expert, if coerced, nature of enslaved people’s farm labor (Stewart 1996; Berry 2007; Kaye 2007).
While crops and environment cannot be fairly regarded as deterministic, the natural requirements of intensive rice, sugar, and cotton production were found in abundance in the antebellum South. The coastal Carolinas and Georgia had offered prime rice land since the colonial period. In the antebellum years, rice operations became more concentrated into fewer hands while spreading to new acreage. Some areas saw dramatic increases in production—rice output from the North Carolina low country increased by 124 percent from 1849 to 1859. Enslaved rice farmers intimately understood this crop developed by their ancestors. New overseers often learned the business from their charges. Relying on the task system, rice planters required laborers to construct ditches and canals. Parceling out the labor into tasks based on a set area of 5–7 acres epitomized the intersection of concepts of labor, time, and space for enslaved people. All of the work was done by hand except for the pounding, which was performed by mills that relied on the power of the receding tide. When the mills came to be powered by steam, enslaved people traded ditching work for labor harvesting pine to fuel the fire. Mart Stewart’s groundbreaking study of the Georgia coast showcases how enslaved people’s lives and work both shaped and were shaped by the landscape of rice culture. One important aspect of rice culture was the presence of uncultivated interstices that facilitated bondspeople’s autonomy away from sites of production. The landscape, routine, and management practices of their captors facilitated enslaved people’s claim of the bounty of nature for their own benefit—for example, to supplement their diet (Clifton 1985; Dusinberre 1996; Stewart 1996; Carney 2001).
Because the product had to be processed on-site, sugar production in the lower Mississippi Valley had always been capital-intensive, but planters realized returns that encouraged them to expand their operations in the antebellum period. While the gang system prevailed, slaveholders employed the task system when it suited. The methods and routines of raising and processing sugar cane continually advanced. Richard Follett shows how steam technology and the more efficient organization of the production routine imbued enslaved workers’ labor with some industrial character. Planters and underling managers increasingly subdivided and specialized the tasks. Enslaved sugar farmers and processors endured a grinding regime that required adaptability as much as strength. As in rice cultivation, it was not just enslaved people’s manpower but their knowledge and skill that developed the sugar economy. The mean annual output of a Louisiana sugar operation increased from 108 hogsheads in 1830 to 310 hogsheads in what Follett calls the “bumper crop” year of 1853. The rise was the result of expansion and increased productivity. Finally, Richard Follett’s study of Louisiana sugar cultivation found that, because profit-minded planters desired to incentivize their labor force, enslaved farmers enjoyed more opportunities to convert their “extra” time and effort to cash or goods (Follett 2005).
As conducive as sugar and rice production had always been to slave labor, it was cotton that breathed new life into slavery. The improvement in processing technology reenergized the system, which had seemed to many contemporaries as destined to die out. Scholars like Anthony Kaye have aptly labeled the cotton plantation expansion that arose after about 1820 the “second slavery.” This new, harsher, more capitalistic form of chattel slavery may have been unleashed by the new saw gin but was boosted by the availability of capital and fed by Indian removals. The second slavery relied on the expansion of western cotton acreage. It transformed former hinterlands or peripheries into centers of production. As with other antebellum agricultural products, innovation in crop varieties improved yields. Upland cotton, especially Mexican varieties, had become the mainstay by the 1840s (while sea island cotton remained in cultivation in the southeast). Planters experimented in order to find and develop plants with greater disease resistance, more fiber, and the tendency of the lint to cling to the boll, which reduced the risk associated with planting more than could be quickly harvested. Cotton plantation productivity rose in the antebellum period—faster than the productivity of American workers overall—but scholars offer differing explanations as to why. While Olmstead and Rhode attribute the increase to improved cotton varieties, Edward Baptist famously ascribed it to a “pushing system” that required enslaved harvesters to pick ever more cotton each day of the harvest (Gray 1933; Olmstead and Rhode 2008; Kaye 2009; Baptist 2014).
Olmstead and Rhode found that women’s picking was essential to the cotton harvest routine. In rice, women made up 60–80 percent of rice hands. One of the pioneers in the scholarship on free and enslaved black women’s labor, Jacqueline Jones demonstrated that slaveholders and their managers did not shrink from assigning enslaved women to so-called men’s work. Yet when whites directed bondswomen’s labor away from the crop, it was usually put toward a domestic task. Further, whites only trained men in skills like carpentry or blacksmithing, and relied on enslaved men to drive wagon teams, meaning that bondswomen were less likely to engage in farm tasks that took them away from the farm or plantation. At the same time, in bondspeople’s own household relationships they formed gendered ideas about labor. Stephanie Camp has emphasized bondswomen’s “second shift”—the work they did in their family’s cabin after the required work day ended. As mothers, bondswomen reproduced their captors’ investment; all aspects of their lives related to production. Even when they cared for their families, enslaved women added to their captors’ production (Jones 1985; Camp 2004; Berry 2007; Olmstead and Rhode 2008).
As chattel, what opportunities did enslaved people have to engage in market activity on their own terms? While scholars have worked for decades now to uncover details concerning what has been termed the “slaves’ economy,” Dylan Penningroth’s Claims of Kinfolk became the standard for using pension files and Southern Claims Commission records to piece together what enslaved people managed to acquire and trade, and what meaning they made of their formal and informal market activity. As we have discussed, Mart Stewart emphasized the ways in which enslaved rice farmers converted their surroundings into food and goods in this micro-economy, while Richard Follett found in the sugar fields of Louisiana a system in which slaveholders extracted profit by utilizing enslaved people’s desire to take part in the market. When opportunity presented itself, enslaved people engaged in both sanctioned and underground exchange. But as property themselves, at the end of the day any “concessions” by whites served overall as input into the staple crop production. Enslaved people’s toil and productivity was never truly their own; they were denied the wealth they created. In fact, that is precisely how the most recent scholarship on slavery has framed the story, in what the field has dubbed the new histories of capitalism. Calvin Schermerhorn’s recent overview of American slavery, Unrequited Toil, emphasizes all of the ways in which chattel slavery robbed African Americans and prevented the creation of generational wealth (McDonald 1993; Stewart 1996; Penningroth 2003; Follett 2005; Schermerhorn 2018).
The debate about the relationship between slavery and capitalism is an old one. Most scholars would agree with John Clegg that “something fundamental changed” in antebellum America. Historians have long employed theories of capitalism as useful ways to try to understand that change. The new histories of capitalism, however, do not simply rehash previous conversations. Rather than establishing specific parameters for what counts as a capitalism (much to the frustration of their critics) and testing to see whether slavery in the American South fit, the new studies emphasize the capitalistic character of slavery. That is to say that these recent studies emphasize efficiency in allocating resources, highly regimented routines, modern financial instruments, and painstaking accounting (Martin 2010; Schermerhorn 2015; Beckert and Rockman 2016; Clegg 2020).
Relatedly, historians have used much ink on the topic of the coming of the Civil War but have not quite agreed upon exactly how the crisis connected to diverging ideas about agriculture. Historians have long since dispensed with the view that the Civil War was caused by a crisis between an agrarian South and an urban manufacturing North. In fact, both societies were made up largely of farmers. Southern income and northern income both grew in close comparison in antebellum years. Of course, the essential issue was slavery, but the question for agricultural historians and historians of the Civil War era has been to understand just how slavery (and its opposition) figured into Americans’ ideals about agriculture, identity, and
