238 / PARADOXES OF FORCED LABOR

fiaund it impossible to maintain the gang system once they
I were deprived of the right to apply force. Freedmen gen-
» erally preferred renting land and farming it, usually for
f shares, to working in gangs, although the payments being
‘ offered for gang labor were more than I00 percent greater
than tl1e average earnings of freedmen through sharecrop-
94 ping. Thus whether one compares immediate postwar gang
\‘\ wages with income from sharecropping or prewar pecuniary
payments, available evidence shows that the application of
force made it possible to obtain labor from slaves at less

fl than half the price that would have had to have been offered

in the absence of force. The nonpecuniary disadvantage of

ang labor was no less to blacks than to whites.

The special advantage of slavery for agricultural produc-
tion, then, is that it was a very cheap way of “ 
slaves for the nonpecuniary disadvantages of gang labor.
This discovery makes it possible to explain why the advan-
tage of slave labor was much less in urban industry than in
agriculture. The nonpecuniary disadvantage of accepting the

Ԥ\ monotonous and intense routine of factories appears to have
~ been offset by nonpecuniary benefits which both black and
white workers attached to life in the cities. In other Words,
the net nonpecuniary disadvantage of work in urban indus-
try was quite low, perhaps even -negative (see appendix B).
K The scope of the benefits that could be obtained from the
\.application of force was thus much more limited in urban

L industry than in plantation agriculture.

For a given amount of labor, there was an optimum
amount of force —— an amount that would make the total
cost (cost of force plus the pecuniary payment to the slave)
of procuring the desired labor a minimum. Planters worried
about what that optimum was. They realized that there were
limits on the extent to which force could be substituted for
pecuniary payments, that if they resorted to too much force
they would increase rather than reduce the cost of labor.
That is why they generally restricted the amount of force

‘l

E

at

 

PROPERTY RIGHTS IN MAN / 239

that their Overseers or drivers were permitted to impose on
hands, why they felt it was necessary to give explicit instruc-
tions on when, how, and to what degree force could be
applied.

It has been widely assumed that slaveholders employ
force because it permitted them to push pecuniary payments
to the subsistence level, or at least close to that level. This
assumption is false. Odd as it may seem, the optimal com-
bination of force and pecuniary income was one that left
slaves on large plantations with more pecuniary income per
capita than they would have ‘earned if they had been free
small farmers. The explanation of this paradoxical findin
turns on the fact there were definite costs to the generation
of force. After a certain point, the cost of obtaining an addi-
tional unit of labor with force became greater than the cost
of obtaining it through pecuniary payments. To use the lan-

guage of economists — there were rapidly diminishing r -
turns to force. The analysis of t£e trade-off which faced

planters in choosing between force and pecun ary payments

   
 
 
 
 
  
  

is a complex but standard problem of economics. Because of

its complexity We have relegated it to appeI1dix\B‘,*Where it
is shown that the average pecuniary income actually re-
ceived by a prime field hand was roughly 15 percent greater
than the income he would have received for his labor as a
free agricultural worker. In other words, far from being kept
at the brink of starvation, slaves actually shared in the gains
from economies of scale— so far as purely pecuniary in-
come was concerned. Slaves received approximately 20 per-
cent of the increase in product attributable to la.rge—scale
operations.

This finding underscores the importance of the system of
pecuniary incentives discussed in chapter 4. It is not correct
to say, as one leading historian did, that though pecuniary
“rewards were much used," force was the “principal basis”
for promoting the work of slaves. Pecuniary incentives were
no more an incidental feature of slavery than force. Both