Slavery how many slaves

Originally posted on The Root. Tags: J. Rogers , slavery , W. Harriet Tubman A short biography of Harriet Tubman and a poster featuring a quotation by the famous Underground Railroad conductor. Connect with Prof. Some Northern citizens worked hand-in-hand with their Southern counterparts, returning fugitive slaves to masters either with or without the prompting of law. But many Northerners vehemently opposed the peculiar institution.

In an attempt to stitch together the young nation, the federal government passed the first fugitive slave act in To circumvent its application, several Northern states passed personal liberty laws in the s. Stronger federal fugitive slave legislation then passed in This occupation was often highly risky — enough so that such men could not purchase life insurance coverage — and just as often highly lucrative. Southern law governed slaves as well as slaveowners and their adversaries. What few due process protections slaves possessed stemmed from desires to grant rights to masters.

Still, slaves faced harsh penalties for their crimes. When slaves stole, rioted, set fires, or killed free people, the law sometimes had to subvert the property rights of masters in order to preserve slavery as a social institution.

Slaves, like other antebellum Southern residents, committed a host of crimes ranging from arson to theft to homicide. Southern states erected numerous punishments for slave crimes, including prison terms, banishment, whipping, castration, and execution.

In most states, the criminal law for slaves and blacks generally was noticeably harsher than for free whites; in others, slave law as practiced resembled that governing poorer white citizens. Particularly harsh punishments applied to slaves who had allegedly killed their masters or who had committed rebellious acts.

Southerners considered these acts of treason and resorted to immolation, drawing and quartering, and hanging. Market prices for slaves reflect their substantial economic value. Scholars have gathered slave prices from a variety of sources, including censuses, probate records, plantation and slave-trader accounts, and proceedings of slave auctions. These data sets reveal that prime field hands went for four to six hundred dollars in the U.

Even controlling for inflation, the prices of U. Slavery remained a thriving business on the eve of the Civil War: Fogel and Engerman projected that by slave prices would have increased on average more than 50 percent over their levels.

No wonder the South rose in armed resistance to protect its enormous investment. Slave markets existed across the antebellum U. It has been a famous landmark at this original location for over years. Established dealers like Franklin and Armfield in Virginia, Woolfolk, Saunders, and Overly in Maryland, and Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee prospered alongside itinerant traders who operated in a few counties, buying slaves for cash from their owners, then moving them overland in coffles to the lower South.

Over a million slaves were taken across state lines between and with many more moving within states. Some of these slaves went with their owners; many were sold to new owners. In his monumental study, Michael Tadman found that slaves who lived in the upper South faced a very real chance of being sold for profit.

From to , he estimated that an average of , slaves per decade moved from the upper to the lower South, most via sales. A contemporary newspaper, The Virginia Times , calculated that 40, slaves were sold in the year The prices paid for slaves reflected two economic factors: the characteristics of the slave and the conditions of the market. Important individual features included age, sex, childbearing capacity for females , physical condition, temperament, and skill level.

In addition, the supply of slaves, demand for products produced by slaves, and seasonal factors helped determine market conditions and therefore prices. Prices for both male and female slaves tended to follow similar life-cycle patterns. In the U. South, infant slaves sold for a positive price because masters expected them to live long enough to make the initial costs of raising them worthwhile.

Prices rose through puberty as productivity and experience increased. In nineteenth-century New Orleans, for example, prices peaked at about age 22 for females and age 25 for males. Girls cost more than boys up to their mid-teens. The genders then switched places in terms of value. In the Old South, boys aged 14 sold for 71 percent of the price of year-old men, whereas girls aged 14 sold for 65 percent of the price of year-old men. After the peak age, prices declined slowly for a time, then fell off rapidly as the aging process caused productivity to fall.

Compared to full-grown men, women were worth 80 to 90 percent as much. One characteristic in particular set some females apart: their ability to bear children.

Fertile females commanded a premium. The mother-child link also proved important for pricing in a different way: people sometimes paid more for intact families. Source: Fogel and Engerman Skilled workers sold for premiums of percent whereas crippled and chronically ill slaves sold for deep discounts. Slaves who proved troublesome — runaways, thieves, layabouts, drunks, slow learners, and the like — also sold for lower prices. Taller slaves cost more, perhaps because height acts as a proxy for healthiness.

In New Orleans, light-skinned females who were often used as concubines sold for a 5 percent premium. Prices for slaves fluctuated with market conditions as well as with individual characteristics. Less than a decade later, slave prices climbed when the international slave trade was banned, cutting off legal external supplies.

Interestingly enough, among those who supported the closing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were several Southern slaveowners. Why this apparent anomaly? Because the resulting reduction in supply drove up the prices of slaves already living in the U. Demand helped determine prices as well. The demand for slaves derived in part from the demand for the commodities and services that slaves provided. Changes in slave occupations and variability in prices for slave-produced goods therefore created movements in slave prices.

As slaves replaced increasingly expensive indentured servants in the New World, their prices went up. In the period to , slave prices in British America rose nearly 30 percent. As cotton prices fell in the s, Southern slave prices also fell. But, as the demand for cotton and tobacco grew after about , the prices of slaves increased as well. Differences in demand across regions led to transitional regional price differences, which in turn meant large movements of slaves.

Yet because planters experienced greater stability among their workforce when entire plantations moved, 84 percent of slaves were taken to the lower South in this way rather than being sold piecemeal. Demand sometimes had to do with the time of year a sale took place. For example, slave prices in the New Orleans market were 10 to 20 percent higher in January than in September. September was a busy time of year for plantation owners: the opportunity cost of their time was relatively high.

Prices had to be relatively low for them to be willing to travel to New Orleans during harvest time. One additional demand factor loomed large in determining slave prices: the expectation of continued legal slavery. As the American Civil War progressed, prices dropped dramatically because people could not be sure that slavery would survive. Burgeoning inflation meant that real prices fell considerably more. That slavery was profitable seems almost obvious. Yet scholars have argued furiously about this matter.

On one side stand antebellum writers such as Hinton Rowan Helper and Frederick Law Olmstead, many antebellum abolitionists, and contemporary scholars like Eugene Genovese at least in his early writings , who speculated that American slavery was unprofitable, inefficient, and incompatible with urban life.

On the other side are scholars who have marshaled masses of data to support their contention that Southern slavery was profitable and efficient relative to free labor and that slavery suited cities as well as farms.

These researchers stress the similarity between slave markets and markets for other sorts of capital. This battle has largely been won by those who claim that New World slavery was profitable. Much like other businessmen, New World slaveowners responded to market signals — adjusting crop mixes, reallocating slaves to more profitable tasks, hiring out idle slaves, and selling slaves for profit.

One well-known instance shows that contemporaneous free labor thought that urban slavery may even have worked too well: employees of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, went out on their first strike in to protest the use of slave labor at the Works. Perhaps the most controversial book ever written about American slavery is Time on the Cross , published in by Fogel and co-author Stanley Engerman.

These men were among the first to use modern statistical methods, computers, and large datasets to answer a series of empirical questions about the economics of slavery. To find profit levels and rates of return, they built upon the work of Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, who in had calculated similar measures from data on cotton prices, physical yield per slave, demographic characteristics of slaves including expected lifespan , maintenance and supervisory costs, and in the case of females number of children.

They included in this index controls for quality of livestock and land and for age and sex composition of the workforce, as well as amounts of output, labor, land, and capital. Time on the Cross generated praise — and considerable criticism. A major critique appeared in as a collection of articles entitled Reckoning with Slavery. Although some contributors took umbrage at the tone of the book and denied that it broke new ground, others focused on flawed and insufficient data and inappropriate inferences.

The book also served as a catalyst for much subsequent research. Even Eugene Genovese, long an ardent proponent of the belief that Southern planters had held slaves for their prestige value, finally acknowledged that slavery was probably a profitable enterprise. Fogel himself refined and expanded his views in a book, Without Consent or Contract. They also found that antebellum Southern farms were 35 percent more efficient overall than Northern ones and that slave farms in the New South were 53 percent more efficient than free farms in either North or South.

This would mean that a slave farm that is otherwise identical to a free farm in terms of the amount of land, livestock, machinery and labor used would produce output worth 53 percent more than the free. On the eve of the Civil War, slavery flourished in the South and generated a rate of economic growth comparable to that of many European countries, according to Fogel and Engerman.

They also discovered that, because slaves constituted a considerable portion of individual wealth, masters fed and treated their slaves reasonably well. Although some evidence indicates that infant and young slaves suffered much worse conditions than their freeborn counterparts, teenaged and adult slaves lived in conditions similar to — sometimes better than — those enjoyed by many free laborers of the same period.

One potent piece of evidence supporting the notion that slavery provides pecuniary benefits is this: slavery replaces other labor when it becomes relatively cheaper. In the early U. As the demand for skilled servants and therefore their wages rose in England, the cost of indentured servants went up in the colonies. At the same time, second-generation slaves became more productive than their forebears because they spoke English and did not have to adjust to life in a strange new world.

Consequently, the balance of labor shifted away from indentured servitude and toward slavery. The value of slaves arose in part from the value of labor generally in the antebellum U.

Scarce factors of production command economic rent, and labor was by far the scarcest available input in America. Moreover, a large proportion of the reward to owning and working slaves resulted from innovative labor practices. Masters found that treating people like machinery paid off handsomely. Antebellum slaveowners experimented with a variety of other methods to increase productivity. Hand ratings categorized slaves by age and sex and rated their productivity relative to that of a prime male field hand.

Masters also capitalized on the native intelligence of slaves by using them as agents to receive goods, keep books, and the like. Masters offered positive incentives to make slaves work more efficiently. Slaves often had Sundays off. Slaves could sometimes earn bonuses in cash or in kind, or quit early if they finished tasks quickly. Some masters allowed slaves to keep part of the harvest or to work their own small plots.

Knight riders went out in the dark, burning the homes of African Americans who bought their own land. They rode up to Washington to demand change as southern white Democrats rolled back many of the albeit limited freedoms from Reconstruction just a couple of decades before.

The Jim Crow era of segregation forbade African Americans from drinking from the same water fountains, eating at the same restaurants or attending the same schools as white Americans — all lasting until, and sometimes well past, the s. As African Americans were shut out of jobs and opportunities during Jim Crow, and as more jobs became available in the north and midwest, more than 2 million southern African Americans migrated after the first world war.

In the lead-up to the end of Jim Crow and the civil rights era, the fight continued. For example: only in did the US military desegregate, by executive order. In , in the Brown v Board of Education ruling, the supreme court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional and schools would have to integrate. Civil rights leaders led anti-segregation marches across the country in the s. Bussing African American children to white schools in white neighborhoods was deemed constitutional.

After weaning, slave infants were fed a starch-based diet, consisting of foods such as gruel, which lacked sufficient nutrients for health and growth.

Slaves suffered a variety of miserable and often fatal maladies due to the Atlantic Slave Trade, and to inhumane living and working conditions. Common symptoms among enslaved populations included: blindness; abdominal swelling; bowed legs; skin lesions; and convulsions. Common conditions among enslaved populations included: beriberi caused by a deficiency of thiamine ; pellagra caused by a niacin deficiency ; tetany caused by deficiencies of calcium, magnesium, and Vitamin D ; rickets also caused by a deficiency of Vitamin D ; and kwashiorkor caused by severe protein deficiency.

Diarrhea, dysentery, whooping cough, and respiratory diseases as well as worms pushed the infant and early childhood death rate of slaves to twice that experienced by white infants and children. The domestic slave trade in the US distributed the African American population throughout the South in a migration that greatly surpassed in volume the Atlantic Slave Trade to North America.

Though Congress outlawed the African slave trade in , domestic slave trade flourished, and the slave population in the US nearly tripled over the next 50 years. The domestic trade continued into the s and displaced approximately 1. Some destinations, particularly the Louisiana sugar plantations, had especially grim reputations. But it was the destruction of family that made the domestic slave trade so terrifying.

Prices of slaves varied widely over time, due to factors including supply, and changes in prices of commodities such as cotton. Even considering the relative expense of owning and keeping a slave, slavery was profitable.

Although young adult men had the highest expected levels of output, young adult women had value over and above their ability to work in the fields; they were able to have children who by law were also slaves of the owner of the mother.