technology, the craftsman, the skilled worker, and the small producer—all anxious to conserve labor time and cut costs—may well have provided the most significant technological thrust. Specifically, the great advances of the modern era arose from a free-labor economy that gave actual producers the incentives to improve methods and techniques.19 In nineteenth-century America, writes one authority, “the farmers … directed and inspired the efforts of inventors, engineers, and manufacturers to solve their problems and supply their needs … [and] the early implements were in many cases invented or designed by the farmers themselves.”20
If workers are to contribute much to technology, the economy must permit and encourage an increasing division of labor, for skilled persons assigned to few tasks can best devise better methods and implements. Once an initial accumulation of capital takes place, the division of labor, if not impeded, will result in further accumulation and further division. Such extensive division cannot readily develop in slave economies. The heavy capitalization of labor, the high propensity to consume, and the weakness of the home market seriously impede the accumulation of capital. Technological progress and division of labor result in work for fewer hands, but slavery requires all hands to be occupied at all times. Capitalism has solved this problem by a tremendous economic expansion along varied lines (qualitative development), but slavery’s obstacles to industrialization prevent this type of solution.
In part, the slave South offset its weakness by drawing upon the technology of more progressive areas. During the first half of the nineteenth century the North copied from Europe on a grand scale, but the South was limited even in the extent to which it could copy and was especially restricted in possibilities for improving techniques once they had been acquired. The regions in which transference of technical skills has always been most effective have been those with an abundance of trained craftsmen as well as of natural resources.21 In the North a shortage of unskilled labor and a preoccupation with labor-saving machinery stimulated the absorption of advanced techniques and the creation of new ones. In the South the importation of slaves remedied the labor shortage and simultaneously weakened nonslave productive units. The availability of a “routinized, poorly educated, and politically ineffectual rural labor force” of whites as well as Negroes rendered, and to some extent still renders, interest in labor-saving machinery pointless.22
Negro slavery retarded technological progress in many ways: it prevented the growth of industrialism and urbanization; it retarded the division of labor, which might have spurred the creation of new techniques; it barred the labor force from that intelligent participation in production which has made possible the steady improvement of implements and machines; and it encouraged ways of thinking antithetical to the spirit of modern science. These impediments undoubtedly damaged Southern agriculture, for improved equipment largely accounted for the dramatic increases in crop yields per acre in the North during the nineteenth century.23 The steady deterioration of American soil under conditions imposed by commercial exploitation, we now know, has been offset primarily by gains accruing from increased investment in technological improvements. Recent studies show that from 1910 to 1950 output per man-hour doubled only because of the rapid improvements in implements, machinery, and fertilizer.24
Southern farmers suffered especially from technological backwardness, for the only way in which they might have compensated for the planters’ advantage of large-scale operation would have been to attain a much higher technological level. The social pressure to invest in slaves and the high cost of machinery in a region that had to import much of its equipment made such an adjustment difficult.
Large-scale production gave the planter an advantage over his weaker competitors within the South, but the plantation was by no means more efficient than the family farm operating in the capitalist economy of the free states. Large-scale production, to be most efficient under modern conditions, must provide a substitute for the incentives possessed by the individual farmer. The experience of Soviet agriculture, with its politically induced collectivization, has again demonstrated that the prerequisite for efficient large-scale commodity production is a level of industrial technology as is only now being attained even in the most advanced countries.25
Although few scholars assert that the Southern slave plantations were self-sufficient units, most assume a fair degree of division of labor in their work force. The employment of skilled artisans usually receives scant attention. An examination of the plantation manuscripts and data in the manuscript census returns shows, however, considerable sums paid for the services of artisans and laborers and a low level of home manufactures.
As Try on has shown, the Confederacy could not repeat the achievements of the colonies during the Revolutionary War, when family industry supplied the war effort and the home front. Although household manufacturing survived longer in the slave states than in other parts of the country, slave labor proved so inefficient in making cloth, for example, that planters preferred not to bother. In those areas of the South in which slavery predominated, household manufactures decreased rapidly after 1840, and the system never took hold in the newer slave states of Florida, Louisiana, and Texas.26 Whereas in the North its disappearance resulted from the development of much more advanced factory processes, in the South it formed part of a general decline in skill and technique.
An examination of the manuscript census returns for selected counties in 1860 bears out these generalizations. It also shows that the large plantations, although usually producing greater totals than the small farms, did poorly in the production of home manufactures. In Mississippi’s cotton counties the big planters (thirty-one or more slaves) averaged only $76 worth of home manufactures during the year, whereas other groups of farmers and planters showed much less. In the Georgia cotton counties the small planters (twenty-one to thirty slaves) led other groups with $127, and the big planters produced only half as much. Fifty-eight per cent of the big planters in the Mississippi counties examined recorded no home manufactures at all, and most agriculturalists in the Georgia counties produced none. In Virginia the same results appeared: in tobacco counties the big planters led other groups with $56 worth of home manufactures, and in the tidewater and northern wheat counties the big planters led with only $35.27
The Richmond Dispatch estimated in the 1850s that the South spent $5,000,000 annually for Northern shoes and boots.28 Although the figure cannot be verified, there is no doubt that Southerners bought most of their shoes in the North. One of the bigger planters, Judge Cameron of North Carolina, owner of five plantations and 267 slaves in 1834, had to purchase more than half the shoes needed for his Negroes despite his large establishment and a conscientious attempt to supply his own needs.29 Most planters apparently did not even try to produce shoes or clothing. When a planter with about thirty slaves in Scotland Neck, North Carolina, made arrangements to have clothing produced on his estate, he hired an outsider to do it.30 Yet, until 1830 shoes were produced in the United States by tools and methods not essentially different from those used by medieval serfs,31 and not much equipment would have been needed to continue those methods on the plantations. Even simple methods of production were not employed on the plantations because the low level of productivity made them too costly relative to available Northern shoes. At the same time, the latter were more expensive than they ought to have been, for transportation costs were high, and planters had little choice but to buy in the established New England shoe centers.
Plantation account books reveal surprisingly high expenditures for a variety of tasks requiring skilled and unskilled labor.32 A Mississippi planter with 130 slaves paid an artisan $320 for labor and supplies for a forty-one-day job in 1849. Other accounts show that Governor Hammond spent $452 to have a road built in 1850; another planter spent $108 for repair of a carriage and $900 for repair of a sloop in 1853, as well as $175 for repair of a bridge in 1857; a third spent $2,950 for the hire of artisans in 1856 on a plantation with more than 175 slaves.33
The largest payments went to blacksmiths. A Panola, Mississippi, planter listed expenditures for the following in 1853: sharpening of plows, mending of shovels, and construction of plows, ox-chains, hooks, and other items. In 1847 a Greensboro, Alabama, planter, whose books indicate