Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism

Slavery has deep roots in the rise of American capitalism, and two recent publications have made significant contributions toward our understanding of how human bondage shaped the growth of the United States’ economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, by Caitlin Rosenthal, and Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, each explore traditionally overlooked aspects of slavery’s connection to business innovation and American capitalism and present readers with a fuller—and perhaps more complicated—narrative of the ties between enslavement and the economy.

Accounting for Slavery is a well-written and thoroughly researched book that offers significant insight into the development of accounting practices and scientific management on Southern and West Indian plantations. Rosenthal demonstrates how the incorporation of standardized account books enabled planters to keep detailed records of their operations, and makes it clear these printed books were an innovative technology that helped spur the growth of improved accounting practices among slaveholders. Additionally, she argues that some Southern and West Indian plantation owners incorporated modern management techniques into their daily operations much earlier than what the traditional narrative states, possibly making these owners some of the earliest businessmen to do such a thing. Rosenthal also suggests that slaveholders were uniquely suited to embrace advanced accounting practices thanks to both the complete control they had over their slaves and the access they had to a steady supply of human chattel. While her exploration of the growth of modern management and accounting practices on plantations is innovative and compelling, another aspect of her book is its impressive ability to keep the slaves themselves at the forefront of the story. Along with examining the various ways that slaveholders reduced the humanity of slaves into quantifiable figures that fit into the neatly organized categories of account books, Rosenthal does a remarkable job portraying the human beings whose lives were inextricably caught up in the incorporation and expansion of plantation accounting. She also succeeds in introducing the creators of the standardized account book as well as the planters who used them to enable the reader to understand business practices. Accounting for Slavery is a well-balanced book that contributes to historians’ understanding of both business history and slavery, providing unique insights into both fields that will be of interest to experts and newcomers alike.

One of the most significant features of Rosenthal’s work is her exploration of the uses of standardized account books on plantations and how they contributed to the improvement of data recording and labor organization. Beginning in Chapter 2, readers are informed how these journals enabled planters to better coordinate and evaluate daily labor distribution, monitor production output and the use of land, track their slaves’ health and obedience, and record the condition of livestock and other features of their business. Plantation owners had access to a variety of printed journals that recorded information on a daily or monthly basis, which not only made their businesses more efficient but also management less difficult. Rosenthal suggests that absentee owners benefited from the use of standardized journals because these daily or monthly reports condensed the most essential data from their plantation’s operations. Thus, owners could analyze organized data from afar to maintain accountability with their overseers. By using established categories, which required only basic arithmetic, the journals allowed owners to overcome overseers’ educational limitations and unfamiliarity with record keeping to obtain accurate and consistent information.

In addition to showing the benefits that standardized account books offered to planters, Rosenthal also explores how improved accounting practices extracted a heavy toll on slaves. Chapter 3 explores how planters made use of the detailed records to continuously push for higher production output and to determine the quickest maintainable rate of labor, and it reveals that increased efficiency often came through violence and intimidation. This was especially true on cotton plantations. Highlighting some of the various techniques that overseers and owners used to obtain higher levels of cotton picking, such as incentive systems, lashings, and chicanery, Rosenthal shows how accounting techniques and scientific management were employed on Southern plantations to determine slaves’ extreme capacity to pick cotton and to establish demanding quotas. The author does an excellent job portraying the significance of cotton weighing and depicting the apprehension slaves felt as they waited for their cotton bales to be weighed. Thanks to Rosenthal’s expressive writing, one can easily appreciate the terror that slaves suffered if they picked too little or the frustration and anguish they underwent if they picked too much and were thus doomed to a higher daily benchmark.

Throughout her book, Rosenthal also draws attention to the myriad ways that planters attempted to quantify the value of their slaves and how standardized journals assisted in their appraisal of human lives. In Chapter 4, Rosenthal emphasizes how owners’ desire to maintain accurate inventories of their human capital required them to incorporate the concepts of appreciation and depreciation in their business activities to monitor the fluctuating worth of their slaves. Attributing a price to a human life was an inconsistent practice. Rosenthal notes that when it was to their advantage, slaveholders would rely on standardized units of judgment to value their slaves. Such practices included the “Prime Hands” system, which reduced the humanity of a slave to a classification of numeric fractions based on their capacity to work. Other times, slaveholders would approach a slave’s worth with individualized evaluations to appreciate the imperceptible and intangible qualities that made certain slaves so valuable. The significance of these practices was immense. For owners, monitoring the changing value of their slaves was necessary to track the evolution of their human capital and to recognize when a slave was a source of profit or loss. Standardized account books contained annual inventories of slaves, which facilitated this process and served other uses as well. Rosenthal asserts that well-kept records and inventories were of use when attempting to secure a loan from a bank because they made it easier for landowners to demonstrate the success of their business practices and the value of their human capital. These practices, while clearly inhumane, highlight the innovative accounting methods that slaveholders incorporated into their business practices to evaluate and grow their capital and to protect themselves from financial loss.

Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development offers readers an interdisciplinary approach to the numerous ways in which slavery was intertwined with the development of American capitalism. Divided into four themes and consisting of fourteen chapters, the book explores previously overlooked ties between slavery and capitalism by examining the following themes: Plantation Technologies, Slavery and Finance, Networks of Interest and the North, and National Institutions and Natural Boundaries. Full of unique perspectives, Slavery’s Capitalism is sure to provoke thought from its readers as they gain a new appreciation of the extent to which slavery was at the forefront of the rise of capitalism in the United States throughout the nation’s formative years.

The book’s opening chapter, “Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor: Hands, Whipping Machines, and Modern Power,” by Edward E. Baptist, is one of the most engrossing and disturbing pieces in the entire collection. Baptist asserts that the between 1800 and 1860 there was a significant increase in the amount of cotton picked on a daily basis, and that the rise in production can be attributed to what he describes as “the technology of torture”(60). Overseers’ brutal use of whips in combination with their ability to record and analyze the amount of cotton slaves picked each day created a culture of both fear and innovation. To meet increased picking quotas and to avoid cruel punishments, slaves were forced to find ways to make their hands move faster. According to Baptist, it was the whip’s capacity to compel slaves to develop personalized tactics to pick more efficiently that explains the dramatic increase in cotton productivity. His assertions are backed by plantation ledgers and by the accounts of the enslaved who endured the violence of cotton plantation culture, the latter of which Baptist asserts should be considered as one of the most authentic sources on cotton picking. Utilizing these sources, Baptist does an impressive job offering a new and convincing explanation about the growth of cotton production and its contributions to capitalism in the United States and abroad. The section’s final chapter, “Plantation Technologies,” by Daniel B. Rood, examines the development of a mechanized wheat reaper and highlights slave’s contributions to its design and production. Created to save time in the wheat harvesting process and to allow wheat to be shipped and exported at an accelerated pace, Rood’s chapter draws attention to the importance of slavery and wheat flour, and shows how slaveholders used their plantations as laboratories to spur innovation.

The second theme of Slavery’s Capitalism, “Slavery and Finance,” consists of four chapters that examine plantation finance and how slavery was deeply embedded in credit, collateral, loans, insurance, and speculation in the American South. Two chapters in this section stand out for their appeal and originality. Bonnie Martin’s “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism: Local Credit Networks and the Mortgaging of Slaves” is one of these chapters. Martin draws attention to the significance of slave mortgaging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and she emphasizes how it contributed to economic growth and the expansion of slavery. Martin describes in detail how the financial value of individual slaves was used as collateral to purchase goods such as land, livestock, or even more slaves. Her entry also pays substantial attention to how mortgaging allowed modest farmers and artisans who did not have funds immediately at their disposal to purchase slaves on installment plans, thereby making it easier for average people to become slaveholders. What makes Martin’s analysis so intriguing is her demonstration of how frequently these types of transactions took place, how much capital they generated, and how it was nearby neighbors rather than far-off bankers who conducted the exchanges. Martin even goes so far as to suggest that as more scholars focus on slave mortgaging and the capital it generated, it will soon “become as customary to envision slaves being worked in the financial arenas as collateral” (120) as it is to imagine them working on plantations.

The other captivating chapter in this section is by Daina Ramey Berry, titled ‘“Broad is de Road dat Leads ter Death’: Human Capital and Enslaved Mortality.” Berry’s innovative chapter explores the overlooked practice of insuring slaves and examines the culture surrounding slaves’ deaths. Noting that scholars have in large part ignored that the enslaved continued to have financial value after their death, Berry asserts that slaves indeed had economic worth after they passed away because of slaveholders’ tendency of taking out insurance policies on their human chattel. According to the author, slaveholders did this to protect their financial stakes in their slaves and to ensure that they would not suffer economically if another free individual was responsible for the death of their property. Berry notes that it was not uncommon for slave owners to pursue reimbursement in court when a slave was killed either intentionally or unintentionally. She also writes about slaves’ proneness to commit suicide to escape the torments of bondage or to challenge their commodification; she interprets suicide as a demonstration of slaves’ agency. While most chapters provide examples of this agency, Berry’s chapter especially emphasizes this interpretation. Berry’s work also deserves recognition for bringing to light the practice of insuring slaves as well as for revealing the complexity of doing so. However, this entry will leave readers wondering what types of companies participated in slave insurance and whether any of them still exist today. Certainly, this is a topic that more scholars will want to explore.

The book’s third theme, “Networks of Interest and the North,” explores how New England contributed to the growth of slavery in the West Indies through commerce and political efforts to protect its investments and trade routes. It also examines the U.S. saltwater slave trade and how it brought together slave traders, merchants, and bankers. While all three chapters in this section are well researched and worth reading, the chapter by Erick Kimball, “‘What Have We to do With Slavery?’ New Englanders and the Slave Economics of the West Indies,” might especially capture readers’ interest. Kimball shows that colonial New England played a crucial role in the development of the Caribbean slave economy by providing West Indian plantations with the essential goods they needed to operate. Kimball does a wonderful job recounting the history of New England merchants’ ties to plantations in the Caribbean. He highlights the variety of products that New England ships transported from the region to the West Indies, such as wood, cattle, barrels, lighting products, fish, and, perhaps most importantly, slaves. On their return voyages, New England ships carried slave-produced goods back to the colonies. By examining this commercial exchange, Kimball makes it clear how many New Englanders were involved in maintaining slave societies in the Atlantic and how they depended on West Indian plantations to export and import goods. He encourages readers to look beyond the geographical limits of the plantation itself and to embrace an Atlantic approach toward slavery to appreciate the complex relationship that New Englanders had with Caribbean plantation owners distant from their own communities. Kimball reminds us that people did not have to own slaves or be in direct contact with them to profit from their existence: New Englanders benefited immensely from their economic connections to slavery. He also asserts that historians should look at New England’s codependent relationship with West Indian plantations as the beginning point in its participation in slavery. Kimball’s chapter is a compelling read from the strength of his argument, and it is sure to provoke people to further question what New Englanders had to do with slavery both at home and abroad.

Slavery’s Capitalism concludes with an interesting but somewhat unfocused final section: “National Institutions and Boundaries.” In “War and Priests,” Craig Steven Wilder reminds readers of how Catholics in the American colonies used wealth generated by slaves to overcome anti-Catholic sentiments and to build the prominence of the Catholic Church. Wilder specifically focuses on the creation of Georgetown University and how its founders relied on slave labor and the revenues produced from plantations to support the school and to subsidize tuition fees in its early stages. His entry also shows that Jesuit priests were capable of the same cruelty as slaveholders. In a following chapter, Andrew Shankman examines the life and writings of Mathew Carey to show the significance of Carey’s conviction that the new political economy of the United States called for the expansion of slavery. Following this, Alfred L. Brophy explores court cases undertaken by Southern jurists and looks at how their rulings bolstered the protection of property and the rights of corporations. The book concludes with John Majewski’s chapter, “Why Did Northerners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery? Economic Development and Education in the Limestone South.” He attempts to understand the Republican Party’s opposition to the growth of slavery by comparing and contrasting access to education in the North, South, and, most significantly, in the Limestone South. As noted, this section lacks the coherence of the other sections, yet taken individually each chapter is full of unique information that helps the reader appreciate some of the lesser-known aspects of slavery’s ties to capitalism in the United States.

Anyone interested in exploring these aspects on development of the U.S. economic system or interested in slavery in the Atlantic world would benefit from reading either or both these books. While the goal of Accounting for Slavery is to trace the rise of modern accounting and management practices during slavery, the book also contains information on the nature of slavery in the United States and in the West Indies. Slavery’s Capitalism also includes impressive writing and unique and thought-provoking information but is significantly different in organization and focus. The anthology is divided into four themes with contributions by more than a dozen scholars, and some chapters will appeal to broad audiences while others will be of greater interest to scholars with specialized knowledge in slavery or economics. Nevertheless, Accounting for Slavery and Slavery’s Capitalism will absorb anyone wanting to know more about how slavery shaped capitalism in the United States.