The Plantation Regime
Since the late eighteenth century, Americans both North and South accepted that slave labor was less efficient than free labor. Even the slave owners agreed that a slave lacked the incentives to diligent labor that motivated the free worker. Slaves could not be promoted for hard work or fired for poor work. They did not get raises. Harder work did not bring more food, better clothing, a finer home. The slaves could not accumulate savings hoping to buy farms of their own; they could not work with the aim of winning their ultimate freedom; nor could they work to insure that their children's lives would be easier than theirs. Lacking the normal incentives of free labor, the slaves were universally dismissed as lackluster and inefficient workers.
And yet the slave economy grew at impressive, even spectacular rates in the nineteenth century. The returns on investment in slave plantations were comparable to the returns on businesses in the North. Despite the ups and downs of the market for slave-produced commodities, slavery was by and large a profitable system in the Old South. This was no accident. The slaveholders organized their farms and plantations to be as productive as possible. They constructed a managerial hierarchy to oversee the daily labor of the slaves. They employed the latest techniques in crop rotation and manuring. They planted corn and raised livestock that complemented the cash crops, thus keeping the slaves both busy and adequately nourished.
Any free farmer could have done as much, but the slaveholders had advantages that counteracted the weaknesses of their labor system. They put otherwise "unproductive" slaves to work. Slave children went to work at an earlier age than free children, for example. And elderly slaves too old for fieldwork were put in charge of minding very small children and preparing the meals for all the slaves. These and other economies of scale turned a labor system that was in theory unproductive and inefficient into what was, in practice, one of the great economic successes of the nineteenth century.
On a well managed plantation the slaves were kept busy year round, fixing tools and repairing buildings during the winter season, tending to the corn when the cotton was taken care of, slaughtering the hogs after the last of the cotton was ginned. Since most slaves lived on units with twenty or more slaves, most were introduced to some form of systematic management. Slave "drivers" acted as foremen to oversee the gangs in the fields. On larger plantations overseers were hired to manage day to day operations. The larger the plantation the more common it was for particular slaves to specialize in various forms of skilled labor. The "well managed plantation," the slaveholders agreed, took into consideration not simply the amount of cotton produced, but the overall productivity of the farm's operations.
Yet the fact remained that the slaves lacked the incentive to care very much or work very hard to maximize the master's profits. As a result, much of the management of slaves was aimed at forcing them to do what they did not really care about. This was the underlying tension of the master-slave relationship. It was the reason almost all masters resorted to physical punishment. In the final analysis, the efficiency of southern slavery, and the resentment of the slaves, was driven by the whip.
