of brutality. And I expect virtually every female slave, especially those deemed desirable, were raped. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2016, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/23 "2016-05-08T20:30:14Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > You seem to be having a hard time grasping a basic fact: You don’t have to abuse all 100. All you have to do is be brutal towards one–the one who dares to slack off due to sickness or exhaution–and make the brutality a public spectacle. Watch as suddenly everyone on the plantation catches a second wind and pushes through the pain. Maybe a couple will keel over in the process, but the plantation’s profits were big enough that the loss was always negligible. Just the cost of doing business. I guess we are both missing basic facts. I can’t post a chart on here, but let’s just say that for a short term duration human beings can work 18 hour days. However, to be productive long term, they need food, rest, and can therefore only work 10 hour days to remain fit to continue producing. Just like how a car might last 30,000 miles if you tear the hell out of it, but may last 150,000 miles or more if you use it reasonably. Whether a slave owner beats each slave or coerces them through witnessed beatings to work 12 to 18 hour days, these slaves will be less productive in the long term. In a slave system, the owner has a vested interest in keeping his slaves healthy and fit for future work. In a sharecropper, sweatshop, or even a present day minimum wage relationship, he has every incentive to work his employee to the bone and when that employee is broken, find another. The cost of killing 10 of your 100 slaves might be “negligible” for the purposes of argument, but having 100 healthy slaves is still better than 90 beat down ones who are working at less than fully capacity and then having to purchase 10 more healthy ones. Then rinse and repeat ad infinitum. ---
**Author:** ![Tzigone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Tzigone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tzigone)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2016, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/24 "2016-05-08T20:37:43Z")
> [@](#): > > but having 100 healthy slaves is still better than 90 beat down ones who are working at less than fully capacity and then having to purchase 10 more healthy ones. Not if 50 of those 100 are “slacking off” because they can get away with it. But as I said earlier - it doesn’t matter what’s logical or “correct” or best business practices because we have records of how it really was, and very often it wasn’t “good medical care, good food, adequate time for rest.” ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2016, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/25 "2016-05-08T20:45:39Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > I guess we are both missing basic facts. I can’t post a chart on here, but let’s just say that for a short term duration human beings can work 18 hour days. However, to be productive long term, they need food, rest, and can therefore only work 10 hour days to remain fit to continue producing. Just like how a car might last 30,000 miles if you tear the hell out of it, but may last 150,000 miles or more if you use it reasonably. > > Whether a slave owner beats each slave or coerces them through witnessed beatings to work 12 to 18 hour days, these slaves will be less productive in the long term. > > In a slave system, the owner has a vested interest in keeping his slaves healthy and fit for future work. In a sharecropper, sweatshop, or even a present day minimum wage relationship, he has every incentive to work his employee to the bone and when that employee is broken, find another. > > The cost of killing 10 of your 100 slaves might be “negligible” for the purposes of argument, but having 100 healthy slaves is still better than 90 beat down ones who are working at less than fully capacity and then having to purchase 10 more healthy ones. Then rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Workers who fear brutal reprisals for being less productive will be more productive than workers who do not fear such brutal reprisals. As long as that increased productivity is more than the loss from the actual (very public and visible) brutality against one or two to serve as examples (and put the fear into the others), then that brutality will result in greater productivity than a system without the brutality. Further, if the fear of brutal reprisals (and restrictions on gathering together, being educated, etc.) results in a lesser likelihood of slaves trying to escape, or slave rebellions, both of which can be very significant losses in productivity, then overall that brutality may result in more productivity than a system without it. ---
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2016, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/26 "2016-05-08T21:20:11Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > In a slave system, the owner has a vested interest in keeping his slaves healthy and fit for future work. In a sharecropper, sweatshop, or even a present day minimum wage relationship, he has every incentive to work his employee to the bone and when that employee is broken, find another. Wait, what? On one hand you say it’s makes no sense for an employer to work someone to the point of exhaustion because it hurts their productivity. But then you admit that sweatshops work people to the bone because these workers can simply be replaced when they finally break. So it looks like your whole argument hinges upon the idea that slaves couldn’t be easily replaced, that they were somehow these rare and precious resources that were too valuable to abuse and overwork lest the slaveowner found himself without the labor needed to keep his operation profitable. Nonsense. As long as slaves kept having children, there was always enough people for replacement. A plantation with a decent supply of childbearing women never needed to worry about having a shortage of field hands, even when abuse was severe. Think about how easy it would be to overwork an old slave until they succumbed to disease and died. What would it cost an slaveowner to do this, when an old person isn’t exactly a promising longterm investment anyway? So you wring as much work out of them as you can, even if it means they suffer greatly. Whether this makes sense to you doesn’t matter. It’s what happened. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2016, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/27 "2016-05-08T21:25:13Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > I guess we are both missing basic facts. I can’t post a chart on here, but let’s just say that for a short term duration human beings can work 18 hour days. However, to be productive long term, they need food, rest, and can therefore only work 10 hour days to remain fit to continue producing. Just like how a car might last 30,000 miles if you tear the hell out of it, but may last 150,000 miles or more if you use it reasonably. > > Whether a slave owner beats each slave or coerces them through witnessed beatings to work 12 to 18 hour days, these slaves will be less productive in the long term. > > In a slave system, the owner has a vested interest in keeping his slaves healthy and fit for future work. In a sharecropper, sweatshop, or even a present day minimum wage relationship, he has every incentive to work his employee to the bone and when that employee is broken, find another. > > The cost of killing 10 of your 100 slaves might be “negligible” for the purposes of argument, but having 100 healthy slaves is still better than 90 beat down ones who are working at less than fully capacity and then having to purchase 10 more healthy ones. Then rinse and repeat ad infinitum. I don’t usually post much in these threads, being as it’s not my history but… Since so many people in this world are complete fucking morons, and that would undoubtedly include a representative proportion of slaveowners, why would you assume they’d be doing what was rational and in their best interest anyway _even if your analysis is true_? “If I beat one slave to death the other 99 will work 10% harder” is a logically defensible position. Evil as fuck, but logically defensible. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2016, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/28 "2016-05-08T22:41:23Z")
> [@Aspidistra](#): > > Since so many people in this world are complete fucking morons, and that would undoubtedly include a representative proportion of slaveowners, why would you assume they’d be doing what was rational and in their best interest anyway even if your analysis is true? Amen! The OP is arguing that slaveowners were irrational enough to rely on an inefficient business model for 250 hundred years. But for some reason, we’re supposed to believe they were rational enough not to brutalize their slaves? As you say, it makes total sense to brutalize slaves. There’s not enough Stockholm Syndrome in the world that would make people willingly acquiesce to a lifetime of unpaid cotton or tobacco picking. There’s not enough whiskey or chitterlings in the world, either. To make people work against their will, you need harsh disincentives for _not_ working. You can’t scare a slave by throwing him in jail. He doesn’t have any wages that you can garnish. But you sure as hell can light some fire under him by bringing out that whip. Maybe the “kindly” Massa tolerated a little ass-dragging during the winter time. But when money is out there in the field fixing to wither away, no black asses were allowed to drag. An overseer that didn’t make sure the field was picked clean at harvest time was an overseer that didn’t get his contract renewed. I’m guessing the more tender-hearted masters tended to avoid the fields during planting and harvest time. That way, they could continue to think of themselves as “kindly”. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2016, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/29 "2016-05-08T23:12:41Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > I’m guessing the more tender-hearted masters tended to avoid the fields during planting and harvest time. That way, they could continue to think of themselves as “kindly”. And they probably only gently raped the more attractive slaves, maybe waiting until they were 16 out of the kindness of their heart. And if the slave bore their master children, they probably even went so far as to _not_ rape them when they grew up, as hard as that might have been. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/30 "2016-05-09T00:26:18Z")
> [@Tzigone](#): > > Not if 50 of those 100 are “slacking off” because they can get away with it. > > But as I said earlier - it doesn’t matter what’s logical or “correct” or best business practices because we have records of how it really was, and very often it wasn’t “good medical care, good food, adequate time for rest.” The worst practice are those remembered best, and also the most likely to be mentioned in a book or article to denounce slavery. It doesn’t mean they were the most representative. I read a book wrote by some 19th century American slave who changed owner a number of times, and it was obvious the attitude of the owners varied very widely. Which makes me think also that this guy at times was owned by people having few slaves, or even just him. While everybody seems to refer only to large plantations in this thread. Also, I disagree with the poster who said that people who owned slaves couldn’t feel any empathy or they wouldn’t have owned a slave in the first place. It’s not because you’re fine with how things are being done in your culture, especially if it benefits you, that you’re necessarily a sociopath. As for people saying that sharecroppers could improve their lots, do something better and that could be a problem for the landowner, that’s quite theoretical. Even recently (and probably even today) people working in latifundias and kept in permanent debt by having to buy everything they need, overpriced, from the landowner’s shop with their minimal wage had no real chance to escape this condition. I strongly doubt that some 19th century guy toiling 12h/day in, say, a steel mill starting at the age of 8 or whatever had any actual opportunity to get an education and improve his situation, either. And even assuming that one did, it’s not like there was a shortage of paupers who needed to take the job in order to have something to eat at the end of the day. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/31 "2016-05-09T00:35:57Z")
Also : posts in this thread seem to me to be based on guesses about what would or would not make sense for a landowner in a time and culture we’re all unfamiliar with, or on specific individual instances read here or there, rather than on any actual hard facts. Surely, there must have been extensive scholarly studies about the actual “typical” way a plantation was run ---
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/32 "2016-05-09T01:51:30Z")
> [@clairobscur](#): > > As for people saying that sharecroppers could improve their lots, do something better and that could be a problem for the landowner, that’s quite theoretical. Neither you nor the OP (or **Ultra** ) have supplied any cites to support what you are saying. Okay, maybe not a big deal since the other side of the debate hasn’t been flush with them either. But really? You’re making this kind of declarative statement with nothing to back it up? It didn’t take much effort for me to find [this](http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/uhic/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?zid=de00f766cfb0b9313f5771bdcb26fa2d&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CCX3048900548&userGroupName=mlin_m_fadayms&jsid=65f6acb4944bf70d42db0e37bc6f0087) summation: > [@](#): > > At harvest the entire crop was given to the owner, who sold it. After deducting the cost of supplies for which the owner had paid, the owner shared the remaining profits with the sharecroppers. **Sharecroppers usually received between one-third and one-half of the remaining profits.** > > When the weather was poor or prices for the crops were low, profits often did not cover much more than the cost of supplies. Sharecroppers frequently wound up in debt. **Sharecroppers who managed to make a profit and save money eventually gained more independence as farmers. Some moved to their own farms, while many who could not afford land became tenant farmers.** > > Tenant farmers were more independent than sharecroppers. Although they also did not own the land they farmed, they were completely in charge of their crops from start to finish. They were responsible for all the necessary supplies and got to select the crops they wanted to raise. The entire harvest was theirs to sell or use as needed. Plantation owners, in exchange for use of their land by tenant farmers, received either a cash payment or a share of the crop as rent. **Though tenant farmers faced challenges in their quest for independence, some managed to remain debt-free long enough to save money to buy their own parcels of land.** The things I put in bold? Not feasible for slaves. The little independence that sharecroppers had over slaves translated to less control that landowners had over labor. Which means less exploitation and fewer profits overall. In the 1930’s, sharecroppers even started organizing and demanding better contracts. Do I need to even point out how this was impossible for slaves to do? An empowered workforce was incompatible with the planter’s financial interest, which is exactly why the planter made damn sure they stayed disempowered. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/33 "2016-05-09T01:56:39Z")
> [@clairobscur](#): > > Also, I disagree with the poster who said that people who owned slaves couldn’t feel any empathy or they wouldn’t have owned a slave in the first place. I’m assuming you’re talking about my post. What I said is that slaveowners didn’t feel _much_ empathy for their enslaved laborers. And this is undeniable. It is impossible to keep people in chains, under threat of the whip, and not detach yourself from _their_ humanity. There is a reason why 18th and 19th scientific racism was so focused on the bestiality of the negro. The slaveowning class needed to believe black people were subhuman to justify to themselves why their enslavement wasn’t immoral. > [@](#): > > It’s not because you’re fine with how things are being done in your culture, especially if it benefits you, that you’re necessarily a sociopath. You’re equating lack of empathy for sociopathy, which means you have little understanding of either of these terms. I don’t feel empathy for every life form out there. I don’t feel the same empathy for a human as I do for a wild animal. I feel more empathy than my cat than I do \*your \*cat. I feel more empathy for people who speak my language and look like me than people who are “foreign” to me. But I’m not a sociopath. I’m just imperfect. > [@](#): > > As for people saying that sharecroppers could improve their lots, do something better and that could be a problem for the landowner, that’s quite theoretical. Even recently (and probably even today) people working in latifundias and kept in permanent debt by having to buy everything they need, overpriced, from the landowner’s shop with their minimal wage had no real chance to escape this condition. I strongly doubt that some 19th century guy toiling 12h/day in, say, a steel mill starting at the age of 8 or whatever had any actual opportunity to get an education and improve his situation, either. And even assuming that one did, it’s not like there was a shortage of paupers who needed to take the job in order to have something to eat at the end of the day. And yet a shitload of black people eventually abandoned share-cropping to migrate up North. The Great Migration is still the largest internal movement of Americans in the history of the USA. The majority of migrants were escapees from the agricultural sector. As far as I know, this migration was not spurred by an executive order or legislative act but by the hands of the free market. Something the antebellum plantation system had been shielded from for some 250 years. The sharecropper was enslaved in lots of ways, but one thing he had over his slave counterpart was that it wasn’t against the law for him or his children to become educated, whether formally or informally. Massa owned his laborers’ bodies and minds. Boss Man did not. And while the black codes served to keep the black sharecropper in his place, Boss Man couldn’t rely on local governments up north to give a flying fuck about a debtor tenant on the lam. In contrast, the Fugitive Slave Act extended Massa’s whip across state boundaries. The federal government benefited from and perpetuated the institution of slavery through policy and regulation. I’m unaware of its involvement with the sharecropping system, but I doubt its approval was codefied into law. Moreover, at least on paper, black sharecroppers were American citizens. Under slavery, they were property that could be destroyed with impunity. Seems to me a no-brainer which type of labor force would be preferred by a cold-hearted bastard capitalist. ---
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/34 "2016-05-09T02:02:34Z")
[Another cite:](http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=465) > [@](#): > > During Reconstruction, former slaves–and many small white farmers–became trapped in a new system of economic exploitation–sharecropping. Lacking capital and land of their own, former slaves were forced to work for large landowners. Initially, planters, with the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau, sought to restore gang labor under the supervision of white overseers. The freedman, who wanted autonomy and independence, refused to sign contracts that required gang labor. Ultimately, sharecropping emerged as a sort of compromise. > > Instead of cultivating land in gangs supervised by overseers, landowners divided plantations into 20- to 50-acre plots suitable for farming by a single family. In exchange for land, a cabin, and supplies, sharecroppers agreed to raise a cash crop (usually cotton) and to give half the crop to their landlord. The high interest rates landlords and merchants charged for goods bought on credit transformed sharecropping into a system of economic dependency and poverty. The freedmen found that “freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make 'em rich.” > > **Nevertheless, the sharecropping system did allow freedmen a degree of freedom and autonomy greater than that experienced under slavery.** As a symbol of their newly won independence, freedmen had teams of mules drag their former slave cabins away from the slave quarters into their own fields. Black wives and daughters sharply reduced their labor in the fields and instead devoted more time to childcare and housework.\*\* For the first time, black families could divide their time between fieldwork and housework in accordance with their own family priorities\*\*. If time is money and money is time, and sharecroppers could now use more of their time taking care of their families rather than making the big boss money at the threat of a whip, by what mechanism would sharecropping yield more profits than slavery? This mechanism needs to be explained for us to accept it as fact. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/35 "2016-05-09T02:13:00Z")
> [@you\_with\_the\_face](#): > > So it looks like your whole argument hinges upon the idea that slaves couldn’t be easily replaced, that they were somehow these rare and precious resources that were too valuable to abuse and overwork lest the slaveowner found himself without the labor needed to keep his operation profitable. A good measure of just how valuable slaves were was their actual selling price on the block. After the importation of slaves was banned in the early 19th century, the price of healthy slaves in the prime of their working lives kept going up and up right until the Civil War. The value of a slave was non-trivial. However, a common practice was to sell off “troublemakers” at a markdown to progressively harsher owners, especially to be sold “down the river” to plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. Sugar cane cultivation was an even worse task than picking cotton, and there working a slave to death WAS occasionally worth it. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/36 "2016-05-09T02:27:45Z")
IMO, if the slavists had figured out that sharecropping or exploitative labor could be more profitable/economically efficient than slave labor, the latter would not have stayed the norm across the US South for so long and would not have been held so dear as an irrenounceable institution upon which their way of life was founded as to be so mentioned in the Acts of Seccession that hundreds of thousands proceeded to die defending. If it was not more profitable, then the slavists were deluded that it was, but in the end either way the effect was the same, the slavist establishment acted as people convinced of the indispensable nature of chattel slavery and legislated accordingly. (OK, so they were were also delusionally convinced they were effecting some sort of divine mandate to subjugate inferior races; but they did not give \*that \*up after the war). ---
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/37 "2016-05-09T02:54:15Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > A good measure of just how valuable slaves were was their actual selling price on the block. After the importation of slaves was banned in the early 19th century, the price of healthy slaves in the prime of their working lives kept going up and up right until the Civil War. The value of a slave was non-trivial. It rose largely because of expansion into the undeveloped west. That created a demand that always made selling slaves profitable, but that doesn’t mean that slaves were so rare and precious that replacing them needed to come at cost. If anything, it underscores just how much money slaveowners could make compared to what they could under share cropping. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/38 "2016-05-09T02:58:47Z")
Another good way of working out the degree to which slavery helped the American cotton industry would be to look at comparisong with countries who didn’t have slavery. For instance, India: > [@wikipedia](#): > > It was thought that the Civil War caused the Lancashire Cotton Famine, a period between 1861–1865 of depression in the British cotton industry, by blocking off American raw cotton. Some, however, suggest that the Cotton Famine was mostly due to overproduction and price inflation caused by an expectation of future shortage. > > Prior to the Civil War, Lancashire companies issued surveys to find new cotton-growing countries if the Civil War were to occur and reduce American exports. **India was deemed to be the country capable of growing the necessary amounts. Indeed, it helped fill the gap during the war, making up only 31% of British cotton imports in 1861, but 90% in 1862 and 67% in 1864.** > > Additionally, the main purchasers of cotton, Britain and France, began to turn to Egyptian cotton. The Egyptian government of Viceroy Isma’il took out substantial loans from European bankers and stock exchanges. **After the American Civil War ended in 1865, British and French traders abandoned Egyptian cotton and returned to cheap American exports** That all seems to suggest that, _economically_, it was perhaps pretty marginal. The American industry, which used slavery, was dominant over industries in other countries which (probably) just used dirt cheap labour (slavery was already illegal in India by the civil war - not in Egypt till later, but I don’t know if they would have been working the cotton fields). But the cotton industries in other countries were still _there_, they weren’t being totally killed by American slave-based competition. On the other hand, after the civil war ended, American cotton was _still_ dominant, for quite a while. So that seems to argue there wasn’t very much difference in the cost of production between the two systems. ETA: If the former slaveowners’ standard of living went down considerably after the civil war, that could be one reason for American cotton remaining competitive. But I don’t have any particular information on that. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/39 "2016-05-09T03:07:14Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > I’m assuming you’re talking about my post. What I said is that slaveowners didn’t feel _much_ empathy for their enslaved laborers. And this is undeniable. It is impossible to keep people in chains, under threat of the whip, and not detach yourself from _their_ humanity. There is a reason why 18th and 19th scientific racism was so focused on the bestiality of the negro. The slaveowning class needed to believe black people were subhuman to justify to themselves why their enslavement wasn’t immoral. > > You’re equating lack of empathy for sociopathy, which means you have little understanding of either of these terms. > > I don’t feel empathy for every life form out there. I don’t feel the same empathy for a human as I do for a wild animal. I feel more empathy than my cat than I do \*your \*cat. I feel more empathy for people who speak my language and look like me than people who are “foreign” to me. > > But I’m not a sociopath. I’m just imperfect. You assume a need for empathy instead of recognizing the limits of your property (standard disclaimers again). I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about my car, as it really doesn’t have feelings, and if I could not empathize with a slave, I wouldn’t treat him any better or worse than a car. Even though I don’t care about my car, I still do not ask it to do things that it is physically incapable of doing. I cannot expect it to drive me 40mpg when it is rated for 23. I can hold a gun to the head of the President of Kia Motors, or flog him in my back yard, and my car will not increase its productivity. I am not saying that abuses did not happen. Certainly not. But a slaveholder who abused his slaves to force work above that which could be expected of a human body would be at a disadvantage to those slaveholders who understood that a human body required good food, rest, and medical care. ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213/40 "2016-05-09T03:11:26Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Or was sharecropping a second-best system as far as the planters were concerned? Decidedly, yes. We know this because planters said so. Planters had to be forced into sharecropping, and left a copious record of complaints in Southern agricultural journals. The first reaction of Southern planters, after the Civil War, was to run their plantations just as under slavery, with labor performed in large gangs, but pay wages, because they had to. Laborers hated this, because they had no autonomy and no ability to profit from harder or smarter work. Still, gang labor persisted for a year or two after emancipation. But then, the price of cotton declined (1866-67), and wages rose, and planters were broke. And, they couldn’t get credit, because most of the banks in the South had gone under, and Northern banks weren’t wild about lending into a very unstable region. Sharecropping arose as the result. Neither side needed much cash up front, so it could work in a cash-poor economy. But, planters complained. One denounced sharecropping as “the most pernicious of all systems under which the labor of a country has ever been organized”. Another called it “the most hazardous undertaking that a planter ever embarked in”. You can read these comments, and many more, in _The Origin of Southern Sharecropping_ by Edward Royce. Black tenant farmers, for their part, didn’t like sharecropping either. It paid shit, and it was easy to fall into debt to your landlord for seeds and stock. Black people would have preferred to rent or own their own land. But, they couldn’t afford it, and under sharecropping they _at least_ got autonomy over their own work (no more gang labor) and some prospect of gain if they could work harder or get luckier and produce a larger crop. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/profitability-of-slavery-vs-sharecropping/754213.md?page=3)