The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (26 page)

TABLE 4.1. COTTON PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES

Source:
Stuart Bruchey,
Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1790–1860: Sources and Readings
(New York, 1967).

BEFORE SUNRISE
,
A LOUD
, braying noise shattered Ball’s sleep. When the overseer’s horn blew for the second time, his bare feet hit the dirt floor. He stumbled out of the hut to which he had been assigned, rubbed his eyes, and looked around to see something new. Around him,
shaping up like day laborers, was the army he’d seen the previous evening. In Maryland and Virginia, labor crews usually numbered only a dozen or so. These people also looked different. Even after a month-long march south, “it could be seen that my shirt and trowsers had once been distinct and separate garments. Not one of the others had on even the remains of two articles of clothing.” Many of the
men wore only long, tattered shirts. Many women only had skirts. Some teenage boys and girls were completely naked. And the state of the bodies thus exposed worried Ball even more. Their skin was reddish and ashy, their hair matted and stringy. Bones stood out. Skin hung slack where muscle had atrophied.
⁶

As Ball took in his new peers, the overseer stepped into their midst. Here was a tightly
contained white man, of a type much like M’Giffin the Georgia-man. He turned, beckoned silently, and the crowd followed. “A wretched-looking troop we were,” Ball said years later, picturing the moment, still watching them (and himself) marching toward the fields of green, waist-high plants that soon loomed up in the gloaming. They trudged past uncounted rows, through a mile of clods drying from the
hoe. Beyond a grove of trees, the rising sun showed that a vast field opened beyond. On its edge the overseer stopped them. He announced eleven men as “captains” for the day, and from his slate named fifteen laborers to follow each. Ball was to go with Simon. Marching his troop to a section of planted furrows, Simon posted his soldiers: one adult or two children to the head of each row.

Every
forced migrant whose story has survived tells us that when they crossed the threshold of the fields of a new slave labor camp, they entered a world that was fundamentally different from the one in which they had toiled before. As Ball lined up by the first waist-high cotton plant of his row, he was about to learn a new way of working, one meant to occupy most of the waking moments remaining to him
on earth. He saw Simon take a row, lift his hoe, and begin to work rapidly down the side of his furrow. Everyone else began to do the same, in a great hurry. Ball could see that each of them had to chop all the weeds in their row without damaging the cotton plants. But then the man in the next row warned him that no one was allowed to fall behind the captain. Ball realized that thus “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.” And the overseer was already stalking across the rows, whip in hand. Ball put his head down and kept his hoe moving, trying to keep up with Simon’s furious pace.
⁷

By the time he reached the end of the first row, Charles Ball had been exposed to crucial differences between the forms
of enslaved labor demanded in Maryland and the new ones on the cotton frontier. Survivors identified these differences not as idiosyncrasies, but as a new system of enslaved labor. Most forced migrants had been brought up working according to the rules of one of two southeastern regimes. In some regions, a “task” system had prevailed, as in the South Carolina and Georgia “low country.” In those
rice swamps, each day enslavers assigned each worker a specific job. Custom fixed the volume of each daily piece of labor, so that a man knew that on a day when he had to chop weeds, his “task” was to cultivate an acre of rice and no more. As historians have pointed out, a long history of “negotiations” between masters’ power and the cunning of the enslaved had created the task system. It
contained
benefits for both left hand and right. Those who finished early could tend their own gardens, help others to work, or simply relax for an hour or two. Without direct supervision, forced labor was usually inefficient, but tasking relieved enslavers of this dilemma by offering diligent slaves an incentive: free time. No wonder owners who tried to increase customary tasking levels and limit free
time faced direct or covert resistance.
⁸

Yet most enslaved migrants marched to places like Congaree did not come from the low country. They came from the greater Chesapeake of Virginia, Maryland, and their North Carolina and Kentucky offshoots. A watercolor sketch made in 1798 by Benjamin Latrobe, designer of the US Capitol, shows the prevalent form of labor on Chesapeake tobacco farms. A white
overseer stands on a stump, a pipe in his mouth and his whip under his arm, supervising a “gang” of enslaved women as they cultivate tobacco plants. This gang system relied on direct surveillance of labor, but by whom? Tobacco planters often grew their crop on many small and widely scattered plots of land. They had to coordinate complex operations carried out by small groups. Most had no choice
but to delegate surveillance to black drivers who led labor crews outside of direct white observation. And while enslavers in the Chesapeake pushed slaves to carry out their field work quickly, drivers had their own incentives. Workers moved across Chesapeake fields in ragged disorder set by divergent individual paces, not ranks formed up in lockstep like the ones that marched that July morning at
Congaree.
⁹

The best-known innovation in the history of cotton production, as every high-school history student knows, is the cotton gin. It allowed enslavers to clean as much cotton for market as they could grow and harvest. As far as most historians have been concerned, the gin is where the study of innovation in the production of cotton ends—at least until the invention of the mechanical cotton
picker in the 1930s, which ended the sharecropping regime. But here is the question historians should have asked: Once enslavers had the cotton gin, how then did enslavers produce (or
have
produced, by other hands) as much as the gin could clean? For once the gin shattered the processing bottleneck, other limits on production and expansion were cast into new relief. For instance, one constraint
was the amount of cheap, fertile land. Another was the lack of labor on the frontier. So enslaver-generals took land from Indians, enslaver-politicians convinced Congress to let slavery expand, and enslaver-entrepreneurs created new ways to finance and transport and commodify “hands.” And, given a finite number of captives in their own control, entrepreneurs created a complex of labor control practices
that enslaved people called “the pushing system.” This system increased the number of acres each
captive was supposed to cultivate. As of 1805, enslavers like Hampton figured that each “hand” could tend and keep free of weeds five acres of cotton per year. Half a century later, that rule of thumb had increased to ten acres “to the hand.” In the first minute of labor Charles Ball had encountered
one of the pushing system’s tactics, in which overseers usually chose captains like Simon to “carry the fore row” and set the pace.
¹⁰

We do not know who invented the pushing system. But it was already present when Charles Ball got to Congaree in 1805. And slavery’s entrepreneurs carried it west and south, sharing it as they went, like Johnny Cottonseed. “You find the Virginian upon Red River,
you find the North Carolina man, the South Carolina man, the man from Georgia, alongside of him,” wrote one enslaver about the new neighborhoods in which greenhorns from tobacco or rice regions learned from their peers how to extract the maximum number of acres from each hand. On early-summer visits to town, migrant entrepreneurs began their street-corner conversations by asking “Well, how does your
cotton look?” Thus, wrote another migrant planter, “any increased quantity of product, by any new course of cultivation, spreads like the fire of the American prairie”—all the way up to ten acres to the hand.
¹¹

Enslavers shared innovations because the world cotton market was an example of what economists call perfect competition. In fact, it was
the
example—it was used later in the nineteenth
century as the archetype in which the great British economist Alfred Marshall discovered the famous concepts of supply-and-demand curves. The market was so big that no individual producer could control even 1 percent of the total. This meant that individual producers had no reason to hoard innovations in the extraction of labor from neighbors, for a neighbor’s increase in production did not change
the price the innovator received by a visible amount. Enslavers also had a vested interest in the ability of their neighbors to suppress their own slaves’ resistance. So planter-entrepreneurs readily shared their labor-control innovations: “The intercourse of experience,” wrote one enslaver, is the “solder” of slaveholders’ communities, in which “every individual is bound not only by his duties
to others, but by his own interests, to extend and nourish this useful interchange of systems.”
¹²

Innovation in violence, in fact, was the foundation of the widely shared pushing system. Enslaved migrants in the field quickly learned what happened if they lagged or resisted. 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, on horseback, dropped his umbrella, spurred up, and shouted, “Take him down.” The overseer pulled
out a pistol and shot the prone man dead. “None of the other slaves,” Sidney remembered, “said a word or turned their heads. They kept on hoeing as if nothing had happened.” They had learned that they had to adapt to “pushing” or face unpredictable but potentially
extreme violence. Enslavers organized space so that violent supervision could extract the maximum amount of labor. “A good part of our rows are five hundred and fifty yards long,” wrote one Tennessee cotton planter in the 1820s. He had created a space in which he could easily identify stragglers. He also simultaneously ensured that when he inflicted exemplary punishment, he did so in clear
view of a large audience.
¹³

THOUGH THE ROWS WERE
long and Simon’s pace was hard, Ball was getting his wind back at seven a.m., when they all paused to eat a breakfast of cold cornbread. Charles Ball and Simon exchanged a few grunted words as they returned to their side-by-side rows. Already, the captain recognized that Ball was one of the few in the field physically capable of keeping up without
panicked effort. Both returned to their toil, hoes swinging like metronomes, sweat rolling down arms and backs. The overseer kept the time. Once an hour he allowed the men, women, and children to walk over to a wagon loaded with water barrels and drink a ladleful of water.
¹⁴

At noon the hands at Congaree ate another hurried meal: more cornbread, a little salt, one radish each. Ball was catching
on to other ways in which the pushing system maximized the amount of labor extracted from him—for instance, the tricks that filled every minute of daylight with money-making labor. At the end of a row, Simon whispered to Ball to conserve what strength he could, for they would have to work until it was too dark to tell cotton from weed. There would be no leaving the field in time to make the evening
meal. In fact, the overseer had assigned an old woman to stay back in the quarter and bake everyone’s suppertime cornmeal ration. Likewise, when, thirty years later, Henry Bibb was transported up Louisiana’s Red River to a slave labor camp, his new enslaver ordered slaves to gorge themselves with a heavy breakfast two hours before sunlight. They were then allowed but one break before nightfall.
¹⁵

If Ball got ahead of Simon for a moment, stood up straight to wipe off the sweat of this long afternoon, and looked around at the bodies behind him, he’d see two more pushing-system elements that enabled entrepreneurs like Wade Hampton to plant and cultivate more and more acres of cotton over time. First, almost everybody who lived in Wade Hampton’s huts—men and women, children and adults—was
in the field. Second, they were all doing
the same job. In 1827 a Virginia-born enslaver wrote to his business partner asking him to procure “a number of slaves sufficient to make 40 working hands—which you know in a cotton country will be much less than in a grain country.” Chesapeake slave quarters had large numbers of nonworking children and old people as well as those who did some kinds of
labor and not others. But cotton entrepreneurs worked men, women, and older children together for most of the year at jobs that were identical.
¹⁶