When cast-iron plows did enter the South, they could not be used to the same advantage as in the North, for they needed the services of expert blacksmiths when, as frequently happened, they broke.62
Twenty years after the introduction of the cultivator in 1820, Northern farmers considered it standard equipment, especially in the cornfields, but cultivators, despite their tremendous value, were so light that few planters would trust them to their slaves. Since little wheat was grown below Virginia, the absence of reapers did not hurt much, but the backwardness of cotton equipment did. A “cotton planter” (a modified grain drill) and one man could do as much work as two mules and four men,63 but it was rarely used. Similarly, corn planters, especially the one invented by George Brown in 1853, might have saved a good deal of labor time, but these were costly, needed careful handling, and would have rendered part of the slave force superfluous. Since slaveholding carried prestige and status, and since slaves were an economic necessity during the picking season, planters showed little interest.64
The cotton picker presents special technical and economic problems. So long as a mechanical picker was not available a large labor force would have been needed for the harvest; but in 1850 Samuel S. Rembert and Jedediah Prescott of Memphis did patent a mule-drawn cotton picker that was a “simple prototype of the modem spindle picker.”65 Virtually no progress followed upon the original design until forty years later, and then almost as long a span intervened before further advances were made. The reasons for these gaps were in part technical, and in part economic pressures arising from slavery and sharecropping. Although one can never be sure about such things, the evidence accumulated by historians of science and technology strongly suggests that the social and economic impediments to technological change are generally more powerful than the specifically technical ones. The introduction of a cotton picker would have entailed the full mechanization of farming processes, and such a development would have had to be accompanied by a radically different social order. Surely, it is not accidental that the mechanical picker has in recent decades taken hold in the Southwest, where sharecropping has been weak, and has moved east slowly as changes in the social organization of the countryside have proceeded. Even without a mechanical picker the plantations might have used good implements and a smaller labor force during most of the year and temporary help during the harvest. In California in 1951, for example, 50 per cent of the occasional workers needed in the cotton fields came from within the county and 90 per cent from within the state. Rural and town housewives, youths, and seasonal workers anxious to supplement their incomes provided the temporary employees.66 There is no reason to believe that this alternative would not have been open to the South in the 1850s if slavery had been eliminated.
A few examples, which could be multiplied many times, illustrate the weakness of plantation technology. A plantation in Stewart County, Georgia, with a fixed capital investment of $42,660 had only $300 invested in implements and machinery. The Tooke plantation, also in Georgia, had a total investment in implements and machinery of $195, of which a gin accounted for $110. Plantations had plows, perhaps a few harrows and colters, possibly a cultivator, and in a few cases a straw cutter or corn and cob crusher. Whenever possible, a farmer or planter acquired a gin, and all had small tools for various purposes.67
The figures reported in the census tabulations of farm implements and machinery are of limited value and must be used carefully. We have little information on shifting price levels, and the valuations reported to the census takers did not conform to rigorous standards. The same type of plow worth five dollars in 1850 may have been recorded at ten dollars in 1860, and in view of the general rise in prices something of the kind probably occurred.68
Even if we put aside these objections and examine investments in selected counties in 1860, the appalling state of plantation technology is evident. Table 1 presents the data from the manuscript returns for 1860. Of the 1,969 farmers and planters represented, only 160 (or 8 per cent) had more than $500 invested in implements and machinery. If we assume that a cotton gin cost between $100 and $125, the figures for the cotton counties suggest that all except the planters (twenty or more slaves) either did without a gin or had little else. Note that an increase in the slave force did not entail significant expansion of technique. As the size of slaveholdings increased in the cotton counties, the investments in implements increased also, but in small amounts. Only units of twenty slaves or more showed tolerably respectable amounts, and even these were poor when one considers the size of the estates.69
Gray has suggested that the poor quality of Southern implements was due only in part to slave inefficiency. He lists as other contributing factors the lack of local marketplaces for equipment, the ignorance of the small farmers and overseers, prejudice against and even aversion to innovations, and a shortage of capital in the interior.70 Each of these contributing factors itself arose from the nature of slave society. The weakness of the market led to a lack of marketplaces. The social structure of the countryside hardly left room for anything but ignorance and cultural backwardness, even by the standards of nineteenth-century rural America. The social and economic pressures to invest in slaves and the high propensity to consume rendered adequate capital accumulation impossible. The psychological factor—hostility to innovation—transcended customary agrarian conservatism and grew out of the patriarchal social structure.
The attempts of reformers to improve methods of cultivation, diversify production, and raise more and better livestock were undermined at the outset by a labor force without versatility or the possibility of increasing its productivity substantially. Other factors must be examined in order to understand fully why the movement for agricultural reform had to be content with inadequate accomplishments, but consideration of the direct effects of slave labor alone tells us why so little could be done.
TABLE 1
Median Value of Farm Implements and Machinery in Selected Counties, 1860a
NOTES
1 Cairnes, The Slave Power (London, 1863), p. 46; Ruffin, The Political Economy of Slavery (Washington, D.C., 1857), p. 4; Farmer’s Register, III (1863), 748–49. The best introduction to the subject is still Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918), Chap. XVIII.
2 See SQR, XIX (Jan. 1851), 221. Ruffin sometimes also argued this way.
3 Charles Sackett Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York, 1933), p. 16; E. A. Davis (ed.), Plantation Life in the Florida Parishes of Louisiana: The Diary of B. H. Barrow (New York, 1943), pp. 86 ff.
4 “Medical Practice in the Old South,” SAQ, XXIX (April 1930), 160–61. See also Felice Swados, “Negro Health on Ante-Bellum Plantations,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, X (Oct. 1941), 460–61; and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Medical and Insurance Costs of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt,” JNH, XLV (July 1960), 141–55.
5 “Probably at no time before the Civil War were fruits and vegetables grown in quantities sufficient to provide the population with a balanced diet,” writes John Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York, 1958), p. 61. At that, slaves undoubtedly received a disproportionately small share of the output.
6 Infra, Chapter V.
7 W. O. Atwater and Charles D. Woods, Dietary Studies with Reference to the Negro in Alabama in 1895 and (Washington, D.C., 1897). Adequate animal proteins plus corn probably would have sufficed to prevent nutritional deficiencies. See C. A. Elvehjem, “Corn in Human Nutrition,” Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Research Institute (Washington, D.C., 1955), p. 83.
8 See J. Masek, “Hunger and Disease” in Josué de Castro (ed.), Hunger and Food (London, 1958).
9 Josué de Castro, The Geography of Hunger (Boston, 1952), p. 48.
10 The Health of Slaves on the Southern Plantations (Baton Rouge, La., 1951), esp. pp. 159 ff.