Slavery was work, often very hard work, sustained by force and the threat of humiliation and separation from family and community. Most commonly, it was routinized and mind-numbing, a repetition of the same tasks or movements, changed only by the season of the year or time of day. This image gave rise to the expression “factories in the field,” evoking an early industrial model where workers were no more than cogs in a machine.
In eighteenth-century North America, planters in the Chesapeake expected to have a large number of skilled slaves as well as common laborers. “I have my Flocks and my Herds, my Bond-men and Bond-women, and every soart [sic] of Trade amongst my own Servants,” wrote William Byrd II in 1727, who expressed an ideal of being able to “live in a kind of Independence on
Most slaves, however, were common laborers. At the earliest stage of plantation development slaves, even common laborers, worked in a traditional fashion, with each being responsible for a multitude of tasks under relatively little supervision. As plantations developed, gang labor superseded traditional laboring methods. Under this system, the processes of cultivation were divided into simple tasks capable of minute supervision, where field hands worked in lock-step under the eye of a white overseer or black driver (foreman). He carried a whip as an emblem of authority and a means of coercion. Gang labor developed at different times in various places and was perhaps first closely associated with sugar cultivation in Barbados. Historians do not agree on when it first appeared there but associate it with a transition from white indentured servitude to African slavery and development of a new plantation structure that more efficiently and economically produced sugar. One historian argues that it developed uniquely among the English and because their cultural outlook permitted them to apply so harsh a regimentation only to people as ethnically distinct as Africans, but not everyone accepts this racial interpretation. Englishmen treated English indentured servants with extreme rigor, certainly more rigorously in America than people in the same condition were treated in England, though legal considerations, however laxly regarded, imposed some limits, as did the realization, at least in North America, that some of the mistreated would eventually command free status and political influence. To the extent that no such restraints applied to Africans, race may be said to have influenced the development of gang labor. It was common in Barbados by the eighteenth century and served as an example for other English plantation regions.
In the eighteenth-century Carolina low country, including coastal Georgia, where planters specialized in rice, work was harder because preparing the land for cultivation usually meant claiming marshlands or swampy regions. One needed to construct dikes to hold water and sluices to let it off. These dikes required considerable effort to build and maintain, in the company of snakes, alligators, and other vermin,
How the task system originated has also been debated because it certainly diverged from the gang labor system that eventually dominated Barbados whence many early South Carolina settlers came, though it apparently had not fully developed before most of them left. Among the reasons advanced for the task system has been the supposition that the character of rice, being hardy, needing a scattered work force, and not requiring minute supervision, was suitable to the method; another is that wealthy South Carolina planters, inclined towards absenteeism, left work initiatives to their slaves, and they, referring
drivers who served under white overseers but directly over the field workers. They allocated the tasks and helped to set the pace. They had less time to themselves than workers who completed their jobs early but the driver was entitled to the help of other workers in his own enterprises. (Of course, not all workers finished with time to spare; maybe even most did not but enough to provide hope and impart value to the system.) The driver had to be very knowledgeable about the crop: when to flood, when to draw down the water, when to drain, and when to harvest. These decisions could make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful crop and drivers often knew these things better than overseers. In fact, some planters dispensed with overseers altogether and depended upon their drivers. A respected driver had a great deal of authority and was frequently a leader in the black community before and after slavery. Cultivation in the rice country took place under the direction of blackBy the nineteenth century the development of a cotton South, stretching from the eastern seaboard all the way to Texas, flattened somewhat the appearance of slavery and increasing mechanization, to which slaves had to adjust,
He noted the presence of a black driver, whip in hand, urging them on. Plantations still required artisans, for which more men were trained than women, but for the vast majority of the enslaved, labor was almost certainly duller and less varied than in the colonial period. Tobacco still grew in the Chesapeake, rice in South Carolina, and sugar in Louisiana, where refining obliged special capabilities and provided opportunities for a few more men, but practically everywhere else slaves labored in cotton. In all of these places, excepting coastal South Carolina and Georgia, they labored in gangs. Guiding Student Discussion Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, slaves even worked in factories, and in Richmond and other urban locales they worked as teamsters, stevedores, porters and dockhands, to mention only a few of the urban tasks they performed. Consequently, the variety of slave labor was greater than students sometimes assume. Most students relate slavery to the cotton South but is important for students to realize that it had a longer and more varied history than that, spanning more years in the colonial period than in the nineteenth century. Equally important is the fact that in this early period it extended to the Middle Colonies and New England. This recognition will allow teachers along the North Atlantic seaboard to look at areas in their own regions where slaves labored, while still considering the more traditional perspective. In New England and the Middle Colonies slaves worked on dairy farms and aboard ship, in wheat farms and on the docks, in gardens and homes, at printing shops or as personal attendants. They might do all of these things in the South as well but plantation slavery was a southern institution and slave labor there was more important and lasting than in the North. It is also important to note that gang labor and the task system were not mutually exclusive practices but represented extremes within which planters might organize their labor. Some jobs might be better performed by task assignment than by gangs even in a region where gang labor prevailed and vice versa. In a few places, as in the
Students should also realized that slavery was a relationship between human beings and while authority emanated from the top, a wise planter did not make decisions without taking into account the reaction of his laborers. Slavery depended upon force but it worked best when slaves cooperated; planters had to compromise as well as command. James Henry Hammond, for example, soundly resented the autonomy provided by the task system and tried with great brutality to impose gang labor on his slaves but ultimately had to accommodate them. He learned in the nineteenth century what most low country South Carolina planters learned in the eighteenth, that he could not grow crops if he spent more time punishing slaves or hunting them down than in supervising while they worked. Planters succeeded when they provided an environment in which enslaved people labored as willingly as could be expected under the circumstances, and the slaves’ quest for some control over their lives. What did it mean that field hands obliged an accommodation even though they could not overthrow the system? How did the possession of managerial skills and craftsmanship and the slaves’ awareness of their own talents affect their sense of self-worth and counteract the prevailing image that they were ignorant and unable to think or care for themselves? the task system’s offer of free time and the chance to do for themselves fell into this category. More than one planter commented that slaves were less likely to abscond if that involved leaving something they were building or growing for their own use. Planters in gang-labor regions had to provide other incentives, maybe extra food or drink, additional clothing or other trinkets, perhaps a little money, for better-than-average performance. Of course, perceptive students might realize that getting slaves to “buy into the system,” to conspire in their own enslavement, was an even more subversive feature of slavery than the physical coercion it entailed. One might therefore discuss the psychological consequences of slavery both in terms of the master’s desire, as in Hammond’s case, to encourage or enforce dependence, andOne might consider that the distinction sometimes made between field hands and house servants, portraying the one as having a much harder lot, can be overdrawn. Domestics occasionally had better food and clothing but, where they existed, these advantages were offset by the tension of being under more constant scrutiny and forever on-call that closer contact with the master’s family brought. Field hands at least normally had evenings to themselves. Moreover, many types of domestic work, such as washing, which might appear relatively unskilled today, required both strength and discrimination because it was not a simple matter of putting clothes in a machine but of heating water in iron kettles, using dangerous soaps made from lye or other corrosive materials, bringing water and clothes to a boil,
Shifting focus slightly, one might encourage students to consider the psychological affects of slave labor on the master class. For one thing, there developed a notion associating hard labor with enslaved people and as something that people of quality avoided. This idea was scarcely modified by the consideration that various immigrants did similar work because they were stigmatized as a result of its association with blackness and slavery. That was one reason why immigrants avoided the slave South. Another more complicated issue is that enslaved people often possessed extraordinary talents and exercised considerable authority during slavery, without which the institution could not operate, but these facts were inconsistent with an ideology of white supremacy that guided southern social and political relations by the nineteenth century. The fact that most slaves were unskilled and uneducated supplied cover but could not have extinguished doubt among those who thought deeply about the nature of their society. There is the caution, however, that human beings have shown themselves to be peculiarly adept at holding contradictory beliefs and clinging to habits even at a psychic cost. There is the additional caution that most people probably do not think much about their customs at all. On the emotional level is the reflection that servants who acted as wet nurses or nannies, frequently establishing strong ties with their charges and influencing their culture and outlook in acknowledged and unacknowledged ways, instilled attitudes and expressions that maturing youth had difficulty shedding, if ever they did so. Historians Debate The subject of slavery and its function as a labor system has been of great interest in recent years, particularly as changing social currents shifted attention to American race relations and the historical background of those relationships. The first scholar to give American slavery serious attention was Ulrich B. Phillips writing at the beginning of the twentieth century. In American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), along with numerous articles and edited works, he gave extended treatment to the organization and regulation of plantation labor. As a southern defender of white supremacy, however, he gave relatively little attention to the slave except as a passive object of white direction. He viewed slavery in a paternalistic fashion, minimizing violence and stressing harmony between master and slave. He viewed African Americans as inferior, lacking in initiative, and unable to care for themselves, characteristics that suited them for the toil of slavery and inclined them to accept their master’s leadership. In his view, slavery was a social relationship rather than an economic one; indeed, he regarded slavery as an uneconomic drag on the South, partly because of the slave’s slothfulness and inefficiency, and as a way to rescue benighted trolls from primitive backwardness. Because he saw only torpor, docility and dim-wittedness among the slaves, his admission of give-and-take in the master-slave relationship was a function of the planter’s paternal outlook rather than of the slave’s assertiveness and self-awareness, and the presence of a few slaves with ability did not soften his general view of slavery was as a way to regulate race relations and to control an indolent and child-like people. Although imprisoned within the racialist notions of the early twentieth century, he nevertheless set the parameters of subsequent scholarship. A changing social climate led to a reconsideration of the picture sketched by Phillips. One consequence of the Second World War was a post-war discrediting of racism and a rejection of the assumption that black people enslaved on American plantations were innately inferior. Operating within Phillips’ framework but rejecting his racial assumptions, Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956) viewed slavery as a repressive institution that required extreme physical coercion to oblige other humans to unrequited toil. Black people were no less intelligent or capable than white people, inclined towards rebelliousness in situations of apparent injustice, and requiring superior force to compel their submission. Where Phillips found paternal compassion, Stampp uncovered brutal exploitation. Slavery was an economic system and existed because people made money from it but it was not the most efficacious way to manage labor and the South suffered because of it. Economic historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, sharing Stampp’s social attitudes, disagreed with his economic argument. In Time On The Cross (1974), they took issue with the notion that slavery was uneconomic and slave laborers inefficient. Comparing output per worker they found the slaves’ exceeded that of northern free laborers and that slavery was a spur to southern agriculture and a rational choice for southern planters. Indeed, they argued that slavery surpassed in efficiency by a considerable margin the northern practice of family farming. They credited the enslaved for much of this success. Rather than incompetent dolts (an assessment they considered racist even among those who rejected racialist assumptions), they saw workers who absorbed the Protestant ethic and responded to incentives rather than punishments to impel an expanding southern economy. They adduced an econometric model they viewed as “scientific” and as providing the basis for a more objective account than previous studies of slave labor. But their findings, highly publicized, were also highly controversial and perhaps were most effectively refuted in an essay by Herbert Gutman and Richard Sutch in “Sambo Makes Good, or Were Slaves Imbued with the Protestant Work Ethic” (in Paul A. David et al., Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery [1976]). Gutman and Sutch charged that Fogel and Engerman paid more attention to their model than to the evidence and that much of their data were unrepresentative. They particularly ridiculed the diminished role of compulsion in Fogel and Engerman’s model because, among other reasons, it seemed to suggest that slaves embraced their condition: that slavery was a career choice rather than forced labor. The issue of accommodation and the nature of the relationship between master and slave was a big part of Eugene Genovese’s work. In Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972) he used a paternalist model, which he was careful to assert did not mean gentle or genial, to show an organic relationship as existing between the planters and their laborers. Within this framework he was able to write with particular sensitivity about the complex mixture of discord and affection that governed work in the Big House and the constant tension surrounding drivers and other bondsmen in authority, caught as they were between the apparent source of their power and a freighted responsibility to their community. But the most original advance in looking at slave labor was made by Peter Wood’s Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974) because it shifted focus to the colonial period and to the lower South, which had largely been neglected and where slaves had a much stronger influence than historians had previously considered. Not only did his work expand the range of activities that engaged the enslaved, but he regarded their African background as contributing to their talents and usefulness. His work set the stage for an entirely new look at slave labor and has, in one way or another, influenced much of what has come since. To sample more recent studies that consider slave labor and its economic and social consequences look at Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,” American Historical Review 85 (1980), and S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (2006).
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