American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[Footnote 59: Frances A. Kemble, _Journal_ (New York, 1863), p. 28.]

[Footnote 60: G.W. Featherstonhaugh, _Excursion Through the Slave States_
(London, 1844), I, 120. Though Featherstonhaugh afterward visited New
Orleans his book does not recur to this topic.]

[Footnote 61: William Goodell, _The American Slave Code in Theory and
Practise_ (New York, 1853), pp. 79-81, citing Theodore Weld, _Slavery as it
is_, p 39, and Mattheson, _Visit to the American Churches_, II, 173.]

[Footnote 62: _The Suppressed Book about Slavery! Prepared for publication
in 1857, never published until the present time_ (New York, 1864), p. 211.]

These assertions, which have been accepted by some historians as valid,
prompt a series of reflections. In the first place, anyone who has had
experience with negro labor may reasonably be skeptical when told that
healthy, well fed negroes, whether slave or free, can by any routine
insistence of the employer be driven beyond the point at which fatigue
begins to be injurious. In the second place, plantation work as a rule had
the limitation of daylight hours; in plowing, mules which could not
be hurried set the pace; in hoeing, haste would imperil the plants by
enhancing the proportion of misdirected strokes; and in the harvest of
tobacco, rice and cotton much perseverance but little strain was involved.
The sugar harvest alone called for heavy exertion and for night work in the
mill. But common report in that regard emphasized the sturdy sleekness as
well as the joviality of the negroes in the grinding season;[63] and even
if exhaustion had been characteristic instead, the brevity of the period
would have prevented any serious debilitating effect before the coming of
the more leisurely schedule after harvest. In fact many neighboring Creole
and Acadian farmers, fishermen and the like were customarily enlisted
on wages as plantation recruits in the months of stress.[64] The sugar
district furthermore was the one plantation area within easy reach of a
considerable city whence a seasonal supply of extra hands might be had to
save the regular forces from injury. The fact that a planter, as reported
by Sir Charles Lyell, failed to get a hundred recruits one year in the
midst of the grinding season[65] does not weaken this consideration. It may
well have been that his neighbors had forestalled him in the wage-labor
market, or that the remaining Germans and Irish in the city refused to take
the places of their fellows who were on strike. It is well established that
sugar planters had systematic recourse to immigrant labor for ditching and
other severe work.[66] It is incredible that they ignored the same recourse
if at any time the requirements of their crop threatened injury to their
property in slaves. The recommendation of the old Roman, Varro, that
freemen be employed in harvesting to save the slaves[67] would apply with
no more effect, in case of need, to the pressing of oil and wine than to
the grinding of sugar-cane. Two months' wages to a Creole, a "'Cajun" or
an Irishman would be cheap as the price of a slave's continued vigor,
even when slave prices were low. On the whole, however, the stress of the
grinding was not usually as great as has been fancied. Some of the regular
hands in fact were occasionally spared from the harvest at its height and
set to plow and plant for the next year's crop.[68]

[Footnote 63: E. g., Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 668.]

[Footnote 64: _DeBow's Review_, XI, 606.]

[Footnote 65: _See_ above, p. 337.]

[Footnote 66: See above, pp. 301, 302.]

[Footnote 67: Varro, _De Re Rustica_, I, XVII, 2.]

[Footnote 68: _E. g_., items for November, 1849, in the plantation diary of
Dr. John P.R. Stone, of Iberville Parish, Louisiana. For the use of this
document, the MS. of which is in the possession of Mr. John Stone Ware,
White-Castle, La., I am indebted to Mr. V. Alton Moody, of the University
of Michigan, now Lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force in France.]

The further question arises: how could a master who set himself to work a
slave to death in seven years make sure on the one hand that the demise
would not be precipitated within a few months instead, and on the other
that the consequence would not be merely the slave's incapacitation instead
of his death? In the one case a serious loss would be incurred at once; in
the other the stoppage of the slave's maintenance, which would be the only
conceivable source of gain in the premises, would not have been effected,
but the planter would merely have an invalid on his hands instead of a
worker. Still further, the slaves had recourses of their own, even aside
from appeals for legal redress. They might shoot or stab the oppressor,
burn his house, or run away, or resort to any of a dozen other forms of
sabotage. These possibilities the masters knew as well as the slaves. Mere
passive resistance, however, in cases where even that was needed, would
generally prove effective enough.

Finally, if all the foregoing arguments be dismissed as fallacious, there
still remains the factor of slave prices as a deterrent in certain periods.
If when slaves were cheap and their produce dear it might be feasible and
profitable to exhaust the one to increase the other, the opportunity would
surely vanish when the price relations were reversed. The trend of the
markets was very strong in that direction. Thus at the beginning of the
nineteenth century a prime field hand in the upland cotton belt had the
value of about 1,500 pounds of middling cotton; by 1810 this value had
risen to 4,500 pounds; by 1820 to 5,500; by 1830 to 6,000; by 1840 to
8,300; from 1843 to 1853 it was currently about 10,000; and in 1860 it
reached about 16,000 pounds. Comparison of slave values as measured in the
several other staples would show quite similar trends, though these great
appreciations were accompanied by no remotely proportionate increase of
the slaves' industrial capacities. The figures tell their own tale of
the mounting preposterousness of any calculated exhaustion of the human
chattels.

The tradition in anti-slavery circles was however too strong to die.
Various travelers touring the South, keen for corroborative evidence but
finding none, still nursed the belief that a further search would bring
reward. It was like the rainbow's end, always beyond the horizon. Thus the
two Englishmen, Marshall Hall and William H. Russell, after scrutinizing
many Southern localities and finding no slave exhaustion, asserted that it
prevailed either in a district or in a type of establishment which they had
not examined. Hall, who traveled far in the Southern states and then merely
touched at Havana on his way home, wrote: "In the United States the life of
the slave has been cherished and his offspring promoted. In Cuba the lives
of the slaves have been 'used up' by excessive labour, and increase in
number disregarded. It is said, indeed, that the slave-life did not extend
beyond eight or ten years."[69] Russell recorded his surprise at finding
that the Louisiana planters made no reckoning whatever of the cost of their
slaves' labor, that Irish gangs nevertheless did the ditching, and that the
slave children of from nine to eleven years were at play, "exempted from
that cruel fate which befalls poor children of their age in the mining and
manufacturing districts of England"; and then upon glimpsing the homesteads
of some Creole small proprietors, he wrote: "It is among these men that, at
times, slavery assumes its harshest aspect, and that slaves are exposed to
the severest labor."[70] Johann Schoepf on the other hand while travelling
many years before on the Atlantic seaboard had written: "They who have the
largest droves [of slaves] keep them the worst, let them run naked mostly
or in rags, and accustom them as much as possible to hunger, but exact of
them steady work."[71] That no concrete observations were adduced in any
of these premises is evidence enough, under the circumstances, that the
charges were empty.

[Footnote 69: Marshall Hall, _The Two-fold Slavery of the United States_
(London, 1854), p. 154.]

[Footnote 70: W.H. Russell, _My Diary North and South_ (Boston, 1863), pp.
274, 278.]

[Footnote 71: Johann David Schoepf, _Travels in the Confederation_, A.J.
Morrisson, tr. (Philadelphia, 1911), II, 147. But _see ibid_., pp. 94, 116,
for observations of a general air of indolence among whites and blacks
alike.]

The capital value of the slaves was an increasingly powerful insurance of
their lives and their health. In four days of June, 1836, Thomas Glover of
Lowndes County, Alabama, incurred a debt of $35 which he duly paid, for
three visits with mileage and prescriptions by Dr. Salley to his "wench
Rina";[72] and in the winter of 1858 Nathan Truitt of Troup County,
Georgia, had medical attendance rendered to a slave child of his to the
amount of $130.50.[73] These are mere chance items in the multitude which
constantly recur in probate records. Business prudence required expenditure
with almost a lavish hand when endangered property was to be saved. The
same consideration applied when famines occurred, as in Alabama in 1828[74]
and 1855.[75] Poverty-stricken freemen might perish, but slaveowners could
use the slaves themselves as security for credits to buy food at famine
prices to feed them.[76] As Olmsted said, comparing famine effects in the
South and in Ireland, "the slaves suffered no physical want--the peasant
starved."[77] The higher the price of slaves, the more stringent the
pressure upon the masters to safeguard them from disease, injury and risk
of every sort.

[Footnote 72: MS. receipt in private possession.]

[Footnote 73: MS. probate records at LaGrange, Ga.]

[Footnote 74: Charleston, _City Gazette_, May 28, 1828.]

[Footnote 75: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, pp. 707, 708, quoting
contemporary newspapers.]

[Footnote 76: Cf. D.D. Wallace, _Life of Henry Laurens_, p. 429.]

[Footnote 77: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 244.]

Although this phase of the advancing valuation gave no occasion for regret,
other phases brought a spread of dismay and apprehension. In an essay of
1859 Edmund Ruffin analyzed the effects in Virginia. In the last fifteen
years, he said, the value of slaves had been doubled, solely because of
the demand from the lower South. The Virginians affected fell into three
classes. The first were those who had slaves to be sold, whether through
pressure of debt or in the legal division of estates or in the rare event
of liquidating a surplus of labor. These would receive advantage from high
prices. The second were those who wishing neither to buy nor sell slaves
desired merely to keep their estates intact. These were, of course,
unaffected by the fluctuations. The third were the great number of
enterprising planters and farmers who desired to increase the scale of
their industrial operations and who would buy slaves if conditions were
propitious but were debarred therefrom by the immoderate prices. When these
men stood aside in the bidding the manual force and the earning power of
the commonwealth were depleted. The smaller volume of labor then remaining
must be more thinly applied; land values must needs decline; and the
shrewdest employers must join the southward movement. The draining of
the slaves, he continued, would bring compensation in an inflow of white
settlers only when the removal of slave labor had become virtually complete
and had brought in consequence the most extreme prostration of land
prices and of the incomes of the still remaining remnant of the original
population. The exporting of labor, at whatever price it might be sold, he
likened to a farmer's conversion of his plow teams into cash instead of
using them in his work. According to these views, he concluded, "the
highest prices yet obtained from the foreign purchasers of our slaves have
never left a profit to the state or produced pecuniary benefit to general
interests. And even if prices should continue to increase, as there is good
reason to expect and to dread, until they reach $2000 or more for the best
laborers, or $1200 for the general average of ages and sexes, these prices,
though necessarily operating to remove every slave from Virginia, will
still cause loss to agricultural and general interests in every particular
sale, and finally render the state a desert and a ruin."[78]

[Footnote 78: Edmund Ruffin, "The Effects of High Prices of Slaves," in
_DeBow's Review_, XXVI, 647-657 (June, 1859).]

At Charleston a similar plaint was voiced by L.W. Spratt. In early years
when the African trade was open and slaves were cheap, said he, in the
Carolina lowlands "enterprise found a profitable field, and necessarily
therefore the fortunes of the country bloomed and brightened. But when
the fertilizing stream of labor was cut off, when the opening West had
no further supply to meet its requisitions, it made demands upon the
accumulations of the seaboard. The limited amount became a prize to be
contended for. Land in the interior offered itself at less than one dollar
an acre. Land on the seaboard had been raised to fifty dollars per acre,
and labor, forced to elect between them, took the cheaper. The heirs who
came to an estate, or the men of capital who retired from business, sought
a location in the West. Lands on the seaboard were forced to seek for
purchasers; purchasers came to the seaboard to seek for slaves. Their
prices were elevated to their value not upon the seaboard where lands were
capital but in the interior where the interest upon the cost of labor was
the only charge upon production. Labor therefore ceased to be profitable
in the one place as it became profitable in the other. Estates which were
wealth to their original proprietors became a charge to the descendants
who endeavored to maintain them. Neglect soon came to the relief of
unprofitable care; decay followed neglect. Mansions became tenantless and
roofless. Trees spring in their deserted halls and wave their branches
through dismantled windows. Drains filled up; the swamps returned. Parish
churches in imposing styles of architecture and once attended by a goodly
company in costly equipages, are now abandoned. Lands which had ready sale
at fifty dollars per acre now sell for less than five dollars; and over
all these structures of wealth, with their offices of art, and over
these scenes of festivity and devotion, there now hangs the pall of an
unalterable gloom."[79] In a later essay the same writer dealt with
developments in the 'fifties in more sober phrases which are corroborated
by the census returns. Within the decade, he said, as many as ten thousand
slaves had been drawn from Charleston by the attractive prices of the west,
and the towns of the interior had suffered losses in the same way. The
slaves had been taken in large numbers from all manufacturing employments,
and were now being sold by thousands each year from the rice fields. "They
are as yet retained by cotton and the culture incident to cotton; but as
almost every negro offered in our markets is bid for by the West, the drain
is likely to continue." In the towns alone was the loss offset in any
degree by an inflow of immigration.[80]

[Footnote 79: L.W. Spratt, _The Foreign Slave Trade, the source of
political power, of material progress, of social integrity and of social
emancipation to the South_ (Charleston, 1858), pp. 7, 8.]

[Footnote 80: L.W. Spratt, "Letter to John Perkins of Louisiana," in the
Charleston _Mercury_, Feb. 13, 1861.]

A similar trend as to slaves but with a sharply contrasting effect upon
prosperity was described by Gratz Brown as prevailing in Missouri. The
slave population, said he, is in process of rapid decline except in a dozen
central counties along the Missouri River. "Hemp is the only staple here
left that will pay for investment in negroes," and that can hardly hold
them against the call of the cotton belt. Already the planters of the
upland counties are beginning to send their slaves to southerly markets
in response to the prices there offered. In most parts of Missouri, he
continued, slavery could not be said to exist as a system. It accordingly
served, not as an appreciable industrial agency, but only as a deterrent
hampering the progress of immigration. Brown therefore advocated the
complete extirpation of the institution as a means of giving great impetus
to the state's prosperity.[81]

[Footnote 81: B. Gratz Brown, _Speech in the Missouri Legislature, February
12, 1857 on gradual emancipation in Missouri_ (St. Louis, 1857).]

These accounts are colored by the pro-slavery views of Ruffin and Spratt
and the opposite predilections of Brown. It is clear nevertheless that the
net industrial effects of the exportation of slaves were strikingly
diverse in the several regions. In Missouri, and in Delaware also, where
plantations had never been dominant and where negroes were few, the loss
of slaves was more than counterbalanced by the gain of freemen; in some
portions of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky the replacement of the one by
the other was at so evenly compensating a rate that the volume of industry
was not affected; but in other parts of those states and in the rural
districts of the rice coast the depletion of slaves was not in any
appreciable measure offset by immigration. This applies also to the older
portions of the eastern cotton belt.

Throughout the northern and eastern South doubts had often been expressed
that slave labor was worth its price. Thus Philip Fithian recorded in his
Virginia diary in 1774 a conversation with Mrs. Robert Carter in which she
expressed an opinion, endorsed by Fithian, "that if in Mr. Carter's or in
any gentleman's estate all the negroes should be sold and the money put to
interest in safe hands, and let the land which the negroes now work lie
wholly uncultivated, the bare interest of the price of the negroes would be
a much greater yearly income than what is now received from their working
the lands, making no allowance at all for the trouble and risk of the
masters as to crops and negroes."[82] In 1824 John Randolph said: "It is
notorious that the profits of slave labor have been for a long time on the
decrease, and that on a fair average it scarcely reimburses the expense of
the slave," and concluded by prophesying that a continuance of the tendency
would bring it about "in case the slave shall not elope from his master,
that his master will run away from him."[83] In 1818 William Elliott
of Beaufort, South Carolina, had written that in the sea-island cotton
industry for a decade past the high valuations of lands and slaves had been
wholly unjustified. On the one hand, said he, the return on investments
was extremely small; on the other, it was almost impossible to relieve an
embarrassed estate by the sale of a part, for the reduction of the scale of
operations would cause a more than proportionate reduction of income.[84]

[Footnote 82: Philip V. Fithian, _Journal and Letters_ (Princeton, 1900),
p. 145.]

[Footnote 83: H.A. Garland, _Life of John Randolph_ (New York 1851), II,
215.]

[Footnote 84: _Southern Agriculturist_, I, 151-163.]

The remorseless advance of slave prices as measured in their produce tended
to spread the adverse conditions noted by Elliott into all parts of the
South; and by the close of the 'fifties it is fairly certain that no
slaveholders but those few whose plantations lay in the most advantageous
parts of the cotton and sugar districts and whose managerial ability was
exceptionally great were earning anything beyond what would cover their
maintenance and carrying charges.

Achille Loria has repeatedly expressed the generalization that slaves have
been systematically overvalued wherever the institution has prevailed, and
he has attempted to explain the phenomenon by reference to an economic law
of his own formulation that capitalists always and everywhere exploit labor
by devices peculiarly adapted to each regime in turn. His latest argument
in the premises is as follows: Man, who is by nature dispersively
individualistic, is brought into industrial coordination only by coercion.
Isolated labor if on exceptionally fertile soil or if equipped with
specially efficient apparatus or if supernormal in energy may produce a
surplus income, but ordinarily it can earn no more than a bare subsistence.
Associative labor yields so much greater returns that masters of one sort
or another emerge in every progressive society to replace dispersion with
concentration and to engross most of the accruing enhancement of produce
to themselves as captains of industry. This "persistent and continuous
coercion, compelling them to labour in conformity to a unitary plan or in
accordance with a concentrating design" is commonly in its earlier form
slavery, and slaveholders are thus the first possessors of capital. As
capitalists they become perpetually concerned with excluding the laborers
from the proprietorship of land and the other means of production. So long
as land is relatively abundant this can be accomplished only by keeping
labor enslaved, and enslavement cannot be maintained unless the slaves are
prevented from buying their freedom. This prevention is procured by the
heightening of slave prices at such a rate as to keep the cost of freedom
always greater than the generality of the slaves can pay with their own
accumulated savings or _peculia_. Slave prices in fact, whether in ancient
Rome or in modern America, advanced disproportionately to the advantage
which the owners could derive from the ownership. "This shows that an
element of speculation enters into the valuation of the slave, or that
there is a hypervaluation of the slave. _This is the central phenomenon of_
_slavery_; and it is to this far more than to the indolence of slave labour
that is due the low productivity of slave states, the permanently unstable
equilibrium of the slaveholding enterprise, and its inevitable ruin." The
decline of earnings and of slave prices promotes a more drastic oppression,
as in Roman Sicily, to reduce the slave's _peculium_ and continue the
prevention of his self-purchase. When this device is about to fail of its
purpose the masters may foil the intention of the slaves by changing them
into serfs, attaching the lands to the laborers as an additional thing to
be purchased as a condition of freedom. The value of the man may now
be permitted to fall to its natural level. Finally, when the growth of
population has made land so dear that common laborers in freedom cannot
save enough to buy farms, the occasion for slavery and serfdom lapses.
Laborers may now be freed to become a wage-earning proletariat, to take
their own risks. An automatic coercion replaces the systematic; the labor
stimulus is intensified, but the stress of the employer is diminished. The
laborer does not escape from coercion, but merely exchanges one of its
forms for another.[85]

[Footnote 85: Achille Loria, _The Economic Synthesis_, M. Eden Paul tr.
(London, 1914), PP. 23-26, 91-99.]

Now Loria falls into various fallacies in other parts of his book, as when
he says that southern lands are generally more fertile than northern
and holds that alone, to the exclusion of climate and racial qualities,
responsible for the greater prevalence of slavery ancient and modern in
southerly latitudes; or when he follows Cairnes in asserting that upon the
American slave plantations "the only form of culture practised was spade
culture, merely agglomerating upon a single area of land a number of
isolated laborers"; or when he contends that either slavery or serfdom
since based on force and fraud "destroys the possibility of fiduciary
credit by cancelling the conditions [of trust and confidence] which alone
can foster it." [86] Such errors disturb one's faith. In the presentation
of his main argument, furthermore, he not only exaggerates the cleavage
between capitalists and laborers, the class consciousness of the two groups
and the rationality of capitalistic purpose, but he falls into calamitous
ambiguity and confusion. The central phenomenon of slavery, says he, is
speculation or the overvaluation of the slave. He thereupon assumes that
speculation always means overvaluation, ignoring its downward possibility,
and he accounts for the asserted universal and continuously increasing
overvaluation by reference to the desire of masters to prevent slaves from
buying their freedom. Here he ignores essential historic facts. In American
law a slave's _peculium_ had no recognition; and the proportion of slaves,
furthermore, who showed any firm disposition to accumulate savings for the
purpose of buying their freedom was very small. Where such efforts were
made, however, they were likely to be aided by the masters through
facilities for cash earnings, price concessions and honest accounting
of instalments, notwithstanding the lack of legal requirements in the
premises. Loria's explanation of the "central phenomenon" is therefore
hardly tenable.