206 / PARADOXES or FORCED LABOR more unremittingly,” tha.n northern laborers, he still doubted that “they accomplish as much in the same time as agricul- tural labourers at the North usually do,” Harvest operations in cotton do not appear to have offered the opportunities for division of labor and specialization that existed during the planting and cultivation seasons (al- though such opportunities do appear to have existed in sugar harvesting). In the absence of an interdependence that could be exploited to promote an intense rhythm of -work, planters attempted to achieve the same objective by dividing harvest hands into competing groups. There were daily as well as weekly races, with prizes (bonuses) offered to the winning team and to the leading individual picker. There were daily weigh—ins of the cotton picked, and those who did not respond to the positive incentive had to face the abuse, verbal or physical, of the driver, if they fell too far below the expected pace. The so-called “task method” was still another means of promoting the inte abor during the harvest season. Under this method, slaves were assigned given plots of land which were to be picked each day. Intensityof labor was pro- moted by permitting the slave to use his time for his own purposes when the task was completed. One way of ensur- ing that the work was done well under this system was to reassign the same plot to the same slave in each of the successive rounds of picking. Daily weighing of cotton also served as a check on performance. -W o Specialization and division of labor were not limited t {74 fieldwork. They carried over into domestic aspects of plan- {tation life. Certain domestic tasks alized to a con- siderable extent. This was true of child rearing and, to a lesser extent, of the production of clothing and of cooking. It was women, predominantly, who specialized in these em- ployments. Most large plantations maintained nurseries. These were supervised by one or more of the older women, depending on the size of the plantation, who generally were 1 RELATIVE EFFICIENCY OF SLAVE AGRICULTURE / 207 assisted by older children. Women who worked in the fields, or at other assignments, deposited their children in the morning and picked them up in the evening. Nursing mothers returned to the nursery three or four times per day for feedings. The production of clothing was, in varying degrees, carried out on most plantations. Some had loom houses in which most of the cloth consumed on plantations was woven. Others limited production to the sewing of purchased cloth. Sometimes these tasks were carried out by Women in their own houses, when the weather was inclement or during slack seasons. In other cases, a permanent stafl‘ was assigned to a special building. Olmsted described the loom-house staff on one very large plantation. Of the dozen hands so em- ployed, one “was insane, and most of the others were crippled, invalids with chronic complaints, or unfitted by age, or some infirmity, for field wor Olmsted’s description points to another aspect of the efficiency of «plantations —— the extraordinarily high abor- force participation rate (share of the population in the labor force). In the free economy — North and South — approximately one third of the population was in the labor force. Among slaves, the labor-force participation rate was two thirds. Virtually every slave capable of being in the labor force was in it. This was due largely to the inability of slaves, particularly women and children, to choose leisure, educa- tion, or work at home, if they preferred it, to work in fields or other assigned tasks. It was partly due to institutional ar- rangements which permitted plantations to find methods of employing those who would, to a large extent, be un- employable in free societies, particularly in free urban societies — the mentally retarded, the crippled, the age Plantations not only brought a larger share of the popula- tion into the labor force, but they were also able to move closer to "full—capacity” utilization of the labor potential than was true of the free economy. This was not because slaves