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Two ■ The Low Productivity of Southern Slave Labor: Causes and Effects

The economic backwardness that condemned the slaveholding South to defeat in 1861–1865 had at its root the low productivity of labor, which expressed itself in several ways. Most significant was the carelessness and wastefulness of the slaves. Bondage forced the Negro to give his labor grudgingly and badly, and his poor work habits retarded those social and economic advances that could have raised the general level of productivity. Less direct were limitations imposed on the free work force, on technological development, and on the division of labor.

Although the debate on slave productivity is an old one, few arguments have appeared during the last hundred years to supplement those of contemporaries like John Elliott Cairnes and Edmund Ruffin. Cairnes made the much-assailed assertion that the slave was so defective in versatility that his labor could be exploited profitably only if he were taught one task and kept at it. If we allow for exaggeration, Cairnes’s thesis is sound. Most competent observers agreed that slaves worked badly, without interest or effort. Edmund Ruffin, although sometimes arguing the reverse, pointed out that whereas at one time cheap, fertile farmland required little skill, soil exhaustion had finally created conditions demanding the intelligent participation of the labor force.¹ Ruffin neither developed his idea nor drew the appropriate conclusions. The systematic education and training of the slaves would have been politically dangerous. The use of skilled workers would increasingly have required a smaller slave force, which would in turn have depended on expanding markets for surplus slaves and thus could not have been realized in the South as a whole. Other Southerners simply dropped the matter with the observation that the difference in productivity between free and slave labor only illustrated how well the Negroes were treated.²

Ample evidence indicates that slaves worked well below their capabilities. In several instances in Mississippi, when cotton picking was carefully supervised in local experiments, slaves picked two or three times their normal output. The records of the Barrow plantation in Louisiana reveal that inefficiency and negligence resulted in two-thirds of the punishments inflicted on slaves, and other contemporary sources are full of corroborative data.³

However much the slaves may have worked below their capacity, the limitations placed on that capacity were probably even more important in undermining productivity. In particular, the diet to which the slaves were subjected must be judged immensely damaging, despite assurances from contemporaries and later historians that the slave was well fed.

The slave usually got enough to eat, but the starchy, high-energy diet of cornmeal, pork, and molasses produced specific hungers, dangerous deficiencies, and that unidentified form of malnutrition to which the medical historian Richard H. Shryock draws attention.⁴ Occasional additions of sweet potatoes or beans could do little to supplement the narrow diet. Planters did try to provide vegetables and fruits, but not much land could be spared from the staples, and output remained minimal.⁵ Protein hunger alone—cereals in general and corn in particular cannot provide adequate protein—greatly reduces the ability of an organism to resist infectious diseases. Even increased consumption of vegetables probably would not have corrected the deficiency, for as a rule the indispensable amino acids are found only in such foods as lean meat, milk, and eggs. The abundant pork provided was largely fat. Since the slave economy did not and could not provide sufficient livestock, no solution presented itself.⁶

In the 1890s a dietary study of Negro field laborers in Alabama revealed a total bacon intake of more than five pounds per week, or considerably more than the three and one-half pounds that probably prevailed in antebellum days. Yet, the total protein found in the Negroes’ diet was only 60 per cent of that deemed adequate.⁷ Recent studies show that individuals with a high caloric but low protein intake will deviate from standard height-weight ratios by a disproportionate increase in weight.⁸ The slave’s diet contained deficiencies other than protein; vitamins and minerals also were in short supply. Vitamin deficiencies produce xerophthalmia, beriberi, pellagra, and scurvy and create what one authority terms “states of vague indisposition [and] obscure and ill-defined disturbances.”⁹

There is nothing surprising in the slave’s appearance of good health: his diet was well suited to guarantee the appearance of good health and to provide the fuel to keep him going in the fields, but it was not sufficient to ensure either sound bodies or the stamina necessary for sustained labor. We need not doubt the testimony of William Dosite Postell, who presents evidence of reasonably good medical attention to slaves and of adequate supply of food bulk. Rather, it is the finer questions of dietary balance that concern us. At that, Postell provides some astonishing statistics that reinforce the present argument: 7 per cent of a sample of more than 8,500 slaves from Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana above the age of fifteen were either physically impaired or chronically ill.¹⁰ As W. Arthur Lewis writes of today’s underdeveloped countries: “Malnutrition and chronic debilitating disease are probably the main reason why the inhabitants … are easily exhausted. And this creates a chain which is hard to break, since malnutrition and disease cause low productivity, and low productivity, in turn, maintains conditions of malnutrition and disease.”¹¹

The limited diet was by no means primarily a result of ignorance or viciousness on the part of masters, for many knew better and would have liked to do better. The problem was largely economic. Feeding costs formed a burdensome part of plantation expenses. Credit and market systems precluded the assignment of much land to crops other than cotton and corn. The land so assigned was generally the poorest available, and the quality of foodstuffs consequently suffered. For example, experiments have shown that the proportion of iron in lettuce may vary from one to fifty milligrams per hundred, according to soil conditions.

The slave’s low productivity resulted directly from inadequate care, incentives, and training, and from such other well-known factors as the overseer system, but just how low was it? Can the productivity of slave labor, which nonstatistical evidence indicates to have been low, be measured? An examination of the most recent, and most impressive, attempt at measurement suggests that it cannot. Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer have arranged the following data to demonstrate the movement of “crop value per hand per dollar of slave price” during the antebellum period: size of the cotton crop, average price, value of crop, number of slaves aged ten to fifty-four, crop value per slave, and price of prime field hands.¹² Unfortunately, this method, like the much cruder one used by Algie M. Simons in 1911 and repeated by Lewis C. Gray, does not remove the principal difficulties.

First, the contribution of white farmers who owned no slaves or who worked in the fields beside the few slaves they did own, cannot be separated from that of the slaves. The output of slaveless farmers might be obtained by arduous digging in the manuscript census returns for 1850 and 1860, but the output of farmers working beside their slaves does not appear to lend itself to anything better than baseless guessing. There is also no reason to believe that slaves raised the same proportion of the cotton crop in any two years, and we have little knowledge of the factors determining fluctuations.

Second, we cannot assume that the same proportion of the slave force worked in the cotton fields in any two years. In periods of expected low prices slaveholders tried to deflect part of their force to food crops. We cannot measure the undoubted fluctuations in the man-hours applied to cotton. The Conrad-Meyer results, in particular, waver; they show a substantial increase in productivity before the Civil War, but the tendency to assign slaves to other crops in periods of falling prices builds an upward bias into their calculations for the prosperous 1850s. It might be possible to circumvent the problem by calculating for the total output instead of for cotton, but to do so would create even greater difficulties, such as how to value food grown for plantation use.¹³

Not all bad effects of slavery on productivity were so direct. Critics of slaveholding have generally assumed that it created a contempt for manual labor, although others have countered with the assertion that the Southern yeoman was held in high esteem. True, the praises of the working farmer had to be sung in a society in which he had the vote, but an undercurrent of contempt was always there. Samuel Cartwright, an outspoken and socially minded Southern physician, referred scornfully to those whites “who make negroes of themselves” in the cotton and sugar fields.¹⁴ Indeed, to work hard was “to work like a nigger.” If labor was not lightly held, why were there so many assurances from public figures that no one need be ashamed of it?¹⁵

There were doubtless enough incentives and enough expressions of esteem to allow white farmers to work with some sense of pride; the full impact of the negative attitude toward labor fell on the landless. The brunt of the scorn was borne by those who had to work for others, much as the slave did. The proletarian, rural or urban, was free and white and therefore superior to one who was slave and black, but the difference was minimized when he worked alongside a Negro for another man. So demoralized was white labor that planters often preferred to hire slaves because they were better workers.¹⁶ How much was to be expected of white labor in a society that, in the words of one worried editor, considered manual labor “menial and revolting”?¹⁷

The attitude toward labor was thus composed of two strains: an undercurrent of contempt for work in general and the more prevalent and probably more damaging contempt for labor performed for another, especially when considered “menial” labor. These notions undermined the productivity of those free workers who might have made important periodic contributions, and thus seriously lowered the level of productivity in the economy. Even today a tendency to eschew saving and to work only enough to meet essential needs has been observed in underdeveloped countries in which precapitalist social structure and ideology are strong.¹⁸

Technological Retardation

Few now doubt that social structure has been an important factor in the history of science and technology or that capitalism has introduced the greatest advances in these fields. For American agricultural technology, the craftsman, the skilled worker, and the small producer—all anxious to conserve labor time and cut costs—may well have provided the most significant technological thrust. Specifically, the great advances of the modern era arose from a free-labor economy that gave actual producers the incentives to improve methods and techniques.¹⁹ In nineteenth-century America, writes one authority, “the farmers … directed and inspired the efforts of inventors, engineers, and manufacturers to solve their problems and supply their needs … [and] the early implements were in many cases invented or designed by the farmers themselves.”²⁰

If workers are to contribute much to technology, the economy must permit and encourage an increasing division of labor, for skilled persons assigned to few tasks can best devise better methods and implements. Once an initial accumulation of capital takes place, the division of labor, if not impeded, will result in further accumulation and further division. Such extensive division cannot readily develop in slave economies. The heavy capitalization of labor, the high propensity to consume, and the weakness of the home market seriously impede the accumulation of capital. Technological progress and division of labor result in work for fewer hands, but slavery requires all hands to be occupied at all times. Capitalism has solved this problem by a tremendous economic expansion along varied lines (qualitative development), but slavery’s obstacles to industrialization prevent this type of solution.

In part, the slave South offset its weakness by drawing upon the technology of more progressive areas. During the first half of the nineteenth century the North copied from Europe on a grand scale, but the South was limited even in the extent to which it could copy and was especially restricted in possibilities for improving techniques once they had been acquired. The regions in which transference of technical skills has always been most effective have been those with an abundance of trained craftsmen as well as of natural resources.²¹ In the North a shortage of unskilled labor and a preoccupation with labor-saving machinery stimulated the absorption of advanced techniques and the creation of new ones. In the South the importation of slaves remedied the labor shortage and simultaneously weakened nonslave productive units. The availability of a “routinized, poorly educated, and politically ineffectual rural labor force” of whites as well as Negroes rendered, and to some extent still renders, interest in labor-saving machinery pointless.²²

Negro slavery retarded technological progress in many ways: it prevented the growth of industrialism and urbanization; it retarded the division of labor, which might have spurred the creation of new techniques; it barred the labor force from that intelligent participation in production which has made possible the steady improvement of implements and machines; and it encouraged ways of thinking antithetical to the spirit of modern science. These impediments undoubtedly damaged Southern agriculture, for improved equipment largely accounted for the dramatic increases in crop yields per acre in the North during the nineteenth century.²³ The steady deterioration of American soil under conditions imposed by commercial exploitation, we now know, has been offset primarily by gains accruing from increased investment in technological improvements. Recent studies show that from 1910 to 1950 output per man-hour doubled only because of the rapid improvements in implements, machinery, and fertilizer.²⁴

Southern farmers suffered especially from technological backwardness, for the only way in which they might have compensated for the planters’ advantage of large-scale operation would have been to attain a much higher technological level. The social pressure to invest in slaves and the high cost of machinery in a region that had to import much of its equipment made such an adjustment difficult.

Large-scale production gave the planter an advantage over his weaker competitors within the South, but the plantation was by no means more efficient than the family farm operating in the capitalist economy of the free states. Large-scale production, to be most efficient under modern conditions, must provide a substitute for the incentives possessed by the individual farmer. The experience of Soviet agriculture, with its politically induced collectivization, has again demonstrated that the prerequisite for efficient large-scale commodity production is a level of industrial technology as is only now being attained even in the most advanced countries.²⁵

The Division of Labor

Although few scholars assert that the Southern slave plantations were self-sufficient units, most assume a fair degree of division of labor in their work force. The employment of skilled artisans usually receives scant attention. An examination of the plantation manuscripts and data in the manuscript census returns shows, however, considerable sums paid for the services of artisans and laborers and a low level of home manufactures.

As Try on has shown, the Confederacy could not repeat the achievements of the colonies during the Revolutionary War, when family industry supplied the war effort and the home front. Although household manufacturing survived longer in the slave states than in other parts of the country, slave labor proved so inefficient in making cloth, for example, that planters preferred not to bother. In those areas of the South in which slavery predominated, household manufactures decreased rapidly after 1840, and the system never took hold in the newer slave states of Florida, Louisiana, and Texas.²⁶ Whereas in the North its disappearance resulted from the development of much more advanced factory processes, in the South it formed part of a general decline in skill and technique.

An examination of the manuscript census returns for selected counties in 1860 bears out these generalizations. It also shows that the large plantations, although usually producing greater totals than the small farms, did poorly in the production of home manufactures. In Mississippi’s cotton counties the big planters (thirty-one or more slaves) averaged only $76 worth of home manufactures during the year, whereas other groups of farmers and planters showed much less. In the Georgia cotton counties the small planters (twenty-one to thirty slaves) led other groups with $127, and the big planters produced only half as much. Fifty-eight per cent of the big planters in the Mississippi counties examined recorded no home manufactures at all, and most agriculturalists in the Georgia counties produced none. In Virginia the same results appeared: in tobacco counties the big planters led other groups with $56 worth of home manufactures, and in the tidewater and northern wheat counties the big planters led with only $35.²⁷

The Richmond Dispatch estimated in the 1850s that the South spent $5,000,000 annually for Northern shoes and boots.²⁸ Although the figure cannot be verified, there is no doubt that Southerners bought most of their shoes in the North. One of the bigger planters, Judge Cameron of North Carolina, owner of five plantations and 267 slaves in 1834, had to purchase more than half the shoes needed for his Negroes despite his large establishment and a conscientious attempt to supply his own needs.²⁹ Most planters apparently did not even try to produce shoes or clothing. When a planter with about thirty slaves in Scotland Neck, North Carolina, made arrangements to have clothing produced on his estate, he hired an outsider to do it.³⁰ Yet, until 1830 shoes were produced in the United States by tools and methods not essentially different from those used by medieval serfs,³¹ and not much equipment would have been needed to continue those methods on the plantations. Even simple methods of production were not employed on the plantations because the low level of productivity made them too costly relative to available Northern shoes. At the same time, the latter were more expensive than they ought to have been, for transportation costs were high, and planters had little choice but to buy in the established New England shoe centers.

Plantation account books reveal surprisingly high expenditures for a variety of tasks requiring skilled and unskilled labor.³² A Mississippi planter with 130 slaves paid an artisan $320 for labor and supplies for a forty-one-day job in 1849. Other accounts show that Governor Hammond spent $452 to have a road built in 1850; another planter spent $108 for repair of a carriage and $900 for repair of a sloop in 1853, as well as $175 for repair of a bridge in 1857; a third spent $2,950 for the hire of artisans in 1856 on a plantation with more than 175 slaves.³³

The largest payments went to blacksmiths. A Panola, Mississippi, planter listed expenditures for the following in 1853: sharpening of plows, mending of shovels, and construction of plows, ox-chains, hooks, and other items. In 1847 a Greensboro, Alabama, planter, whose books indicate that he was business-like and efficient, spent about $140 for blacksmiths’ services on his large plantation of seventy-five slaves.³⁴ One South Carolina planter with forty-five slaves had an annual blacksmith’s account of about $35, and expenditures by other planters were often higher_ĝ³⁵

Even simple tasks like the erection of door frames sometimes required the services of hired carpenters, as in the case of a Jefferson County, Mississippi, planter in 1851.³⁶ If buildings, chimneys, or slave cabins had to be built, planters generally hired free laborers or slave artisans.³⁷ Skilled slaves had unusual privileges and incentives, but there was not much for them to do on a single plantation. Rather than allow a slave to spend all his time acquiring a skill for which there was only a limited need, a planter would hire one for short periods. Even this type of slave specialization brought frowns from many planters, who considered the incentives and privileges subversive of general plantation discipline.

If it paid to keep all available slaves in the cotton fields during periods of high prices, the reverse was true during periods of low prices. At those times the factors forcing a one-crop agriculture and the low productivity of nonfield labor wrought devastating results. The South’s trouble was not that it lacked sufficient shoe or clothing factories, or that it lacked a diversified agriculture, or that it lacked enough other industrial enterprises; the trouble was that it lacked all three at the same time. The slight division of labor on the plantations and the slight social division of labor in the region forced the planters into dependence on the Northern market. As a result, the cost of cotton production rose during periods of low as well as high cotton prices. Even during the extraordinary years of the Civil War, when Southerners struggled manfully to feed and clothe themselves, the attempt to produce home manufactures met with only indifferent results.³⁸ These observations merely restate the problem of division of labor in the slave South: the low level of productivity, caused by the inefficiency of the slaves and the general backwardness of society, produced increasing specialization in staple-crop production under virtually colonial conditions.

Farm Implements and Machinery

“There is nothing in the progress of agriculture,” the United States Agricultural Society proclaimed in 1853, “more encouraging than the rapid increase and extension of labor-saving machinery.”³⁹ The South did not profit much from these technological advances, nor did it contribute much to them.⁴⁰

The most obvious obstacle to the employment of better equipment was the slave himself.⁴¹ In 1843 a Southern editor sharply rebuked planters and overseers for complaining that Negroes could not handle tools. Such a complaint was, he said, merely a confession of poor management, for with proper supervision Negro slaves would provide proper care.⁴² The editor was unfair. Careful supervision of unwilling laborers would have entailed either more overseers than most planters could afford or a slave force too small to provide the advantages of large-scale operation. The harsh treatment that slaves gave equipment shocked travelers and other contemporaries, and neglect of tools figured prominently among the reasons given for punishing Negroes.⁴³ In 1855 a South Carolina planter wrote in exasperation:

The wear and tear of plantation tools is harassing to every planter who does not have a good mechanic at his nod and beck every day in the year. Our plows are broken, our hoes are lost, our harnesses need repairing, and large demands are made on the blacksmith, the carpenter, the tanner, and the harnessmaker. [sic]⁴⁴

The implements used on the plantations were therefore generally much too heavy for efficient use. The “nigger hoe,” often found in relatively advanced Virginia, weighed much more than the “Yankee hoe,” which slaves broke easily. Those used in the Southwest weighed almost three times as much as those manufactured in the North for Northern use.⁴⁵ Curiously, in many cases equipment was too light for adequate results. Whereas most planters bought extra-heavy implements in the hope that they would withstand rough handling, others resigned themselves and bought the cheapest possible.⁴⁶

We do not know the proportion of Southern implements made by local blacksmiths, but the difference in quality between them and Northern goods was probably not so great as one might think. Local blacksmiths made wretched goods, but those made in the North especially for the Southern market fell well below national standards. J. D. Legare, editor of the Southern Cabinet, visited Northern implement factories and was “struck” by the inferior grade of goods sent South. The materials and workmanship did not approach standards set for goods destined for Northern markets. The reason for the double standard, as Legare admitted, was that planters demanded inexpensive items.⁴⁷ We have little information on implements produced in the North for the Southern market. John Hebron Moore quite plausibly suggests that a few unscrupulous Northern manufacturers gave the rest a bad reputation by misrepresentations and other unethical practices.⁴⁸ Misrepresentations aside, frequent complaints suggest that the implements were often inferior to those designated for the North. M. W. Philips demonstrated that Northern plows lasted three times as long as local Mississippi products,⁴⁹ but the question at issue is not the quality of Northern equipment but the quality of that which Southerners could and would buy.

In 1857 an agricultural journal carried a special report by a former editor who had visited the South Carolina state fair and had inspected plows made by Southern manufacturers. He described the instruments as poor, of indifferent quality and crude construction, adding that most Southern producers had advanced only to the point at which James Small of Berwickshire had left the plow in 1740.⁵⁰

Good plows in 1857 sold for fifteen or twenty dollars, although perhaps some of those selling for five or ten dollars were adequate. “A low estimate of the investment in implements necessary to the operation of an average Northern farm was $500.”⁵¹ Cultivators and harrows cost from five to twenty dollars; a grist mill from fifteen to thirty dollars; a treadmill horsepower from eighty-five to 150 dollars; a seed drill sixty dollars; and a reaper-mower 135 dollars. Planters, M. W. Philips noted, usually refused to buy anything except the cheapest of essential items. “We of the South have a jaundiced eye. Everything we view looks like gold—costly.”⁵²

Plows such as those generally in use in Arkansas were valued at five dollars, and of greater significance, an average cotton-producing unit of one hundred acres was said to have only fifteen dollars’ worth of equipment other than plows.⁵³ A Mississippi planter valued his thirty “indifferent” plows at seventy-five dollars; even if he had made a liberal allowance for depreciation, he was clearly using the poorest kind of equipment.⁵⁴ As an indication of the quality of the work done by local blacksmiths, one planter spent a total of five dollars for ten turning plows in 1853.⁵⁵ Gray claims that most Southern plows were worth only three to five dollars. There is little reason to question either his estimate or his opinion that they probably did not last more than a year or so.⁵⁶

Most planters in Mississippi, wrote Philips, thought they could use one kind of plow for every possible purpose.⁵⁷ The weakness was doubly serious, for the one kind was usually poor. The most popular plow in the Lower South—at least, well into the 1840s—was the shovel plow, which merely stirred the surface of the soil to a depth of two or three inches.⁵⁸ Made of wrought iron, it was “a crude and inefficient instrument which, as commonly employed, underwent no essential improvement throughout its long career.”⁵⁹ It was light enough for a girl to carry and exemplified the “too light” type of implement used on the plantations.

In the 1850s the shovel plow slowly gave way in the South to a variety of light moldboard plows, which at least were of some help in killing and controlling weeds. Good moldboard plows should have offered other advantages, such as aid in burying manure, but those in the South were not nearly so efficient as those in the North.⁶⁰ In 1830, Connecticut manufacturers began to produce large numbers of Cary plows, exclusively for the Southern market. These light wooden plows with wrought-iron shares were considered of good quality. Unfortunately, they required careful handling, for they broke easily, and they could not penetrate more than three or four inches below the surface. During the 1820s Northern farmers had been shifting to cast-iron plows that could cover 50 per cent more acreage with 50 per cent less animal-and manpower.⁶¹ When cast-iron plows did enter the South, they could not be used to the same advantage as in the North, for they needed the services of expert blacksmiths when, as frequently happened, they broke.⁶²

Twenty years after the introduction of the cultivator in 1820, Northern farmers considered it standard equipment, especially in the cornfields, but cultivators, despite their tremendous value, were so light that few planters would trust them to their slaves. Since little wheat was grown below Virginia, the absence of reapers did not hurt much, but the backwardness of cotton equipment did. A “cotton planter” (a modified grain drill) and one man could do as much work as two mules and four men,⁶³ but it was rarely used. Similarly, corn planters, especially the one invented by George Brown in 1853, might have saved a good deal of labor time, but these were costly, needed careful handling, and would have rendered part of the slave force superfluous. Since slaveholding carried prestige and status, and since slaves were an economic necessity during the picking season, planters showed little interest.⁶⁴

The cotton picker presents special technical and economic problems. So long as a mechanical picker was not available a large labor force would have been needed for the harvest; but in 1850 Samuel S. Rembert and Jedediah Prescott of Memphis did patent a mule-drawn cotton picker that was a “simple prototype of the modem spindle picker.”⁶⁵ Virtually no progress followed upon the original design until forty years later, and then almost as long a span intervened before further advances were made. The reasons for these gaps were in part technical, and in part economic pressures arising from slavery and sharecropping. Although one can never be sure about such things, the evidence accumulated by historians of science and technology strongly suggests that the social and economic impediments to technological change are generally more powerful than the specifically technical ones. The introduction of a cotton picker would have entailed the full mechanization of farming processes, and such a development would have had to be accompanied by a radically different social order. Surely, it is not accidental that the mechanical picker has in recent decades taken hold in the Southwest, where sharecropping has been weak, and has moved east slowly as changes in the social organization of the countryside have proceeded. Even without a mechanical picker the plantations might have used good implements and a smaller labor force during most of the year and temporary help during the harvest. In California in 1951, for example, 50 per cent of the occasional workers needed in the cotton fields came from within the county and 90 per cent from within the state. Rural and town housewives, youths, and seasonal workers anxious to supplement their incomes provided the temporary employees.⁶⁶ There is no reason to believe that this alternative would not have been open to the South in the 1850s if slavery had been eliminated.

A few examples, which could be multiplied many times, illustrate the weakness of plantation technology. A plantation in Stewart County, Georgia, with a fixed capital investment of $42,660 had only $300 invested in implements and machinery. The Tooke plantation, also in Georgia, had a total investment in implements and machinery of $195, of which a gin accounted for $110. Plantations had plows, perhaps a few harrows and colters, possibly a cultivator, and in a few cases a straw cutter or corn and cob crusher. Whenever possible, a farmer or planter acquired a gin, and all had small tools for various purposes.⁶⁷

The figures reported in the census tabulations of farm implements and machinery are of limited value and must be used carefully. We have little information on shifting price levels, and the valuations reported to the census takers did not conform to rigorous standards. The same type of plow worth five dollars in 1850 may have been recorded at ten dollars in 1860, and in view of the general rise in prices something of the kind probably occurred.⁶⁸

Even if we put aside these objections and examine investments in selected counties in 1860, the appalling state of plantation technology is evident. Table 1 presents the data from the manuscript returns for 1860. Of the 1,969 farmers and planters represented, only 160 (or 8 per cent) had more than $500 invested in implements and machinery. If we assume that a cotton gin cost between $100 and $125, the figures for the cotton counties suggest that all except the planters (twenty or more slaves) either did without a gin or had little else. Note that an increase in the slave force did not entail significant expansion of technique. As the size of slaveholdings increased in the cotton counties, the investments in implements increased also, but in small amounts. Only units of twenty slaves or more showed tolerably respectable amounts, and even these were poor when one considers the size of the estates.⁶⁹

Gray has suggested that the poor quality of Southern implements was due only in part to slave inefficiency. He lists as other contributing factors the lack of local marketplaces for equipment, the ignorance of the small farmers and overseers, prejudice against and even aversion to innovations, and a shortage of capital in the interior.⁷⁰ Each of these contributing factors itself arose from the nature of slave society. The weakness of the market led to a lack of marketplaces. The social structure of the countryside hardly left room for anything but ignorance and cultural backwardness, even by the standards of nineteenth-century rural America. The social and economic pressures to invest in slaves and the high propensity to consume rendered adequate capital accumulation impossible. The psychological factor—hostility to innovation—transcended customary agrarian conservatism and grew out of the patriarchal social structure.

The attempts of reformers to improve methods of cultivation, diversify production, and raise more and better livestock were undermined at the outset by a labor force without versatility or the possibility of increasing its productivity substantially. Other factors must be examined in order to understand fully why the movement for agricultural reform had to be content with inadequate accomplishments, but consideration of the direct effects of slave labor alone tells us why so little could be done.

TABLE 1

Median Value of Farm Implements and Machinery in Selected Counties, 1860^a

NOTES

1 Cairnes, The Slave Power (London, 1863), p. 46; Ruffin, The Political Economy of Slavery (Washington, D.C., 1857), p. 4; Farmer’s Register, III (1863), 748–49. The best introduction to the subject is still Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918), Chap. XVIII.

2 See SQR, XIX (Jan. 1851), 221. Ruffin sometimes also argued this way.

3 Charles Sackett Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York, 1933), p. 16; E. A. Davis (ed.), Plantation Life in the Florida Parishes of Louisiana: The Diary of B. H. Barrow (New York, 1943), pp. 86 ff.

4 “Medical Practice in the Old South,” SAQ, XXIX (April 1930), 160–61. See also Felice Swados, “Negro Health on Ante-Bellum Plantations,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, X (Oct. 1941), 460–61; and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Medical and Insurance Costs of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt,” JNH, XLV (July 1960), 141–55.

5 “Probably at no time before the Civil War were fruits and vegetables grown in quantities sufficient to provide the population with a balanced diet,” writes John Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York, 1958), p. 61. At that, slaves undoubtedly received a disproportionately small share of the output.

6 Infra, Chapter V.

7 W. O. Atwater and Charles D. Woods, Dietary Studies with Reference to the Negro in Alabama in 1895 and (Washington, D.C., 1897). Adequate animal proteins plus corn probably would have sufficed to prevent nutritional deficiencies. See C. A. Elvehjem, “Corn in Human Nutrition,” Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Research Institute (Washington, D.C., 1955), p. 83.

8 See J. Masek, “Hunger and Disease” in Josué de Castro (ed.), Hunger and Food (London, 1958).

9 Josué de Castro, The Geography of Hunger (Boston, 1952), p. 48.

10 The Health of Slaves on the Southern Plantations (Baton Rouge, La., 1951), esp. pp. 159 ff.

11 The Theory of Economic Growth (Homewood, Ill., 1955). p. 33.

12 “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” JPE, LXVI (April 1958), 95–130, esp. Table 17. Reprinted in Conrad and Meyer, The Economics of Slavery and Other Econometric Studies (Chicago, 1964).

13 Other questions are also raised by the Conrad-Meyer price data; cotton statistics were not kept with the degree of accuracy required for sophisticated analysis. In any event, the authors have not demonstrated a significant increase in productivity at all. They show no increase for the depressed 1840s, but 20% for the 1850s. These results emerge from a certain carelessness in rounding off figures. Crop value per hand per dollar of slave price is indexed at .05 for 1840; .05 for 1850; and .06 for 1860. But if we carry out the arithmetic two more decimal places we get .0494 (1840), .0538 (1850), and .0562 (1860)—i.e., a 9% increase for the depressed 1840s and only 4% for the 1850s. These results are implausible and, in any case, contradict their own conclusions.

14 J. D. B. De Bow, Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States (3 vols.; New Orleans, 1852–53), III, 62.

15 “Let no man be ashamed of labor; let no man be ashamed of a hard hand or a sunburnt face.” William W. Holden, Address Delivered Before the Duplin County Agricultural Society (Raleigh, N.C., 1857), p. 7.

16 Cornelius O. Cathey, Agricultural Developments in North Carolina, 1783–1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), pp. 54–55.

17 Southern Cultivator, V (Jan. 1847), 141.

18 Cf. S. Daniel Neumark, “Economic Development and Economic Incentives,” South African Journal of Economics, March 1958, pp. 55–63. For a discussion of this question as related to Greek slavery see Karl Polany’s brilliant essay on Aristotle in Polanyi et al., Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe, III., 1957), p. 77.

19 Edgar Zilsel, “The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of Sociology, XLVII (Jan. 1942), 557 ff.

20 Fowler McCormick, Technological Progress in American Farming (Washington, D.C., 1940), p. 9.

21 H. J. Habakkuk, “The Historical Experience on the Basic Conditions of Economic Progress,” in Léon H. Dupriez (ed.), Economic Progress (Louvain, 1955), pp. 149–69.

22 James H. Street, The New Revolution in the Cotton Economy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957), p. 34.

23 Leo Rogin, The Introduction of Farm Machinery … in the United States During the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Cal., 1931), Chap. I.

24 Cited by Ronald L. Mighell, American Agriculture: Its Structure and Place in the Economy (New York, 1955), pp. 7–8.

25 Paul A. Baran, Political Economy of Growth, pp. 267 ff, 278–83, insists that collectivization was justified because the only alternative to it in a country lacking enough urban purchasing power to support high food prices would dry up rural sources of capital accumulation by heavier peasant consumption. He adds that the U.S.S.R. had to force the pace of industrialization for political and military reasons and that grain deliveries to cities had to be guaranteed. Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development Since 1917 (New York, 1948) presents similar arguments. These arguments, however valid, do not contradict the observation that collectivization removed a good part of the peasants’ incentives without providing them with implements and machines. Collectivization may, from the point of view of the regime, have been necessary and urgent, but a big price had to be paid for it. For a summary of experiences with large-scale farming elsewhere see Lewis, Theory of Economic Growth, pp. 134 ff.

26 Rolla M. Tryon, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640–1860 (Chicago, 1917), pp. 5, 184 ff, 295–98, 371.

27 Specialists who wish to consult the sampling and computing methods used here may see my unpublished dissertation, “The Limits of Agrarian Reform in the Slave South,” Columbia University, 1959, appendices.

28 De Bow, Industrial Resources, II, 130.

29 Cameron Papers, CXIII, University of North Carolina.

30 Simmons Jones Baker Account Book, miscellaneous notes, University of North Carolina.

31 Blanche Evans Hazard, The Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge, Mass., 1921), p. 3.

32 The use of white labor for ditching is frequently cited, but the size of the expenditures has not generally been appreciated. One planter paid $170 in 1852, another $250 in 1859. Such sums were not trifles, especially for small planters. See Moses St. John R. Liddell Papers, 1852, Louisiana State University; entry of Feb. 8, 1859, Leonidas Pendleton Spyker Diary, also at L.S.U.

33 Haller Nutt Papers, 1849, Duke University; James H. Hammond Account Book, 1850, Library of Congress; Stephen D. Doar Account Books, 1853, 1857, Library of Congress; Charles Bruce Plantation Accounts, 1856, Library of Congress.

34 Everard Green Baker Papers, I, University of North Carolina; Iverson L. Graves Papers, XV, University of North Carolina; Henry Watson Papers, 1847, Duke University. Graves spent $20 to sharpen and repair tools during four months of 1853.

35 De Bow, Industrial Resources, I, 161. One planter with 50 slaves spent about $75 in eight months. Killona Plantation Journals, I, 60 ff, Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi. See also William McKinley Book, p. 17, and Robert Withers Books, I, 46, at the University of North Carolina; and James Sheppard Papers, April 9, 1849, at Duke University.