The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (29 page)

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

Dusk now settled, achingly slow, over the field’s white glow. At last, tired eyes could not tell boll from leaf. The overseer grunted. Men, women, and children straightened their stiff backs. They trudged to the ends of their rows, emptied their last sackfuls into their cotton baskets, and hefted the wicker containers onto their
heads—Ball, too. He arched his tired spine to bear the weight and began swaying slowly back toward the open shed that held the cotton. A long half-mile later, the final drops of sweat squeezed out of pores, lining tracks in the dust that caked the pickers’ bodies. The outbuildings of the camp loomed up from the now-f dark.

Another day was almost done. Ball had almost survived it. But now,
in the yard in front of the cotton-shed, he would learn the secret that made hands pick cotton like machines.

In a semicircle outside the “stand,” the open shed that sheltered the gin, Ball and the others put their baskets down. They waited while drivers hung each basket by its handles on a “steelyard,” a balance-beam scale that measured their day’s picking. The overseer called out the weight
and then chalked the numbers by the picker’s name on his slate. Ball had thirty-eight pounds—at least ten less than most of the other men, even though they were not as strong with the axe or as swift with the hoe. Yet some, and some women and teenagers who had also picked more than Ball, were being taken to the patch of ground where Lydia had been beaten.
³⁷

Twenty years after Ball’s first day
of picking, Israel Campbell went through his own first season at a Mississippi slave labor camp. Try as he might, Campbell could pick no more than ninety pounds between first light and full dark. But the planter, “Belfer,” had told the young man that his daily minimum was one hundred pounds—and that on this day he would “have
as many lashes as there were pounds short” in the “draft of cotton”
recorded beside the name “Israel” on the Irish-born overseer’s slate. (A “draft” was a check that paid off a debt, in the commercial lingo of the time.) On the hard-packed earth of Belfer’s cotton yard, between the rough-hewn timbers of the gin stand and the packing screw that squashed cleaned cotton into bales, a kind of accounting took place. It used slate and chalk, balance beam, and one more tool
as well. And as Campbell brought his cotton up in the growing darkness, he knew that his weight left him with a negative balance. Desperate to avoid a reckoning, he set his basket down and silently slipped behind the other slaves lining up outside the circle of torchlight where the Irishman was weighing baskets. He went to hide in the hut where the slaves did their cooking. But just a few moments
later, the door opened, and looming backlit on the threshold stood Belfer—lantern in one hand, four stakes and the bullwhip in the other: “Well, Israel, is that you?” The Irishman had weighed Campbell’s basket. The account was negative. “I will settle with you now,” Belfer said.
³⁸

Image 4.3. Carrying the cotton from the fields to the gin stand for the weigh-in, at the end of the day.
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
, March 1854, p. 457.

We can find this system of accounting, experienced by Campbell and Ball, reported again and again by people who were moved to the southwestern
cotton fields. Southern whites themselves sometimes admitted that enslavers used the vocabulary
of credit and debit accounting to frame weighing and whipping—like this Natchez doctor, who in 1835 described the end of a picking day: “The overseer meets all hands at the scales, with the lamp, scales, and whip. Each basket is carefully weighed, and the nett weight of cotton set down upon the slate, opposite the name of the picker. . . . [O]ccasionally the countenance of an idler may be
seen to fall”: “So many pounds short, cries the overseer, and takes up his whip, exclaiming, ‘Step this way, you damn lazy scoundrel,’ or ‘Short pounds, you bitch.’”
³⁹

Charles Ball’s first-day total on his slate became the new minimum on his personal account. He understood that if he failed on the next day to pick at least his minimum, thirty-eight pounds, “it would go hard with me. . . . I knew
that the lash of the overseer would become familiar with my back.” In contrast to the task system of the South Carolina rice swamps, on the cotton frontier, each person was given a unique, individual quota, rather than a limit of work fixed by general custom. The overseer, wrote one owner in the rules he created for his Louisiana labor camp in 1820, “shall see that the people of the plantation
that are fit to pick cotton shall do it and to Pick clean as much as possible and a quantity conforming [to] their age[,] Strength & Capacitys.”