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208 / PARADOXES or FORCED LABOR

Worked more hours per day or more days per Week than free
farmers. The best available evidence is that both slaves and
free farmers averaged approximately 70-75 hours of work
per week during the peak labor periods of planting, cultiva-
tion, and harvesting. Nor does it appear that slaves worked
more days per year. In addition to having Sundays off,

aves had all or part of half of their Saturdays free, most
of these being concentrated in the off-peak ‘periods of farm-
ing. There was also up to a week or so of additional holidays,
some at predesignated times, as during Christmas or in the
interstice between the end of cultivation and the beginning
of the harvest, some as unscheduled rewards for work well
done. About a dozen days per year were lost due to illness.
Thus the work year appears to have consisted of roughly
265-275 days.

The higher rate of the utilization of labor capacity was
partly due to what was, by the usual standards of farmers,
an extraordinary intensity of labor. Far from being “ordinary
peasants” unuse to pre—1n us al rhythms of work,” black
plantation agriculturalists labored under a regimen that
was more like a modern assembly line than was true of
the routine in-many of the factories of the antebellum era.
It was often easier for factory workers to regulate the pace
of machines to their accustomed rhythm than for slaves to
regulate the pace set by drivers. For much of antebellum
manufacturing was still operated on the work patterns of the
handicrafts. Division of labor was still at relatively low
levels and interdependence of operations was still limited.

ust as the great plantations were the first large, scientifi-
cally managed business enter rises, and as planters were
 cde, scientific personnel
management, so, too, black slaves were the first group of
workers to be trained in the work rhythms which later be-

ame characteristic of industrial society. It was not the
slaves but men like Olmsted who retained a “pre~industrial
peasant mentality,” who viewed the teamwork, coordina-

 

   

QUALITY OF SLAVE LABOR AND RACISM / 209

tion, and intensity of effort achieved by black field hands
as “stupid, plodding, machine»like,” and “painful to witness.”
While O1msted’s revulsion is quite understandable, he was
nevertheless wrong in concluding that the gang system was
inefficient, and his belittling of the quality of slave labor
was unwarranted.

The high rate of the utilization of labor capacity was also
abetted by the large scale of plantation enterprises in an-
other respect — greater flexibility in being able to match
occupations to abilities. This was most apparent in the case
of Elie elderly. On free farms as well as on plantations,
child rearing was a task assigned to the aged. But whereas
a grandmother on a free farm devoted herself to only a few
children, her plantation counterpart cared for a score of
children in plantation nurseries. Planters with relatively
large numbers of superannuated slaves, or others whose
mental or physical ability limited their capacity for work,
found that it paid to promote less demanding enterprises,
such as weaving, to make use of their labor. This feature
of plantation life helps to explain one of the findings of
chapter 3, the positive average net earnings from slaves
down to ages in the middle or late seventies.

The Quality of Slave Labor
and Racism

The large slave plantations were about 34 percent more
efficient than free southern farms. This advantage was not
due to some special way in which land or machinery was
used, but to the special quality of plantation labor. It is
true that large plantations used more land and equipment
(by value) per worker than small plantations. However,
this feature was taken into account in computing the