Slavery's Capitalism

A New History of American Economic Development

Sven Beckert, Seth Rockman, Sven Beckert, Seth Rockman

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780812293098
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism—renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man—has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence.Drawing on the expertise of sixteen scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery's Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom. Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, Craig Steven Wilder.

PART I

Plantation Technologies

CHAPTER 1

Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor

Hands, Whipping-Machines, and Modern Power

EDWARD E. BAPTIST

Charles Ball had been a family man, a skilled worker. From his cabin on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he had seen a brighter future. True, he was enslaved, like his wife and children. Yet in 1805, men with his intelligence and drive were finding ways to buy their freedom from enslavers in Maryland’s tobacco districts. But on this morning, when a blaring horn jerked him out of sleep before dawn, he sat up in a loft bed at the top of a cabin 500 miles to the southwest, and he was no longer who he had been. In fact, he was not even—by some reckonings—a whole body any more.

A few weeks earlier, Ball had been bought by a slave trader who purchased men, women, and children in the Upper South, so that he could march them south and west and sell them to the cotton planters who were pushing the frontier of that commodity south and west into the Carolina and Georgia backcountry. Ball had carried iron chains on his wrists and neck for 500 miles to a new owner’s slave labor camp on the Congaree River in South Carolina.¹ Now more than ever the appendage to another man’s dreams, Ball looked down from his loft bed, remade at modernity’s dawn not into an insect like Gregor Samsa but into something just as strange as a fly on a Prague ceiling. He was a hand.

Though historians have written tens of thousands of pages on the enslavement of people like Charles Ball, relatively few of those pages have considered the specific labor he was about to do in Wade Hampton’s cotton fields. That is odd, for within a few short years from 1805, cotton made by enslaved African Americans not only accounted for the majority of U.S. exports, but also helped to generate a transformation unprecedented in human history. In the years between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, Western societies achieved rates of sustained economic growth and transformation that had never been seen before. These gave the West extraordinary power over other societies and their peoples. Industrial transformation, virtually all accounts agree, emerged in northwestern Europe. More specifically, almost all agree that it proceeded from England, and most concede that it proceeded specifically from northwest England’s cotton textile industry, from the late eighteenth century on. All human societies today ride on a trajectory of growth and innovation, of creation and destruction, launched from Manchester.²

Since this initial acceleration out of the Malthusian world’s gravity well shapes us all, a little more every day, I will use the first person plural in the next paragraph or two. We historians have been trying to explain the causes of this transformation ever since. In many ways, explaining it has been (along with hymning the nation) our main alibi for existence. And we’ve collectively offered a great many explanations for this set of changes. We’ve said that industrialization was written in the book of fate long before, because of a specific market orientation encoded in the genes of Western culture. We’ve argued that an existing technological lead was transformed by a burst of innovation in machine and other technologies in eighteenth-century Britain. We’ve argued that legal and other fundamental rules were changed to open up the British market for land and labor, making wage-labor manufacturing employment and a true credit market possible. We’ve read that the Puritan sensibility pushed Western capitalists to accumulate well beyond their needs, rather than wasting their profits in display. We’ve even heard, though this idea has often been flatly dismissed by those who see capitalism as a purely Western creation, that “primitive accumulation” in the course of early imperial conquest, the Atlantic slave trade, and the sugar plantations of the British and French West Indies provided the basis for the Industrial Revolution.

For all that arguing, we historians have spent relatively few pages on the connection between the South’s cotton fields and the cotton textile industry, an oversight especially noteworthy in light of how direct that connection was. And we certainly haven’t argued that all that came from modernization and modernity was impossible without the cotton-field work of “hands,” to use the body part by which enslavers described whole people like Charles Ball. Above all, we haven’t argued that the character of that labor was quintessentially modern, and particularly important for creating the modern world economy.³ Indeed, we have done the opposite. True, the history of cotton slavery is usually told as that of a pivot on a machine, the cotton gin, for which Eli Whitney claimed credit. Every high school history student hears that the gin broke the processing bottleneck. But there the story is dropped. After all, the remainder of the labor that began with clearing a densely forested South Carolina or Alabama acre and ended at the steamboat landing with the delivery of a cotton bale—400-odd pounds of clean fiber ready for the spinning machines on the far side of the Atlantic—was hand labor. Enslaved African Americans did it, and they did it unaided by machine.

Yet the invention of the cotton gin still left two significant choke points in the production of raw cotton. This meant, therefore, two bottlenecks for the nascent textile industry as well, and here they were: growing the plants and harvesting their fiber. Over a relatively short period of time, enslavers in the United States managed to break them. Within two decades of Charles Ball’s first morning in the cotton fields, American planter-entrepreneurs would deliver for sale enough cotton to dominate the world market in this, the Industrial Revolution’s most essential commodity. To do so they began by using political, military, and financial power to get more cotton land and labor: taking land from the Indians, developing a set of new slave trades to transport captives to the frontiers. After that, they forced transported captives to work, and to work in new ways. So when the overseer’s horn blew a second time, propelling Charles Ball out into the predawn humidity of a July morning, he was about to learn what we historians have not known: how enslavers were going to break that remaining bottleneck.⁴

Ball’s bare feet hit the dirt floor. He stumbled out of his hut and soon was marching behind the overseer, along with 170 other workers, into the fields.⁵ When they came to the vast field in which they were to labor that day, cultivating the soil around the waist-high cotton plants to drive back the competing growth of weeds that migrated southwest with the monocrop system, the overseer portioned the laborers in dozens, each under a “captain.” And so Charles began to learn about a dynamic system of labor extraction designed by white people whom the enslaved identified as “pushing men.”⁶

Pushing men like Ball’s owner, whose right hand wrote out the instructions for the equally pushing overseer, deployed several innovative techniques of labor control to fill new fields with ever-greater quantities of cotton. One such technique was that of forcing fast workers like Ball’s captain, a man named Simon, to “carry the fore row”—to work at top speed, and thus set a pace that the others had to match. “By this means,” Ball decided, “the overseer had nothing to do but to keep Simon hard at work, and he was certain that all the others must work equally hard.”⁷ If not, their slowness would be visible as a break in the line of workers. In the vast fields in which cotton was being grown, such a technique allowed an overseer to surveil scores of workers simultaneously, alerting him to anyone who lagged behind the leaders, whom he was consciously pushing at higher and higher speed. Enslavers also eliminated customary breaks and meals, forcing slaves to eat huge breakfasts, passing out cold meals in the fields, and detailing one older slave to make suppers so that field workers could toil until full dark.⁸

This “system,” implemented by pushing men, was new for those who had learned to labor in the “task” system of the rice swamps or cotton fields of the Carolina Lowcountry where enslaved people had to furnish a fixed quantity of labor, set by custom, after which they might have some free time. (In the Lowcountry, enslaved workers cultivated and harvested a specialized variant of cotton on the task system, Sea Island cotton, which generally grew only in coastal regions.) These developments were also new for those who, like Ball, had grown up in the gang labor system of Chesapeake tobacco and wheat fields. In Virginia, Maryland, and much of North Carolina—as well as Kentucky, settled by enslavers and enslaved from the Chesapeake—enslaved people usually toiled in small groups that worked at somewhat individualized paces, often supervised by enslaved “drivers” out of whites’ vision.⁹

“A good part of our rows are five hundred and fifty yards long,” wrote one Tennessee cotton planter in the 1820s. Not only had he created a kind of space where he could easily identify stragglers, he could also use it as a stage on which to inflict immediate and exemplary punishment in front of a large audience. In Mississippi, Allen Sidney saw a man who had fallen behind the fore row fight back against a black driver who tried to “whip him up” to pace. The white overseer spurred up, pulled out his pistol, and shot the prone man dead. “None of the other slaves,” Sidney claimed, “said a word or turned their heads. They kept on hoeing as if nothing had happened.”¹⁰ Enslaved migrants in new cotton fields quickly discovered that they had to adapt to what pushing men demanded, or face ruthless violence. And like many other forced migrants, Charles Ball insisted that the violence used on slavery’s commodity frontier was of a greater order of magnitude. Even the whip was different. Here it was a lead-loaded handle from which snaked a ten-foot lash of heavy plaited cowskin, whose tip ripped open the air with a sonic boom. Many other migrants, including some white ones, reported Ball’s feeling of shocked discovery at their first witness of the new lash in use. The shock of the whip made bales of cotton, to borrow words from a Mississippi overseer.¹¹

Enslavers used whatever violence was necessary to make forced migrants accept the elimination of both the Lowcountry task system and other customs of slavery developed in the early modern southeast. Part of this violence was the forcible disruption of people’s lives by forced migration and separation from community and family. Like Ball, other survivors in their accounts repeatedly tell us that in their minds and memories they constructed the passage into the southwest of the expanding United States as a moment of transformation of the self, though not self-transformation. The experience of that forced migration was a huge one, in time or space or on any other scale. Over seventy years, from the signing of the Constitution, in 1787, to the start of the Civil War, enslavers turned a vast area of 800,000 square miles, as big as Saudi Arabia and inhabited almost exclusively by about 50,000 Native Americans, into a subcontinent of slavery. Enslavers and their allies dispossessed two European empires, two postcolonial states, and six Native American nations. They moved one million forced migrants to the new territory. Within a single lifetime the entrepreneurs who masterminded this process had created a complex that produced 80 percent of the cotton sold in Britain, the world’s central market. Cotton made by people enslaved on the United States’ southwestern frontier was both the world’s most widely traded commodity and its most crucial industrial raw material.¹²

Indeed, each year the cotton country cycled through its channels and pipes a good part of the English-speaking world’s most high-velocity money, the commercial credit backed by quasi-national banks in Britain and the United States and deployed by the world’s most innovative merchant firms. And why not? The cotton region was a massive sink of collateral in the form of commodified human beings who generated massive revenues. Creditors around the Western world liked to lend money with slaves as collateral. An active domestic slave trade meant that in normal times, one could always recoup one’s losses on a mortgage that went bad by foreclosing and selling the man, woman, or child treated as property.

Enslaved people could be sold so readily that in almost any year they constituted in their bodies almost one-fifth of all national accounting wealth, and a far higher proportion of its liquid wealth. In enslaved people, the world’s money worked, usually generating high returns at low risks. Of course, the essential interweaving of enslaved people and their labor product into the financial patterns of the United States and of the Atlantic nations in general meant that any credit crisis for southern cotton planters would automatically lead to a worldwide credit crunch. Dynamic, creative-destructive cycles of boom and bust followed the succession of international financial relationships linking the cotton frontier to world markets for cotton, credit, textiles, and textile labor. Still, by 1860, five of the six states in the Union with the highest average white income were in the belt that cotton entrepreneurs wrapped across the South. The region would have been among the world’s ten largest economies, and by one accounting its fourth most prosperous one. The three million white people in the cotton states were per capita the richest people in the United States, and probably the richest group of people of that size in the world.¹³

That was the macroscale. But Charles Ball lived his life at the microlevel. In this experience—which would be repeated a million times over—the unwilling migrant would inevitably be forced down a thermocline of brutal learning. In their narratives, formerly enslaved people repeatedly allegorized this process in this fashion: it happened on the first day in the new fields. Or they realized the nature of the new labor the first moment they stepped across the first cotton row. Such a pattern, imposed on experience, can surely play a major role in any construction-of-self analysis if cultural historians and others who analyze the texts of ex-slaves focus closely on the gigantic forced migration that made the South. The scale and significance of this process are force multipliers for the weight of any analysis that can explain it.

Understanding how enslaved people constructed and reconstructed their own analyses of their internal worlds, under conditions of extreme stress, is an important task....