“any child, white or black, of ordinary capacity, may be taught, in a few weeks, to be expert in any part of a cotton factory. . . .”
—William Gregg, 18451
A still-popular explanation for the lack of industrial development in the pre–Civil War South is that the mass of enslaved agricultural workers, devoid of any talent for industrial employment, confined the region to traditional labor systems with only minor excursions into economic diversity and industrial development. For some time historians have linked the South’s labor system with a persistent premodern economic outlook. More recently, however, a more focused examination of the work and economic activities of enslaved agricultural workers on the eve of the Civil War has revealed a distinct bent toward the modern, suggesting that the absence of a modern-minded workforce provides an unsatisfactory explanation for the South’s industrial underdevelopment.2 Over the last decade or two the scholarship on Southern slavery has revealed not only an abundance of examples of industrial activity on antebellum farms and plantations, but also a noticeable commercial savvy among enslaved workers who participated in an informal or “internal economy”: the trading and selling of surplus goods they had produced for themselves in small gardens provided by their owners.3
Having succeeded to a remarkable extent in encouraging their workers to “grab a stake” in slavery, masters fought a losing battle to curtail burgeoning entrepreneurship that went from cabin to cabin and throughout the wider cabin community as bondmen and bondwomen expanded the terrain of work and mastered new tasks on farms and plantations and in villages, towns, and cities.4 By the eve of the Civil War, the South’s enslaved workers had or were acquiring the economic and market skills necessary to advance their interests in a slowly modernizing South.5 Constituting an increasingly flexible labor force eager to acquire new skills and opportunities, these laborers are more usefully examined as a distinct and growing group of Southerners who embraced modernization. Historians need no longer confine their search to a few exceptional instances; recent scholarly focus on the activities of enslaved workers suggests that the distance—geographical, economical, and social—between skilled and unskilled workers and between town and country was shrinking as more and more enslaved people, taking advantage of diverse work opportunities, found a way into an expanding internal economy. Increasingly sophisticated and incorporating more and more people, goods, and services, the internal economy extended the reach of individuals and cabin communities sufficiently to narrow if not completely erase economic and cultural differences between rural and urban settings, as well as between skilled and unskilled workers. As David Goldfield has shown, the boundary between city and country was indeed “permeable.”6
Studies of enslaved workers and the internal economy, in raising important questions about slaves’ role or potential role in the pace of Old South modernization, have shaken the old image of the South. Despite this, there remains a tendency to identify any industrial activity in the South as exceptional, and the image of agricultural “slave gangs” remains the norm. Given such preconceptions, the thousands of enslaved agricultural workers who made the transition to industrial work have puzzled contemporaries and scholars alike. It has become standard to focus on exceptional individuals, groups, and places while seldom seeking to locate their broader social and economic contexts.7 Historians of the South have tended to disaggregate the cabin community and its values, separating them by town and country, class and status, despite the fact that such neat divides—sometimes imposed for practical reasons—did not always exist. For even quarters on the most isolated plantations, such as some plantations of central Georgia, could establish and maintain significant economic and social connections with towns and cities.8 Rather than exceptionalizing outstanding accomplishments by enslaved workers, for example, we would do better to consider enslaved workers on some kind of blurred continuum from artisans and skilled workers (who hired out their time) to the spiritless gang workers (who labored with little respite and few positive incentives). In the broad middle, of course, lay the vast majority whose labor was organized within a task-and-garden system that encouraged the production of extra provisions for themselves.9
Over the last two decades the working life of the South’s enslaved workers has garnered a good deal of attention, with particular interest in the operation of a task-and-garden system. In its most sophisticated configuration, plantation managers would assign each worker a measured amount of work for a given period of time, usually a working day; once the task was completed the worker was at liberty to tend to his or her small garden, on which the family cultivated a variety of foodstuffs. In addition, provision gardens, which ranged in size from small areas around their cabins to five or more acres in remote corners of the plantation, supplemented the workers’ food allowance and provided surplus that could be traded or sold. Although a primary feature on South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations, the practice of tasking spread well beyond the rice-producing regions of the South and encompassed a wide variety of labor activities on the plantation.10 At its most successful, the task-and-garden system came to represent an acceptance on the part of both enslaver and enslaved of a degree of trust and mutual responsibility. Treating the workers as individuals and giving them responsibility for a particular piece of land, the task system did not require the close supervision usually associated with forced gang labor. Tasked workers were not only expected to complete their assignment, they were expected to do it well. In turn, owners were obliged to respect the workers’ “nonwork” time—indeed, this time “became sacrosanct,” and the workers’ right to use this time as they saw fit (within certain parameters) was duly acknowledged by planters.11
The popularity of the task-and-garden system among planters, coupled with the material and spiritual rewards the workers could reap from the system, facilitated its spread to other crops and other regions. The task-and-garden system was, however, only the most sophisticated expression of pervasive work-and-garden-systems under which enslaved workers of all classes and regions were encouraged to work efficiently for their owners first and then for themselves as time became available. As a general rule, enslaved workers throughout the South were allowed time each week to work their own gardens. In addition, former bondsmen recalled having worked “extra” hours on neighboring farms and plantations for which they were paid. Thus, a growing number of enslaved workers were provided, in a variety of ways, with the opportunity to produce food surpluses and earn cash for themselves and their families.12 The accumulation of food surpluses was the primary means by which enslaved people entered the internal economy, wherein they could engage in the increasingly sophisticated trading of goods and services—commercial activities that expanded to include their fellows in a widening economic and social network of cabin communities, connecting an expanding group of people, enslaved and free, white and black, rural and urban.
The production of extra work performed by ordinary workers was the currency that fueled the underground economy—with all its associated rewards and risks. Armed with a few pounds of cotton, rice, or corn, grown in a cabin garden, the least skilled worker could enter the internal economy and trade his or her goods for a desired item that might otherwise remain out of reach. Importantly, John Campbell writes: “As market participants—who produced, sold and purchased their own property—slaves temporarily experienced one of the central attributes of freedom: the purchase and sale of labor power and the enjoyment of its fruits.” Here, then, was a potent challenge to the traditional ways of the rural South—a first, and necessary, step toward modernity. As Joseph Reidy makes clear, by trading a portion of their own produce beyond the plantation, “slaves crossed the boundary into the corrupting world of commerce that most masters wished to keep impermeable.” In so doing, they satisfied not only “a variety of material and psychological needs,” they also challenged the ideological and legal tenets on which Southern slavery rested. Contained in these numerous, small, bold acts of resistance was an inherent opposition to an oppressive system, under which the enslaved workers’ natural instincts toward economic independence and property accumulation were thwarted or, at best, forcefully restricted. Agricultural workers who participated in the internal economy, in challenging the region’s dominant values, displayed to their fellows the kind of economic and social value system requisite for workers in a modern (free) society. Furthermore, in discriminating which goods they chose to trade with white Southerners, “some slaves evinced sophisticated market behavior,” suggests Jeff Forret, “carefully calculating which items were best suited for trade.” To become successful traders in the internal economy, these market participants, with little or no formal training, acquired what Kathleen Mary Hilliard describes as “consumer skills”: numeracy, marketing pricing, and debt and credit negotiation.13
Emphasizing the work and commercial activities of enslaved people, scholars have challenged many previously held assumptions; there remains a tendency, however, to focus on certain groups, such as those hired out as skilled industrial workers. In contradistinction to the vast majority of the enslaved, these (largely) urban workers reaped economic and psychological rewards denied to their rural fellows and appear, somehow, unconnected with the inhabitants and values of rural cabin communities.14 It is now abundantly clear, however, that whatever benefits were available to enslaved people on the eve of the Civil War, they were not neatly located within one particular class to the exclusion of all others. Furthermore, as Forret argues, the success of the few at one end of a broad spectrum—the skilled and those who hired their labor—might be shared by the whole as the “sale of their labor enabled all members of the slave community . . . to face their masters as equals in a market shorn of racial, social, and class hierarchies.”15 An enslaved population—knit together by family, race, class, and a common need to restrict its economic and political communication to the trusted among its own—produced a growing black community with expanding geographical boundaries and, as Susan O’Donovan suggests, “the efficacy and power of the networks of subterranean communication that linked quarter to field to workshop.” Writing in 1862, Georgia planter Richard F. Lyon described black networks that no doubt were in operation long before the outbreak of war, but which only became visible once the plantation order came under military attack. As Lyon wrote to Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown: “A negro or negroes from any part of the state . . . will meet in Savannah, where the negroes & traitorous white men are in constant communication . . . the negroes there are as fully informed . . . an opportunity will thus be afforded them of talking with one another of their wants & wishes. . . .”16 The enslaved used their networks of communication and exchange to distribute benefits gained by the skilled elite to the larger slave community. By the eve of Civil War, there were, among the enslaved population, clear indications of a positive disposition to work in order to obtain increased access to an expanding internal economy. At several junctures and on a variety of terrains, some more visible than others, the behavior of the enslaved reflected a decidedly modern outlook as they negotiated their way through the rigors of property accumulation and participation in an increasingly sophisticated internal economy.17
Whether or not an individual was a full participant in this clandestine world of the enslaved, it no doubt provided a worldview and ways of understanding self, family, and community different from those typically encouraged by plantation masters. As enslaved people moved from place to place, new ideas and economic and social techniques likely returned with them and filtered into the community. It is not surprising, then, that plantation managers feared “strange Negroes”—never sure what they might bring with them—and took care to keep corrupting influences out of the home place. However, the very demands of plantation management made it virtually impossible for owners to quarantine their enslaved workers from strange, unfamiliar people and ideas. Armed only with the weapon of gossip, then, hired workers and others exposed to more industrial style working relationships with temporary white managers could easily reconfigure work relationships back on the plantation. If, as Charles Dew demonstrates, enslaved ironworkers knowing full well that they could “get the ear of [the] master” by pleading “ironmaster brutality,” it seems that in industrial work situations, as well as on farms and plantations, the “slaves’ wishes . . . counted for something.”18
The two scholars most responsible for the recent focus on the labor and economic activities of rural bondmen, Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, describe work as a double-edged sword for the enslaved, but of crucial importance, as it provided all kinds of positive benefits, the like of which has only recently been explored with any depth and sensitivity. What is now clear is that slaves’ broader, and increasingly varied, work experiences shaped the way the enslaved viewed the many terrains on which they labored. For enslaved people throughout the South, work was full of economic, social, and psychological meaning. Placing the world of work of the enslaved at the center helps to better understand the institution itself, as well as the African-American experience under slavery. The cultural and psychological relevancy of the work the enslaved performed for themselves has been elevated above that performed for their owners alone. Increasingly, scholars focus their attention on the emotionally liberating aspects of the enslaved workers’ own labor and commercial activities. As Lawrence McDonnell asserts, for example, “few incidents of slave life rivaled market relations for political and psychological meaning. Commodity exchange and property accumulation, however trivial . . . transformed real relations . . . within the slave community itself.” Similarly, Roderick McDonald found that their participation in the internal economy “proved cathartic. . . . The dimensions of independence, responsibility, and decision making inherent in the system would, in themselves, have held rewards. . . . [I]t was a source of satisfaction.”19
This chapter argues in part against the exceptionalization of both the South and enslaved Southerners.20 It is clear that occupational training was systematically denied rural slaves; only about 6 percent of adult male slaves held occupations above those of agricultural worker. When one considers the social status accrued to the skilled worker from grateful owners, one begins to see a scholarly pattern: exceptionalize those who fared well and critique the vast majority. Clearly an individual was better placed to combat the evils of slavery armed with some skills and specialized know-how, but it is a distortion to suggest that this small group alone had the wherewithal to advance and protect its interests. The concern here is that many scholars have emphasized those singular, consciousness-raising, commercial-exchange experiences—as if they were only rare “moments,” fragile and fleeting—with little sense of their broader and cumulative affects on the individual, group, and community. Given that these emotionally powerful moments often extended beyond the individual actors, we should avoid exceptionalizing them at the expense of the larger group. This chapter follows the more recent, alternative scholarly approach and seeks to examine the enslaved on their own terrain and, wherever possible, on their own terms. In this regard, it acknowledges the advice of the late John Blassingame and, more recently, Michael Johnson, who warned against the tendency to create and reinforce artificial divisions among the enslaved people, often self-servingly imposed by slaveholders. Dylan Penningroth has added his plea for an examination of black lives on black terms.21
By the eve of the Civil War, measured by the growing number of enslaved people who were involved in diverse work on farms, plantations, shops and factories across the South—from agricultural laborers confined to field work, to nonskilled workers who hired themselves out daily or annually, to fully skilled workers—enslaved workers participated in a Southern economy that was, sometimes reluctantly, acquiring elements of a modern mentality.22 Much of this change is revealed in the expanding range of enslaved work experiences, and the resulting shift in their attitude to performing work that promised some tangible economic and social reward.
The constant movement of its members, and a growing participation in the internal economy, brought into the cabin community a steady flow of new commodities, new people, and (with them) new ways of thinking about and responding to enslavement.23 Inasmuch as the more mobile individuals on the plantation (skilled artisans, coachmen, wagoners, messengers) moved between different social spaces, they not only were conduits and purveyors of the ideas, values, and behaviors prevalent in urban settings, but also were themselves concrete evidence of the immediate rewards of industrial work, providing powerful endorsements of the strategies necessary to aspire to similar positions on farms or in towns. Not surprisingly, in his exhaustive study of the mortality schedules of the 1860 U.S. federal census manuscripts, Michael Johnson concludes: “[D]espite skilled slaves’ more desirable and rewarding work, the thousands of slave narratives contain no evidence that field hands resented the prerogatives of skilled craftsmen—in vivid contrast to field hands’ views of house servants. The narratives’ silence about uppity or unworthy skilled slaves suggests that field hands saw craftsmen as more attractive models of behavior than house servants who were expected to bow and scrape.”24
Hiring and other economic opportunities pursued by the enslaved were often only small steps toward freedom. Those who held any realistic hope of self-purchase had to command incomes sizable enough to persuade owners to enter into arrangements that might bring about that desired end. While artisans and some hired workers could shape their working conditions and enjoy some control over their income—and even accumulate quite considerable sums of money—for the vast majority of enslaved workers, the goal was not self-purchase, but merely the acquisition of desired goods and services and the emotional satisfaction that came with the process that led to their procurement.25 As such, a primary result for enslaved people of laboring within work-and-garden systems and participating in an internal economy was an emotional means to improve the quality of their daily lives and so combat the more debilitating aspects of their enslavement. Not surprisingly, then, cabin communities encouraged their members to grab any opportunity to diversify their work routines, learn new skills, and increase their work options. These enslaved workers were predisposed to respond positively to new work opportunities—the more sophisticated, the better.
On cotton farms and plantations there were clear signs of excursions into the industrial sphere. The economic activities of South Carolina’s Michael Gramling, a cotton planter who owned thirty-eight bondmen and women, demonstrates the close proximity and easy combination of agricultural and industrial enterprise—as well as the willingness, even desire, of the enslaved to embrace new work experiences. In producing “mudsills” for the local railroad, Gramling’s enslaved workers, with some ease, made the transition from agricultural to industrial work. For a felled tree that measured thirty-six feet long by seven inches wide and sixteen inches across the stump, Gramling was paid “at 2 cents the running foot.” He delegated this task to two of his workers, Anthony and Tom. The former would be tasked “15 pieces a week” and the latter would be tasked only 12 pieces. “I make this difference,” Gramling explained, “because Tom has never hewn before and Anthony has.”26 Like many other masters, Gramling held little fear of industrialization and willingly embraced modernization (manifested in this case by the rationalization of labor time into piece rates), if only on his terms—economic development, “plantation style.”
Gramling’s encounter with the modern provides only a small-scale example of the ease with which Southern planters could incorporate industrial activities into the rhythm of plantation life. On a much larger scale, Richmond’s William Weaver combined his iron-making operations and farming operations, resulting in a “constant interchange of slave labor between industrial and agricultural tasks.” Dew suggests that this was the pattern at “furnaces and forges throughout the South.” A similar arrangement existed in other industries, most noticeably in textiles. As E. M. Lander pointed out over half a century ago, cotton mills, typically established on or near the plantations, “were financed and run by local planters and merchants, many of whom were large slave-holders.” As such, industrialization was more likely to flourish when it accommodated agriculture and was organized as an appendage to and in tandem with the plantation system. Diversification of this kind encountered little opposition from the Southern nationalists and Whigs, who saw no danger in industrialization so long as it remained subordinate to the plantation system.27
As important as were the financial rewards that came to rural workers who, like Gramling’s Anthony and Tom, performed industrial tasks for the railroad, another significant benefit was the opportunity to interact with others, enslaved and free, who resided in nearby towns and cities. As David Goldfield’s study of Richmond’s railroads suggests, although many of the bondmen who were owned or employed by the railroad companies worked in the countryside, “they lived in and contributed to the life of the city.”28
The disposition to work, visible among a growing number of enslaved people on Southern farms and plantations, did not emerge from financial and social rewards alone; a crucial factor was the cabin community’s ability to reward productive members and to punish those who spurned opportunities to increase their occupational skills. There are numerous examples of parents and grandparents passing along occupational skills, literacy, and numeracy; some even managed to bequeath their accumulated wealth.29
The case of Edward Brown and William Drayton illustrates how some enslaved families and communities provided a social environment that encouraged hard work and property accumulation. Brown, a young man under slavery, had been left a mule by his grandfather and had “used the mule as his own property for two or three years before he left to join the Union Army.” Drayton’s father had died and “left me the means with which I bought the Jenny mule.” His father had entrusted “the means and property he left for his children” to his oldest brother, and Drayton had purchased the mule on the advice of his uncle and paid in three installments: the first was $100 in gold and silver, then a second payment of $50 “all in silver,” and a final payment of $100 in “state bank bills.”30 As stunning as might be the extent of property ownership among this family, their attitude towards work, wealth accumulation, and provision for the future are, if nothing else, modern. As rural workers in Beaufort, South Carolina, the actions of the Browns suggests that such modern outlook and behavior among the enslaved were not limited to artisans, skilled, or hired-out industrial workers.
As eager as planters were to find new ways of profiting from their enslaved workers, the enslaved too had an eye to their own economic interests. If the South was to diversify its agriculture and develop more manufacturing, it would require technical flexibility from both enslaver and enslaved. Antebellum masters, however, seemed unclear as to what exactly they desired from their enslaved workers: dependency, talent, versatility, obedience, or merely sufficient flexibility to respond to management’s dictates. Renowned agricultural reformer Edmund Ruffin of Virginia was determined to realize the South’s independence. Ruffin, however, seems to have been intellectually incapable of recognizing the abilities of his black labor force, which had been trained according to his precise instructions. His biographer suggests that once slavery “became a closed issue,” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, some planters were unable to accept that their black laborers had the capacity and willingness to learn the new techniques that agricultural reform demanded. Experimenting with a complicated fertilization system, Ruffin could not believe that Jem Sykes, his highly competent black foreman, could take responsibility for the new tasks at hand, much less display what were quite basic cognitive skills. He was taken aback to learn that Sykes had had the wherewithal to identify and acknowledge the improvements Ruffin’s reforms had brought to the plantation. While gratified that Sykes gave him the credit for the increased productiveness of the plantation, Ruffin was nonetheless surprised that “the slave had the wit to do so.” He noted that he “did not expect a negro, even one of superior intelligence as he is, to look back to causes so remote, & of such slow & and gradual action.” Here was the major obstacle in the way of Southern diversification and improvement—a Southern racist mind-set from which naturally followed an inability to “see” black intellectual and mental capacity, and the determination that “slavery was necessary to make blacks work.”31 Of course, planters like Ruffin were not unique; and, in all fairness to them, enslaved people often deliberately hid their skills and talents from a white world unaccustomed to black people straying too far from their traditionally assigned, intellectually subordinate roles.
A short account of slavery written in the 1920s by Susan Bradford Eppes, the daughter of a former slaveholder, reveals the concealed talents of several enslaved people and the kinds of work they performed on a regular basis under white supervision—work that often went unrecognized, unacknowledged, and unrewarded. Eppes recounted the story of Henry Fort, who had worked as “stoker for the engineer” in the mill. Once the white workers had enlisted in the Confederacy, the expectation was that the mill would have to close. Henry, however, asked permission to “fire up.” He was told that it would be of no use to “fire up without an engineer,” to which Henry replied that he had been “a’studyin’ an’ a’studyin’ on dat ingin’ a long time—an’ I kin run her jis’ as well as John Grady.” Furthermore, the stoker informed “Marse Ned,” “me an’ Mac an’ Peter kin run dat whole concern if you will keep the books an’ will let us pick out de helpers we wants.” According to Eppes, Master Ned was both “surprised and pleased, but also somewhat doubtful.” Questioned as to their ability to run the mill, Henry repeated that he ran the engine as well as the white engineer, John Grady, adding that Peter “is run the saw fur Wheeler when you didn’t know nuthin’ erbout it—an Mac is jis’ as good a miller as you want to see.” Mrs. Eppes reported that the “new force was put on, to their great joy, and barring a few, a very few, mistakes, all went well.”32 For whatever reason, many white Southerners found it difficult to concede that black, enslaved labor could be “as well adapted to mechanical employment as to agriculture.”33 Despite these attitudes, we can only imagine the satisfaction felt by Henry, Mac, and Peter at their ability to “run dat whole concern.” Both these examples reveal the desire and ability of the enslaved to perform complicated industrial tasks, as well as the lengths to which many had to go in order to convince their owners that, as a racial group and as individuals, they had the mental capacity and predisposition to perform a wide range of agricultural and industrial tasks. As John Blassingame suggests, many would have looked to and found the recognition and reward for their skills and talents in their own community—both the quarters and the broader cabin community.
An increasingly diverse work life and its associated benefits triggered a mind-set that included a disposition to work and a value system in antebellum cabin communities that elevated those who worked hard and provided much-needed goods and services for their families and the community at large. As enslaved workers took advantage of opportunities to expand the range and quality of their working lives and acquire new skills, these cabin communities took on features of the larger, slaveholders’ world. On the ever-changing landscape of work and labor, enslaved men and women in cabin communities all across the rural South displayed an economic and social mind-set that was decidedly modern in its benign rebellion against traditionalism as well as in its pragmatism.
In the last decades before the Civil War, few enslaved people were in a position to purchase themselves and/or their family members. As such, it serves no useful purpose to gauge their economic success solely on markers such as the ability to self-purchase. Far more significant was the multilayered meanings that certain kinds of work held for the enslaved as individuals and as a community. As Christopher Morris has suggested, by serving the economic interests of their owners, the enslaved not only took steps toward advancing their own interests, but they also embraced some of the language and practices, if not the underlying values, prevalent in the public world of their owners. For example, ex-slave Albert Todd recalled that “work was a religion we was taught.” In many regards, the enslaved were instinctively and often deliberately modern. The values of the marketplace, absent interference from disgruntled white slaveholders, offered to the enslaved the promise of self-realization, if not freedom; even if the poorest enslaved person stumbled into the commercial arena, he or she would have found a means to participate as equal members in an exchange of goods and services and, as a consequence, to experience the associated psychological benefits. Without these opportunities, short of violent rebellion, the enslaved population would have been ill-equipped to pursue their own economic and social interests.34
Much of the recent scholarship provides evidence of a disposition among enslaved plantation workers to work themselves away from, if not out of, slav-ery’s worst elements. As such, decades before the outbreak of the Civil War, these people were well prepared to make the transition to a more diversified agriculture on home farms and plantations and to industrial labor in the South’s factories and mines. Not surprisingly, and in large part as a result of this disposition to labor, there was little delay in the Confederacy’s ability to rev-up its industrial machine.35
Most slaveowners (and not a few scholars today) were convinced that “illegal” goods fueled the internal economy. As their commercial activity became increasingly sophisticated, the internal economy expanded and attracted more “clients.” Whatever their background or location, these people could exploit their work opportunities to participate in an economy that promised a widening variety of rewards.36 Of course, not everyone who traded goods did so with honestly acquired items. In the absence of legal access to a stake in the internal economy, some were tempted to use other methods. Not surprisingly, the line between honest work and illegal behavior was sometimes blurred.37
Antebellum court trial records reveal a clandestine world that exposes much about the values and desires of enslaved men and women.38 The latter group, though too often excluded from discussions of “skilled” workers and similarly under-represented in the antebellum court records, nevertheless, also engaged in the internal economy to improve their economic and social position. For example, women armed with tailoring skill could provide extra income for themselves and their families. Trial records also reveal the extent to which the internal economy rested on a principle of free-market transactions—here, work was directly exchanged for compensation. Daniel and Abram, charged in Spartanburg with stealing two bushels of wheat from Reverend Thomas Curtin and two more from their master, explained how they transported the wheat to the house of Sally and how Daniel “sold her a part of it for sewing.” The theft of property provided Daniel with the means to pay Sally for her skills—he traded the wheat for her work. The exchange, here as elsewhere, is a direct, commercial transaction: Daniel “sold” her a part of the stolen wheat “for sewing.” No doubt other women, like Sally, provided a crucial service in the internal economy by transforming an easily recognizable item into a more nondescript but more valuable commodity.39 The creation of widely valued commodities delivered not only cash but also pride and satisfaction for those who made and sold them. These psychic rewards of the internal economy were embedded elements of a modern consciousness that not only fuelled the internal economy, but also shaped the attitude of the enslaved to their own work—and the very idea of work itself as a means to a desired end. The male’s everyday need for what might be termed “female skills”—sewing, tailoring, and doctoring—rendered women like Sally a far greater presence in the cabin community and its internal economy than their white counterparts in the formal economy.40 This pattern helps explain the complementary, egalitarian character of marriages among the enslaved, described by Deborah Gray White, wherein the male and female roles were “different yet so critical to slave survival that they were of equal necessity.” To participate in the internal economy, Sally relied upon these opportunities to market her skills so as to increase her income.41
The steady expansion of the antebellum South’s economy and the many attempts at agricultural diversification demanded that the enslaved labor force take on new jobs, skills, and responsibilities. In turn, work as artisans, domestic servants, teamsters, and the like offered slaves opportunities and with it a broader “vision” of the world around them—a world that ever expanded as members took on new responsibilities. The more skilled slaves became, the more likely they were to be hired out, further exposing them to a larger, changing world.
Southern slaveholders, bombarded both externally and internally by a rapidly modernizing world, had the difficult task of monitoring and controlling economic and social changes while trying to keep from their enslaved populations those ideas and habits that threatened the authority of the so-called master class. In general, they failed as the ideas and practices which, through these newly skilled and modern-minded workers, infused the internal economy, and argued powerfully argued against human inequality and slavery. On the eve of the Civil War, for the vast majority of the enslaved, the overwhelming disposition was to work. From the Brown family who looked to the future and bequeathed funds to their descendants, or to the majority who looked to more immediate realization of their extra efforts via their internal economy, the enslaved were positively disposed to labor demands placed before them, so long as they promised some economic and social reward. If there was an obstacle to the spread of market culture throughout the South, it was the region’s political and intellectual elite, not the enslaved.
NOTES
1. William Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry or, An Inquiry into the Expediency of Establishing Cotton Manufactures in South Carolina (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845), 21.
2. Winfred B. Moore, Jr., Joseph F. Tripp, and Lyon G. Tyler, eds., Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Society (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 31–44.
3. Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 2.
4. Lawrence T. McDonnell, “Money Knows No Master: Market Relations and the American Slave Community,” in Moore, Tripp, and Tyler, Developing Dixie, 31–44; Roderick McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 79. On the various incentives used to instill in the enslaved workers a “Protestant ethic,” see Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 147. The “cabin community” lay at the heart of the broader neighborhood community in which enslaved people interacted socially and economically with one another, as well as with free black and white people. It was, as John Blassingame described, the major source of values such as mutual cooperation, service to the community, and respect for family and place. The cabin community was the very pulse of the expanding neighborhood described so well by Anthony Kaye. See Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Anthony Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
5. Kathleen Mary Hilliard, “Spending in Black and White: Race, Slavery and Consumer Values in the Antebellum South” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2006); David E. Paterson, “Slavery, Slaves, and Cash in a Georgia Village, 1825–1865,” Journal of Southern History 75 (November 2009): 879–930.
6. David Goldfield, Region, Race and Cities: Interpreting the Urban South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 106; Kaye, Joining Places, 151.
7. Shearer Davis Bowman, “Industrialization and Economic Development in the South,” in Global Perspective on Industrial Transformation in the American South, ed. Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 84; Charles B. Dew, “Disciplining Slave Ironworkers in the Antebellum South: Coercion, Conciliation, and Accommodation,” American Historical Review 79 (April 1974): 393–418; Midori Takagi, “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction”: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999).
8. Paterson, “Slavery, Slaves, and Cash,” 884; Susan O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
9. Paterson, “Slavery, Slaves, and Cash,” 928. See also Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 1–48; Larry E. Hudson, Jr., “To Have and to Hold”: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).
10. Philip D. Morgan, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Low Country Blacks, 1700 to 1860,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (October 1982): 566, 575. See also Hudson, “To Have and to Hold,” chap. 2; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 12.
11. John Campbell, “As ‘A Kind of Freeman’?: Slaves’ Market-Related Activities in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860,” in The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 162, 146.
12. McDonald, Economy and Material Culture; Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 120–123; Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Berlin and Morgan, Cultivation and Culture, 1–48; Hudson, “To Have and to Hold.”
13. Campbell, “As ‘A Kind of Freeman’?” 131; Joseph P. Reidy, “Obligation and Right: Patterns of Labor, Subsistence and Exchange in the Cotton Belt of Georgia, 1790–1860,” in Berlin and Morgan, Slaves’ Economy, 154;. Jeff Forret, “Slaves, Poor Whites and the Underground Economy of the Rural Carolinas,” Journal of Southern History 70 (November 2004): 792, 803; Hilliard, “Spending in Black and White,” 85, 89.
14. James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877–1984 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 8; Claudia Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820–1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 121. Goldin identifies a close correlation between increasing demand for agricultural slaves and a decline in the urban population.
15. Jeff Forret, Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 199.
16. Lyon quoted in O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 80.
17. According to Charles Ball, enslaved people looked for opportunities to leave their owner’s fields to find paid work opportunities elsewhere, especially on Sundays. Charles Ball, Fifty Years In Chains (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 166, 187,272, 275; John Campbell, “As ‘A Kind of Freeman’?: Slaves’ Market - Related Activities in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1800 - 1860,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 131, 134, 135; and Christopher Morris, “The Articulation of Two Worlds: The Master-Slave Relationship Reconsidered,” Journal of American History 85 (1998): 982–1007.
18. See Berlin and Morgan, Slaves’ Economy, 1; McDonnell, “Money Knows no Master,” 79; Follett, The Sugar Masters, 199. My concern here is that McDonnell and others tend to identify those consciousness raising commercial exchanges moments, but often only as “moments” fragile and fleeting with little sense of their broader and cumulative affects on the group and the community. Given that these emotionally powerful moments could extend beyond the individual actors we should avoid exceptionalizing them and the individuals involved at the expense of the larger group. As Morris makes clear, “the interests of masters and slaves often overlapped and reciprocated.” See Morris, “The Articulation of Two Worlds, 986.
19. McDonald, Economy and Material Culture, 79; Berlin and Morgan, Slaves’ Economy, 1; McDonnell, “Money Knows No Master,” 79; Follett, Sugar Masters, 199.
20. This tendency is evident in the work of Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 15. More recently, see John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 155–156.
21. John Blassingame, “Status and Social Structure in the Slave Community: Evidence From New Sources,” in Perspectives and Irony in American Slavery, ed. Harry P. Owens, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1976), 137–188; Michael P. Johnson, “Work, Culture, and the Slave Community: Slave Occupations in the Cotton Belt in 1860,” Labor History 27 (Summer 1986): 325–355; Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7.
22. See, for example, David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).
23. Anthony E. Kaye, “‘In the Neighborhood’: Towards a Human Geography of U.S. Slave Society,” Southern Spaces, September 3, 2008, http://southernspaces.org/2008/neighborhood-towards-human-geography-us-slave-society (accessed October 2010).
24. Johnson, “Work, Culture, and the Slave Community,” 348.
25. Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Dew, “Disciplining Slave Ironworkers,” 393–418.
26. Michael Gramling, Plantation Journal, entry for March 1846, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Susie King Taylor, A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs: Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops, late 1st South Carolina Volunteers (1902; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1968), 176. Evidence from the economic activities of the enslaved from the sugar regions is in Follett, Sugar Masters, 122, 123; McDonald, Economy and Material Culture, 60.
27. Industrialization and the use of skilled black workers were widely embraced when Southern planters merely extended the geography of the plantation economy to incorporate and invest in industrial activities. See E. M. Lander, “Slave Labor in South Carolina Cotton Mills,” Journal of Negro History 38 (April 1953): 161–173, 164; Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 30. For a more recent example, see Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy, 107.
28. Dew, “Disciplining Slave Ironworkers,” 396. See also Goldfield, Region, Race and Cities, 108.
29. Hilliard, “Spending in Black and White,” 85, 89.
30. Testimonies of William Izzard, claim no. 10096 (1876), and E. Brown, claim no. 21768 (1876), Southern Claims Commission, Approved Claims, 1871–1880, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, record group 217, boxes 236–244, National Archives, Washington, D.C. See also Ira Berlin et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 1: The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 140–141.
31. William M. Mathew, Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 57, 59, 206, 181; Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).
32. Susan Bradford Eppes (Mrs. Nicholas Ware Eppes), The Negro of the Old South: A Bit of Period History (Chicago: Joseph G. Branch, 1925), 108–109.
33. Robert R. Russell, “The General Effects of Slavery upon Southern Economic Progress,” Journal of Southern History 4 (February 1938): 48. See also Dew, Bond of Iron.
34. Christopher Morris, “The Articulation of Two Worlds: The Master-Slave Relationship Reconsidered,” Journal of American History 85 (December 1998): 982–1007; Johnson, “Work, Culture, and the Slave Community,” 325 (Todd quoted); Takagi, “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction,” 2.
35. Morgan, “Work and Culture”; Hudson, “To Have and to Hold”; Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm the Slaves During the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 62.
36. See Larry E. Hudson Jr., “‘All that Cash’: Work and Status in the Slave Quarters,” in Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South, ed. Larry E. Hudson Jr. (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1994), 77–94. Peter Berger seems to have anticipated these outcomes; as he noted, modernity has a tendency to fundamentally uproot “beliefs, values, and even the emotional texture of life.” See Berger, Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 107.
37. Alex Lichtenstein, “‘That Disposition to Theft with which They Have Been Branded’: Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law,” Journal of Social History 21 (Spring 1988): 413–440; McDonnell, “Money Knows No Master,” 31–44; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 608.
38. Anderson Magistrates and Freeholders Court, case 176, December 30, 1845, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia. For the operation and organization of the Magistrates and Freeholders Court, see Philip Racine, “The Spartanburg District Magistrates and Freeholders Court, 1824–1865,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 87 (October 1986): 197–212.
39. Spartanburg Magistrates and Freeholders Court, case 102, September 3, 1849, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia.
42. For distinctions between “informal” and “formal” economies, see Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work, 2–3.
41. Fett, Working Cures; Blassingame, “Status and Social Structure,” 151; Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Diana Ramey Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Deborah Gray White, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?”: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 158.