The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  TABLE 4.2. INFANT DEATH RATES ON SELECTED SOUTHWESTERN SLAVE LABOR CAMPS

  Sources: R. C. Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Henry Watson Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Richard H. Steckel, The Economics of U.S. Slave and Southern White Fertility (New York, 1985).

  * In the McCutcheon documents, only 14.6 percent of all recorded infant deaths occur in the first twenty-eight days after birth, whereas other statistics suggest that a rate of 50 percent is much more typical. This fact, in turn, suggests a substantial under-enumeration of both births and deaths. The real infant death rate was probably about 350.

  But other costs cannot be measured. Although Ball had been able to keep up with Simon, he foresaw that the pace of work on coming days would be difficult and unvarying. He could tell that his clothes would wear down to rags. He also clearly ran the constant risk of suffering violent, humiliating assault. Ball had not been beaten since he was fifteen. Back in Maryland, he had been what owners called “a well-disposed negro” who tried to build a life within the system. Anyway, the pathological bullies that white supremacy bred in such high numbers preferred easier targets than someone as large and strong as Ball. But he could see that on the Congaree, if white folks thought that doing so would result in more cotton, they would find a way to bend even the toughest black man to the new bullwhip.24

  TABLE 4.3. COMPARATIVE INFANT DEATH RATES

  Sources: * Jack Ericson Eblen, “Growth of the Black Population in Ante Bellum America, 1820–1860,” Population Studies 26 (1972): 273–289.

  ** Richard H. Steckel, The Economics of U.S. Slave and Southern White Fertility (New York, 1985), 88–89.

  *** B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1995), 319.

  † Actuarial estimate for 1830–1860 made in 1895. See Michael R. Haines and Roger C. Avery, “The American Life Table of 1830–1860: An Evaluation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (1980): 11–35, esp. 88.

  †† Central Intelligence Agency, World Fact Book, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html.

  Intimidated, Ball strove hard in the days that followed to labor at the torrid tempo of the southwestern pushing system. By the time July rolled toward its close, he had begun to outpace Simon. The “hands” had chopped weeds from every cotton row three times over, and now the plants were “laid by”—tall enough to shade the rows and keep down the growth of weeds. Now Ball began to look around. One Sunday, exploring, he found a body dangling in the woods—a runaway, despairing of escape, unwilling to return. Through his own long march he had stuck to his resolution to stay alive for something better to offer itself. So now, as he hilled sweet potatoes, he calculated how many he could carry in his shirt if he slipped off for Maryland. As he pulled leaves from the corn stalks, fodder for the livestock, he looked at swelling ears and mentally mapped the months when they would be ripe on the stalk on the banks of all the rivers he’d counted and named on his route south.

  July turned to August. Carbohydrates sweetened in the corn kernels. But something was happening in the cotton fields, too. The plants strained up to man height and added leaves. The branches grew “squares,” or buds. And white people began to dole out pennies to slaves in exchange for baskets woven by firelight. They inspected cotton-gin machinery. They checked the weighting of whips. They went to town and bought sacks, new slates, chalk, ledgers, pens, and ink. And they mailed off expectant, calculating letters that yammered on, as the wife of a Louisiana planter complained in 1829, about nothing but how the profits of the cotton now in the fields would let them continue “buying plantations & negrows.”25

  “Cotton! Cotton! Cotton! . . . is the theme of nearly all the conversations now a days,” wrote one migrant to Florida. “Even the Ladies talk learnedly upon the subject. . . . If you see a knot of Planters engaged in earnest conversation, without even approaching, you may [know] the topic of their discourse. Get within earshot of them, and, I will guranty, that the first word that you will hear will be cotton.” As planters talked, the squares grew and swelled behind cream-and-yellow blossoms. Growing heavier every day, they tilted this way and that until stalks arched and groaned. One day the first boll exploded open, and then the next one, and then the next, millions. A white blizzard settled on the green fields. One more night, and another first day in the life of a hand was here.26

  ON AN EARLY MORNING at the beginning of September, the overseer ordered the enslaved people at Congaree back into the cotton fields. He gave each man, woman, and child a long sack and ordered them to take a row and start picking. As Ball bent over the plants in the gloam of near-dawn, wetting his shirt with cotton-leaf dew, he found that picking required sharp eyes, speedy hands, and good coordination. Slip up and the hand clutched a leaf, or fingers pricked on the hard points of the drying “square” at the base of the boll. Grab too much, and a mess of fiber and stem sprung loose in one’s hand. Grab too little and the fingers twisted only a few strands. Finally reaching the end of his first row, Ball emptied his sack into his own large basket. Suddenly he realized that women and even children were already far down the neighboring rows. As the pickers bent in ever-more hurried motion, their hands were blurs. Not just their right hands, in the fastest cases, but their left as well. But when Ball tried to set both hands to work, his arms flailed like disconnected parts. His fingers lumbered. For the first time since he was a boy, he felt out of control of his body. Muscular strength could not solve this task.27

  The sun crawled in a slow parabola across the sky. All day long the sound of click, click, click rose from almost-silent fields, as nails tapped on hard pods and fingertips pulled bolls. The overseer rode his horse slowly across the rows, whip in hand. By late afternoon, Ball was exhausted and anxious. Looking left and right at the baskets of others, he felt shrunken, “not equal to a boy of twelve or fifteen years of age.” Cotton-picking had little to do with physical strength. It broke down distinctions of size and sex. Women were sometimes the fastest pickers in a cotton slave labor camp. Young migrants could learn picking more quickly than their elders. In fact, Ball heard that “a man who has arrived at the age of twenty-five before he sees a cotton field will never, in the language of the overseers, become a crack picker.”28

  Image 4.1. This 1853 illustration shows men and women picking furiously. The men wear palmetto hats made in New England. “Picking cotton in Louisiana,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1854, p. 456.

  In their heads, in conversations, and on paper, planters obsessively calculated equations of hands and cotton, always coming up with the same solution: wealth. A visitor reported that according to Florida calculations, “a hand generally makes from 5 to 6 bales weighing 400 lbs—at 15 [cents per pound] five bales to the hand will give $300—and at 15 six bales will give you $360, at 10 five bales will give you $200 and 6 bales at 10 cents will give $240.” Looking at the soil of Mississippi’s Yazoo River district, Clement Jameson concluded, “I shall make close to $250.00 to the hand.” In Alabama, wrote a woman from North Carolina, “a thousand witnesses will attest that you may average on each hand about four to six hundred dollars clear of expense.” Making more money allowed one to buy more slaves, thus harvesting more cotton, which meant yet more money. Mississippi farmer L. R. Starks asked a slave-dealer to send a young man he wanted to buy at “the first opportunity. . . . I have purchased five very likely negroes this season. We have raised great crops the last season. I am planting 130 acres in Cotton. I shall not be able to pay for the boy forthwith perhaps, but can make the money sure upon time.”29

  Yet as the acres of plants grew and the squares ripened into bolls, the key unknown variable was the speed at which hands would pick. As early as 1800, enslavers deploying the pushing system could make their captives raise more acres of cotton than they could harvest between the time the bolls opened and the t
ime one had to begin planting again. Picking was now the bottleneck: the part of the cotton production process that took the most labor, and the part that determined how much money enslavers would make. And as Ball was discovering, picking was difficult, and picking fast was very difficult.

  In 1820, Mississippi enslaver John Ker reminded himself that because his brother-in-law’s “hands” were “unaccustomed to the cultivation and picking of cotton [it] would render it prudent that I not make large calculations on the profit of their labor.” Yet enslavers made optimistic calculations nonetheless, because, despite the real difficulty of learning, the amount of cotton that enslaved people picked increased dramatically over time. From 1805, when Charles Ball first dragged his cotton sack down a Congaree row, to 1860 in Mississippi, the amount of cotton the typical “hand” harvested during a typical day increased three, four, six, or even more times over. In 1801, 28 pounds per day, per picker, was the average from several South Carolina labor camps. By 1818, enslaved people on James Magruder’s Mississippi labor camp picked between 50 and 80 pounds per day. A decade later, in Alabama, the totals on one plantation ranged up to 132 pounds, and by the 1840s, on a Mississippi labor camp, the hands averaged 341 pounds each on a good day—“the largest that I have ever heard of,” the overseer wrote. In the next decade, averages climbed even higher. A study of planter account books that record daily picking totals for individual enslaved people on labor camps across the South found a growth in daily picking totals of 2.1 percent per year. The increase was even higher if one looks at the growth in the newer southwestern areas in 1860, where the efficiency of picking grew by 2.6 percent per year from 1811 to 1860, for a total productivity increase of 361 percent (see Figure 4.1).30

  Almost as remarkable as this dramatic rise in productivity is the fact that the history of the modern world, of industrialization and great divergences, of escape from the Malthusian trap, has almost never noticed it. Or perhaps that should be no surprise. This increase confounds our expectation that dramatic, systematic gains in labor efficiency depend on new machine technologies, such as the continuous series of innovations in spinning and weaving machines that were increasing the productivity of Manchester’s textile workers. Some of the climb in cotton-picking efficiency may be attributable to a kind of “bioengineering”—new breeds of cotton, especially the “Petit Gulf” seed introduced from Mexico in the 1820s. Yet if heavy-yield and bigger cotton bolls of these breeds made picking individual bolls easier, the richer yield also meant more reaching and bending and moving and grabbing and lifting and carrying. And more expectations.31

  Figure 4.1. Increase in Picking Productivity Over Time

  Source: Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth,” NBER Working Paper No. 14142, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2008.

  Anyway, picking totals rose continuously. They rose before Petit Gulf. They rose after it. Moreover, while some planters obsessively chased the latest fad for cottonseed varieties (they were marketed with names like “Mastodon,” “100 Seed,” “Sugar Loaf,” and “Prolific”), others argued that new breeds added nothing to the “picking qualities” of Petit Gulf. So something that cannot be explained by the seeds happened to produce a continuous increase in productivity. That increase had huge consequences for global history. Cotton, like oil later on, was the world’s most widely traded commodity, but that analogy doesn’t even begin to explain how crucial the ever-growing efficiency of cotton-picking was to the modernizing world economy. Neither Britain nor any other country that followed it down the path of textile-based industrialization could have accomplished an economic transformation without the millions of acres of cotton fields of the expanding American South. To replace the fiber it imported from American slave labor camps with an equivalent amount of wool, Britain in 1830 would have had to devote 23 million acres to sheep pasture—more than the sum total of the island’s agricultural land.32

  The expanding cotton plantations of America’s southwestern region allowed the textile industries to escape Malthusian constraints, and not just by adding additional acres and laborers. Consider this: The total gain in productivity per picker from 1800 to 1860 was almost 400 percent. And from 1819 to 1860, the increase in the efficiency of workers who tended spinning machines in Manchester cotton mills was about 400 percent. Meanwhile, the efficiency of workers in weaving mills improved by 600 to 1,000 percent (see Table 4.4). Therefore, even as textile factories harnessed increasingly complex machinery to more powerful non-human energy sources, even moving from water to steam power, cotton pickers produced gains in productivity similar to those of cotton factories. And those gains created a huge pie, from which many other people around the world took a slice. Lower real cotton prices passed on gains in the form of capital reinvested in more efficient factory equipment, higher wages for the new industrial working class, and revenue for factory owners, enslavers, and governments. Cheaper cotton meant cheaper cloth and clothing. Thus productivity gains in cotton fields also translated into benefits for consumers of cloth. Most of the world eventually acquired clothes made in the industrial West from cotton picked in the US South.33

  There would be no mechanical cotton picker until the late 1930s. In fact, between 1790 and 1860, there was no mechanical innovation of any kind to speed up the harvesting of cotton. There was nothing like the change from scythe to mechanical reaper, for instance, that by the 1850s began to reshape the Chesapeake wheat fields Ball had left behind. Even slave-operated Louisiana sugar mills were more factory-like than the cotton labor camps were. And the nature of human bodies, the only “machine” that worked in the cotton fields, did not change between 1805 and 1860. Still, the possibility that enslaved people might have picked more cotton because they picked faster, harder, and with more efficient technique does not come readily to our minds. In fact, during the late antebellum years, northern travelers insisted that slave labor was less efficient than free labor, a point of dogma that most historians and economists have accepted.34

  TABLE 4.4. COTTON-PICKING PRODUCTIVITY AND BRITISH COTTON TEXTILE–MAKING PRODUCTIVITY OVER TIME

  Sources: Cotton-picking index derived from Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth,” NBER Working Paper No. 14142, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2008, www.nber.org/papers/w14142, accessed January 8, 2014, using mean annual increase of 2.1 percent. Spinning and weaving indexes derived from D. A. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market, 1815–1896 (Oxford, 1979), 199. Figures for 1790 through 1810 are unknown. Value of exports is derived as midpoint of decade values from Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester, UK, 1979), 15. Davis’s figures are averages for three-year sets, such as 1784–1786, 1794–1796, etc. While not precisely accurate for this specific year, this does map trends with accuracy.

  The same northern observers who proclaimed that slave labor was inefficient had great faith in the idea that free people who were motivated by a cash wage would work harder and smarter than coerced workers. Occasionally, under special circumstances, some enslavers did pay people a wage. In 1828, Edward Barnes paid eight of the twenty-seven people enslaved on his Mississippi cotton labor camp a total of $28.32 for picking on Sundays, the day of the week when it was technically illegal for enslavers to force field labor. These positive incentives, however, accounted for only 3 to 5 percent of the raw cotton that Barnes’s hands harvested in 1828, a year in which he sold eighty-one bales. In fact, enslavers typically only paid for Sunday picking, if they ever used wages. Most enslavers never used positive incentives at all. And perhaps most conclusively, after the Civil War, when many cotton planters would pay pickers by the pound at the end of a day’s work, free labor motivated by a wage did not produce the same amount of cotton per hour of picking as slave labor had.35

  Image 4.2. Late in the year, the pickings grew slimmer. “Picking Cotton Near Montgomery, Alabama,” J. H. Lakin, 1860s. Library
of Congress.

  What enslavers used was a system of measurement and negative incentives. Actually, one should avoid such euphemisms. Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck. The continuous process of innovation thus generated was the ultimate cause of the massive increase in the production of high-quality, cheap cotton: an absolutely necessary increase if the Western world was to burst out of the 10,000-year Malthusian cycle of agriculture. This system confounds our expectations, because, like abolitionists, we want to believe that the free labor system is not only more moral than systems of coercion, but more efficient. Faith in that a priori is very useful. It means we never have to resolve existential contradictions between productivity and freedom. And slave labor surely was wasteful and unproductive. Its captives knew it wasted the days and years and centuries extorted from them. They would never get those days back. Yet those who actually endured those days knew the secret that, over time, drove cotton-picking to continually higher levels of efficiency.

  BY THE EVENING OF his first long day of picking cotton in the Congaree field, Charles Ball hadn’t discovered the secret. Not yet. His hands had struggled and shuffled against each other as he observed his fellow slaves moving as frantically as if some demon pursued them. As afternoon moved toward evening, the sun finally neared the western trees. The toiling bodies hunched across the fields, heads bowed, arms moving back and forth between branch and bag, legs shuffling forward down the row. The only sound was the occasional hoarse cry of “Water, water!” Children ran back and forth, buckets resting on their heads where within a few weeks a circle of hair would wear off in a ring, visible until February.36