Capitalism and Slavery

I wanted to get into the vibrant conversation that AGR and Brian are having over Brian's provocatively titled post, "many slaves were paid overtime."  I must say that I find it somewhat odd to think about being paid "overtime" when you're not paid for regular time.   And I think that focusing on the fact that some enslaved people received "extra" wages for skilled work or for work beyond what was "required," may run the risk of distracting us from the brutality that lay at the heart -- and very near the surface -- of American slavery.  There may not have been a whole lot of overtime work, since much research suggests that slaves were worked to the limits of their endurance.  Those who talk about slavery should not lose sight of the fact that slaves worked for free  and -- as AGR has eloquently shown -- the vast majority (approaching 100%, I suppose) were subjected to all sorts of other horrific crimes.

Without getting involved in the important question of how often this practice took place, a question of social and labor history that is outside of my area of expertise -- I have a few points on the "payment" for extra work.  First off, this appears in the fictional literature about slavery.  For instance, doesn't George Harris make money he hopes to use to purchase his freedom and that of Eliza and little Harry in Uncle Tom's Cabin?  That's my recollection; it's been too long since I read Uncle Tom's Cabin.  Second, as I talked about in a paper a few years back on North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin, there was some recognition by the legal system that slaves should be allowed to keep the (very modest) sums they earned by doing "extra" work.   In the 1845 case Waddill v. Martin, 38 N.C. (3 Ired. Eq.) 562 (1845), Ruffin excluded slaves' property from a claim against an estate.  The executor in Waddill had not collected the slaves' property and a co-executor charged that he should have.  Ruffin thought the executor's exclusion of slaves' property appropriate, for several reasons. First, no one had previously collected “the little crops of cotton, corn, potatoes, ground peas and the like, made by slaves by permission of their deceased owners.” Second, it was desirable to allow the slaves to keep such little property.

[A]n executor is not bound to strip a poor negro of the things his master gave him, nor to take away his petty profits from a patch, with the proceeds of which the slave, with the ordinary precaution of a prudent and humane master, may be induced, and in a measure compelled, to buy those needful comforts of food and raiment, over and above the allowances of the owner, which promote his health, cheerfulness and contentment, and enhance his value. . . . [T]hese slight indulgencies are repaid by the attachment of the slave to the master and his family, by exerting his industry and honesty, and a spirit to make and save for the master as well as for himself.

(I'm now noticing Ruffin's language about the "prudent" master and need to go back and see how much this may be related to the prudent person standard in trust law.  I'm also now seeing the "compelled" aspect, which suggests that the payment for extra work wasn't so much payment for extra work.  It was, more likely, essentially required work that was done to supplement otherwise food/clothing that had been "provided" the enslaved worker.)  And let's not get carried away here in thinking this is about protecting slaves -- I think one implication here is that the slaves' "property" doesn't need to be collected as part of the estate, but it could be.  I'll spare everyone my lecture on how the probate system frequently destroyed enslaved families.  Third, turning now to the advice given to slaveowners on how to behave as "Christian" owners, one allusion to this appears here, where the author talks of slaves being "coaxed or bribed."  But also of much interest to me is is concern in this essay about just how much enslaved people were worked constantly.

 Fourth --  and this is where I am maybe coming at the AGR-Sawyers discussion obliquely -- I think such practices show the penetration of a capitalist mindset among slave-owners.  The incentive of the market was used to get enslaved people to do more work than they might otherwise do, or maybe to do it more effectively.  The plantation became a marketplace.  By way of background, many proslavery southerners attempted to justify slavery as something that was a solution to the problems of the market -- as something that protected enslaved people from the harsh treatment that free workers suffered in the industrial cities of the North and Europe.  (Hence the illustration for this post, the frontispiece of a book on the harsh life of free workers, which one of my key subjects, Thomas R.R. Cobb, referred to in his An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery.)  That of course was pure hockum, but that was their argument.  Much to say about this if anyone's interested in this.  It's been a debate that has engaged that slavery literature for several decades now.  I think the idea of "paying" slaves for more work was yet another way that the slavery and the market were connected.  There are a lot of other, more important ways that slavery and capitalism were connected, but I think this is yet another example of those connections.  (I have a lot more to say about the relationship between capitalism and slavery; I wrote some about this about a year ago.)

Comments

[AGR]

Thanks for joining in. I really am sorry if I sounded hostile, because that was not my intent. I know that some enslaved people got paid. TJ paid members of the Hemings family. His nail "factory", an experiment in the kind of capitalist enterprise of which you speak, "paid" the young boys who worked there in goods rather than money. But he paid the foreman George Granger, Jr., in money. He paid George's father, who was the overseer at Monticello, in money as well. There were other people, too. And the enslaved people at Monticello sold produce to TJ to stock his kitchen.

There are all kinds of things-you-might-not have- thought-existed-in-slavery- but-did out there. I just thought it overreaching to suggest that being paid "overtime" was part of the life of many enslaved people.

[Alfred Brophy]

You didn't sound hostile in the least, AGR. Brian wasn't suggesting this, obviously, but I think it's easy to slide from the sense that enslaved people were paid to a sense that slavery wasn't all that bad. "Look, they were paid! Some of their work was voluntary!" The issue of how voluntary this was is really open to question. What I'm now very interested in -- thanks to you and Brian -- is that this seems to have been a strategy to extract yet more labor from enslaved people. See the Ruffin quote above, which contains more insight than I'd realized about the coercion that might lie behind the "pay."

Looking around my office this afternoon for books that might shed some more light on this, I see that Fogel and Engerman discuss this some in Time on the Cross, volume 1 (especially at 40-41). How we interpret "pay" is difficult; did this allow the enslaved more autonomy/freedom/power than we'd previously thought? In some settings -- particularly where we're dealing with skilled workers, like those at Buffalo Forge that Charles Dew writes about -- perhaps so. In other settings -- like those that AGR writes about at Monticello, which is probably closer to the majority of situations enslaved people were in -- it appears as a way of harnessing the market to get more labor from enslaved people and not returning all that much to them in terms of power or improvement in material lives.

Thanks, as always, for commenting.

[INDONESIA MARBLE CRAFT]

I hate Capitalisme and Never like A Slavery in the World,We All Borned as A free Humans being.

[Brian Sawers]

Assigning garden plots shifted part of the cost of feeding slaves from owners to the slaves themselves. While growing a surplus might have been voluntary, working garden plots to feed your family wasn't voluntary. The owner's rations of cornmeal and pork (sometimes molasses, rice, or yams) did not provide enough nutrition. Acknowledging that rations were inadequate, Louisiana in 1795 required owners to provide slaves without garden plots with clothing and more food.

Even if working garden plots wasn't voluntary, the work wasn't supervised and provided a modicum of autonomy, especially to slaves who sold the surplus. Reasonable people can differ, but I think freedom/power grossly overstates the economic and daily autonomy that garden plots (or overtime) provided.

Vernon Palmer in Customs of Slavery reports the practice was widespread elsewhere in the Americas. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, the 1685 Code Noir banned the practice because it reduced sugar output. Palmer reports the ban was impossible to enforce. According to Eleanor Brown (GW), London actually required planters to set aside land for garden plots. Reducing food imports would reduce the military vulnerability of the British West Indies

Fogel & Engerman's methodology and econometrics have received a lot of criticism, but I don't know if those criticisms extend to their estimate (p. 40) that a quarter of slaves were at least semi-skilled workers.