Slaves were worked harder and fed less than free people. They faced a great deal more brutal corporal punishment.
Comparisons are pretty impossible, honestly, but I don’t think field slaves ever got to forget they were slaves. The man with a whip and the scars all around them made it pretty clear at all times.
There’s a limit to how much harder you can do farm work. You can’t pick cotton harder, for example. If you go too fast you damage the plants. And when you have a field of cotton to pick there’s not a lot of incentive to pick it faster anyway. The job is done when the field is picked. It’s not like you can pick it more.
The same is true for most other agricultural work. There’s almost always an upper limit to how fast you can do it without causing problems.
And back before electricity, it wasn’t practical to try to extend the number of hours people worked beyond the limit of sunrise to sunset.
Finally, if your objective is to get the maximum amount of work out of slaves, you’re not going to stop them from working so you can whip them and then wait until they were recovered enough to go back to work. The overseers might whip some slaves as a warning to the others if he felt they were working too slow. But the goal was to have slaves working not being beaten. A slave’s normal routine was hard work; corporal punishment was the exception.
Little_Nemo, your stance is very rational. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely true.
I wasn’t going to hop back into this thread after mhendo more or less called me a Southern Apologist, after he wildly misinterpreted my remarks and failed to draw some obvious inferences. I’m still a little burned over that and I may respond. For now:
The unfortunate truth, is that slaves were frequently whipped just because - at least on plantations in the Antebellum era. I don’t want to belabor the point, because there are different “eras” in the American slave experience. A slave in the post-Revolutionary period potentially faced a different experience than one in the 30 years facing up to the Civil War. I could provide some quotes but we’ll never really have anything like a neat mathematical record of how many slaves were whipped and when. But we have more than enough evidence from slaveowners’ own mouths or pens that they engaged in a low level of intimidation based on the constant threat of violence, which was only effective in that some of it was constantly being used.
(1) Slaves were often punished for perceived slacking despite achieving theoretical productivity well above that of a free laborer.
(2) Violence was used to instill fear and obedience among the victims directly and some other slaves.
(3) This was not spared even when working conditions were tough. truth be told, few slave-owners would have been disciplined enough to exercise that level of self-control.
While the use of whippings was common enough among plantation masters, there’s a fair amount of evidence that even the hardened ones often had to rein in their overseers. There were quite a few Southerners who objected to the rampant use of violence (including sexual abuse of every variety) as well, but few, if any, were in a position to change things. That being said, the lash was widely used and few slaves were unfamiliar with its agonies.
Additionally, we have pretty clear evidence from the testimony of slaves themselves that they were often worried to excel at their work even if they were in a mood to, or the labor went easily that day, for fear that even greater exertions would be demanded every day thereafter. The punishment for failure might include more physical abuse, even at harvest. One aspect of this is that cotton isn’t gathered all at once. Bolls don’t all open at the same time so the same field may have to be picked multiple times a season.
I think we risk projecting our own attitudes back into history. We recognize owning another human being is a great wrong. So we tend to project this attitude on to other wrong acts; we assume owners must have whipped and starved their slaves because those were also immoral acts and slave owners were fundamentally immoral people.
But slave owners didn’t see owning a slave as an immoral act. To them owning a slave was like owning a horse or a mule. It was just part of the world they lived in. And like a horse or mule they owned, the main purpose for owning a slave was to get work out of them. They weren’t going to starve their slaves or whip them for amusement just like they weren’t going to starve or whip their horses or mules.
Slaves were, of course, whipped; I’m not denying that. But most slave owners and slave overseers didn’t see this as a routine event. Most slaves didn’t live in the constant expectation of being beaten at any moment. They knew it happened but it wasn’t part of their daily routine.
Um… perhaps you should find out something about the mistreatment of horses and mules in the past. It was very common.
If you think that people always act rationally according to their best economic interests, and if you think there aren’t people who enjoy cruelty and domination for its own sake, you really don’t know much about human nature.
To get an insight into slavery in the American South, I suggest you read Frederick Douglass’s book for a start.
This isn’t projecting. This is one of the most thoroughly documented and intensely studied eras in history. The 19th C was an era of texts, of journals, letters, memoirs, financial records, newspapers, and court cases. We have mountains of primary sources, and they’ve been critically read by literally generations of scholars, who have furiously debated pretty much every point of potential contention. The stuff that fits under “broadly agreed upon” is about as sod as any fact that isn’t math. And one of those is that slaves were worked harder and fed less. They experienced or observed brutal physical violence often, several times a year at the low end. We have the words of slaves and slave owners and observers. We have bones and teeth. We have records from estate books.
Look, you’re the one projecting back what you think the attitudes towards slaves were, based on your own idea of what a “rational person” would do. But mountains of actual empirical evidence show that’s not true.
Also, agricultural work has a time limit. You don’t have forever to get the cotton in. Slaveowners ran farms with as tight a workload as humanly possible, with, then as now, a focus on immediate profits. You know how companies shoot themselves in the foot by laying off needed employees at critical times just to make the bottom line look better? Imagine if, when they laid people off, they also got a significant cash payment. And lots of plantation slaves were rented. Do you think they rented a comfortable margin above needs? If they needed 5.8 slaves, do you think they rounded up or down? What would most bosses do? IME, rent 5. And that’s with people who can quit if what’s asked in unreasonable.
Right. Slaves had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before they went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day picking cotton, and pay the plantation owner for permission to come to work, and when they got home, the overseer would kill them, and dance about on their graves singing ‘Hallelujah.’
But you try and tell the young people today that… and they’ll you they read a book.
That’s pretty feeble, to suggest that accounts by slaves are exaggerations. And pretty despicable.
Obviously you prefer to believe what suits you, rather than doing any research on the subject.
My point is that slavery was not the Holocaust. The system was set up to get work out of slaves not to exterminate them.
But some people can’t handle concepts like that. They insist that everything has to be simple. So slavery must be the most evil thing ever. And the Holocaust must also be the most evil thing ever. And the treatment of Native Americans must be the most evil thing ever. And the police shooting black people must be the most evil thing ever. And sexual harassment in the workplace must be the most evil thing ever.
If you try to suggest so somebody like this that all of these things are bad but maybe some of them were, in fact, worse than others you’re accused of being an apologist for whatever it is that you argue wasn’t the worst possible thing in the history of humanity.
That’s a pitiful straw man argument.
Nobody here has compared slavery to the Holocaust, and nobody here has suggested that there are not degrees of evil. You are making up imaginary arguments to knock down.
If I had a guy standing over me with a whip every day, I’d do my absolute best to make sure that whipping wasn’t a routine event, and if pushing myself to pick cotton faster was the best way to avoid having my back torn to pieces, then I’d do it. And that’s pretty much the situation described by slave narratives and other evidence that we have from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Here’s Solomon Northup from his narrative 12 Years a Slave, talking about the Epps plantation:
More generally, even on plantations where the owner and overseers might be less prone to whipping than Epps, violence still shaped the slave experience.
In the 1970s, the economists/economic historians William Fogel and Stanley Engerman wrote a book, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, in which they attempted to investigate the extent to which the principles of rational economic maximization, which you have been promoting in this thread, applied to slave plantation. Some of Fogel and Engerman’s conclusions agreed with the points you have made here, but they were also immediately assailed by other economists, and by historians, for problems in their methodology. Perhaps one of the most sustained critiques was of their discussion of violence on slave plantations, with some economists arguing that they got the numbers wrong, and some historians arguing that, even if they got the numbers right, their analysis of the significance of violence was far too simplistic.
One of the largest datasets they had was for the Barrow plantation, and Fogel and Engerman argued that violence was not an especially common occurrence on the plantation because, on average, each slave received an average of 0.7 whippings per year. So, that’s basically one whipping every year and a half, per slave. This led the authors, as one critic observed, to a rather benign view of slavery.
But some argued that they had counted the number of slaves and the number of whippings incorrectly. More importantly, because the Barrow plantation was large, with many slaves, Fogel and Engerman’s analysis also completely ignored the impact of whippings on those who are not actually being whipped. While each slave might have receive “only” 0.7 whippings per year, historians argued that a more relevant questions was, “How often do slaves on the Barrow plantation witness a whipping?” And the answer to that turned out to be, once every four and a half days.
As one critic, Thomas Haskell, observed:
The possibility and threat and imminence of violence is a method of social control, even if the whip hand is not actually rising and falling 24 hours a day.
And my point is that there’s a great deal of scholarly research out there that suggests it’s not that simple.
Thank you. This was excellent.
Something that many people skeptical of the brutality of the slave system in the U.S. forget to take into account is the fear of a slave uprising. On a plantation, the slaves outnumbered the free people. Being massacred by your slaves was a constant worry. With the examples of Haiti and Nat Turner in the slave holders minds, brutal suppression was considered by some the only way to maintain control.
The system was set up to get work out of slaves not to exterminate them
The system was premised on the non-humanness of black people. If you believe that a person isn’t a human, you can work that person to the bone and willfully ignore all the indicators that you’re hurting them. Slaveowners did this shit all the time. They were convinced that slaves were malingering to get out of work whenever they complained about fatigue or injury. So they would punish them for this “malingering” to deter anyone else from complaining.
Slaves weren’t just purchased for their labor. They were purchased because they were seen as things to be exploited however their owner desired… Imagine if slavery was legal today and completely unregulated. Do you really think modern day slaveowners would be satisfied with just having house servants? Or do you think it’s very likely that many of them would use their slaves for perverse forms of recreation IN ADDITION TO keeping the household running smoothly?
Wealth is just a means to power and dominance. Slavery provided all three services.
Ironically, this weird seemingly right-wing apologism for slavery is tainted with Marxist logic - “there’s just no way someone would do something economically irrational like make their slave too disabled to work!” As if people don’t do things for non-economic reasons all the time.
The role of psychology in Southern culture should be emphasized more. Everything about the slave society rewarded sadism and punished clear moral thinking. For many slaveowners, the cruelty was the point.
Ignoring that a big part of the Holocaust was - slave labour.
The system in the South was also set up to work slaves to death. Slow death, but work to death, nonetheless. Slaves were an expendable resource, to be used and discarded and replaced.
I would argue slavery was primarily economic, but it’s hard to understand how brutal that gets when you have an economic drive and zero empathy or social pressure. And, yes, there were sociopaths and sadists who were able to indulge their impulses freely, and indulging those impulses just makes them worse. You got a lot of monsters.
The other thing is, as I understand it, ( and as discussed earlier in this thread), there were generations of teachers, especially in High School, who taught this way. One of the many effects of bungling up Reconstruction is that the history of the Antebellum era was pretty much ceded to Southern historians. And it’s not just that they wanted to soften the situation of the South to make the past look better: they were sitting in a context where perpetuating the Jim Crow system was urgent and essential. The message that slavery wasn’t so bad, that Black Americans were fundamentally different (and unsuited to autonomy) served an immediate political and economic purpose. And, I really want to reiterate, it wasn’t propaganda on a hapless audience: it was more like an extraordinary echo chamber.
Anyway, that didn’t really even start to change until post WW2, and it takes a LONG time for something to go from what’s current in the field to what’s taught to undergraduates to what those undergraduates who become History teachers teach to their students. Generations.
@Little_Nemo, did you ever have someone talk to you about how things “Really are” in prisons and they had some sort of very logical story that sorta internally made sense and held together–you could see the logic, and they were utterly convinced–but was just wrong? The rational idea they had was just not how it worked out in practice, because of a thousand things they didn’t understand because they weren’t there. This seems like that to me: you’re basing your argument on what a “rational person” would do, but the opposite argument is based on a whole lot of evidence. Studies. Books. Whole careers dedicated to this question–all based on a truly extraordinary amount of evidence. And the overwhelming consensus is that while slavery was not the Holocaust, it was substantially different for white agricultural workers of the same time and place, and that the bulk of that difference is that slaves were worked much harder, fed much less, frequently subjected to family separation, and lived in a climate of brutal physical (and sexual) abuse.
It is my understanding that the majority of slaves were sent to work in conditions that resembled death camps. This is why the constant importation of slaves to the new world were necessary for hundreds of years. I also assume that life in the 1800’s of America was probably more survivable than in the 1500’s
Of course I am no historian and will now need to verify my assumptions with a bit of internet research.
Majority? Hard to say based on absolute numbers, but there is definite truth it. However, that is per-dominantly in a Caribbean context, not the United States or 13 Colonies. At some times in the Caribbean, slaves were apparently so cheap that planters often barely bothered to feed them. Punishments for so-called “disobedience” could become so harsh that they were tantamount to murder, and slaves effectively didn’t reproduce. Not surprisingly, many of these economic systems went into serious decline after having their slave supplies cut off.
The United States, and it was not alone in this, did not follow-suit. As bad as slavery was in the US, slaves did live, on average, lifespans about as long as most places. They got married, often endured great and unjust hardships, but they had children. The slave population grew because their conditions were good enough.
Now, Mr. Dibble said this: “The system in the South was also set up to work slaves to death. Slow death, but work to death, nonetheless. Slaves were an expendable resource, to be used and discarded and replaced.”
That is, broadly speaking, not true. There were those who called for the renewal of the slaves trade, but apart from a very few cases of smuggling no slaves arrived from outside the United States after 1807 - and at that, I believe that only South Carolina (rolleyes of course it was) imported slaves in the decade or so preceding. Slavery is a sin and a stain, but slaves in the United States were not discarded, if for no other reason than they could not be replaced easily. The two biggest challenges to the health of slaves lay in bad diets and poor working conditions, at least along the Mississippi. But healthcare in general was so bad that there was not much to be done about disease in the first place except not to catch it. I could go on about some of the less-savory, or more stupid, things slaveowners did with their human property, but that’s a whole 'nother digression so I will spare you.
In short, my response overall is that American slave-masters may have been in the main cruel, short-sighted, skinflints with hearts of lead. But they weren’t Nazis, and the system survived as long as it did because they were, in general, no more evil than the next man. There were reformers among them, and the did not all have the same views about what slavery was or should be, or whether it should remain at all.