American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[Footnote 86: _Ibid_., pp. 26, 190, 260.]

A far sounder basic doctrine is that of the accountant Gibson, recited
at the beginning of this chapter, that the valuation of a slave is
theoretically determined by the reckoning of his prospective earnings above
the cost of his maintenance. In the actual Southern regime, however, this
was interfered with by several influences. For one thing, the successful
proprietors of small plantations could afford to buy additional slaves at
somewhat more than the price reckoned on _per capita_ earnings, because the
advance of their establishments towards the scale of maximum efficiency
would reduce the proportionate cost of administration. Again, the scale of
slaveholdings was in some degree a measure of social rank, and men were
accordingly tempted by uneconomic motives to increase their trains of
retainers. Both of these considerations stimulated the bidding. On the
other hand conventional morality deterred many proprietors from selling
slaves except under special stress, and thereby diminished the offers in
the market. If the combination of these factors is not adequate as an
explanation, there remain the spirit of inflation characteristic of a new
country and the common desire for tangible investments of a popularly
sanctioned sort. All staple producers were engaged in a venturesome
business. Crops were highly uncertain, and staple prices even more so. The
variability of earnings inured men to the taking of risks and spurred them
to borrow money and buy more of both lands and slaves even at inflated
prices in the hope of striking it rich with a few years' crops. On the
other hand when profits actually accrued, there was nothing available as a
rule more tempting than slaves as investments. Corporation securities were
few and unseasoned; lands were liable to wear out and were painfully slow
in liquidation; but slaves were a self-perpetuating stock whose ownership
was a badge of dignity, whose management was generally esteemed a
pleasurable responsibility, whose labor would yield an income, and whose
value could be realized in cash with fair promptitude in time of need. No
calculated overvaluation by proprietors for the sake of keeping the slaves
enslaved need be invented. Loria's thesis is a work of supererogation.

But whatever may be the true explanation it is clear that slave prices did
rise to immoderate heights, that speculation was kept rife, and that in
virtually every phase, after the industrial occupation of each area had
been accomplished, the maintenance of the institution was a clog upon
material progress. The economic virtues of slavery lay wholly in its making
labor mobile, regular and secure. These qualities accorded remarkably, so
far as they went, with the requirements of the plantation system on the one
hand and the needs of the generality of the negroes on the other. Its vices
were more numerous, and in part more subtle.

The North was annually acquiring thousands of immigrants who came at their
own expense, who worked zealously for wages payable from current earnings,
and who possessed all the inventive and progressive potentialities of
European peoples. But aspiring captains of industry at the South could as
a rule procure labor only by remitting round sums in money or credit which
depleted their working capital and for which were obtained slaves fit only
for plantation routine, negroes of whom little initiative could be expected
and little contribution to the community's welfare beyond their mere
muscular exertions. The negroes were procured in the first instance mainly
because white laborers were not to be had; afterward when whites might
otherwise have been available the established conditions repelled them. The
continued avoidance of the South by the great mass of incoming Europeans in
post-bellum decades has now made it clear that it was the negro character
of the slaves rather than the slave status of the negroes which was chiefly
responsible. The racial antipathy felt by the alien whites, along with
their cultural repugnance and economic apprehensions, intrenched the
negroes permanently in the situation. The most fertile Southern areas when
once converted into black belts tended, and still tend as strongly as ever,
to be tilled only by inert negroes, the majority of whom are as yet perhaps
less efficient in freedom than their forbears were as slaves.

The drain of funds involved in the purchase of slaves was impressive to
contemporaries. Thus Governor Spotswood wrote from Virginia to the British
authorities in 1711 explaining his assent to a L5 tax upon the importation
of slaves. The members of the legislature, said he, "urged what is really
true, that the country is already ruined by the great number of negros
imported of late years, that it will be impossible for them in many years
to discharge the debts already contracted for the purchase of those negroes
if fresh supplys be still poured upon them while their tobacco continues so
little valuable, but that the people will run more and more in debt."[87]
And in 1769 a Charleston correspondent wrote to a Boston journal: "A
calculation having been made of the amount of purchase money of slaves
effected here the present year, it is computed at L270,000 sterling, which
sum will by that means be drained off from this province."[88]

[Footnote 87: Virginia Historical Society _Collections_, I, 52.]

[Footnote 88: Boston _Chronicle_, Mch. 27, 1769.]

An unfortunate fixation of capital was likewise remarked. Thus Sir Charles
Lyell noted at Columbus, Georgia, in 1846 that Northern settlers were
"struck with the difficulty experienced in raising money here by small
shares for the building of mills. 'Why,' say they, 'should all our cotton
make so long a journey to the North, to be manufactured there, and come
back to us at so high a price? It is because all spare cash is sunk here in
purchasing negroes.'" And again at another stage of his tour: "That slave
labour is more expensive than free is an opinion which is certainly gaining
ground in the higher parts of Alabama, and is now professed openly by some
Northerners who have settled there. One of them said to me, 'Half the
population of the South is employed in seeing that the other half do their
work, and they who do work accomplish half what they might do under a
better system.' 'We cannot,' said another,[89] 'raise capital enough for
new cotton factories because all our savings go to buy negroes, or as has
lately happened, to feed them when the crop is deficient."

[Footnote 89: Sir Charles Lyell, _Second Visit to the United States_
(London, 1850), II, 35, 84, 85.]

The planters, who were the principal Southern capitalists, trod in a
vicious circle. They bought lands and slaves wherewith to grow cotton,
and with the proceeds ever bought more slaves to make more cotton; and
oftentimes they borrowed heavily on their lands and slaves as collateral in
order to enlarge their scale of production the more speedily. When slave
prices rose the possessors of those in the cotton belt seldom took profit
from the advance, for it was a rare planter who would voluntarily sell his
operating force. When crops failed or prices fell, however, the loans might
be called, the mortgages foreclosed, and the property sold out at panic
levels. Thus while the slaves had a guarantee of their sustenance, their
proprietors, themselves the guarantors, had a guarantee of nothing. By
virtue, or more properly by vice, of the heavy capitalization of the
control of labor which was a cardinal feature of the ante-bellum regime,
they were involved in excessive financial risks.

The slavery system has often been said to have put so great a stigma on
manual labor as to have paralyzed the physical energies of the Southern
white population. This is a great exaggeration; and yet it is true that the
system militated in quite positive degree against the productivity of the
several white classes. Among the well-to-do it promoted leisure by giving
rise to an abnormally large number of men and women who whether actually
or nominally performing managerial functions, did little to bring sweat
to their brows. The proportion of white collars to overalls and of muslin
frocks to kitchen aprons was greater than in any other Anglo-Saxon
community of equal income. The contrast so often drawn between Southern
gentility and Northern thrift had a concrete basis in fact. At the other
extreme the enervation of the poor whites, while mainly due to malaria
and hookworm, had as a contributing cause the limitation upon their
wage-earning opportunity which the slavery system imposed. Upon the middle
class and the yeomanry, which were far more numerous and substantial[90]
than has been commonly realized, the slavery system exerted an economic
influence by limiting the availability of capital and by offering the
temptation of an unsound application of earnings. When a prospering farmer,
for example, wanted help for himself in his fields or for his wife indoors,
the habit of the community prompted him to buy or hire slaves at a greater
cost than free labor would normally have required.[91] The high price of
slaves, furthermore, prevented many a capable manager from exercising his
talents by debarring him from the acquisition of labor and the other means
of large-scale production.

[Footnote 90: D.R. Hundley, _Social Relations in our Southern States_ (New
York, 1860), pp. 91-100, 193-303; John M. Aughey, _The Iron Furnace, or
Slavery and Secession_ (Philadelphia, 1863), p. 231.]

[Footnote 91: F.L. Olmsted, _Journey through Texas_, p. 513.]

Finally, the force of custom, together with the routine efficiency of slave
labor itself, caused the South to spoil the market for its distinctive
crops by producing greater quantities than the world would buy at
remunerative prices. To this the solicitude of the masters for the health
of their slaves contributed. The harvesting of wheat, for example, as a
Virginian planter observed in a letter to his neighbor James Madison, in
the days when harvesting machinery was unknown, required exertion much more
severe than the tobacco routine, and was accordingly, as he put it, "by
no means so conducive to the health of our negroes, upon whose increase
(_miserabile dictu_!) our principal profit depends."[92] The same
letter also said: "Where there is negro slavery there will be laziness,
carelessness and wastefulness. Nor is it possible to prevent them. Severity
increases the evil, and humanity does not lessen it."

[Footnote 92: Francis Corbin to James Madison, Oct. 10, 1819, in the
Massachusetts Historical Society _Proceedings_, XLIII, 263.]

On the whole, the question whether negro labor in slavery was more or less
productive than free negro labor would have been is not the crux of the
matter. The influence of the slaveholding regime upon the whites themselves
made it inevitable that the South should accumulate real wealth more slowly
than the contemporary North. The planters and their neighbors were in the
grip of circumstance. The higher the price of slaves the greater was the
absorption of capital in their purchase, the blacker grew the black belts,
the more intense was the concentration of wealth and talent in plantation
industry, the more complete was the crystallization of industrial society.
Were there any remedies available? Certain politicians masquerading as
economists advocated the territorial expansion of the regime as a means
of relief. Their argument, however, would not stand analysis. On one hand
virtually all the territory on the continent climatically available for the
staples was by the middle of the nineteenth century already incorporated
into slaveholding states; on the other hand, had new areas been available
the chief effects of their exploitation would have been to heighten the
prices of slaves and lower the prices of crops. Actual expansion had in
fact been too rapid for the best interests of society, for it had kept the
population too sparse to permit a proper development of schools and the
agencies of communications.

With a view to increase the power of the South to expand, and for other
purposes mainly political, a group of agitators in the 'fifties raised a
vehement contention in favor of reopening the African slave trade in full
volume. This, if accomplished, would have lowered the cost of labor, but
its increase of the crops would have depressed staple prices in still
greater degree; its unsettling of the slave market would have hurt vested
interests; and its infusion of a horde of savage Africans would have
set back the progress of the negroes already on hand and have magnified
permanently the problems of racial adjustment.

The prohibition of the interstate slave trade was another project for
modifying the situation. It was mooted in the main by politicians alien to
the regime. If accomplished it would have wrought a sharp differentiation
in the conditions within the several groups of Southern states. An analogy
may be seen in the British possessions in tropical America, where,
following the stoppage of the intercolonial slave trade in 1807, a royal
commission found that the average slave prices as gathered from sale
records between 1822 and 1830 varied from a range in the old and stagnant
colonies of L27 4_s_. 11-3/4_d_. in Bermuda, L29 18_s_. 9-3/4_d_. in the
Bahamas, L47 1_s_. in Barbados and L44 15_s_. 2-1/4_d_. in Jamaica, to L105
4_s_., L114 11_s_. and L120 4_s_. 7-1/2_d_ respectively in the new and
buoyant settlements of Trinidad, Guiana and British Honduras.[93] If the
interstate transfer had been stopped, the Virginia, Maryland and Carolina
slave markets would have been glutted while the markets of every
southwestern state were swept bare. Slave prices in the former would have
fallen to such levels that masters would have eventually resorted to
manumission in self-defence, while in the latter all existing checks to the
inflation of prices would have been removed and all the evils consequent
upon the capitalization of labor intensified.

[Footnote 93: _Accounts and Papers_ [of the British Government], 1837-1838,
vol. 48, [p. 329].]

Another conceivable plan would have been to replace slavery at large by
serfdom. This would have attached the negroes to whatever lands they
chanced to occupy at the time of the legislation. By force of necessity it
would have checked the depletion of soils; but by preventing territorial
transfer it would have robbed the negroes and their masters of all
advantages afforded by the virginity of unoccupied lands. Serfdom could
hardly be seriously considered by the citizens of a new and sparsely
settled country such as the South then was.

Finally the conversion of slaves into freemen by a sweeping emancipation
was a project which met little endorsement except among those who ignored
the racial and cultural complications. Financially it would work drastic
change in private fortunes, though the transfer of ownership from the
masters to the laborers themselves need not necessarily have great effect
for the time being upon the actual wealth of the community as a whole.
Emancipation would most probably, however, break down the plantation system
by making the labor supply unstable, and fill the country partly with
peasant farmers and partly with an unattached and floating negro
population. Exceptional negroes and mulattoes would be sure to thrive upon
their new opportunities, but the generality of the blacks could be counted
upon to relax into a greater slackness than they had previously been
permitted to indulge in. The apprehension of industrial paralysis, however,
appears to have been a smaller factor than the fear of social chaos as a
deterrent in the minds of the Southern whites from thoughts of abolition.

The slaveholding regime kept money scarce, population sparse and land
values accordingly low; it restricted the opportunities of many men of both
races, and it kept many of the natural resources of the Southern country
neglected. But it kept the main body of labor controlled, provisioned and
mobile. Above all it maintained order and a notable degree of harmony in a
community where confusion worse confounded would not have been far to
seek. Plantation slavery had in strictly business aspects at least as many
drawbacks as it had attractions. But in the large it was less a business
than a life; it made fewer fortunes than it made men.

CHAPTER XX

TOWN SLAVES

Southern households in town as well as in country were commonly large, and
the dwellings and grounds of the well-to-do were spacious. The dearth of
gas and plumbing and the lack of electric light and central heating made
for heavy chores in the drawing of water, the replenishment of fuel and the
care of lamps. The gathering of vegetables from the kitchen garden, the
dressing of poultry and the baking of relays' of hot breads at meal times
likewise amplified the culinary routine. Maids of all work were therefore
seldom employed. Comfortable circumstances required at least a cook and
a housemaid, to which might be added as means permitted a laundress, a
children's nurse, a seamstress, a milkmaid, a butler, a gardener and a
coachman. While few but the rich had such ample staffs as this, none but
the poor were devoid of domestics, and the ratio of servitors to the gross
population was large. The repugnance of white laborers toward menial
employment, furthermore, conspired with the traditional predilection of
householders for negroes in a lasting tenure for their intimate services
and gave the slaves a virtual monopoly of this calling. A census of
Charleston in 1848,[94] for example, enumerated 5272 slave domestics as
compared with 113 white and 27 free colored servants. The slaves were more
numerous than the free also in the semi-domestic employments of coachmen
and porters, and among the dray-men and the coopers and the unskilled
laborers in addition.

[Footnote 94: J.L. Dawson and H.W. DeSaussure, _Census of Charleston for
1848_ (Charleston, 1849), pp. 31-36. The city's population then comprised
some 20,000 whites, a like number of slaves, and about 3,500 free persons
of color. The statistics of occupations are summarized in the accompanying
table.]

MANUAL OCCUPATIONS IN CHARLESTON, 1848

Slaves | Free Negroes| Whites
Men | Women Men |Women Men |Women
Domestic servants 1,888 | 3,384 9 | 28 13 | 100
Cooks and
confectioners 7 | 12 18 | 18 ... | 5
Nurses and midwives ...| 2 ... | 10 ... | 5
Laundresses ...| 33 ... | 45 ... | ...
Seamstresses and
mantua makers ... | 24 ... | 196 ... | 125
Milliners ... | ... ... | 7 ... | 44
Fruiterers, hucksters
and pedlers ... | 18 6 | 5 46 | 18
Gardeners 3 | ... ...| ... 5 | 1
Coachmen 15 | ... 4 | ... 2 | ...
Draymen 67 | ... 11 | ... 13 | ...
Porters 35 | ... 5 | ... 8 | ...
Wharfingers and
stevedores 2 | ... 1 | ... 21 | ...
Pilots and sailors 50 | ... 1 | ... 176 | ...
Fishermen 11 | ... 14 | ... 10 | ...
Carpenters 120 | ... 27 | ... 119 | ...
Masons and
bricklayers 68 | ... 10 | ... 60 | ...
Painters and
plasterers 16 | ... 4 | ... 18 | ...
Tinners 3 | ... 1 | ... 10 | ...
Ship carpenters
and joiners 51 | ... 6 | ... 52 | ...
Coopers 61 | ... 2 | ... 20 | ...
Coach makers and
wheelwrights 3 | ... 1 | ... 26 | ...
Cabinet makers 8 | ... ... | ... 26 | ...
Upholsterers 1 | ... 1 | ... 10 | ...
Gun, copper and
locksmiths 2 | ... 1 | ... 16 | ...
Blacksmiths and
horseshoers 40 | ... 4 | ... 51 | ...
Millwrights ... | ... 5 | ... 4 | ...
Boot and shoemakers 6 | ... 17 | ... 30 | ...
Saddle and harness
makers 2 | ... 1 | ... 29 | ...
Tailors and cap makers 36 | ... 42 | 6 68 | 6
Butchers 5 | ... 1 | ... 10 | ...
Millers ... | ... 1 | ... 14 | ...
Bakers 39 | ... 1 | ... 35 | 1
Barbers and hairdressers 4 | ... 14 | ... ... | 6
Cigarmakers 5 | ... 1 | ... 10 | ...
Bookbinders 3 | ... ... | ... 10 | ...
Printers 5 | ... ... | ... 65 | ...
Other mechanics [A] 45 | ... 2 | ... 182 | ...
Apprentices 43 | 8 14 | 7 55 | 5
Unclassified, unskilled
laborers 838 | 378 19 | 2 192 | ...
Superannuated 38 | 54 1 | 5 ... | ...

[Footnote A: The slaves and free negroes in this group were designated
merely as mechanics. The whites were classified as follows: 3 joiners,
1 plumber, 8 gas fitters, 7 bell hangers, 1 paper hanger, 6 carvers and
gilders, 9 sail makers, 5 riggers, 1 bottler, 8 sugar makers, 43 engineers,
10 machinists, 6 boilermakers, 7 stone cutters, 4 piano and organ builders,
23 silversmiths, 15 watchmakers, 3 hair braiders, 1 engraver, 1 cutler, 3
molders, 3 pump and block makers, 2 turners, 2 wigmakers, 1 basketmaker, 1
bleacher, 4 dyers, and 4 journeymen.

In addition there were enumerated of whites in non-mechanical employments
in which the negroes did not participate, 7 omnibus drivers and 16
barkeepers.]

On the other hand, although Charleston excelled every other city in the
proportion of slaves in its population, free laborers predominated in all
the other industrial groups, though but slightly in the cases of the masons
and carpenters. The whites, furthermore, heavily outnumbered the free
negroes in virtually all the trades but that of barbering which they
shunned. Among women workers the free colored ranked first as seamstresses,
washerwomen, nurses and cooks, with white women competing strongly in the
sewing trades alone. A census of Savannah in the same year shows a similar
predominance of whites in all the male trades but that of the barbers, in
which there were counted five free negroes, one slave and no whites.[2]
From such statistics two conclusions are clear: first, that the repulsion
of the whites was not against manual work but against menial service;
second, that the presence of the slaves in the town trades was mainly due
to the presence of their fellows as domestics.

[Footnote 2: Joseph Bancroft, _Census of the City of Savannah_ (Savannah,
1848).]

Most of the slave mechanics and out-of-door laborers were the husbands and
sons of the cooks and chambermaids, dwelling with them on their masters'
premises, where the back yard with its crooning women and romping
vari-colored children was as characteristic a feature as on the
plantations. Town slavery, indeed, had a strong tone of domesticity, and
the masters were often paternalistically inclined. It was a townsman, for
example, who wrote the following to a neighbor: "As my boy Reuben has
formed an attachment to one of your girls and wants her for a wife, this
is to let you know that I am perfectly willing that he should, with your
consent, marry her. His character is good; he is honest, faithful and
industrious." The patriarchal relations of the country, however, which
depended much upon the isolation of the groups, could hardly prevail in
similar degree where the slaves of many masters intermingled. Even for
the care of the sick there was doubtless fairly frequent recourse to such
establishments as the "Surgical Infirmary for Negroes" at Augusta which
advertised its facilities in 1854,[3] though the more common practice, of
course, was for slave patients in town as well as country to be nursed
at home. A characteristic note in this connection was written by a young
Georgia townswoman: "No one is going to church today but myself, as we have
a little negro very sick and Mama deems it necessary to remain at home to
attend to him."[4]

[Footnote 3: _Southern Business Directory_ (Charleston, 1854), I, 289,
advertisement. The building was described as having accommodations for
fifty or sixty patients. The charge for board, lodging and nursing was $10
per month, and for surgical operations and medical attendance "the usual
rates of city practice."]

[Footnote 4: Mary E. Harden to Mrs. Howell Cobb, Athens, Ga., Nov. 13,
1853. MS. in possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]

The town regime was not so conducive to lifelong adjustments of masters
and slaves except as regards domestic service; for whereas a planter could
always expand his operations in response to an increase of his field hands
and could usually provide employment at home for any artizan he might
produce, a lawyer, a banker or a merchant had little choice but to hire
out or sell any slave who proved a superfluity or a misfit in his domestic
establishment. On the other hand a building contractor with an expanding
business could not await the raising of children but must buy or hire
masons and carpenters where he could find them.