A Disease in the Public Mind (33 page)

Skilled slaves were equally common on the plantations. About 25 percent of the bondsmen had jobs that required expertise. They ranged from overseers to artisans to teamsters and gardeners. The idea that all slaves were menial workers is false. Even some women slaves held jobs as seamstresses and nurses for the master's children.
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The South's 260,000 free blacks had an even more impressive net worth. They owned property worth $25,000,000. About one in every hundred owned slaves. Even more surprising to modern readers is the number of slaves who worked in factories, displaying a gamut of industrial skills. The papers of David Ross, who operated the Oxford Ironworks in Campbell County, Virginia, one of the largest factories in the nation, reveal that the business was staffed and run entirely by slaves. A black man named Abram was responsible for the highly technical and demanding day-to-day management of the blast furnace. The furnace keepers, Abram's chief assistants, had to know precisely how much charcoal and limestone to put into the furnace
when it was in blast. All the other skilled workers—blacksmiths, potters, hammer men, miners—were slaves.

David Ross was proud of the many workers who had mastered more than one skill. His blacksmiths could double as potters and were adept at repairing or rebuilding the machinery of the forges, furnaces, or mills. Of manager Abram, Ross wrote that he “supports an unblemished character, for his integrity, good understanding, and talents.” Like Josiah Henson, Abram had revealed these gifts virtually from his infancy, and still retained them in spite of his “gray hairs.”

Once a white overseer of a nearby Ross farm complained that the owner had compared him unfavorably to Abram. Ross replied the man must be mistaken. “It is hard to compare a farmer with an ironmaster.” If Abram were a free man, Ross said, he would earn twice as much as the overseer, whether he was working in the North, South, or West.
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As the profitability of cotton culture grew in the 1850s, money became an ingredient in raising productivity on many plantations. Owners frequently paid between $40 and $110 a year to experienced slaves for doing a good job. Slaves were also permitted to grow fruit and vegetables in their gardens, and sell the produce. One industrious field hand made $309 in a single year selling peaches and apples on the side. In modern money that sum would be about $5,000.

In tobacco farming, where a high degree of skill was necessary, planters frequently paid slaves as much as $300 a year to guarantee a good performance. Rice cultivation required equal amounts of savvy. The plantations were divided into dozens of small watery plots surrounded by dikes. One traveler visited a rice farmer in Georgia and found a slave engineer who received “considerably higher wages” (in the form of presents) than the white overseer for his skill in building and maintaining the dikes.
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On cotton plantations, the “gang” system required another group of leaders, who functioned as assistant overseers, somewhat like foremen in a
factory or sergeants in an army. Before his gang went to work, the leader had to measure out their tasks for the day—no small job in fields that were often shaped irregularly. With a boy helper and the aid of a five-foot measuring rod, the leader would set stakes that usually covered about forty acres. Once his gang went to work, he watched them closely to make sure they were not “overstrained.” If he saw they were seriously tiring, he had the authority to call a halt to the day's work. The next day he would order part of his gang to finish the previous day's assignment, while the rest moved on to another section of the field.
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Some planters, to increase productivity, entered into profit-sharing arrangements with their slaves. One Alabama owner permitted his bondsmen to keep two thirds of the profits of the plantation, setting aside a third for his private use. From the slaves' share came the cost of clothing and food for him and his family, the taxes for the farm, and medical bills. “What clear money you make shall be divided equally amongst you in a fair proportion agreeable to the services rendered by each hand,” the contract stated. “Those that earn most shall have most.”
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These startling facts have come to light in the last three or four decades, thanks to in-depth research by a new generation of historians, who are trying to get beyond the myths perpetrated by abolitionist critics and southern defenders of slavery.

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Perhaps the most startling fact these statistic-minded scholars have uncovered is the South's breathtaking wealth. In the 1850s, the fifteen slave states were by far the most prosperous section of the nation. Southern farms, many of them slave-managed, were between 35 and 50 percent more profitable than comparable farms in the free North and Midwest. In 1860, the South, if considered as a separate country, would have ranked as the fourth-richest nation in the world. Southern whites had a higher per capita income than citizens of France, Germany, or Denmark.

Instead of the pleasure-wallowing wastrels portrayed by the abolitionists in their assaults on The Slave Power, most southern planters were
hardworking businessmen who studied the latest techniques in scientific farming and did their best to keep their slaves contented in spite of the restrictions and confinements of the system.

A man who owned fifty slaves and managed them well with the help of a good overseer could clear $7,500 a year—the equivalent of $250,000 today. This was sixty times the average white American's per capita income, North or South, in the 1850s. The black slave overseer might get a bonus of $50 or $60 and a new suit at the end of the year, but he continued to live in a humble cabin in the slave quarters, starkly different from the master's “Big House.”
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Inevitably, this inequality bred resentment in black Americans. They were being cheated out of a fair share of the profits. Historians estimate the average field worker was underpaid by three or four thousand modern dollars annually. Overall, the South's slaves would have earned $84 million each year, if they had been given a fair share of the profits they were making for the owners.
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Perhaps most remarkable is how much the South's four million slaves were worth as property: $3 billion. That sum exceeded the North's investment in railroads and factories. This figure does not include the value of the land that the South's farmers owned, worth at least another $3 billion. If we study the income of those men who owned twenty slaves or more and qualified as “planters”—some 46,274 individuals—the picture is even more astonishing. These men owned half of all the slaves, which means their net worth was at least $1.5 billion. Put another way, a mere 0.58 of the South's population composed 70 percent of the richest people in the United States in 1860.

On a per capita basis, the four wealthiest states in the Union were South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia. In the top twelve were only two northern states, Connecticut and Rhode Island. These newly discovered facts demolish the standard abolitionist assumption that the North was the dynamic section of the country and the slave-encumbered South was mired in backwardness and poverty.
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In the past, black men and women have been given very little credit for the South's remarkable wealth. It is time to revise that mindset. The slaves
participated in the system, not as mere automatons, but as achievers, frequently mastering the technology of the South's agriculture as well as the psychology of leadership. A substantial number of black men and women did not succumb to the worst tendencies of the system. Their industrious lives within the unjust institution of slavery were frequently a triumph of the human spirit over adversity that should no longer be overlooked.

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Among the many ironies of this new information about the South's wealth is the almost total ignorance about it that prevailed in both sections in the 1850s. The classic example is an 1857 book by a North Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper,
The Impending Crisis in the South.
Helper claimed to draw on statistics from the 1850 census to prove that the South was far poorer and less economically developed than the North. Helper said he spoke for “the Plain Folk of the Old South” who were in the grip of the wealthy minority of slave owners. The
New York Tribune
, eager to prove that slavery was an economic as well as a moral plague, gave it an eight-column review, making the author famous.
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The new facts about the economic success of southern slavery lead to an interesting and possibly significant conclusion: slavery was evolving. Overall it remained a deplorable institution. But American freedom, sometimes disguised as business enterprise, was constantly seeping into the system. Would it have continued to move toward more and more freedom? Many planters did not like slavery but were baffled by the problem of how to eliminate it. Haunted by the specters of Haiti and Nat Turner, they did not think the black and white races could live in peace if both were free. This was a view that was shared by almost everyone in the North as well as the South. In most northern states, blacks could not vote, serve on juries, or obtain decent jobs. They lived a segregated way of life in housing, schools, and even churches.

It seems inevitable that, sooner rather than later, southern masters would have had to confront American slavery's greatest failure: its lack of freedom, not only for gifted leaders like Josiah Henson and skilled artisans and factory managers like David Ross's Abram, but for the children and grandchildren of these men. Slaves with above-average intelligence and abilities would find it harder and harder to tolerate a system that did not reward them adequately and that condemned their descendants to the caprices of being sold to settle a dead master's estate or of paying the debts of a dissolute living owner. More and more individuals like the Louisiana planter who mourned the death of his black overseer might have become ready to risk emancipation rather than to live with such gross injustice on a day-to-day basis.

Alas, the momentum of the multiple diseases of the public mind, North and South, would prove too strong for this fragile hope to acquire substance. The myths of The Slave Power and genetic black inferiority twisted in this deadly wind while the South's unspoken fear of a race war was visible night after night in the slave patrols that continued to ride the shrouded southern roads. As the 1850s lurched toward a close, a perfect storm of deadly emotions was poised to engulf the United States of America.

What the nation desperately needed was a leader who would confront these aberrations with a voice of sanity and moderation. This savior was on the scene, but before he could speak with the needed political power, John Brown and his wealthy secret backers triggered an explosion of hatred and fear that shattered all hope of a peaceful solution.

CHAPTER 19

Free Soil for Free (White) Men

“I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not now introduce it. . . . I surely will not blame them [Southerners] for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given to me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [slavery]. . . . When they [Southerners] remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly, and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives which should not, in their stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery. . . . But all this, to my judgment furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our . . . free territory than it would for reviving the African slave trade by law.”
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Abraham Lincoln spoke these enormously important words in Peoria, Illinois, not long after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They simultaneously declared his disagreement with the abolitionists' gospel of hate and vituperation and his commitment to preventing slavery from becoming
legal in any new states formed from the western territories. This stance seemed to him a political compromise that would preserve the Union and put slavery on the path to eventual elimination. From a distance of 150 years, we can see its seeming reasonableness—and its potentially fatal flaw. The refusal to permit Southerners to take slaves into the territories not only insulted and infuriated them, it also meant that they were left to confront the growing density of their slave population, which was rapidly approaching four million—almost 40 percent of the whites' numbers.

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The quarrel over the extension of slavery had moved the issue to the center of the political debate in a new and dangerous way. The Whig Party collapsed as it became apparent that there was no longer any agreement between northern and southern members. Another political party, the Know-Nothings, had a brief ascent. As their name suggests, they operated as a semisecret society. When asked about the party's inner workings, a member was supposed to respond, “I know nothing.”

The Know-Nothings were devoted to arousing the nation to the supposed menace of the recent flood of mostly Catholic German and Irish immigrants. For a few years they seized a large share of the northern public mind, electing governors and congressmen. But the Know-Nothings crumbled when it became apparent that they could not agree on slavery, no matter how much they all hated the “Popish” newcomers.