Free Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon Page A

pretense of the mythology of the paternalistic agrarian slave
    owner. Labor here was more akin to a source of fuel than an
    extension of a slave owner's familial circle. Even on the harshest of
    family-operated antebel um farms, slave masters could not help but
    be at least marginal y moved by the births, loves, and human
    be at least marginal y moved by the births, loves, and human
    a ections that close contact with slave families inevitably
    manifested.
    But in the set ing of industrial slavery—where only strong young
    males and a tiny number of female "washerwomen" and cooks were
    acquired, and no semblance of family interaction was possible—
    slaves were assets to be expended like mules and equipment. By
    the early 1860s, such slavery was commonplace in the areas of the
    most intensive commercial farming in Mississippi and parts of
    Alabama.
    It was a model particularly wel suited to mining and rst
    aggressively exploited in high-intensity cot on production, in which
    individual skil was not necessarily more important than brute
    strength. In those set ings, black labor was something to be
    consumed, with a clear comprehension of return on investment.
    Food, housing, and physical care were bot om-line accounting
    considerations in a formula of pro t and loss, weighed primarily in
    terms of their e ect on chat el slave productivity rather than
    plantation harmony.
    On the enormous cot on plantations unfolding in the antebel um
    years across the malarial wasteland of the Mississippi Delta,
    absentee owners routinely left overseers in charge of smal armies
    of slaves. In an economic formula in which there was no pretense
    of paternalistic protection for slaves, the overseers drove them
    mercilessly.
    Frederick Law Olmsted, traveling through the South prior to the
    Civil War, wrote of the massive plantations of Alabama and
    Mississippi as places where black men and women "work harder
    and more unremit ingly" than the rest of slave country. "As
    property, Negro life and Negro vigor were general y much less
    encouraged than I had always before imagined them to be."7
    Another observer of Mississippi farms said that on the new
    plantations "everything has to bend, give way to large crops of
    cot on, land has to be cultivated wet or dry, Negroes to work hot or
    cold."8 Under these circumstances, slave owners came to accept that
    cold." Under these circumstances, slave owners came to accept that
    black laborers would also die quickly9 "The Negroes die o every
    few years, though it is said that in time each hand also makes
    enough to buy two more in his place," wrote planter James H.
    Ruf in in 1833.10
    An English traveler visiting the great plantations in the nal years
    of slavery described African Americans who "from the moment they
    are able to go a eld in the picking season til they drop worn out
    in the grave in incessant labor, in al sorts of weather, at al seasons
    of the year without any change or relaxation than is furnished by
    sickness, without the smal est hope of any improvement either in
    their condition, in their food, or in their clothing indebted solely to
    the forbearance and good temper of the overseer for exemption
    from terrible physical suf ering."11
    Even large-scale slave owners who directed their business
    managers to provide reasonable care for slaves nonetheless
    advocated harsh measures to maintain the highest level of
    production. "They must be ogged as seldom as possible yet always
    when necessary," wrote one.12
    An overseer's goal, a Delta planter said, was "to get as much work
    out of them as they can possibly perform. His skil consists in
    knowing exactly how hard they may be driven without
    incapacitating them for future exertion. The larger the plantation,
    the less chance there is, of course, of the owner's softening the rigor
    of the overseer, or the sternness of discipline by personal
    interference."13
    Scip saw those changes coming. In the 1830s, a water-driven
    cot on mil was constructed on