[lbo-talk] Question on efficiency of slave labor in US South

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Tue May 30 19:31:45 PDT 2006


Some slaves were hired out by their masters to work as wage laborers for others. (Frederick Douglass was, if memory serves.) Whether they were permitted to keep some or all of their wages depended on local law and the master's good graces.

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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