Some slaves were able to buy their freedom -- this also varied with time and local law. It became harder in the decades before the civil war approached. Douglass bought his own freedom with the proceeds of his best-selling autobiography and his speaking tours on behalf of abolitionism -- not from his hiring out as a wage working slave.
How much hired-out slaves got in wages probably depended on their level of skill -- a skilled carpenter or smith or stonemason then s now could get more than an unskilled farm laborer of any race. They probably did not get paid as much as their skilled white counterparts, though.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Kara-Murza also makes the astonishing (to me anyway)
> claim that slaves received more monetary
> compensation
> tham white plantation hirelings. I wasn't aware that
> slaves even got wages -- but if slaves were able to
> buy their freedom, as I think they were, I suppose
> it
> follows they must have received SOMETHING. I find it
> hard to believe that it was more than white farm
> laborers though.
>
> I suppose the superiority in efficiency on the part
> of
> slaves might be because they had lived often on the
> plantation all or most of their lives and so knew
> well
> how to work there????
>
> --- andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > There was a big debate around this about 25 years
> > ago. Some Chicago Nobel Memorial Prize winning
> > economist, , I forget his name, North, something
> > like
> > that? he won the prize later, and a collaborate
> > published a book called Time On The Cross and a
> > followup book in which he argued that slave labor
> > was
> > pretty efficient, more than people had thought.
> He
> > ran into a firestorm from people like Herbert
> Gutman
> > and Eugene Genovese (then on the left). I am
> really
> > bot qualified to judge the outcome, as a lot of it
> > depended on economic issues combined with
> historical
> > research that are a little beyond my depth,
> besides
> > it
> > was a long time ago, and I have forgotten the
> > details
> > I once knew. Probably there has been more recent
> > research. I think that part of the problem the
> TotC
> > people ran into was also due to the fact that they
> > made the claim that most slaves were tolerably
> > decently treated as valuable property and that not
> > all
> > slaveowners were sadistic brutes. (Genovese ran
> > into
> > similar problems arguing in a Gramscian vein in
> Roll
> > Jordon Roll that slavery rested on a combination
> of
> > consent or at least acquiescence and coercion).
> > Anyway, it is at least possible that slave labor
> was
> > highly efficient --s some smart and respectable
> > people
> > who did a reputable if controversial study thought
> > so.
> > But was certainly controversial.
> >
>
> Nu, zayats, pogodi!
>
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