The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (28 page)

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.”
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“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.
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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.
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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
.”
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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.”
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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 time 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
).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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