$140 for blacksmiths’ services on his large plantation of seventy-five slaves.34 One South Carolina planter with forty-five slaves had an annual blacksmith’s account of about $35, and expenditures by other planters were often higherĝ35
Even simple tasks like the erection of door frames sometimes required the services of hired carpenters, as in the case of a Jefferson County, Mississippi, planter in 1851.36 If buildings, chimneys, or slave cabins had to be built, planters generally hired free laborers or slave artisans.37 Skilled slaves had unusual privileges and incentives, but there was not much for them to do on a single plantation. Rather than allow a slave to spend all his time acquiring a skill for which there was only a limited need, a planter would hire one for short periods. Even this type of slave specialization brought frowns from many planters, who considered the incentives and privileges subversive of general plantation discipline.
If it paid to keep all available slaves in the cotton fields during periods of high prices, the reverse was true during periods of low prices. At those times the factors forcing a one-crop agriculture and the low productivity of nonfield labor wrought devastating results. The South’s trouble was not that it lacked sufficient shoe or clothing factories, or that it lacked a diversified agriculture, or that it lacked enough other industrial enterprises; the trouble was that it lacked all three at the same time. The slight division of labor on the plantations and the slight social division of labor in the region forced the planters into dependence on the Northern market. As a result, the cost of cotton production rose during periods of low as well as high cotton prices. Even during the extraordinary years of the Civil War, when Southerners struggled manfully to feed and clothe themselves, the attempt to produce home manufactures met with only indifferent results.38 These observations merely restate the problem of division of labor in the slave South: the low level of productivity, caused by the inefficiency of the slaves and the general backwardness of society, produced increasing specialization in staple-crop production under virtually colonial conditions.
“There is nothing in the progress of agriculture,” the United States Agricultural Society proclaimed in 1853, “more encouraging than the rapid increase and extension of labor-saving machinery.”39 The South did not profit much from these technological advances, nor did it contribute much to them.40
The most obvious obstacle to the employment of better equipment was the slave himself.41 In 1843 a Southern editor sharply rebuked planters and overseers for complaining that Negroes could not handle tools. Such a complaint was, he said, merely a confession of poor management, for with proper supervision Negro slaves would provide proper care.42 The editor was unfair. Careful supervision of unwilling laborers would have entailed either more overseers than most planters could afford or a slave force too small to provide the advantages of large-scale operation. The harsh treatment that slaves gave equipment shocked travelers and other contemporaries, and neglect of tools figured prominently among the reasons given for punishing Negroes.43 In 1855 a South Carolina planter wrote in exasperation:
The wear and tear of plantation tools is harassing to every planter who does not have a good mechanic at his nod and beck every day in the year. Our plows are broken, our hoes are lost, our harnesses need repairing, and large demands are made on the blacksmith, the carpenter, the tanner, and the harnessmaker. [sic]44
The implements used on the plantations were therefore generally much too heavy for efficient use. The “nigger hoe,” often found in relatively advanced Virginia, weighed much more than the “Yankee hoe,” which slaves broke easily. Those used in the Southwest weighed almost three times as much as those manufactured in the North for Northern use.45 Curiously, in many cases equipment was too light for adequate results. Whereas most planters bought extra-heavy implements in the hope that they would withstand rough handling, others resigned themselves and bought the cheapest possible.46
We do not know the proportion of Southern implements made by local blacksmiths, but the difference in quality between them and Northern goods was probably not so great as one might think. Local blacksmiths made wretched goods, but those made in the North especially for the Southern market fell well below national standards. J. D. Legare, editor of the Southern Cabinet, visited Northern implement factories and was “struck” by the inferior grade of goods sent South. The materials and workmanship did not approach standards set for goods destined for Northern markets. The reason for the double standard, as Legare admitted, was that planters demanded inexpensive items.47 We have little information on implements produced in the North for the Southern market. John Hebron Moore quite plausibly suggests that a few unscrupulous Northern manufacturers gave the rest a bad reputation by misrepresentations and other unethical practices.48 Misrepresentations aside, frequent complaints suggest that the implements were often inferior to those designated for the North. M. W. Philips demonstrated that Northern plows lasted three times as long as local Mississippi products,49 but the question at issue is not the quality of Northern equipment but the quality of that which Southerners could and would buy.
In 1857 an agricultural journal carried a special report by a former editor who had visited the South Carolina state fair and had inspected plows made by Southern manufacturers. He described the instruments as poor, of indifferent quality and crude construction, adding that most Southern producers had advanced only to the point at which James Small of Berwickshire had left the plow in 1740.50
Good plows in 1857 sold for fifteen or twenty dollars, although perhaps some of those selling for five or ten dollars were adequate. “A low estimate of the investment in implements necessary to the operation of an average Northern farm was $500.”51 Cultivators and harrows cost from five to twenty dollars; a grist mill from fifteen to thirty dollars; a treadmill horsepower from eighty-five to 150 dollars; a seed drill sixty dollars; and a reaper-mower 135 dollars. Planters, M. W. Philips noted, usually refused to buy anything except the cheapest of essential items. “We of the South have a jaundiced eye. Everything we view looks like gold—costly.”52
Plows such as those generally in use in Arkansas were valued at five dollars, and of greater significance, an average cotton-producing unit of one hundred acres was said to have only fifteen dollars’ worth of equipment other than plows.53 A Mississippi planter valued his thirty “indifferent” plows at seventy-five dollars; even if he had made a liberal allowance for depreciation, he was clearly using the poorest kind of equipment.54 As an indication of the quality of the work done by local blacksmiths, one planter spent a total of five dollars for ten turning plows in 1853.55 Gray claims that most Southern plows were worth only three to five dollars. There is little reason to question either his estimate or his opinion that they probably did not last more than a year or so.56
Most planters in Mississippi, wrote Philips, thought they could use one kind of plow for every possible purpose.57 The weakness was doubly serious, for the one kind was usually poor. The most popular plow in the Lower South—at least, well into the 1840s—was the shovel plow, which merely stirred the surface of the soil to a depth of two or three inches.58 Made of wrought iron, it was “a crude and inefficient instrument which, as commonly employed, underwent no essential improvement throughout its long career.”59 It was light enough for a girl to carry and exemplified the “too light” type of implement used on the plantations.
In the 1850s the shovel plow slowly gave way in the South to a variety of light moldboard plows, which at least were of some help in killing and controlling weeds. Good moldboard plows should have offered other advantages, such as aid in burying manure, but those in the South were not nearly so efficient as those in the North.60 In 1830, Connecticut manufacturers began to produce large numbers of Cary plows, exclusively for the Southern market. These light wooden plows with wrought-iron shares were considered of good quality. Unfortunately, they required careful handling, for they broke easily, and they could not penetrate more than three or four inches below the surface. During the 1820s Northern farmers had been shifting to cast-iron plows that could cover 50 per cent more