The Political Economy of Slavery. Eugene D. Genovese

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СКАЧАТЬ implements used on the plantations were therefore generally much too heavy for efficient use. The “nigger hoe,” often found in relatively advanced Virginia, weighed much more than the “Yankee hoe,” which slaves broke easily. Those used in the Southwest weighed almost three times as much as those manufactured in the North for Northern use.⁴⁵ Curiously, in many cases equipment was too light for adequate results. Whereas most planters bought extra-heavy implements in the hope that they would withstand rough handling, others resigned themselves and bought the cheapest possible.⁴⁶

      We do not know the proportion of Southern implements made by local blacksmiths, but the difference in quality between them and Northern goods was probably not so great as one might think. Local blacksmiths made wretched goods, but those made in the North especially for the Southern market fell well below national standards. J. D. Legare, editor of the Southern Cabinet, visited Northern implement factories and was “struck” by the inferior grade of goods sent South. The materials and workmanship did not approach standards set for goods destined for Northern markets. The reason for the double standard, as Legare admitted, was that planters demanded inexpensive items.⁴⁷ We have little information on implements produced in the North for the Southern market. John Hebron Moore quite plausibly suggests that a few unscrupulous Northern manufacturers gave the rest a bad reputation by misrepresentations and other unethical practices.⁴⁸ Misrepresentations aside, frequent complaints suggest that the implements were often inferior to those designated for the North. M. W. Philips demonstrated that Northern plows lasted three times as long as local Mississippi products,⁴⁹ but the question at issue is not the quality of Northern equipment but the quality of that which Southerners could and would buy.

      In 1857 an agricultural journal carried a special report by a former editor who had visited the South Carolina state fair and had inspected plows made by Southern manufacturers. He described the instruments as poor, of indifferent quality and crude construction, adding that most Southern producers had advanced only to the point at which James Small of Berwickshire had left the plow in 1740.⁵⁰

      Good plows in 1857 sold for fifteen or twenty dollars, although perhaps some of those selling for five or ten dollars were adequate. “A low estimate of the investment in implements necessary to the operation of an average Northern farm was $500.”⁵¹ Cultivators and harrows cost from five to twenty dollars; a grist mill from fifteen to thirty dollars; a treadmill horsepower from eighty-five to 150 dollars; a seed drill sixty dollars; and a reaper-mower 135 dollars. Planters, M. W. Philips noted, usually refused to buy anything except the cheapest of essential items. “We of the South have a jaundiced eye. Everything we view looks like gold—costly.”⁵²

      Plows such as those generally in use in Arkansas were valued at five dollars, and of greater significance, an average cotton-producing unit of one hundred acres was said to have only fifteen dollars’ worth of equipment other than plows.⁵³ A Mississippi planter valued his thirty “indifferent” plows at seventy-five dollars; even if he had made a liberal allowance for depreciation, he was clearly using the poorest kind of equipment.⁵⁴ As an indication of the quality of the work done by local blacksmiths, one planter spent a total of five dollars for ten turning plows in 1853.⁵⁵ Gray claims that most Southern plows were worth only three to five dollars. There is little reason to question either his estimate or his opinion that they probably did not last more than a year or so.⁵⁶

      Most planters in Mississippi, wrote Philips, thought they could use one kind of plow for every possible purpose.⁵⁷ The weakness was doubly serious, for the one kind was usually poor. The most popular plow in the Lower South—at least, well into the 1840s—was the shovel plow, which merely stirred the surface of the soil to a depth of two or three inches.⁵⁸ Made of wrought iron, it was “a crude and inefficient instrument which, as commonly employed, underwent no essential improvement throughout its long career.”⁵⁹ It was light enough for a girl to carry and exemplified the “too light” type of implement used on the plantations.

      In the 1850s the shovel plow slowly gave way in the South to a variety of light moldboard plows, which at least were of some help in killing and controlling weeds. Good moldboard plows should have offered other advantages, such as aid in burying manure, but those in the South were not nearly so efficient as those in the North.⁶⁰ In 1830, Connecticut manufacturers began to produce large numbers of Cary plows, exclusively for the Southern market. These light wooden plows with wrought-iron shares were considered of good quality. Unfortunately, they required careful handling, for they broke easily, and they could not penetrate more than three or four inches below the surface. During the 1820s Northern farmers had been shifting to cast-iron plows that could cover 50 per cent more acreage with 50 per cent less animal-and manpower.⁶¹ When cast-iron plows did enter the South, they could not be used to the same advantage as in the North, for they needed the services of expert blacksmiths when, as frequently happened, they broke.⁶²

      Twenty years after the introduction of the cultivator in 1820, Northern farmers considered it standard equipment, especially in the cornfields, but cultivators, despite their tremendous value, were so light that few planters would trust them to their slaves. Since little wheat was grown below Virginia, the absence of reapers did not hurt much, but the backwardness of cotton equipment did. A “cotton planter” (a modified grain drill) and one man could do as much work as two mules and four men,⁶³ but it was rarely used. Similarly, corn planters, especially the one invented by George Brown in 1853, might have saved a good deal of labor time, but these were costly, needed careful handling, and would have rendered part of the slave force superfluous. Since slaveholding carried prestige and status, and since slaves were an economic necessity during the picking season, planters showed little interest.⁶⁴

      The cotton picker presents special technical and economic problems. So long as a mechanical picker was not available a large labor force would have been needed for the harvest; but in 1850 Samuel S. Rembert and Jedediah Prescott of Memphis did patent a mule-drawn cotton picker that was a “simple prototype of the modem spindle picker.”⁶⁵ Virtually no progress followed upon the original design until forty years later, and then almost as long a span intervened before further advances were made. The reasons for these gaps were in part technical, and in part economic pressures arising from slavery and sharecropping. Although one can never be sure about such things, the evidence accumulated by historians of science and technology strongly suggests that the social and economic impediments to technological change are generally more powerful than the specifically technical ones. The introduction of a cotton picker would have entailed the full mechanization of farming processes, and such a development would have had to be accompanied by a radically different social order. Surely, it is not accidental that the mechanical picker has in recent decades taken hold in the Southwest, where sharecropping has been weak, and has moved east slowly as changes in the social organization of the countryside have proceeded. Even without a mechanical picker the plantations might have used good implements and a smaller labor force during most of the year and temporary help during the harvest. In California in 1951, for example, 50 per cent of the occasional workers needed in the cotton fields came from within the county and 90 per cent from within the state. Rural and town housewives, youths, and seasonal workers anxious to supplement their incomes provided the temporary employees.⁶⁶ There is no reason to believe that this alternative would not have been open to the South in the 1850s if slavery had been eliminated.

      A few examples, which could be multiplied many times, illustrate the weakness of plantation technology. A plantation in Stewart County, Georgia, with a fixed capital investment of $42,660 had only $300 invested in implements and machinery. The Tooke plantation, also in Georgia, had a total investment in implements and machinery of $195, of which a gin accounted for $110. Plantations had plows, perhaps a few harrows and colters, possibly a cultivator, and in a few cases a straw cutter or corn and cob crusher. Whenever possible, a farmer or planter acquired a gin, and all had small tools for various purposes.⁶⁷

      The figures reported in the census tabulations of farm implements and machinery СКАЧАТЬ