The Political Economy of Slavery. Eugene D. Genovese

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Two ■ The Low Productivity of Southern Slave Labor: Causes and Effects

      The economic backwardness that condemned the slaveholding South to defeat in 1861–1865 had at its root the low productivity of labor, which expressed itself in several ways. Most significant was the carelessness and wastefulness of the slaves. Bondage forced the Negro to give his labor grudgingly and badly, and his poor work habits retarded those social and economic advances that could have raised the general level of productivity. Less direct were limitations imposed on the free work force, on technological development, and on the division of labor.

      Although the debate on slave productivity is an old one, few arguments have appeared during the last hundred years to supplement those of contemporaries like John Elliott Cairnes and Edmund Ruffin. Cairnes made the much-assailed assertion that the slave was so defective in versatility that his labor could be exploited profitably only if he were taught one task and kept at it. If we allow for exaggeration, Cairnes’s thesis is sound. Most competent observers agreed that slaves worked badly, without interest or effort. Edmund Ruffin, although sometimes arguing the reverse, pointed out that whereas at one time cheap, fertile farmland required little skill, soil exhaustion had finally created conditions demanding the intelligent participation of the labor force.¹ Ruffin neither developed his idea nor drew the appropriate conclusions. The systematic education and training of the slaves would have been politically dangerous. The use of skilled workers would increasingly have required a smaller slave force, which would in turn have depended on expanding markets for surplus slaves and thus could not have been realized in the South as a whole. Other Southerners simply dropped the matter with the observation that the difference in productivity between free and slave labor only illustrated how well the Negroes were treated.²

      Ample evidence indicates that slaves worked well below their capabilities. In several instances in Mississippi, when cotton picking was carefully supervised in local experiments, slaves picked two or three times their normal output. The records of the Barrow plantation in Louisiana reveal that inefficiency and negligence resulted in two-thirds of the punishments inflicted on slaves, and other contemporary sources are full of corroborative data.³

      However much the slaves may have worked below their capacity, the limitations placed on that capacity were probably even more important in undermining productivity. In particular, the diet to which the slaves were subjected must be judged immensely damaging, despite assurances from contemporaries and later historians that the slave was well fed.

      The slave usually got enough to eat, but the starchy, high-energy diet of cornmeal, pork, and molasses produced specific hungers, dangerous deficiencies, and that unidentified form of malnutrition to which the medical historian Richard H. Shryock draws attention.⁴ Occasional additions of sweet potatoes or beans could do little to supplement the narrow diet. Planters did try to provide vegetables and fruits, but not much land could be spared from the staples, and output remained minimal.⁵ Protein hunger alone—cereals in general and corn in particular cannot provide adequate protein—greatly reduces the ability of an organism to resist infectious diseases. Even increased consumption of vegetables probably would not have corrected the deficiency, for as a rule the indispensable amino acids are found only in such foods as lean meat, milk, and eggs. The abundant pork provided was largely fat. Since the slave economy did not and could not provide sufficient livestock, no solution presented itself.⁶

      In the 1890s a dietary study of Negro field laborers in Alabama revealed a total bacon intake of more than five pounds per week, or considerably more than the three and one-half pounds that probably prevailed in antebellum days. Yet, the total protein found in the Negroes’ diet was only 60 per cent of that deemed adequate.⁷ Recent studies show that individuals with a high caloric but low protein intake will deviate from standard height-weight ratios by a disproportionate increase in weight.⁸ The slave’s diet contained deficiencies other than protein; vitamins and minerals also were in short supply. Vitamin deficiencies produce xerophthalmia, beriberi, pellagra, and scurvy and create what one authority terms “states of vague indisposition [and] obscure and ill-defined disturbances.”⁹

      There is nothing surprising in the slave’s appearance of good health: his diet was well suited to guarantee the appearance of good health and to provide the fuel to keep him going in the fields, but it was not sufficient to ensure either sound bodies or the stamina necessary for sustained labor. We need not doubt the testimony of William Dosite Postell, who presents evidence of reasonably good medical attention to slaves and of adequate supply of food bulk. Rather, it is the finer questions of dietary balance that concern us. At that, Postell provides some astonishing statistics that reinforce the present argument: 7 per cent of a sample of more than 8,500 slaves from Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana above the age of fifteen were either physically impaired or chronically ill.¹⁰ As W. Arthur Lewis writes of today’s underdeveloped countries: “Malnutrition and chronic debilitating disease are probably the main reason why the inhabitants … are easily exhausted. And this creates a chain which is hard to break, since malnutrition and disease cause low productivity, and low productivity, in turn, maintains conditions of malnutrition and disease.”¹¹

      The limited diet was by no means primarily a result of ignorance or viciousness on the part of masters, for many knew better and would have liked to do better. The problem was largely economic. Feeding costs formed a burdensome part of plantation expenses. Credit and market systems precluded the assignment of much land to crops other than cotton and corn. The land so assigned was generally the poorest available, and the quality of foodstuffs consequently suffered. For example, experiments have shown that the proportion of iron in lettuce may vary from one to fifty milligrams per hundred, according to soil conditions.

      The slave’s low productivity resulted directly СКАЧАТЬ