A point that you might want to consider here is that especially in the latter part of the antebellum period, slavery operated on a highly extractive, chew-them-up-and-spit-them-out principle; slave plantations in the East derived the majority of their income from selling slaves West, and the Western plantations operated at full tilt to leech out the maximum profit from the land before the soil gave out and they had to move yet further west. (For a brief overview of how extractive farming practices drove the slaveholding economy, see the relevant chapters of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery.)
Consequently, the Eastern plantations were mainly concerned with producing more slaves as quickly as possible; the labor they performed was a nice bonus but secondary, and they didn’t have a strong incentive to maintain the long-term health of anyone except adolescents close to sellable age (since rates of infant mortality and death of the mother in childbirth were both high). And since the Western plantations were only highly profitable for the first few decades anyway, working slaves so hard that they died in their 30’s wasn’t a problem; as long as most of them lasted long enough for the owner to make his pile it was all good, and the replacement cost of slaves was just part of the cost of doing business.
Aside from any tenderheartedness on the part of the owners, the issue of how well to treat slaves came down to whether it was more profitable to just use them up, and very frequently it was, just as it was often more profitable to work horses or oxen to death. An oldie but goodie on the subject is The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South by Kenneth M. Stampp, which among other things goes into the changing economics of slavery and the corresponding attitudes among slaveholders.
I’m unclear about what you are claiming. It seems that you are claiming that slaveowners had an incentive to work his slaves to the point of “exhaustion, sickness, or death.” I am not saying that some slaveowners did not do this, but there is no such incentive to abuse personal property in this way.
This is GD. If you want to be taken seriously, why don’t put up some support for your argument just as I have done? You’ve had how many days to scrounge up something? And yet all you have is assertions.
As I pointed out earlier, your argument seems to hinge on the assumption that replacing worn out slaves was too difficult and costly to make it profitable to work them to death. But it keeps being pointed out to you that this assumption is wrong. The amount of money that could be wrung out of a slave more made up for the cost of purchasing them and keeping them alive. So nothing else really needs to be said here.
I’ve already posted cites that says this is false. In many cases, yes, debts kept accruing such that sharecroppers could never leave the hole. But in fairer arrangements, this wasn’t the case. Sharecroppers could save enough money so that they could eventually buy land.
But to address your comment about maternity leave: yes, sharecroppers could take that shit…at least moreso than they could under slavery. If a woman was pregnant and needed downtime, do you think it’s likely her husband would force her to be in the fields all day just the same as an overseer?
Why do you think the plantation owner was dictating who was working a sharecropper’s land and for how long? Sounds like another assumption you’ve pulled out of your bum, in your continued insistence to convince me and others that slavery actually represented a step down for black folks’ quality of life. And let’s not pretend you aren’t really arguing this, because it’s pretty obvious at this point.
Sounds like another assumption you’ve pulled out of your bum, in your continued insistence to convince me and others that** slavery **actually represented a step down for black folks’ quality of life. And let’s not pretend you aren’t really arguing this, because it’s pretty obvious at this point.
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