American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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Free workingmen in general, whether farmers, artisans or unskilled wage
earners, merely filled the interstices in and about the slave plantations.
One year in the eighteen-forties a planter near New Orleans, attempting to
dispense with slave labor, assembled a force of about a hundred Irish and
German immigrants for his crop routine. Things went smoothly until the
midst of the grinding season, when with one accord the gang struck for
double pay. Rejecting the demand the planter was unable to proceed with
his harvest and lost some ten thousand dollars worth of his crop.[9] The
generality of the planters realized, without such a demonstration, that
each year must bring its crop crisis during which an overindulgence by the
laborers in the privileges of liberty might bring ruin to the employers.
To secure immunity from this they were the more fully reconciled to the
limitations of their peculiar labor supply. Freemen white or black might
be convenient as auxiliaries, and were indeed employed in many instances
whether on annual contract as blacksmiths and the like or temporarily
as emergency helpers in the fields; but negro slaves were the standard
composition of the gangs. This brought it about that whithersoever the
planters went they carried with them crowds of negro slaves and all the
problems and influences to which the presence of negroes and the prevalence
of slavery gave rise.

[Footnote 9: Sir Charles Lyell, _Second Visit to the United States_,
(London, 1850), II, 162, 163.]

One of the consequences was to keep foreign immigration small. In the
colonial period the trade in indentured servants recruited the white
population, and most of those who came in that status remained as permanent
citizens of the South; but such Europeans as came during the nineteenth
century were free to follow their own reactions without submitting to a
compulsory adjustment. Many of them found the wage-earning opportunity
scant, for the slaves were given preference by their masters when steady
occupations were to be filled, and odd jobs were often the only recourse
for outsiders. This was an effect of the slavery system. Still more
important, however, was the repugnance which the newcomers felt at working
and living alongside the blacks; and this was a consequence not of the
negroes being slaves so much as of the slaves being negroes. It was
a racial antipathy which when added to the experience of industrial
disadvantage pressed the bulk of the newcomers northwestward beyond the
confines of the Southern staple belts, and pressed even many of the native
whites in the same direction.

This intrenched the slave plantations yet more strongly in their local
domination, and by that very fact it hampered industrial development. Great
landed proprietors, it is true, have oftentimes been essential for making
beneficial innovations. Thus the remodeling of English agriculture which
Jethro Tull and Lord Townsend instituted in the eighteenth century could
not have been set in progress by any who did not possess their combination
of talent and capital.[10] In the ante-bellum South, likewise, it was the
planters, and necessarily so, who introduced the new staples of sea-island
cotton and sugar, the new devices of horizontal plowing and hillside
terracing, the new practice of seed selection, and the new resource of
commercial fertilizers. Yet their constant bondage to the staples debarred
the whole community in large degree from agricultural diversification, and
their dependence upon gangs of negro slaves kept the average of skill and
assiduity at a low level.

[Footnote 10: R.E. Prothero, _English Farming, past and present_, (London,
1912), chap. 7.]

The negroes furnished inertly obeying minds and muscles; slavery provided a
police; and the plantation system contributed the machinery of direction.
The assignment of special functions to slaves of special aptitudes would
enhance the general efficiency; the cooerdination of tasks would prevent
waste of effort; and the conduct of a steady routine would lessen the
mischiefs of irresponsibility. But in the work of a plantation squad no
delicate implements could be employed, for they would be broken; and no
discriminating care in the handling of crops could be had except at a cost
of supervision which was generally prohibitive. The whole establishment
would work with success only when the management fully recognized and
allowed for the crudity of the labor.

The planters faced this fact with mingled resolution and resignation. The
sluggishness of the bulk of their slaves they took as a racial trait to
be conquered by discipline, even though their ineptitude was not to
be eradicated; the talents and vigor of their exceptional negroes and
mulattoes, on the other hand, they sought to foster by special training and
rewards. But the prevalence of slavery which aided them in the one policy
hampered them in the other, for it made the rewards arbitrary instead of
automatic and it restricted the scope of the laborers' employments and of
their ambitions as well. The device of hiring slaves to themselves, which
had an invigorating effect here and there in the towns, could find little
application in the country; and the paternalism of the planters could
provide no fully effective substitute. Hence the achievements of the
exceptional workmen were limited by the status of slavery as surely as
the progress of the generality was restricted by the fact of their being
negroes.

A further influence of the plantation system was to hamper the growth of
towns. This worked in several ways. As for manufactures, the chronic demand
of the planters for means with which to enlarge their scales of operations
absorbed most of the capital which might otherwise have been available for
factory promotion. A few cotton mills were built in the Piedmont where
water power was abundant, and a few small ironworks and other industries;
but the supremacy of agriculture was nowhere challenged. As for commerce,
the planters plied the bulk of their trade with distant wholesale dealers,
patronizing the local shopkeepers only for petty articles or in emergencies
when transport could not be awaited; and the slaves for their part, while
willing enough to buy of any merchant within reach, rarely had either money
or credit.

Towns grew, of course, at points on the seaboard where harbors were good,
and where rivers or railways brought commerce from the interior. Others
rose where the fall line marked the heads of river navigation, and on the
occasional bluffs of the Mississippi, and finally a few more at railroad
junctions. All of these together numbered barely three score, some of which
counted their population by hundreds rather than by thousands; and in the
wide intervals between there was nothing but farms, plantations and thinly
scattered villages. In the Piedmont, country towns of fairly respectable
dimensions rose here and there, though many a Southern county-seat could
boast little more than a court house and a hitching rack. Even as regards
the seaports, the currents of trade were too thin and divergent to permit
of large urban concentration, for the Appalachian water-shed shut off
the Atlantic ports from the commerce of the central basin; and even the
ambitious construction of railroads to the northwest, fostered by the
seaboard cities, merely enabled the Piedmont planters to get their
provisions overland, and barely affected the volume of the seaboard trade.
New Orleans alone had a location promising commercial greatness; but her
prospects were heavily diminished by the building of the far away Erie
Canal and the Northern trunk line railroads which diverted the bulk of
Northwestern trade from the Gulf outlet.

As conditions were, the slaveholding South could have realized a
metropolitan life only through absentee proprietorships. In the Roman
_latifundia_, which overspread central and southern Italy after the
Hannibalic war, absenteeism was a chronic feature and a curse. The
overseers there were commonly not helpers in the proprietors' daily
routine, but sole managers charged with a paramount duty of procuring
the greatest possible revenues and transmitting them to meet the urban
expenditures of their patrician employers. The owners, having no more
personal touch with their great gangs of slaves than modern stockholders
have with the operatives in their mills, exploited them accordingly. Where
humanity and profits were incompatible, business considerations were likely
to prevail. Illustrations of the policy may be drawn from Cato the Elder's
treatise on agriculture. Heavy work by day, he reasoned, would not only
increase the crops but would cause deep slumber by night, valuable as a
safeguard against conspiracy; discord was to be sown instead of harmony
among the slaves, for the same purpose of hindering plots; capital
sentences when imposed by law were to be administered in the presence of
the whole corps for the sake of their terrorizing effect; while rations for
the able-bodied were not to exceed a fixed rate, those for the sick were to
be still more frugally stinted; and the old and sick slaves were to be
sold along with other superfluities.[11] Now, Cato was a moralist of wide
repute, a stoic it is true, but even so a man who had a strong sense of
duty. If such were his maxims, the oppressions inflicted by his fellow
proprietors and their slave drivers must have been stringent indeed.

[Footnote 11: A.H.J. Greenidge, _History of Rome during the later Republic
and the early Principate_ (New York, 1905), I, 64-85; M. Porcius Cato, _De
Agri Cultura_, Keil ed. (Leipsig, 1882).]

The heartlessness of the Roman _latifundiarii_ was the product partly of
their absenteeism, partly of the cheapness of their slaves which were
poured into the markets by conquests and raids in all quarters of the
Mediterranean world, and partly of the lack of difference between masters
and slaves in racial traits. In the ante-bellum South all these conditions
were reversed: the planters were commonly resident; the slaves were costly;
and the slaves were negroes, who for the most part were by racial quality
submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable
and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited
paternalism rather than repression. Many a city slave in Rome was the boon
companion of his master, sharing his intellectual pleasures and his revels,
while most of those on the _latifundia_ were driven cattle. It was hard to
maintain a middle adjustment for them. In the South, on the other hand, the
medium course was the obvious thing. The bulk of the slaves, because they
were negroes, because they were costly, and because they were in personal
touch, were pupils and working wards, while the planters were teachers and
guardians as well as masters and owners. There was plenty of coercion in
the South; but in comparison with the harshness of the Roman system the
American regime was essentially mild.

Every plantation of the standard Southern type was, in fact, a school
constantly training and controlling pupils who were in a backward state of
civilization. Slave youths of special promise, or when special purposes
were in view, might be bound as apprentices to craftsmen at a distance.
Thus James H. Hammond in 1859 apprenticed a fourteen-year-old mulatto boy,
named Henderson, for four years to Charles Axt, of Crawfordville, Georgia,
that he might be taught vine culture. Axt agreed in the indenture to feed
and clothe the boy, pay for any necessary medical attention, teach him his
trade, and treat him with proper kindness. Before six months were ended
Alexander H. Stephens, who was a neighbor of Axt and a friend of Hammond,
wrote the latter that Henderson had run away and that Axt was unfit to have
the care of slaves, especially when on hire, and advised Hammond to take
the boy home. Soon afterward Stephens reported that Henderson had returned
and had been whipped, though not cruelly, by Axt.[12] The further history
of this episode is not ascertainable. Enough of it is on record, however,
to suggest reasons why for the generality of slaves home training was
thought best.

[Footnote 12: MSS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]

This, rudimentary as it necessarily was, was in fact just what the bulk of
the negroes most needed. They were in an alien land, in an essentially
slow process of transition from barbarism to civilization. New industrial
methods of a simple sort they might learn from precepts and occasional
demonstrations; the habits and standards of civilized life they could only
acquire in the main through examples reinforced with discipline. These the
plantation regime supplied. Each white family served very much the function
of a modern social settlement, setting patterns of orderly, well bred
conduct which the negroes were encouraged to emulate; and the planters
furthermore were vested with a coercive power, salutary in the premises, of
which settlement workers are deprived. The very aristocratic nature of the
system permitted a vigor of discipline which democracy cannot possess. On
the whole the plantations were the best schools yet invented for the mass
training of that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the
American negroes represented. The lack of any regular provision for the
discharge of pupils upon the completion of their training was, of course, a
cardinal shortcoming which the laws of slavery imposed; but even in view
of this, the slave plantation regime, after having wrought the initial and
irreparable misfortune of causing the negroes to be imported, did at
least as much as any system possible in the period could have done toward
adapting the bulk of them to life in a civilized community.

CHAPTER XVIII

ECONOMIC VIEWS OF SLAVERY: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE

In barbaric society slavery is a normal means of conquering the isolation
of workers and assembling them in more productive cooerdination. Where
population is scant and money little used it is almost a necessity in the
conduct of large undertakings, and therefore more or less essential for
the advancement of civilization. It is a means of domesticating savage or
barbarous men, analogous in kind and in consequence to the domestication of
the beasts of the field.[1] It was even of advantage to some of the people
enslaved, in that it saved them from extermination when defeated in war,
and in that it gave them touch with more advanced communities than their
own. But this was counterbalanced by the stimulus which the profits of
slave catching gave to wars and raids with all their attendant injuries.
Any benefit to the slave, indeed, was purely incidental. The reason for the
institution's existence was the advantage which accrued to the masters.
So positive and pronounced was this reckoned to be, that such highly
enlightened people as the Greeks and Romans maintained it in the palmiest
days of their supremacies.

[Footnote 1: This thought was expressed, perhaps for the first time, in
T.R. Dew's essay on slavery (1832); it is elaborated in Gabriel Tarde, _The
Laws of Imitation_ (Parsons tr., New York, 1903), pp. 278, 279.]

Western Europe in primitive times was no exception. Slavery in a more or
less fully typical form was widespread. When the migrations ended in the
middle ages, however, the rise of feudalism gave the people a thorough
territorial regimentation. The dearth of commerce whether in goods or in
men led gradually to the conversion of the unfree laborers from slaves
into serfs or villeins attached for generations to the lands on which they
wrought. Finally, the people multiplied so greatly and the landless were
so pressed for livelihood that at the beginning of modern times European
society found the removal of bonds conducive to the common advantage. Serfs
freed from their inherited obligations could now seek employment wherever
they would, and landowners, now no longer lords, might employ whom they
pleased. Bondmen gave place to hirelings and peasant proprietors,
status gave place to contract, industrial society was enabled to make
redistributions and readjustments at will, as it had never been before. In
view of the prevailing traits and the density of the population a general
return whether to slavery or serfdom was economically unthinkable. An
intelligent Scotch philanthropist, Fletcher of Saltoun, it is true,
proposed at the end of the seventeenth century that the indigent and their
children be bound as slaves to selected masters as a means of relieving
the terrible distresses of unemployment in his times;[2] but his project
appears to have received no public sanction whatever. The fact that he
published such a plan is more a curious antiquarian item than one of
significance in the history of slavery. Not even the thin edge of a wedge
could possibly be inserted which might open a way to restore what everyone
was on virtually all counts glad to be free of.

[Footnote 2: W.E.H. Lecky, _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_
(New York, 1879), II, 43,44.]

When the American mining and plantation colonies were established, however,
some phases of the most ancient labor problems recurred. Natural resources
invited industry in large units, but wage labor was not to be had. The
Spaniards found a temporary solution in impressing the tropical American
aborigines, and the English in a recourse to indented white immigrants. But
both soon resorted predominantly for plantation purposes to the importation
of Africans, for whom the ancient institution of slavery was revived. Thus
from purely economic considerations the sophisticated European colonists
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved themselves and their
descendants, with the connivance of their home governments, in the toils of
a system which on the one hand had served their remote forbears with good
effect, but which on the other hand civilized peoples had long and almost
universally discarded as an incubus. In these colonial beginnings the
negroes were to be had so cheaply and slavery seemed such a simple and
advantageous device when applied to them, that no qualms as to the future
were felt. At least no expressions of them appear in the records of thought
extant for the first century and more of English colonial experience.
And when apprehensions did arise they were concerned with the dangers of
servile revolt, not with any deleterious effects to arise from the economic
nature of slavery in time of peace.

Now, slavery and indented servitude are analogous to serfdom in that they
may yield to the employers all the proceeds of industry beyond what is
required for the sustenance of the laborers; but they have this difference,
immense for American purposes, that they permit labor to be territorially
shifted, while serfdom keeps it locally fixed. By choosing these
facilitating forms of bondage instead of the one which would have attached
the laborers to the soil, the founders of the colonial regime in industry
doubtless thought they had avoided all economic handicaps in the premises.
Their device, however, was calculated to meet the needs of a situation
where the choice was between bond labor and no labor. As generations passed
and workingmen multiplied in America, the system of indentures for white
immigrants was automatically dissolved; but slavery for the bulk of the
negroes persisted as an integral feature of economic life. Whether this
was conducive or injurious to the prosperity of employers and to the
community's welfare became at length a question to which students far and
wide applied their faculties. Some of the participants in the discussion
considered the problem as one in pure theory; others examined not only the
abstract ratio of slave and free labor efficiency but included in their
view the factor of negro racial traits and the prospects and probable
consequences of abolition under existing circumstances. On the one point
that an average slave might be expected to accomplish less in an hour's
work than an average free laborer, agreement was unanimous; on virtually
every other point the views published were so divergent as to leave the
public more or less distracted. Adam Smith, whose work largely shaped the
course of economic thought for a century following its publication in 1776,
said of slave labor merely that its cost was excessive by reason of its
lack of zest, frugality and inventiveness. The tropical climate of the
sugar colonies, he conceded, might require the labor of negro slaves,
but even there its productiveness would be enhanced by liberal policies
promoting intelligence among the slaves and assimilating their condition to
that of freemen.[3] To some of these points J.B. Say, the next economist to
consider the matter, took exception. Common sense must tell us, said he,
that a slave's maintenance must be less than that of a free workman, since
the master will impose a more drastic frugality than a freeman will adopt
unless a dearth of earnings requires it. The slave's work, furthermore,
is more constant, for the master will not permit so much leisure and
relaxation as the freeman customarily enjoys. Say agreed, however, that
slavery, causing violence and brutality to usurp the place of intelligence,
both hampered the progress of invention and enervated such free laborers as
were in touch with the regime.[4]

[Footnote 3: Adam Smith, _The Wealth of Nations_, various editions, book I,
chap. 8; book III, chap. 2; book IV, chaps. 7 and 9.]

[Footnote 4: J.B. Say, _Traite d'Economie Politique_ (Paris, 1803), book I,
chap. 28; in various later editions, book I, chap. 19.]

The translation of Say's book into English evoked a reply to his views on
slavery by Adam Hodgson, an Englishman with anti-slavery bent who had made
an American tour; but his essay, though fortified with long quotations,
was too rambling and ill digested to influence those who were not already
desirous of being convinced.[5] More substantial was an essay of 1827 by
a Marylander, James Raymond, who cited the experiences of his own
commonwealth to support his contentions that slavery hampered economy by
preventing seasonal shiftings of labor, by requiring employers to support
their operatives in lean years as well as fat, and by hindering the
accumulation of wealth by the laborers. The system, said he, could yield
profits to the masters only in specially fertile districts; and even there
it kept down the growth of population and of land values.[6]

[Footnote 5: Adam Hodgson, _A Letter to M. Jean-Baptiste Say, on the
comparative expense of free and slave labour_ (Liverpool, 1823; New York,
1823).]

[Footnote 6: James Raymond, _Prize Essay on the Comparative Economy of Free
and Slave Labor in Agriculture_ (Frederick [Md.], 1827), reprinted in the
_African Repository_, III, 97-110 (June, 1827).]

About the same time Dr. Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College,
wrote: "Slave labour is undoubtedly the dearest kind of labour; it is all
forced, and forced too from a class of human beings who have the least
propensity to voluntary labour even when it is to benefit themselves
alone." The cost of rearing a slave to the age of self support, he
reckoned, including insurance, at forty dollars a year for fifteen years.
The usual work of a slave field hand, he thought, was barely two-thirds of
what a white laborer at usual wages would perform, and from his earnings
about forty dollars a year must be deducted for his maintenance. When
interest on the investment and a proportion of an overseer's wages were
deducted in addition, he thought the prevalent rate, six to eight dollars
a month and board valued at forty or fifty dollars a year, for free white
farm hands in the Northern states gave a decisive advantage to those who
hired laborers over those who owned them. "Nothing will justify slave
labour in point of economy," he concluded, "but the nature of the soil and
climate which incapacitates a white man from labouring in the summer time,
as on the rich lands in Carolina and Georgia extending one hundred miles
from the seaboard."[7]

[Footnote 7: Thomas Cooper, _Lectures on the Elements of Political
Economy_, (Columbia [S.C.], 1826), pp. 94, 95.]

The economic vices of slavery as exemplified in Virginia were elaborated in
an essay printed in 1832 attributed to Jesse Burton Harrison of that state.
Slavery, said this essay, drives away free workmen by stigmatizing labor,
for "nothing but the most abject necessity would lead a white man to hire
himself to work in the fields under the overseer"; it causes exhaustion of
the soil by reason of the negligence it promotes in the workmen and
the stress which overseers are fain to put upon immediate returns; it
discourages all forms of industry but plantation tillage, furthermore, for
although it has not and perhaps cannot be proved that slaves may not be
successfully employed in manufactures, the community has gone and tends
still to go, on that assumption; it discourages mechanic skill, for the
slaves never acquire more than the rudiments of artisanry, and the planters
discourage white craftsmen by giving preference uniformly to their
own laborers. Slave labor is dearer than free, because of its lack of
incentive; the regime costs the community the services of the immigrants
who would otherwise enter; and finally it promotes waste instead of
frugality on the part of both masters and slaves. The only means by which
Virginia could procure profit from slaves, it concluded, was that of
raising them for sale to the lower South; but such profit could only be
gained systematically at a complete sacrifice of honor.[8]