I realize this is a macabre question. I ask because I’ve often heard that most Southerners in antebellum America didn’t own slaves (this is not to discount its widespread propagation, but rather that slave owning was limited to a wealthy section of the population).
So, as a means of understanding the relative wealth of the slave-owning class, I wonder how much a slave would have cost today.
This site says
Using this handy calculator, I’m told that
$700 sounds about right, given what I remember from US History class. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that calculator, but if it’s right, then yeah, I’d say that owning a slave wasn’t something that every family could afford.
First, you have to remember that slavery in the U.S. lasted 250 years. Second, the price of slaves started to move sharply upward after importation of slaves was stopped in 1808.
Slaves were also priced by other factors, like sex, age, strength, and health. Their pricing varied by location, by era, by economic conditions, by the kind of sale, by whether the sale was a punishment.
I’m afraid the question is something like asking what the cost of a car was in the 20th century.
You probably want something more specific, I’m sure. Here’s a quote from Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis.
The first figure comes to $875 per slave. This corresponds well with figures I’ve seen giving the maximum for a young male in good health at $2000. That also means that half the slaves would be worth somewhere under $800 down to essentially zero for an aged, dying slave.
A $2000 slave was more than most workers made in a year, so they could only be afforded by the rich, like prize horses, which they were comparable to in price.
But that last figure shows that the value of slaves to the economic system was far out of proportion to their actual sale price. It would be like taking all the cars or computers out of today’s world. Their cost in dollars has little relation to their importance in the world.
But that list figure takes a single year’s GDP… presumably a slave would be worth something for more than a single year?
In our high school American history class, we passed around many receipts for slaves. They were handwritten, of course, and mentioned the slave by name with some description. I remember one young adult man was described as a healthy young buck, and several women praised as being fertile. Prices were in the $1000 to $2000 range for most of them, but only a few hundred for older slaves.
It was a pretty amazing exposure and made the whole process of chattel slavery feel very real, to hold all these stained and fragile documents. These papers had touched the lives of specific people about whom we knew a little. Touched the lives? No, that isn’t right; there isn’t really a proper expression for it, is there?
Wouldn’t part of the cost also be for food, clothing, and medical care?
Have there ever been any serious attempts to breed slaves for resale, or to avoid the cost of purchasing more?
Or would the cost of food and keep be too much to make such an effort profitable?
Didn’t Lincoln float an idea about buying every slave in the USA with Federal funds? IIRC, his original idea was to return them to Africa. Also, IIRC, he suggested that $800.00 (might have been $1800.00) per slave would be a fair price. (Fair to the owners, of course, not to the slaves.)
[Sort of off-topic]
What’s really depressing is that the value of human life in some countries today is such that pretty much any American family can actually afford a slave in 2008!
In his book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-To-Face With Modern-Day Slavery, journalist Benjamin Skinner details his experiences negotiating the purchase of a slave for fifty dollars in Haiti, and of attempting to trade a used car for a human being in Eastern Europe.
In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett is shocked that her father paid $3,000 for Dilcey, Pork’s wife who was the Wilkes’s property, even though Prissy was thrown in for free.
I remember a scene from Roots…Alex Haley is tracking down his ancestors, and goes to the descendants of a plantation owner, looking for information. The man can’t find anything, until Alex asks if his family kept a stable. There, the information was found, (property, you know, akin to owning horses.) The man was suitably embarrassed and ashamed, but Alex shrugged it off, saying he didn’t personally own slaves.
[Demographics and economics of slavery in the United States](Slavery in the United States)
My understanding is that’s what was generally done in America, as most international slave trade actually went to places like the Caribbean and Brazil, a truly horrible place to be a slave. I have read that the vast majority of American slaves were born in America and that African-born slaves were considered “wild” and undesirable.
That doesn’t follow my understanding of history.
It was the Native Americans, especially the Caribbean island tribes, who were considered wild and untamable. African blacks were brought over specifically because they were thought to be *less * wild and more tractable than the Indians. This was especially true on the deadly sugar plantations of the Indies.
It is true that most slaves were born in the U.S. but this doesn’t have the meaning you think.
The American colonies were small and not heavily populated in the 18th century. Total white population in 1790 was only about 3.2 million. How many slaves could they have handled? (Answer: about 700,000.)
The slave trade would have brought many more slaves in if it had been extended. It wasn’t, but the population grew swiftly. White population in 1860 was about 27 million, but slaves had only increased to 4 million. (This was a higher slave to white ratio in the south than in 1790, admittedly.)
Slave owners had no choice after 1808 except to breed slaves, since they could no longer legally import them. (Some were brought in illegally, but only a small number.) They would have preferred to import slaves, since that would have kept prices down and made threats against slaves even more effective.
Despite many attempts, no sizable number of Native Americans were successfully kept as slaves. African blacks filled that role. (As to why, there are many theories, but probably two best explain it: Indians could escape and more easily live off of familiar land with the help of those who spoke their language, and Indians were more susceptible to European diseases and died in far greater numbers when exposed to them.)
However, from 1450-1900 according to Wikipedia (obviously dates that include, for instance, slave trading after the American cut-off date, but still instructive) only 4.4% of the internationally traded slaves went to the US. 35% went to Brazil and 22% to Spanish possessions.
I would think it would have been cheaper and more cost efficient to buy new slaves rather than breed them yourself. After all, we are talking about humans (regardless of what slave owners thought), and the slave probably wouldn’t be able to “work” until at least age 5, and wouldn’t be able to substantially help out around the plantation until 15 or so. That’s a long time to wait for a source of labor.
I feel slightly icky having to speculate about this. 
Well, one reason that Brazil and the sugar islands bought so many slaves is that the life expectancy for slaves in those places was absolutely dismal.
I’m kinda :dubious: on that one. Who files paperwork in a stable, even for transactions of things like saddles or chicken feed, much less high-dollar purchases like horses or slaves? If there were some sort of plantation manager’s office, I could maybe accept that. Paperwork in a stable just sounds like convenient hyperbole.
While it wasn’t your original question, it is established fact that most Southerners did not own slaves, there are census records which show this. So from now on you won’t have to say you have “often heard” you can simply know it as fact ;).
Here is a link to all kinds of interesting data from the 1860 U.S. census.
In total, there were 17 states where slave owners resided in 1860. In those 17 states there were 8,171,786 white people, and 393,975 slave owners (roughly 4.8%.)
In those 17 states, the state with the most slave owners was Virginia with 52,128. The state with the highest rate of slave ownership was South Carolina, where 9.1% of the white population owned slaves.
It’s worth noting that in the state with the highest rate of slave ownership, it was still well below 50%, meaning it is quite factual that the majority of whites did not own slaves.
It also raises the interesting question of why so many whites fought and died in order to keep rich men their slaves. It’s a complex issue, by and large the Southern plantation owners were simply the power elite. Slave owners were a very small portion of the population.
Even more remarkable, is that a small portion of the slave owners owned a majority of the slaves. The system of slavery was actually economically bad for whites who didn’t own slaves, and wasn’t very advantageous even for the whites who owned one or two slaves.
It tended to be very profitable for the very small number of people who owned a great number of slaves. These people were the most powerful people in their societies, and used their power to shape state politics. While only a small portion of the population, these types of people typically dominated the state house, tended to be the class from which U.S. House Representatives and Senators were chosen from.
I think he’s saying the paperwork was filed under the heading “Stable”, or in the same general area as the papers on horse ownership, rather than physically in a stable.