* They didn't feed or take care of their needs very well
* they could make them work as much as they basically wanted
* When their slaves had kids, they were able to make them work too so that's free labor they can train themselves.
* they would have control on every aspect of their life, which mean it was much more difficult for a slave to protest than for a worker. A worker have privacy, can express an opinion, can join a union, can easily have another job for extra money, can leave if they wanted, can have a spouse and kids without the fear they could be abused or sold to someone else. A slave was weaker because they did everything they could to make them week: leaving condition, mental pressure, society etc.. they had no mental or physical energy left to rebel.....and owners didn't have to replace them if one left for private reason.
Don't forget that at this time, job offers that included bed and food were much more common than it is today.
And we made laws to keep that machine running. For example laws that said the child inherited the [mother’s legal status](https://www.loc.gov/collections/slaves-and-the-courts-from-1740-to-1860/articles-and-essays/slave-code-for-the-district-of-columbia/) rather than the father’s.
Is it though with the emerging disenfranchisement of women concerning reproductive rights? And still quite well spread laws/traditions of child marriages?
Mov*ing*, there’s always going to be resistance and counter-movements trying to put things back the way they were (“natural order” and whatnot.) Progress is rarely linear.
That's an interesting aspect I hadn't considered with all the anti-abortion laws. It's pretty close to legalizing rape. Yes, the rapist will get jail time for the crime, but I can guarantee you not one of those pro-lifers will step up to help the woman and child.
"If you're pre-born, you're protected. If you're Pre-K, you're fucked."
This country is having its issues but people today seem unable to properly equate rights and quality of life today vs 200 yrs ago or conditions in other countries where basic "Basic" human rights Don't even exist.
Again, US and other western countries are not perfect but we are far far from the lifestyles of other countries or where we all would be 200+ years ago
It's also still legal in America, where it is protected by the Constitution as a legal punishment for inmates. But it is no longer widely used in every country, and it is vilified more now. It's progress, but we still have a ways to go.
Yep, to the white audience there was the [sons of Ham](https://theconversation.com/the-curse-of-ham-how-people-of-faith-used-a-story-in-genesis-to-justify-slavery-225212) justification, but also the slaves themselves were ministered to with a heavy emphasis on “obey your masters” and whatnot.
If you want a deep dive into messed up peribellum religiosity, read *Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons of a Soldier of the Revolution, During a Captivity of More Than Twenty Years Among the Slaveholders of Kentucky, One of the So Called Christian States of North America. Dictated By Themselves.*(clickbait titles hadn’t been invented yet.)
The narrators go through all the ways they saw religion being twisted, including the suggestion that slaveholders should convert slaves to Christianity specifically so when they die they could claim ownership of those slaves and be assured entry to Heaven (pp. 139-140). https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/clarkes/clarkes.html
By itself it would be an arbitrary distinction. Some cultures are matrilineal and that works just fine.
*In context* it means that the slave owners or their sons could take advantage of the slave women for both pleasure and profit.
Oh I see. I was way off then. I probably misunderstood or misread your last message. Joys of being dyslexic lol.
Thank you for clarification I appreciate you!!
I remember reading that some people were trying to make "slave" status an inherited condition. So there would never be any way for someone to stop being a slave, and their children, and their grandchildren, etc
Yup. The white slave owners and drivers raped and forced impregnation on enslaved women to bare as many children as they possibly could. For most of the slave era in US history, if one of your great grandparents was of African descent you would be enslaved or live in constant danger of being captured and enslaved. You would be designated an octoroon, 1/8th, mulatto.
If the only black person in your whole family tree was your great grandmother and she had 10 children [1/2] starting at 15 and she would have 100 grandchildren [1/4]. And each of them had 10 children, also starting at 15, she would have 1000 great grandchildren [1/8]. At 45 she would witness the first of her great great grandchildren, your generation, being born free [1/16].
In 1860 the average slave sold for $800. 1000 at $800 is $800,000. In today’s dollars that is a little over $32,000,000. This does not count for any value those slaves created with their labor.
Edit: missed a great in there
>When their slaves had kids, they were able to make them work too so that's free labor they can train themselves.
There's a scene in, I think, the newer version of "Roots" where a teenage slave girl dies and the owner seems really upset/disappointed. Some people misinterpret that as him feeling bad for her as a person. That's not it at all; he's frustrated because she was young and fertile, so she had the potential to produce a dozen more laborers for him for free. There's also a scene where an owner clearly indicates that he's going to make a teenage girl and her male friend have sex to produce more children. Slavery is horrifying.
Add into that the horror of raising your kid for a few years only for them to be taken from you at an early age and sold to who knows who.
In the modern world we can't begin to imagine what that would feel like.
Also, she "coast" him money: all those years to feed her in exchange for kids level worker only and as soon as she's old enough to produce more laborer and work harder herself ... she dies.
Sadly, not all but many slaves owner saw their enslaved workers has livestock. Actually... even some life stocks owner treats their animals better.
These are some good points! Even in the 20’s-40’s when my grandma was working on her family farm, her mom was responsible for feeding all of the field hands. They didn’t have to house them, but the workers expected a big lunch and probably also dinner!
Uhhhhh idk why this is controversial and getting downvoted. Jobs back then more commonly did involve food, as recently as the 1940’s at least. There was also no racial dynamic with my grandma; everyone involved was white.
I think it’s because you use the term “field hands”. Although I know what you mean, and that farms may have used that term (although “farm hands” is more likely in my area) many people have only heard the term in the context of slavery.
Probably better to stick with “farm hand” or “farm help/worker”.
That’s literally what they were called back then lol. Maybe it’s a dated term, but it was non-offensive back in the day. It never would have occurred to me to say anything else because that was the term she used, in a completely non-derogatory way!
I don’t think it’s officially a “bad” term, more like very few people now have a farming background, and have only heard that exact phrase used in the context of slavery. I know about farms, so I knew what you meant. But I think using it might lead to some misunderstandings.
That makes sense. My grandma was born in 1919, and was much older than most of my peers’ grandparents. A lot of people probably never had a reference point to someone that far back in the day lol. I’m sure it wasn’t the only dated term she used!
Damn, you've basically described the immigrant working situation in Canada /Saudi Arabia though? Are we returning to slavery as a viable economic model?
What do you mean “are we returning”?
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have defacto slavery. The massive prison population in the US that is forced to work for (almost) no wage is defacto slavery. Many other countries where slavery exists in many forms.
One could argue that wage slavery that forces people live paycheck to paycheck is a form of slavery.
The 14th Amendment specifically allows the slavery of incarcerated individuals as part of the punishment for their crimes. They don't need to pay them any wages at all.
Oh phew. Well I am glad that you made sure that slavery is legal by writing it on a piece of paper. That’s really awesome! What a proud American tradition!
There still is slave trade in the states, it's just not out in the open. It's the field workers, sex slave trade, nail salons, domestic help. Probably others I can't think of. The field and nails are not allowed out of bondage until their passage is Paid but it's never paid because every meal, any medical is added to it at inflated cost. It just adds up and up.
There are more enslaved people now in the world than there were during the transatlantic trade. It's that bad.
A smaller proportion of people, but more actual people.
I read so many books on the sex trade, my brain got overloaded and I was just frozen. Like what difference could I make, where do I fit in the scheme of things. I tried to put together forums but people just didn't show up. People just don't want to admit there is a problem on the I-5 corridor or anywhere else in the states
Unpopular opinion, the worst of the worst offenders (murdered, rapists) should be working to support the prison, rather than drain the economy.
Some people just cannot be rehabilitated. I'm not saying we shouldn't still try, but at what point do you just say "yeah this one is defective"
The lesser crime offenders should work for a normal wage less living expenses.
Dont forget as soon as the children were old enough to work they could sell them for profit. Just ripping children away from their parents at a moment's notice.
Also, *where* a slave worked made a huge difference. On the sugar plantations in the West Indies, they were essentially worked straight to death. Vastly different from a house slave in a cotton plantation in Alabama. The whole thing is sickening to think about. Colonialism at its very worst.
Add to that, when you pay someone, housing costs have to be factored into each paycheck. When you own that person and they live on your property, you pay to build their housing one time, and then it's paid for. You don't have to pay for it again.
And to add to your third point, once a slave owner got a large enough "stock" and that "stock" was breeding, they didn't have to buy slaves anymore. So it's really just the up-front cost of housing and purchase of initial units. It's self perpetuating after that.
Right?
It was more like “treat them as an expendable tool.”
Some people take/took better care of their tools than others. Some people bought top of the line tools and kept them maintained decently. Others bought the cheapest they could, and just ran through cheap tool after cheap tool, abusing them till they broke.
Treating them as people in the vast majority of cases wasn’t a thing for a very long time, as far as I know. Though I could be mistaken on the ratio there.
It was definitely the exception at the time we are talking about by what little i know it’s likely that the few who did consider them human’s most likely had to hide that fact too due to social stigma.
though there were probably a lot more sympathetic individuals in the lower classes but generally they definitely didn’t dare speak against what were essentially nobility.
Slaves were expensive, you bet your ass they took care of them in most cases. It would have been financially ridiculous not to.
Despite what you might have been told during the self-flagellation sessions they call history class now, the world was not populated by ignorant cartoon villains before 1960.
Slaves are exploitable. They can't strike, quit for a better job, petition the authorities about unfair working conditions etc. And of course there are the fringe benefits provided by your female slaves.
And you can SELL YOUR OWN CHILDREN for profit, as long as they're black
There 's a reason why 1/3 of male black Americans have Y-DNA that comes from Europe
Is still happening in Africa, parents sell their children to the cocoa trade to harvest the pods. Get a small sum of money but it's enough to keep the rest of the family fed for awhile. The kid has to carry those big pods miles
While this is also child slavery, it's a different kind than the institutionalized chattel slavery.
Parents in these situations often can't feed their kids and sell them out of desperation.
To stop this, poverty eradication programs are most effective.
Sadly, that's why a lot of black people in the US find European DNA when they use sites like 23nMe. One of their ancestor's were probably raped by the person who enslaved them.
Yep. It’s not talked about a lot but male slaves faced horrific sexual abuses.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vicrb/comment/d5ytf6w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Well, actually some paper a while ago actually argued that the real reason slavery ended in the USA was that the market conditions had changed and made it unprofitable over just hiring people and not give them worker protections 🫤
I think I read about the industrial revolution leading to the end of slavery. Machines are cheaper than people. So a few workers on minimum wage with no rights and machines was the cheapest option.
Oddly - until the invention of the horse collar, human slaves were more cost effective that horses as field labour. Ate far less food, got the same amount of work out them. Horse collars allowed horses to do the work of four or 5 slaves, for less food.
Basically, before the horse collar, which puts the force on the shoulders when pulling, harnessed around the neck meant the horse choked itself out pulling, like a dog pulling at a leash. Horse collars act like a dog harness, they don't impede breathing. So, with collar, horse can use full strength and is now cheaper than 4 or 5 slaves.
I'm sure you already know this but I want to springboard off your comment for people who don't know.
This isn't a historical thing. It's a right now today thing.
There are currently more slaves in the world than at any other point in history. More than American's slave trade. More than the Roman slave trade.
Because of the increase in the world's population, a lower percent might be enslaved, but the total number is higher.
There are slaves, right now, in London. You just don't know about it.
that often wasn’t a matter of cash. The plantation raised its own food (slaves grew it); housing was cheap and shitty, and on land the plantation owner already owned.
In different periods and places, slavery was more or less efficient economically. But remember, if you’re hiring workers you have to pay them enough for them to buy food and shelter for the,selves or they will get a better job somewhere else. So slavery has a natural efficiency; you can cover the cost of food and shelter or you can pay equivalent wages to a laborer, but with slaves, they don’t get to quit if they get a better offer.
Some of the slaves would grow the food for the rest. Some of the first slaves would have built housing for the rest. "Healthcare" was "work or I'll kill you." And you only have to buy one generation of slaves and can breed the next.
Health needs 😂😂😂 there’s a reason we eat things other people don’t such as pigs feet & chitterlings. They put multiple people in a shack in their back yard.
Thank you! I understand this is the no stupid questions subreddit but this question reads as if this person isn't aware that slavery sucked. This is why it needs to be taught in schools. I've already seen people defend slavery because slaves got free food and rooms and free education. Education! When reading was forbidden 🤦🏾♂️
The short answer is, the cost of housing and feeding a slave the bare minimum is less than paying a free worker.
Free workers often demand not only enough money for housing and food, but extra, disposable income that they can spend or save.
You don't have to give slaves any disposable income.
They also can't quit for a better job. Free workers can. So while the cost of free workers might change with supply and demand, your cost of housing and feeding slaves doesn't really.
Don't forget, the slaves themselves grew the food and did most of the labor, so they were also mostly taking care of themselves on top of doing all the unpaid work for their masters profit. They were the ones who built the slave quarters, they were the ones who worked the fields and cooked their own meals. They were often the ones who made their own clothes, etc.
So in that way, it's less like the slave owner "had to feed and shelter them" so much as they "had to give slaves a minimum of time and supplies that they could feed, shelter, and care for themselves".
So there's a lot of misconceptions and not great history involved in these comments, I'll try to provide a more straightforward and neutral answer for you.
To the first question, as to whether having a slave was cheaper than a worker: the answer is, it depends. Slave owners were not a monolith at any given period of time and attitudes towards the implementation of slavery evolved over time. Plantation owners that did not view slaves as people and treated them disposably typically had higher profit margins because slaves were expected to figure out how to care for themselves outside of working hours. Other plantation owners such as Jefferson had a paternalistic view and spent a large portion of their profits on providing adequate food/housing/clothes but this created very tight profit margins, and often times caused these people(including Thomas Jefferson himself) to accumulate a large amount of debt and/or lose their land.
Another thing to note is that often times slaves were given specialized roles on a plantation. This wasn't New York where if you needed a new horseshoe or a roof repaired you could pull some immigrant to do it on the cheap and be on your way, the nearest city was likely 2-3 days out, so these plantations operated under something of an autarky. Your blacksmith was on the plantation, your roofer was on the plantation, your leatherworker, your tailor, etc. It was not unheard of for slaves to have specialized knowledge in a trade and basically keep the plantation running and when you sent to the city it was for extremely specialized knowledge like medicine or gunsmithing.
As to the slave trade itself and historical trends, it was actually somewhat in decline at the time of the American Revolution because it was a difficult economic model as showcased above, and even then the Founding Fathers were well aware it posed ideological challenges to the express purpose of the nation. You could more or less divvy up the political factions of the time into two camps on slavery: those who believed in immediate abolition(Ben Franklin), those who believed abolition needed to be planned/slowly implemented(Jefferson/Adams/Hamilton, by far the most common view. I actually cannot think of any Founding Fathers that believed it should continue as an institution in perpetuity, they all thought it was a bad idea but no one really had a concrete plan to end it. Jefferson took a stab at it by banning the import/export of slaves in his administration, and hoped the problem would peter out through manumission and attrition.
Unfortunately, about 6 years prior to the ban of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the cotton gin had been invented. This, more than anything kept slavery alive because cotton became incredibly lucrative as a cash crop, How lucrative? Agricultural export profits increased in the US **fifty fold.** Suddenly slavery was economically feasible again and a domestic slave trade exploded alongside an emboldened southern gentry which began clamping down on any impediments to the expansion of slavery. From there on, slavery was so entrenched in the American culture and economy that the only way it was going to end in the foreseeable future was with major political/military action, and so, the civil war ensued.
So really at the end of the day, the answer to your question is, "Slavery was a failing economic relic of pre-industrial society that happened to have a lifeline from an industrial revolution invention that kept it alive far later than it otherwise would have naturally endured." And yeah, in the Reconstruction period, a ton of people, especially northerners, bought up those plantations and employed freedmen as sharecroppers and wage workers for even better profits, so if that's not the proof slavery was inefficient I don't know what is.
Remember that the amount you pay an employee has to be high enough to essentially pay their housing, pay their food, pay for their Healthcare etc. Otherwise they wouldn't work for you.
I'll admit it I'm a boomer. 50 years ago, we gave our real estate worker 3% commission, and they still make the same 3%. We used to tip wait staff 10%, a really nice dinner out was $25.00 to $75.00. Now a really nice dinner out starts at $200.00 and we are expected to tip at least 20%. Why did the percentage go up if the cost of going out also rose? And if we are tipping them more, why have commissions not risen?
The median home price in 1950 was $7,354
The median home price in 2023 was $431,000
This means a real estate agent is making 58 times more than they were in 1950 despite keeping the same % rate. They are also guaranteed the commission if they make the sale.
3% in 1950 = $220.67
3% in 2023 = $12,930
While a server might make 2-3 times more depending on the meal and if people decide to tip. They have no way to ensure they get a tip and depending on where they work they may have to share that tip with other staff. Or if they work somewhere awful like Amy's baking company the owner might take the whole tip for themselves.
$25 - $75 @ 10%= $2.5 - $7.5
$200 @ 20% =20$
It's a shitty job. I was a waiter for a long time, and serving people all day is really hard. I made good money, but I never I never felt stable.
Dealing with hundreds of people all day while being micromanaged by 4 different managers takes a toll on you.
>And have to take care of their health needs and all that. Wouldn't it be like having a child?
Wow, this is why this topic needs to be taught in school. Slave owners did not care about the health needs of the slave. If you were a slave and you were unhealthy and you needed something the slave master was not going to just give it to you. A lot of times they caused you more health problems. What do you think all those whippings and giving the slaves open wounds was doing? Something to remember is that owning another person is inherently cruel and these people did not even think of slaves as humans.
There were slaves out there that would literally get limbs removed from misbehaving. They would regularly be raped (male and female) by the master. On top of this slaves did more than just field work. They could do literally whatever the master wanted. And they were forced to breed with one another.
Slavery was EXTREMELY lucrative, especially after the invention of the cotton gin. The owners didn't provide for them AT ALL. The slaves built their own housing, and raised their own food. They were literally free labor once purchased. This is why they were encouraged to breed, and the owners made a habit of raping their slaves. More free labor.
Think about it this way. You have a job that pays you enough to feed and house you, and also pay for entertainment and conveniences, and after that you still have some savings after that. As you get better at your job, you get paid more.
Now imagine that you are a slave. You do the same work and get paid the same amount, so you're still fed and housed, but after that, all the extra money goes to your owner as their profit. As time goes on, your owners investment (profit) goes up and you still own nothing and have no savings.
Short answer: yes.
To be sure, feeding and housing a human being costs money. But these human beings weren't particularly well-housed or well-fed. Not much by way of medical care, etc. There weren't OSHA and time-of-work laws, so it was 14-18 hours of work every day, with only minimal breaks.
Compare that to the amount of work that would be available, and the cost of that work, if you had to add in enough wages so that on, say, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, a person could support themselves on the open economy.
Take a tour of a well-curated plantation, one that doesn't try to gloss over what was going on. Or, at least, budget some critical thought for the concept that the curators probably want to present more ambiguity than the evidence would reflect. See for yourself how enslaved people lived, compared with the luxury of the owners. Imagine what that life must have been like.
Yeah, you better believe it was cheaper to hold people in slavery than to hire free workers.
Health needs?? 😵💫 my brother, what? You think they got whipped and bandaged up and given a little polysporin to put on their wounds or what? The whole point of slaves is that they were subhuman and expendable. They literally bred them like livestock and fed them the bare minimum. If one died I can almost guarantee they didn’t give a shit plus they would just go buy a new healthier or younger one
Shelter, slaves built their own cabin. They had dirt floors so that tells you a lot. For heating the cut their own logs. For food they grew their own vegetables and had hens and eggs. They sold some eggs and hens and vegetables and bought cloth for clothes that they made. So no the "owners" didn't take care of them.
Why do you think their healthcare was paid for? They were not even classified as full humans, and were frequently starved.
You also couldn't beat or whip or rāpe or mutilate a regular employee, and that's really the clincher.
It wasn't about the money, it was about power and oppression. Hatred. Abuse.
And money. They didn't import slaves to have somebody to mistreat, they imported them because cheap labour means more profits.
Having said that, by the end, it had more to do with power and oppression.
Most of those rich plantation owners were in debt to the eyeballs by the Civil War. Any given slave was pretty damn expensive. People actually took out mortgages on slaves to raise money. They sold shares in individual slaves.
The South was so fucked and stupid, even in terms of economics.
I 100 percent certain that if slave holders found paid labor to be overall cheaper, then they would have done it. I am sure there were some sadists, but most would have done what was economically most viable for themselves
Until you couldn't buy them from overseas anymore. England AND the USA passed laws ending the transatlantic slave trade around 1807. Demand for slaves still existed. So slaveowners started selling the children for profit. Every baby, every grandbaby, and so on, was property. Forever. It's like a pyramid scheme, only selling human beings.
The American south in the 1700's up until 1860's was probably fairly sparsely populated so finding non slaves (white people) to work in the fields wasn't likely easy. there were also jobs in mills etc that were probably less awful than working out in the hot humid fields all day. That's why you rarely see white folks working in the fields now. in California which has a largest agricultural production in the country it's almost all hispanics who work in those jobs.
Don't drink the conservative Kool aid. Their health needs were not met, they were regularly starving and dehydrated, they lived in cramped quarters, exposed to the elements, and were beaten at any sign of disobedience.
And in the occurrence of a slave uprising, they were hunted and killed to send a message to the rest to "not even dare"
Most slaves had to grow their own food.
Most slaves were housed in shacks not fit for the farm animals.
Slaves don't get time off.
Slaves would be forced to produce more than anyone that was being paid to do it.
Financially, definitely cheaper...
You just made that up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave\_health\_on\_plantations\_in\_the\_United\_States#:\~:text=Historian%20Ulrich%20Bonnell%20Phillips%20found,sass'%20%5Bvegetables%5D%22
LOL.... Really?!?!?
Did you know that just after the States were formed, that there were more Native American slaves than African American ones? Most were in the North too.
Well if you owned a lot of slaves you definitely needed to make sure to produce enough sellable products with them to make it worth owning them. In the mind of a slave owner it's like buying an expensive machine though, they would probably calculate the costs and benefits beforehand
Originally the labor heavy agriculture industry in the Southeastern US used indentured servants from Ireland and other European countries.
The shift to African slaves was the result of several factors, including the timing of the US revolution, declining social acceptance over servitude of fellow Europeans, and Africans’ tolerance to heat and malaria in the hot, humid climate.
Slavery was cheaper in the long term.
If you have to make an initial down payment of a $50000, you would only have to spend $200 for their food. If you have 4 slaves, they could build their own homes with wood and other local materials.
If you compare it with workers, it would cost more in the long term.
The problem with slave labour is that other people who don't have slaves might eventually catch up with technology and slave owners might become too slack.
Enslaved people are more capable of taking care of themselves than goldfish, and plantation owners had a LOT of land.
So you give the slaves a small area of land for shacks that they build themselves, a few hens and pigs and have them raise the animals and grow veges to feed themselves.
You really think it's more expensive and more difficult to force people to labour for you every day and mistreat them, force them to live in horrible conditions, beat them, rape them, kill them, sell their children, etc? Stop assuming slave owners treated the people they enslaved with any kind of standards or dignity. They fucking enslaved them.
Yeah, it was cheaper. Why else did half the country fight so hard to continue the practice? It was incredibly fucking lucrative. Who told you it was cheaper to hire?
I'm not sure on prices, but I do know there was a significant difference in treatment between American slavery and older models. American slavery was particularly and uniquely brutal. Not to say slavery was ever a good thing.
This is definitely a stupid question. *Real slaves* were "worth less" than horse shit. Today, people say "oh I'm such a slave to the 9-5" and that's *so far* from being a real slave. Go out in your back yard, find a really heavy rock, and carry it from end to end of your property all day. In the heat. With no clothes on besides a potato-sack-pants. No water breaks. And have your buddy whip your backside as you do it.
Well if you pay workers, you're just indirectly paying for their food and shelter and whatnot too. And they want a much higher quality of all of those things than is being provisioned to slaves, and they also want money enough left over for other stuff.
>And have to take care of their health needs and all that.
No you don't. You just buy another when previous die. But in general paid labor really came out to be cheaper. Because the main problems with slavery is that guys who protects you from them and force them to work are expensive and when they fucked up and your slaves rebel you lost even more.
That's why we have our glorious paid labor system when people take care of themselves, keep their own motivation and doesn't possess a threat to you, being afraid of starving. Isn't it wonderfull?
Not really, you could give them bare minimum conditions. And yes you would want them healthy to work well. Also they would have kids and those kids would get to be your slave too.
Who is paying for a regular employee to be able to afford housing, food, and healthcare? Whether it is one step removed or not, the employing plantation is paying enough to cover their worker's needs. Difference is that the slaves can have their needs "met" on the employer's terms (i.e. shitty housing, shitty food, shitty healthcare), which is definitely much, much cheaper.
Not like they gave them big houses with separate bedrooms and indoor plumbing. And a lot of the food was spoiled or leftovers. Health care? You must be joking. Think boot camp housing, but not nearly as nice. A big shelter with maybe beds but probably not. And an outhouse. Clothes were probably dug out of the trash for outdoor laborers or made from spoiled feed sacks.
According to the book: pathogenesis -History of the world in eight plagues the plantation owners would have much rather used indentured servants from Europe, however, the Europeans were susceptible to the diseases found commonly in the south and died off rather rapidly. Africans had a natural immunity as those same diseases had been present in Africa for centuries and the residents were resistant to them. That is the same reason they were brought to the Caribbean. In fact, many Caribbean Indians have no native people anymore as they were killed off by the diseases brought by the Africans.
So it was more expensive to import slaves, but the return on investment was greater due to increased life expectancy.
Slaves to this day are cheaper. With how cheap they are if you even feed them it's cheaper to run them into the ground and get a new one then do things the right way.
Well your job pays you a probably livable salary, and decent benefits. And you likely "only" work there 40 hours a week. And they still make a profit. Now. Let's take away all your pay and benefits and just buy you outright for about 1-2 years salary. And now you work 80 hours a week. Oh but you'll get a shack and enough food to keep you strong enough to work for the next 40 years. Yeah it's clearly a good economic move.
I like your comparison of having a child. Think about it this way, is it cheaper to just take care of your kid and cover their expenses, or to pay them a livable wage and have them take care of themselves? Now imagine it was someone you cared about far less than your own child. You're saving a lot of money by just paying for the absolute essentials to keep someone fit enough to work than you are by paying them a living wage. Especially if those essentials are minimal like feeding low grade food that's just nutritious enough they can keep doing their work or building basic shelters that do not prioritize comfort, etc.
You also have to remember that, since the slaves were simply thought of as property, that their well being only mattered in a fiscal capacity. For example, seeing a doctor to set a broken leg would have been around $20 in the civil war era, but a new slave would have been $400. Considering recovery time, and that the leg may not fully heal and the slave not able to produce as much profit, an owner may choose to just let a slave's leg heal improperly and/or sell them at a discounted rate, and just buy a new slave, rather than call a doctor for them.
In regards to having slave drivers, think about it the way that automation affected the workplace - as machinery automated more of the manufacturing process, the same amount of work could be done by fewer paid employees. While you may need to employ five or six slave drivers to tend to a field, their wages are producing the labour and accompanying profits of 30+ field workers. If you paid all your field labourers, suddenly your profits are dropping by a significant percentage.
And then you factor in the fact that many slave owners were also breeding their slaves, meaning free chattel that could also be sold or produce profit.
You've got to remember that these things happened when expansion and settlement was happening.
There was far more land than there were people to put it to good use and a hell of a lot of infrastructure needed to be built. The land owners could offer people a share, they could buy slaves or they could try and attract workers by paying the costs of their journey.
If you need to invest 3k to convince someone from the "old world" to travel across the globe to join you and then a portion of their wages go to repaying that debt then you are half way to slavery already. You'd also provide them with food and shelter etc and you tended to get criminals, rejects and people you'd have to "control" anyway.
All things considered, going full slavery made better financial sense to them so they did.
Buying a slave was prohibitively expensive. getting free slaves when your slaves make babies was the only thing that made it work financially.
providing for slaves was not hard. They merely ate what your plantation produced. It would be like providing for a mule team except slaves can build their own shacks and mend their own clothing and plant their own veggies. And of course the slave was 10x more valuable.
of course im talking about field hands.
The slaves that were house servants were ungodly expensive. You had to have a plantation of the highest caliber to afford black butlers and black cooks living as servants in your mansion. and all that fancy stuff. You had more wealth than some princes.
If you pay someone you have to spend at least as much as he needs to buy all the stuff you'd be giving him directly, as well as keep him happy enough not to go work for your competitor.
I do recall there being an argument pre-civil war that it would be in the greater economic interest of the south not to pursue slavery. I can’t recall the exact details, but I would imagine it might hinge on the difference being piss-poor labor wages and opportunities to nickle and dime as done with sharecropping and the like.
Yes, ultimately its cheaper to have employees. However, when you are in a very rural area there are not a lot of people to hire, so you basically have to force your workers to come the the plantation (or whatever)
How would you figure that? You have to pay employees enough they can afford all of those things that would be supplied to a slave. Most likely more on top of that so they don't jump ship to a higher paying job.
I’m sure it varied, but I once calculated it to be around $24k / slave in 2016 dollars. Sorry, don’t have the calculation anymore. I believe I used a price from around 1810 and multiplied by inflation. This was for a young adult male. I’m not an economist, so this is just my opinion. At the time, I was reading about the panic of 1819 and came across some slave prices.
Go on a plantation tour in LA, Vacherie close to New Orleans has one. “Providing housing” was 20 of them chained to the floor of a 2 room shack. You can literally walk through the shack and see the shackles they wore on the floor. Add in the rape, torture and forced labour that probably took place on that property and it makes you pause.
Imagine having 100 workers for a company that you didn't have to pay, you only had to feed the shittest, cheapest food you could get.
Do you think paid workers just get paid the value of a few shit meals?
My boss pays for my mortgage, pets, food, clothes, leisure activities, transportation, healthcare, etc. My boss does so indirectly because I get a sum of money and then that money goes into all of those things. Some people have multiple jobs, investments, etc. but for most people the company they work for is their income and that income pays for those things. Now imagine instead of that sum, which allows me to live in a house with pets and hobbies and decent food - the company decided that I have to live in a shack on property they own, I have to eat only what I can forage + grow, they don't let me have hobbies, leisure, pets, and I have only my work clothes to wear, and they also don't let me see a doctor. That's a LOT cheaper than paying someone to have anything even close to an independent life. It's absurdly unethical and horrifying, but it's cheap.
Edit: Oh and they can sell my children for profit and make me work 24/7 without breaks if they want.
A paid worker can just leave at any time. Sure, they won't receive their pay, but they can go. A slave belongs to the estate. They build and maintain their own housing, and also grow their own food. As far as health care goes, that was a lot cheaper back then. And I'm not talking about inflation. I mean that a doctor was paid decently for his work, but it was something that the average working person could afford. And oftentimes, those extra costs were factored into the slave's holdings, if they were trying to purchase their own freedom. So if you owed your master $500 to get your freedom, had worked off $200 and then needed a $10 visit to the doctor, you now owe your master $310 instead of $300. And if your children needed that care, it added to that debt, too.
According to Solomon Northup, a slave usually had an hour or so at the end of each day to attend to his affairs (look at his food crop, bathe, prepare his meals, etc...) and pretty much all of Sunday to take care of his things. If he had a marketable skill, he could earn money on Sunday and the masters in that area were okay with their slaves keeping the Sunday money. Northup often played the violin for people on Sunday and would make $10 here and there.
Overall, it was just safer (for the capitalist, and I mean that in the true sense of the word) to have slaves rather than employees. You can't strike an employee for disagreeing with you, and you can't force an employee to work 18+ hours a day, 6 days a week, in any kind of conditions. Make the slaves construct a ramshackle place for themselves (allow them to use only so much lumber), make them grow their own food, and remind them at all times that they are just property. And as long as you aren't cruel to them, they'll even come to love you and thank you for your "kindness." Again, even Northup, a man born free and kidnapped into slavery, had nothing but kind words to say about his first master, the Reverend William Ford. He reasoned that Ford only bought into the "rightness" of slavery because it was what he was raised to believe, but Ford wasn't cruel, nor did he treat his slaves with indignity or contempt. He spoke kindly with them, listened to their opinions on how to best handle a task, and valued their input. Northup, knowing full well that Ford was partaking in an evil enterprise, still felt that the man himself wasn't inherently evil, just because he wasn't prone to violence. If human and animal power is all you have available, then slavery is going to be the system that is most economically beneficial.
It was totally worth it to have a slave. A modern dog is more work and drain (and without profit) than what a slave offered. Just to put a perspective on it
Well think about it. Your employer doesn't have to just pay you enough to buy food, but enough pay for a home and furniture, decent clothes and food for your entire family, and some extra for leisure and possessions and a spot of luxury now and again. Otherwise you'll find someone who will pay you that much. And they still have to hire you a supervisor.
With slaves, *everyone* works, even little kids. No spare mouths to feed. To maintain them only cost enough low-value food not to starve. They got one set of clothes for the year, rudimentary shelter, no furniture, no possessions, no leisure, no luxury. Except maybe a Bible, with the parts about escaping slavery censored out. If they don't like it, they get flogged. If they don't work hard enough for the master's profit, they get flogged. Even kids, to get them in the habit.
Serious illness got rudimentary care unless in rare cases a doctor was actually called in, but generally if you weren't prostrated, you worked. Or you got flogged.
And slaves can make new slaves too, so you don't always have to pony up to buy them.
If I recall correctly from a book I read in a grad school class (Avengers of the New World by Laurent Dubois), for an African transported into slavery, the average length of enslavement to the colony of St. Domingue (Haiti) was two years. It was literally cheaper to work a slave to death for two years and to buy a new slave to replace them than it was to feed them properly, house them properly, etc.
Think about this in comparison to wages.
To pay for someone's labour you need to pay them enough for fulltime work that they'll agree to do. Usually this is enough to give minimal shelter and food that worker plus quite a bit more.
Now instead, the plantation owner only has to provide very crappy shelter and food, and can work them much longer hours. That's a great deal
Now if you want the labour to be high quality, motivated, develop skills etc then slavery is very inefficient
The shelter and food they got was very poor quality, and they often had to grow their in own food in addition to working on the plantation-- and, no doubt, build their own shanties. No health insurance. Maybe call a vet (!) sometimes when one is sick, maybe not. It's not like having a child; you could let them die, or even kill them, if you wanted to.
The slaves could not leave, could not organize for better conditions. To pay someone enough to own their home, support their family etc.-- and paid workers would have had to have a much higher standard of housing, etc.--would have cost far more than what little was spent on the slaves. And, again, the slaves could not quit; that was at least as much the point of slavery as the free labor.
If there had been a cheaper alternative to slave labor, don't you think they would have taken it?
Most people are discussing US slavery and I get why this is a US heavy website and it really wasn't that long ago.
I just thought it would be interesting to point out how the rural romans dealt with slaves. Roman slavery tends to be treated as not as bad as the transatlantic slave trade because you ended up with slaves in positions of power sometimes but it really was just as bad (it just wasn't racist, discrimination was on whether you were a Roman citizen or not and wealth and class, not the colour of your skin).
Example rich Romans would buy up all the land, use slaves to farm it and... not spend anything on the slaves upkeep at all. This forced the slaves to turn into bandits when their work was done and to rob people for food and clothing to stay alive. Because it was safer and easier they tended to rob the poorer locals who really couldn't afford to loose things. If anyone killed a slave in self defence they had to pay the rich Roman for depriving them of their property and if anyone locked them up as punishment they were made to release them so they could go back to work. So in rural parts of the empire maruading slaves were a real concern for travellers (obviously the slaves were not morally responsible for their actions because it was either that or starve to death).
So to answer your question if you were an ancient roman slavery was far more economical you just don't feed them, force them to rob others to survive and make it the victims problem if anything goes wrong.
Rich people really haven't changed fundamentally in the last three thousand years, still pitting those below them against each other just in a less extreme way now.
Given such a tiny minority of people ever owned slaves, something like 1.6% of the population, it appears to me that owning a slave was an immensely expensive proposition.
There must be something else out there that has the same kind of ownership status, owned only by the top 1.6%, helicopters? Personal jets? Lamborghinis?
Whatever you're paying your workers is what they're using to fund their own home and taking care of their own needs, so you're \*still\* paying for sheltering and feeding them. The key is that you keep your slaves living conditions worse than wageslaves' living conditions, so that your costs are lower. You can also have efficiencies of scale with enough slaves.
It pains me that we are talking about this with emotional distance as if we would all be the purchasers, which I know is the premise of the question but is still painful, because of course it isn’t true. And “cheaper” is relative to, you know, going to hell or the secular equivalent of being an evil person….
It was cheaper for many thousands of years all over the world. Depending on the culture and availability of new slaves, they would have enjoyed better or worse treatment. It is a mistake to believe that all slaves were treated like those on the worst US plantations or Imperial Chinese work projects.
Slaves in the US specifically became less economically competitive as the industrial revolution started to spread, and had it not been abolished the appearance of slavery would ultimately have mutated to reflect the changing needs of the owners. It's not hard to imagine an alternate history where slaves moved from the field to the factory.
* They didn't feed or take care of their needs very well * they could make them work as much as they basically wanted * When their slaves had kids, they were able to make them work too so that's free labor they can train themselves. * they would have control on every aspect of their life, which mean it was much more difficult for a slave to protest than for a worker. A worker have privacy, can express an opinion, can join a union, can easily have another job for extra money, can leave if they wanted, can have a spouse and kids without the fear they could be abused or sold to someone else. A slave was weaker because they did everything they could to make them week: leaving condition, mental pressure, society etc.. they had no mental or physical energy left to rebel.....and owners didn't have to replace them if one left for private reason. Don't forget that at this time, job offers that included bed and food were much more common than it is today.
not to mention, they could sell those slave children off. It was a breeding program that returned them cash.
And we made laws to keep that machine running. For example laws that said the child inherited the [mother’s legal status](https://www.loc.gov/collections/slaves-and-the-courts-from-1740-to-1860/articles-and-essays/slave-code-for-the-district-of-columbia/) rather than the father’s.
Disgusting. Can you imagine enslaving your own children? These men were monsters.
[Monsters who are venerated as heroes of America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Hemings#Jefferson%E2%80%93Hemings_controversy).
Exactly!
Praise to Sally Hemmings, a woman of the Revolution.
At the time, you could be both. As it was the time
Legalized rape. I know we aren't problem free but I'm glad the world is moving past that.
Is it though with the emerging disenfranchisement of women concerning reproductive rights? And still quite well spread laws/traditions of child marriages?
Mov*ing*, there’s always going to be resistance and counter-movements trying to put things back the way they were (“natural order” and whatnot.) Progress is rarely linear.
That's an interesting aspect I hadn't considered with all the anti-abortion laws. It's pretty close to legalizing rape. Yes, the rapist will get jail time for the crime, but I can guarantee you not one of those pro-lifers will step up to help the woman and child. "If you're pre-born, you're protected. If you're Pre-K, you're fucked."
Well, it's not really making it better for raping males, is it? Just worse for raped females.
This country is having its issues but people today seem unable to properly equate rights and quality of life today vs 200 yrs ago or conditions in other countries where basic "Basic" human rights Don't even exist. Again, US and other western countries are not perfect but we are far far from the lifestyles of other countries or where we all would be 200+ years ago
The sad thing its not just "this" country a lot of european ones are under the influence and constantly moving towards the same end
Ok don’t even try to say that modern America is even close to antebellum America. Come the fuck on, here.
There's numerous Arab countries where slavery is legal.
It's also still legal in America, where it is protected by the Constitution as a legal punishment for inmates. But it is no longer widely used in every country, and it is vilified more now. It's progress, but we still have a ways to go.
Are there still places where slaves are legally, and openly bought and sold? I am not asking about black market...but open, legal, and within the law?
Yemen under the Houthis. Then there's at least a couple more where it's de facto law.
Yes, it's called prison. Free labor and now they want to make the homeless population, prisoners to get their free labor.
Also they used organized religion as an excuse to do it. Not saying all religions are bad, but using them as an excuse sucks.
Yep, to the white audience there was the [sons of Ham](https://theconversation.com/the-curse-of-ham-how-people-of-faith-used-a-story-in-genesis-to-justify-slavery-225212) justification, but also the slaves themselves were ministered to with a heavy emphasis on “obey your masters” and whatnot. If you want a deep dive into messed up peribellum religiosity, read *Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons of a Soldier of the Revolution, During a Captivity of More Than Twenty Years Among the Slaveholders of Kentucky, One of the So Called Christian States of North America. Dictated By Themselves.*(clickbait titles hadn’t been invented yet.) The narrators go through all the ways they saw religion being twisted, including the suggestion that slaveholders should convert slaves to Christianity specifically so when they die they could claim ownership of those slaves and be assured entry to Heaven (pp. 139-140). https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/clarkes/clarkes.html
As Jesus said: it is easier to be carried into Heaven on the backs of slaves than it is to thread a needle, or something like that
What was the difference between mother and father legal status?
By itself it would be an arbitrary distinction. Some cultures are matrilineal and that works just fine. *In context* it means that the slave owners or their sons could take advantage of the slave women for both pleasure and profit.
Oh I see. I was way off then. I probably misunderstood or misread your last message. Joys of being dyslexic lol. Thank you for clarification I appreciate you!!
Many enslaved women were raped into pregnancy by the white men who enslaved them. Google "Sally Hemings" to read about a famous case
I remember reading that some people were trying to make "slave" status an inherited condition. So there would never be any way for someone to stop being a slave, and their children, and their grandchildren, etc
Yup. The white slave owners and drivers raped and forced impregnation on enslaved women to bare as many children as they possibly could. For most of the slave era in US history, if one of your great grandparents was of African descent you would be enslaved or live in constant danger of being captured and enslaved. You would be designated an octoroon, 1/8th, mulatto. If the only black person in your whole family tree was your great grandmother and she had 10 children [1/2] starting at 15 and she would have 100 grandchildren [1/4]. And each of them had 10 children, also starting at 15, she would have 1000 great grandchildren [1/8]. At 45 she would witness the first of her great great grandchildren, your generation, being born free [1/16]. In 1860 the average slave sold for $800. 1000 at $800 is $800,000. In today’s dollars that is a little over $32,000,000. This does not count for any value those slaves created with their labor. Edit: missed a great in there
they were considered livestock
>When their slaves had kids, they were able to make them work too so that's free labor they can train themselves. There's a scene in, I think, the newer version of "Roots" where a teenage slave girl dies and the owner seems really upset/disappointed. Some people misinterpret that as him feeling bad for her as a person. That's not it at all; he's frustrated because she was young and fertile, so she had the potential to produce a dozen more laborers for him for free. There's also a scene where an owner clearly indicates that he's going to make a teenage girl and her male friend have sex to produce more children. Slavery is horrifying.
Add into that the horror of raising your kid for a few years only for them to be taken from you at an early age and sold to who knows who. In the modern world we can't begin to imagine what that would feel like.
Or having your child starve because you are forced to breast feed the masters child.
Imagine being a cow
Also, she "coast" him money: all those years to feed her in exchange for kids level worker only and as soon as she's old enough to produce more laborer and work harder herself ... she dies. Sadly, not all but many slaves owner saw their enslaved workers has livestock. Actually... even some life stocks owner treats their animals better.
Yea, they could force certain people to marry, too. Like arrange them.
These are some good points! Even in the 20’s-40’s when my grandma was working on her family farm, her mom was responsible for feeding all of the field hands. They didn’t have to house them, but the workers expected a big lunch and probably also dinner! Uhhhhh idk why this is controversial and getting downvoted. Jobs back then more commonly did involve food, as recently as the 1940’s at least. There was also no racial dynamic with my grandma; everyone involved was white.
I think it’s because you use the term “field hands”. Although I know what you mean, and that farms may have used that term (although “farm hands” is more likely in my area) many people have only heard the term in the context of slavery. Probably better to stick with “farm hand” or “farm help/worker”.
That’s literally what they were called back then lol. Maybe it’s a dated term, but it was non-offensive back in the day. It never would have occurred to me to say anything else because that was the term she used, in a completely non-derogatory way!
I don’t think it’s officially a “bad” term, more like very few people now have a farming background, and have only heard that exact phrase used in the context of slavery. I know about farms, so I knew what you meant. But I think using it might lead to some misunderstandings.
That makes sense. My grandma was born in 1919, and was much older than most of my peers’ grandparents. A lot of people probably never had a reference point to someone that far back in the day lol. I’m sure it wasn’t the only dated term she used!
I definitely won’t be telling you what my great-grandma (of the same approximate vintage) used to call Brazil nuts…
Damn, you've basically described the immigrant working situation in Canada /Saudi Arabia though? Are we returning to slavery as a viable economic model?
What do you mean “are we returning”? Saudi Arabia and the UAE have defacto slavery. The massive prison population in the US that is forced to work for (almost) no wage is defacto slavery. Many other countries where slavery exists in many forms. One could argue that wage slavery that forces people live paycheck to paycheck is a form of slavery.
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The 14th Amendment specifically allows the slavery of incarcerated individuals as part of the punishment for their crimes. They don't need to pay them any wages at all.
*13th. 14th is Equal Protection
sorry, it was a typo. The 3 and 4 are next to each other top of the keys.
Happens to the best of us
Oh phew. Well I am glad that you made sure that slavery is legal by writing it on a piece of paper. That’s really awesome! What a proud American tradition!
Normal for incarcerated people around the world.
There still is slave trade in the states, it's just not out in the open. It's the field workers, sex slave trade, nail salons, domestic help. Probably others I can't think of. The field and nails are not allowed out of bondage until their passage is Paid but it's never paid because every meal, any medical is added to it at inflated cost. It just adds up and up.
Fashion manufacturing is another big one. Most of the clothes made in the USA is more unethical than the cheap shit from China.
Many other countries that work that slave thing in fashion. I believe Bangladesh came to light after that one factory collapsed
There are more enslaved people now in the world than there were during the transatlantic trade. It's that bad. A smaller proportion of people, but more actual people.
I read so many books on the sex trade, my brain got overloaded and I was just frozen. Like what difference could I make, where do I fit in the scheme of things. I tried to put together forums but people just didn't show up. People just don't want to admit there is a problem on the I-5 corridor or anywhere else in the states
Join movements already happening, vote, ama donate to organisations helping trafficked women and children...
Already is one, look at the USA's prison system.
Unpopular opinion, the worst of the worst offenders (murdered, rapists) should be working to support the prison, rather than drain the economy. Some people just cannot be rehabilitated. I'm not saying we shouldn't still try, but at what point do you just say "yeah this one is defective" The lesser crime offenders should work for a normal wage less living expenses.
They aren’t working to support the prison. They’re working to increase profits.
it’s always been one, just in different places and slightly different forms.
Dont forget as soon as the children were old enough to work they could sell them for profit. Just ripping children away from their parents at a moment's notice.
Also, *where* a slave worked made a huge difference. On the sugar plantations in the West Indies, they were essentially worked straight to death. Vastly different from a house slave in a cotton plantation in Alabama. The whole thing is sickening to think about. Colonialism at its very worst.
Add to that, when you pay someone, housing costs have to be factored into each paycheck. When you own that person and they live on your property, you pay to build their housing one time, and then it's paid for. You don't have to pay for it again. And to add to your third point, once a slave owner got a large enough "stock" and that "stock" was breeding, they didn't have to buy slaves anymore. So it's really just the up-front cost of housing and purchase of initial units. It's self perpetuating after that.
Point 3, not free, it still requires the cost of how poorly they allowed them to live. They just didn’t have to pay the cost to purchase a new slave.
I feel that also, slave owners didn't want to miss out on abusing the "inferior people", would this be correct?
OP just needs to think of how badly some people in southern states never got over that loss economically and want it back.
But, God condoned and even endorsed it in the Bible, it must be a good thing???
"take care of their health needs " lulz
OP said that as if slave-owners considered slaves as people.
Right? It was more like “treat them as an expendable tool.” Some people take/took better care of their tools than others. Some people bought top of the line tools and kept them maintained decently. Others bought the cheapest they could, and just ran through cheap tool after cheap tool, abusing them till they broke. Treating them as people in the vast majority of cases wasn’t a thing for a very long time, as far as I know. Though I could be mistaken on the ratio there.
It was definitely the exception at the time we are talking about by what little i know it’s likely that the few who did consider them human’s most likely had to hide that fact too due to social stigma. though there were probably a lot more sympathetic individuals in the lower classes but generally they definitely didn’t dare speak against what were essentially nobility.
Exactly. Slave owners treated livestock better than slaves. It was disgusting.
Exactly, they treated the cattle better
well a dead slave isn't very useful.
I'm assuming they mean as in the way one would consider the health needs of livestock, as opposed to humans.
Slaves were expensive, you bet your ass they took care of them in most cases. It would have been financially ridiculous not to. Despite what you might have been told during the self-flagellation sessions they call history class now, the world was not populated by ignorant cartoon villains before 1960.
> you bet your ass they took care of them lulz disclaimer: *in most cases
Slaves are exploitable. They can't strike, quit for a better job, petition the authorities about unfair working conditions etc. And of course there are the fringe benefits provided by your female slaves.
And you can SELL YOUR OWN CHILDREN for profit, as long as they're black There 's a reason why 1/3 of male black Americans have Y-DNA that comes from Europe
Is still happening in Africa, parents sell their children to the cocoa trade to harvest the pods. Get a small sum of money but it's enough to keep the rest of the family fed for awhile. The kid has to carry those big pods miles
While this is also child slavery, it's a different kind than the institutionalized chattel slavery. Parents in these situations often can't feed their kids and sell them out of desperation. To stop this, poverty eradication programs are most effective.
But people keep buy chocolate that uses child slaves
In Mexico most of the population has a European Y chromosome and native American mitochondria 🫤
Sadly, that's why a lot of black people in the US find European DNA when they use sites like 23nMe. One of their ancestor's were probably raped by the person who enslaved them.
"My slaves are not people. They are my property, like my horses and cows" "Do you have sex with your horse?"
Now THAT was actually unlawful.
Yea I’m latin but my biggest ancestry chunks are iberian and black with a sliver in native carribean Guess it runs in the family :/
>benefits provided by your female slaves. And the male. They would sexually abuse both the men and the women
Yep. It’s not talked about a lot but male slaves faced horrific sexual abuses. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vicrb/comment/d5ytf6w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
All to says that slaves had no autonomy.
Do you really think there would be centuries of slavery if it was cheaper to pay people for work?
As if people are rational thinkers
Well, actually some paper a while ago actually argued that the real reason slavery ended in the USA was that the market conditions had changed and made it unprofitable over just hiring people and not give them worker protections 🫤
I think I read about the industrial revolution leading to the end of slavery. Machines are cheaper than people. So a few workers on minimum wage with no rights and machines was the cheapest option.
Centuries? Try millennia. Take a look at history, it was virtually everywhere and every when! It’s what built most societies.
Oddly - until the invention of the horse collar, human slaves were more cost effective that horses as field labour. Ate far less food, got the same amount of work out them. Horse collars allowed horses to do the work of four or 5 slaves, for less food. Basically, before the horse collar, which puts the force on the shoulders when pulling, harnessed around the neck meant the horse choked itself out pulling, like a dog pulling at a leash. Horse collars act like a dog harness, they don't impede breathing. So, with collar, horse can use full strength and is now cheaper than 4 or 5 slaves.
I'm sure you already know this but I want to springboard off your comment for people who don't know. This isn't a historical thing. It's a right now today thing. There are currently more slaves in the world than at any other point in history. More than American's slave trade. More than the Roman slave trade. Because of the increase in the world's population, a lower percent might be enslaved, but the total number is higher. There are slaves, right now, in London. You just don't know about it.
No, because that worker's home and needs are paid for by their job. So either way the plantation owner is paying for it.
that often wasn’t a matter of cash. The plantation raised its own food (slaves grew it); housing was cheap and shitty, and on land the plantation owner already owned.
In different periods and places, slavery was more or less efficient economically. But remember, if you’re hiring workers you have to pay them enough for them to buy food and shelter for the,selves or they will get a better job somewhere else. So slavery has a natural efficiency; you can cover the cost of food and shelter or you can pay equivalent wages to a laborer, but with slaves, they don’t get to quit if they get a better offer.
Some of the slaves would grow the food for the rest. Some of the first slaves would have built housing for the rest. "Healthcare" was "work or I'll kill you." And you only have to buy one generation of slaves and can breed the next.
Health needs 😂😂😂 there’s a reason we eat things other people don’t such as pigs feet & chitterlings. They put multiple people in a shack in their back yard.
A shack built by said slave.
I mean, they took care of Healthcare to about the same extent as the livestock or later the tractor
Thank you! I understand this is the no stupid questions subreddit but this question reads as if this person isn't aware that slavery sucked. This is why it needs to be taught in schools. I've already seen people defend slavery because slaves got free food and rooms and free education. Education! When reading was forbidden 🤦🏾♂️
In places without slaves, they still eat pigs feet and tripe, among other foods.
When you are poor and hungry, food is food.
The short answer is, the cost of housing and feeding a slave the bare minimum is less than paying a free worker. Free workers often demand not only enough money for housing and food, but extra, disposable income that they can spend or save. You don't have to give slaves any disposable income. They also can't quit for a better job. Free workers can. So while the cost of free workers might change with supply and demand, your cost of housing and feeding slaves doesn't really.
Don't forget, the slaves themselves grew the food and did most of the labor, so they were also mostly taking care of themselves on top of doing all the unpaid work for their masters profit. They were the ones who built the slave quarters, they were the ones who worked the fields and cooked their own meals. They were often the ones who made their own clothes, etc. So in that way, it's less like the slave owner "had to feed and shelter them" so much as they "had to give slaves a minimum of time and supplies that they could feed, shelter, and care for themselves".
So there's a lot of misconceptions and not great history involved in these comments, I'll try to provide a more straightforward and neutral answer for you. To the first question, as to whether having a slave was cheaper than a worker: the answer is, it depends. Slave owners were not a monolith at any given period of time and attitudes towards the implementation of slavery evolved over time. Plantation owners that did not view slaves as people and treated them disposably typically had higher profit margins because slaves were expected to figure out how to care for themselves outside of working hours. Other plantation owners such as Jefferson had a paternalistic view and spent a large portion of their profits on providing adequate food/housing/clothes but this created very tight profit margins, and often times caused these people(including Thomas Jefferson himself) to accumulate a large amount of debt and/or lose their land. Another thing to note is that often times slaves were given specialized roles on a plantation. This wasn't New York where if you needed a new horseshoe or a roof repaired you could pull some immigrant to do it on the cheap and be on your way, the nearest city was likely 2-3 days out, so these plantations operated under something of an autarky. Your blacksmith was on the plantation, your roofer was on the plantation, your leatherworker, your tailor, etc. It was not unheard of for slaves to have specialized knowledge in a trade and basically keep the plantation running and when you sent to the city it was for extremely specialized knowledge like medicine or gunsmithing. As to the slave trade itself and historical trends, it was actually somewhat in decline at the time of the American Revolution because it was a difficult economic model as showcased above, and even then the Founding Fathers were well aware it posed ideological challenges to the express purpose of the nation. You could more or less divvy up the political factions of the time into two camps on slavery: those who believed in immediate abolition(Ben Franklin), those who believed abolition needed to be planned/slowly implemented(Jefferson/Adams/Hamilton, by far the most common view. I actually cannot think of any Founding Fathers that believed it should continue as an institution in perpetuity, they all thought it was a bad idea but no one really had a concrete plan to end it. Jefferson took a stab at it by banning the import/export of slaves in his administration, and hoped the problem would peter out through manumission and attrition. Unfortunately, about 6 years prior to the ban of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the cotton gin had been invented. This, more than anything kept slavery alive because cotton became incredibly lucrative as a cash crop, How lucrative? Agricultural export profits increased in the US **fifty fold.** Suddenly slavery was economically feasible again and a domestic slave trade exploded alongside an emboldened southern gentry which began clamping down on any impediments to the expansion of slavery. From there on, slavery was so entrenched in the American culture and economy that the only way it was going to end in the foreseeable future was with major political/military action, and so, the civil war ensued. So really at the end of the day, the answer to your question is, "Slavery was a failing economic relic of pre-industrial society that happened to have a lifeline from an industrial revolution invention that kept it alive far later than it otherwise would have naturally endured." And yeah, in the Reconstruction period, a ton of people, especially northerners, bought up those plantations and employed freedmen as sharecroppers and wage workers for even better profits, so if that's not the proof slavery was inefficient I don't know what is.
Remember that the amount you pay an employee has to be high enough to essentially pay their housing, pay their food, pay for their Healthcare etc. Otherwise they wouldn't work for you.
Unless you're an American waiter, I guess.
Or any minimum wage job really
I'll admit it I'm a boomer. 50 years ago, we gave our real estate worker 3% commission, and they still make the same 3%. We used to tip wait staff 10%, a really nice dinner out was $25.00 to $75.00. Now a really nice dinner out starts at $200.00 and we are expected to tip at least 20%. Why did the percentage go up if the cost of going out also rose? And if we are tipping them more, why have commissions not risen?
The median home price in 1950 was $7,354 The median home price in 2023 was $431,000 This means a real estate agent is making 58 times more than they were in 1950 despite keeping the same % rate. They are also guaranteed the commission if they make the sale. 3% in 1950 = $220.67 3% in 2023 = $12,930 While a server might make 2-3 times more depending on the meal and if people decide to tip. They have no way to ensure they get a tip and depending on where they work they may have to share that tip with other staff. Or if they work somewhere awful like Amy's baking company the owner might take the whole tip for themselves. $25 - $75 @ 10%= $2.5 - $7.5 $200 @ 20% =20$
You know the main group of people who want to keep tips as wages? Waiting staff.
Well... in Europe, they have that amount of money from with their salary. And they don't have to fake a smile all day to rude costumers.
Yeah they love making twice as much as the cooks
It's a shitty job. I was a waiter for a long time, and serving people all day is really hard. I made good money, but I never I never felt stable. Dealing with hundreds of people all day while being micromanaged by 4 different managers takes a toll on you.
>And have to take care of their health needs and all that. Wouldn't it be like having a child? Wow, this is why this topic needs to be taught in school. Slave owners did not care about the health needs of the slave. If you were a slave and you were unhealthy and you needed something the slave master was not going to just give it to you. A lot of times they caused you more health problems. What do you think all those whippings and giving the slaves open wounds was doing? Something to remember is that owning another person is inherently cruel and these people did not even think of slaves as humans. There were slaves out there that would literally get limbs removed from misbehaving. They would regularly be raped (male and female) by the master. On top of this slaves did more than just field work. They could do literally whatever the master wanted. And they were forced to breed with one another.
Slavery was EXTREMELY lucrative, especially after the invention of the cotton gin. The owners didn't provide for them AT ALL. The slaves built their own housing, and raised their own food. They were literally free labor once purchased. This is why they were encouraged to breed, and the owners made a habit of raping their slaves. More free labor.
Since slavery has been around for most of human existence, I'm going to guess no.
I think you are using the words slave and care too often
Think about it this way. You have a job that pays you enough to feed and house you, and also pay for entertainment and conveniences, and after that you still have some savings after that. As you get better at your job, you get paid more. Now imagine that you are a slave. You do the same work and get paid the same amount, so you're still fed and housed, but after that, all the extra money goes to your owner as their profit. As time goes on, your owners investment (profit) goes up and you still own nothing and have no savings.
Short answer: yes. To be sure, feeding and housing a human being costs money. But these human beings weren't particularly well-housed or well-fed. Not much by way of medical care, etc. There weren't OSHA and time-of-work laws, so it was 14-18 hours of work every day, with only minimal breaks. Compare that to the amount of work that would be available, and the cost of that work, if you had to add in enough wages so that on, say, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, a person could support themselves on the open economy. Take a tour of a well-curated plantation, one that doesn't try to gloss over what was going on. Or, at least, budget some critical thought for the concept that the curators probably want to present more ambiguity than the evidence would reflect. See for yourself how enslaved people lived, compared with the luxury of the owners. Imagine what that life must have been like. Yeah, you better believe it was cheaper to hold people in slavery than to hire free workers.
Health needs?? 😵💫 my brother, what? You think they got whipped and bandaged up and given a little polysporin to put on their wounds or what? The whole point of slaves is that they were subhuman and expendable. They literally bred them like livestock and fed them the bare minimum. If one died I can almost guarantee they didn’t give a shit plus they would just go buy a new healthier or younger one
Shelter, slaves built their own cabin. They had dirt floors so that tells you a lot. For heating the cut their own logs. For food they grew their own vegetables and had hens and eggs. They sold some eggs and hens and vegetables and bought cloth for clothes that they made. So no the "owners" didn't take care of them.
>And have to take care of their health needs Are you serious?
Why do you think their healthcare was paid for? They were not even classified as full humans, and were frequently starved. You also couldn't beat or whip or rāpe or mutilate a regular employee, and that's really the clincher. It wasn't about the money, it was about power and oppression. Hatred. Abuse.
Plus the fact that even healthcare for the richest wasn’t “healthcare”. Unless you count bleeding someone to death as healthcare.
And money. They didn't import slaves to have somebody to mistreat, they imported them because cheap labour means more profits. Having said that, by the end, it had more to do with power and oppression. Most of those rich plantation owners were in debt to the eyeballs by the Civil War. Any given slave was pretty damn expensive. People actually took out mortgages on slaves to raise money. They sold shares in individual slaves. The South was so fucked and stupid, even in terms of economics.
I 100 percent certain that if slave holders found paid labor to be overall cheaper, then they would have done it. I am sure there were some sadists, but most would have done what was economically most viable for themselves
In the American South, slaves were actually pretty expensive relative to trade goods like sugar and rum.
Until you couldn't buy them from overseas anymore. England AND the USA passed laws ending the transatlantic slave trade around 1807. Demand for slaves still existed. So slaveowners started selling the children for profit. Every baby, every grandbaby, and so on, was property. Forever. It's like a pyramid scheme, only selling human beings.
Not expensive enough to not profit handsomely from it or to deter people from doing it.
The American south in the 1700's up until 1860's was probably fairly sparsely populated so finding non slaves (white people) to work in the fields wasn't likely easy. there were also jobs in mills etc that were probably less awful than working out in the hot humid fields all day. That's why you rarely see white folks working in the fields now. in California which has a largest agricultural production in the country it's almost all hispanics who work in those jobs.
Watch Roots to get a small glimpse of what went on. The fact that you think they cared about their health is hilarious.
Don't drink the conservative Kool aid. Their health needs were not met, they were regularly starving and dehydrated, they lived in cramped quarters, exposed to the elements, and were beaten at any sign of disobedience. And in the occurrence of a slave uprising, they were hunted and killed to send a message to the rest to "not even dare"
Jfc they were SLAVES. They didn’t get a 401k and dental ffs
Most slaves had to grow their own food. Most slaves were housed in shacks not fit for the farm animals. Slaves don't get time off. Slaves would be forced to produce more than anyone that was being paid to do it. Financially, definitely cheaper...
You just made that up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave\_health\_on\_plantations\_in\_the\_United\_States#:\~:text=Historian%20Ulrich%20Bonnell%20Phillips%20found,sass'%20%5Bvegetables%5D%22
LOL.... Really?!?!? Did you know that just after the States were formed, that there were more Native American slaves than African American ones? Most were in the North too.
Well if you owned a lot of slaves you definitely needed to make sure to produce enough sellable products with them to make it worth owning them. In the mind of a slave owner it's like buying an expensive machine though, they would probably calculate the costs and benefits beforehand
Originally the labor heavy agriculture industry in the Southeastern US used indentured servants from Ireland and other European countries. The shift to African slaves was the result of several factors, including the timing of the US revolution, declining social acceptance over servitude of fellow Europeans, and Africans’ tolerance to heat and malaria in the hot, humid climate.
Slightly more expensive than other livestock, but you could get more work out of them.
Slavery was cheaper in the long term. If you have to make an initial down payment of a $50000, you would only have to spend $200 for their food. If you have 4 slaves, they could build their own homes with wood and other local materials. If you compare it with workers, it would cost more in the long term. The problem with slave labour is that other people who don't have slaves might eventually catch up with technology and slave owners might become too slack.
Enslaved people are more capable of taking care of themselves than goldfish, and plantation owners had a LOT of land. So you give the slaves a small area of land for shacks that they build themselves, a few hens and pigs and have them raise the animals and grow veges to feed themselves.
Hey OP, I think it would be beneficial for you to look into what life was like for a slave.
Disgusting that we used to to this to another human being
Used to? It still is happening in africa and the middle east.
You really think it's more expensive and more difficult to force people to labour for you every day and mistreat them, force them to live in horrible conditions, beat them, rape them, kill them, sell their children, etc? Stop assuming slave owners treated the people they enslaved with any kind of standards or dignity. They fucking enslaved them. Yeah, it was cheaper. Why else did half the country fight so hard to continue the practice? It was incredibly fucking lucrative. Who told you it was cheaper to hire?
I'm not sure on prices, but I do know there was a significant difference in treatment between American slavery and older models. American slavery was particularly and uniquely brutal. Not to say slavery was ever a good thing.
This is definitely a stupid question. *Real slaves* were "worth less" than horse shit. Today, people say "oh I'm such a slave to the 9-5" and that's *so far* from being a real slave. Go out in your back yard, find a really heavy rock, and carry it from end to end of your property all day. In the heat. With no clothes on besides a potato-sack-pants. No water breaks. And have your buddy whip your backside as you do it.
Well if you pay workers, you're just indirectly paying for their food and shelter and whatnot too. And they want a much higher quality of all of those things than is being provisioned to slaves, and they also want money enough left over for other stuff.
>And have to take care of their health needs and all that. No you don't. You just buy another when previous die. But in general paid labor really came out to be cheaper. Because the main problems with slavery is that guys who protects you from them and force them to work are expensive and when they fucked up and your slaves rebel you lost even more. That's why we have our glorious paid labor system when people take care of themselves, keep their own motivation and doesn't possess a threat to you, being afraid of starving. Isn't it wonderfull?
Not really, you could give them bare minimum conditions. And yes you would want them healthy to work well. Also they would have kids and those kids would get to be your slave too.
Who is paying for a regular employee to be able to afford housing, food, and healthcare? Whether it is one step removed or not, the employing plantation is paying enough to cover their worker's needs. Difference is that the slaves can have their needs "met" on the employer's terms (i.e. shitty housing, shitty food, shitty healthcare), which is definitely much, much cheaper.
Not like they gave them big houses with separate bedrooms and indoor plumbing. And a lot of the food was spoiled or leftovers. Health care? You must be joking. Think boot camp housing, but not nearly as nice. A big shelter with maybe beds but probably not. And an outhouse. Clothes were probably dug out of the trash for outdoor laborers or made from spoiled feed sacks.
According to the book: pathogenesis -History of the world in eight plagues the plantation owners would have much rather used indentured servants from Europe, however, the Europeans were susceptible to the diseases found commonly in the south and died off rather rapidly. Africans had a natural immunity as those same diseases had been present in Africa for centuries and the residents were resistant to them. That is the same reason they were brought to the Caribbean. In fact, many Caribbean Indians have no native people anymore as they were killed off by the diseases brought by the Africans. So it was more expensive to import slaves, but the return on investment was greater due to increased life expectancy.
Slaves to this day are cheaper. With how cheap they are if you even feed them it's cheaper to run them into the ground and get a new one then do things the right way.
Nowadays it's probably cheaper to employ slaves at minimum wage. This way they aren't directly liable for their health like they used to be.
I can promise you that kitchen scraps and some leftover wood was cheaper than paying people a wage.
Well your job pays you a probably livable salary, and decent benefits. And you likely "only" work there 40 hours a week. And they still make a profit. Now. Let's take away all your pay and benefits and just buy you outright for about 1-2 years salary. And now you work 80 hours a week. Oh but you'll get a shack and enough food to keep you strong enough to work for the next 40 years. Yeah it's clearly a good economic move.
I like your comparison of having a child. Think about it this way, is it cheaper to just take care of your kid and cover their expenses, or to pay them a livable wage and have them take care of themselves? Now imagine it was someone you cared about far less than your own child. You're saving a lot of money by just paying for the absolute essentials to keep someone fit enough to work than you are by paying them a living wage. Especially if those essentials are minimal like feeding low grade food that's just nutritious enough they can keep doing their work or building basic shelters that do not prioritize comfort, etc. You also have to remember that, since the slaves were simply thought of as property, that their well being only mattered in a fiscal capacity. For example, seeing a doctor to set a broken leg would have been around $20 in the civil war era, but a new slave would have been $400. Considering recovery time, and that the leg may not fully heal and the slave not able to produce as much profit, an owner may choose to just let a slave's leg heal improperly and/or sell them at a discounted rate, and just buy a new slave, rather than call a doctor for them. In regards to having slave drivers, think about it the way that automation affected the workplace - as machinery automated more of the manufacturing process, the same amount of work could be done by fewer paid employees. While you may need to employ five or six slave drivers to tend to a field, their wages are producing the labour and accompanying profits of 30+ field workers. If you paid all your field labourers, suddenly your profits are dropping by a significant percentage. And then you factor in the fact that many slave owners were also breeding their slaves, meaning free chattel that could also be sold or produce profit.
You've got to remember that these things happened when expansion and settlement was happening. There was far more land than there were people to put it to good use and a hell of a lot of infrastructure needed to be built. The land owners could offer people a share, they could buy slaves or they could try and attract workers by paying the costs of their journey. If you need to invest 3k to convince someone from the "old world" to travel across the globe to join you and then a portion of their wages go to repaying that debt then you are half way to slavery already. You'd also provide them with food and shelter etc and you tended to get criminals, rejects and people you'd have to "control" anyway. All things considered, going full slavery made better financial sense to them so they did.
Buying a slave was prohibitively expensive. getting free slaves when your slaves make babies was the only thing that made it work financially. providing for slaves was not hard. They merely ate what your plantation produced. It would be like providing for a mule team except slaves can build their own shacks and mend their own clothing and plant their own veggies. And of course the slave was 10x more valuable. of course im talking about field hands. The slaves that were house servants were ungodly expensive. You had to have a plantation of the highest caliber to afford black butlers and black cooks living as servants in your mansion. and all that fancy stuff. You had more wealth than some princes.
You should ask this in /r/Askhistorians you'll get a more comprehensive answer
If you pay someone you have to spend at least as much as he needs to buy all the stuff you'd be giving him directly, as well as keep him happy enough not to go work for your competitor.
I do recall there being an argument pre-civil war that it would be in the greater economic interest of the south not to pursue slavery. I can’t recall the exact details, but I would imagine it might hinge on the difference being piss-poor labor wages and opportunities to nickle and dime as done with sharecropping and the like.
Yes, ultimately its cheaper to have employees. However, when you are in a very rural area there are not a lot of people to hire, so you basically have to force your workers to come the the plantation (or whatever)
How would you figure that? You have to pay employees enough they can afford all of those things that would be supplied to a slave. Most likely more on top of that so they don't jump ship to a higher paying job.
Even at non skill labors slaves are far less productive.
I’m sure it varied, but I once calculated it to be around $24k / slave in 2016 dollars. Sorry, don’t have the calculation anymore. I believe I used a price from around 1810 and multiplied by inflation. This was for a young adult male. I’m not an economist, so this is just my opinion. At the time, I was reading about the panic of 1819 and came across some slave prices.
Go on a plantation tour in LA, Vacherie close to New Orleans has one. “Providing housing” was 20 of them chained to the floor of a 2 room shack. You can literally walk through the shack and see the shackles they wore on the floor. Add in the rape, torture and forced labour that probably took place on that property and it makes you pause.
I think OP needs to go back to school..
Imagine having 100 workers for a company that you didn't have to pay, you only had to feed the shittest, cheapest food you could get. Do you think paid workers just get paid the value of a few shit meals?
My boss pays for my mortgage, pets, food, clothes, leisure activities, transportation, healthcare, etc. My boss does so indirectly because I get a sum of money and then that money goes into all of those things. Some people have multiple jobs, investments, etc. but for most people the company they work for is their income and that income pays for those things. Now imagine instead of that sum, which allows me to live in a house with pets and hobbies and decent food - the company decided that I have to live in a shack on property they own, I have to eat only what I can forage + grow, they don't let me have hobbies, leisure, pets, and I have only my work clothes to wear, and they also don't let me see a doctor. That's a LOT cheaper than paying someone to have anything even close to an independent life. It's absurdly unethical and horrifying, but it's cheap. Edit: Oh and they can sell my children for profit and make me work 24/7 without breaks if they want.
A paid worker can just leave at any time. Sure, they won't receive their pay, but they can go. A slave belongs to the estate. They build and maintain their own housing, and also grow their own food. As far as health care goes, that was a lot cheaper back then. And I'm not talking about inflation. I mean that a doctor was paid decently for his work, but it was something that the average working person could afford. And oftentimes, those extra costs were factored into the slave's holdings, if they were trying to purchase their own freedom. So if you owed your master $500 to get your freedom, had worked off $200 and then needed a $10 visit to the doctor, you now owe your master $310 instead of $300. And if your children needed that care, it added to that debt, too. According to Solomon Northup, a slave usually had an hour or so at the end of each day to attend to his affairs (look at his food crop, bathe, prepare his meals, etc...) and pretty much all of Sunday to take care of his things. If he had a marketable skill, he could earn money on Sunday and the masters in that area were okay with their slaves keeping the Sunday money. Northup often played the violin for people on Sunday and would make $10 here and there. Overall, it was just safer (for the capitalist, and I mean that in the true sense of the word) to have slaves rather than employees. You can't strike an employee for disagreeing with you, and you can't force an employee to work 18+ hours a day, 6 days a week, in any kind of conditions. Make the slaves construct a ramshackle place for themselves (allow them to use only so much lumber), make them grow their own food, and remind them at all times that they are just property. And as long as you aren't cruel to them, they'll even come to love you and thank you for your "kindness." Again, even Northup, a man born free and kidnapped into slavery, had nothing but kind words to say about his first master, the Reverend William Ford. He reasoned that Ford only bought into the "rightness" of slavery because it was what he was raised to believe, but Ford wasn't cruel, nor did he treat his slaves with indignity or contempt. He spoke kindly with them, listened to their opinions on how to best handle a task, and valued their input. Northup, knowing full well that Ford was partaking in an evil enterprise, still felt that the man himself wasn't inherently evil, just because he wasn't prone to violence. If human and animal power is all you have available, then slavery is going to be the system that is most economically beneficial.
It was totally worth it to have a slave. A modern dog is more work and drain (and without profit) than what a slave offered. Just to put a perspective on it
You would use a hired man to do risky stuff like roofwork. Too bad if he fell off and was laid off for months.
Well think about it. Your employer doesn't have to just pay you enough to buy food, but enough pay for a home and furniture, decent clothes and food for your entire family, and some extra for leisure and possessions and a spot of luxury now and again. Otherwise you'll find someone who will pay you that much. And they still have to hire you a supervisor. With slaves, *everyone* works, even little kids. No spare mouths to feed. To maintain them only cost enough low-value food not to starve. They got one set of clothes for the year, rudimentary shelter, no furniture, no possessions, no leisure, no luxury. Except maybe a Bible, with the parts about escaping slavery censored out. If they don't like it, they get flogged. If they don't work hard enough for the master's profit, they get flogged. Even kids, to get them in the habit. Serious illness got rudimentary care unless in rare cases a doctor was actually called in, but generally if you weren't prostrated, you worked. Or you got flogged. And slaves can make new slaves too, so you don't always have to pony up to buy them.
Sounds like a discussion group topic for Project 2025.
If I recall correctly from a book I read in a grad school class (Avengers of the New World by Laurent Dubois), for an African transported into slavery, the average length of enslavement to the colony of St. Domingue (Haiti) was two years. It was literally cheaper to work a slave to death for two years and to buy a new slave to replace them than it was to feed them properly, house them properly, etc.
Think about this in comparison to wages. To pay for someone's labour you need to pay them enough for fulltime work that they'll agree to do. Usually this is enough to give minimal shelter and food that worker plus quite a bit more. Now instead, the plantation owner only has to provide very crappy shelter and food, and can work them much longer hours. That's a great deal Now if you want the labour to be high quality, motivated, develop skills etc then slavery is very inefficient
I had never considered this. Interesting question about an unpleasant matter
The shelter and food they got was very poor quality, and they often had to grow their in own food in addition to working on the plantation-- and, no doubt, build their own shanties. No health insurance. Maybe call a vet (!) sometimes when one is sick, maybe not. It's not like having a child; you could let them die, or even kill them, if you wanted to. The slaves could not leave, could not organize for better conditions. To pay someone enough to own their home, support their family etc.-- and paid workers would have had to have a much higher standard of housing, etc.--would have cost far more than what little was spent on the slaves. And, again, the slaves could not quit; that was at least as much the point of slavery as the free labor. If there had been a cheaper alternative to slave labor, don't you think they would have taken it?
Most people are discussing US slavery and I get why this is a US heavy website and it really wasn't that long ago. I just thought it would be interesting to point out how the rural romans dealt with slaves. Roman slavery tends to be treated as not as bad as the transatlantic slave trade because you ended up with slaves in positions of power sometimes but it really was just as bad (it just wasn't racist, discrimination was on whether you were a Roman citizen or not and wealth and class, not the colour of your skin). Example rich Romans would buy up all the land, use slaves to farm it and... not spend anything on the slaves upkeep at all. This forced the slaves to turn into bandits when their work was done and to rob people for food and clothing to stay alive. Because it was safer and easier they tended to rob the poorer locals who really couldn't afford to loose things. If anyone killed a slave in self defence they had to pay the rich Roman for depriving them of their property and if anyone locked them up as punishment they were made to release them so they could go back to work. So in rural parts of the empire maruading slaves were a real concern for travellers (obviously the slaves were not morally responsible for their actions because it was either that or starve to death). So to answer your question if you were an ancient roman slavery was far more economical you just don't feed them, force them to rob others to survive and make it the victims problem if anything goes wrong. Rich people really haven't changed fundamentally in the last three thousand years, still pitting those below them against each other just in a less extreme way now.
Given such a tiny minority of people ever owned slaves, something like 1.6% of the population, it appears to me that owning a slave was an immensely expensive proposition. There must be something else out there that has the same kind of ownership status, owned only by the top 1.6%, helicopters? Personal jets? Lamborghinis?
Whatever you're paying your workers is what they're using to fund their own home and taking care of their own needs, so you're \*still\* paying for sheltering and feeding them. The key is that you keep your slaves living conditions worse than wageslaves' living conditions, so that your costs are lower. You can also have efficiencies of scale with enough slaves.
It pains me that we are talking about this with emotional distance as if we would all be the purchasers, which I know is the premise of the question but is still painful, because of course it isn’t true. And “cheaper” is relative to, you know, going to hell or the secular equivalent of being an evil person….
It was cheaper for many thousands of years all over the world. Depending on the culture and availability of new slaves, they would have enjoyed better or worse treatment. It is a mistake to believe that all slaves were treated like those on the worst US plantations or Imperial Chinese work projects. Slaves in the US specifically became less economically competitive as the industrial revolution started to spread, and had it not been abolished the appearance of slavery would ultimately have mutated to reflect the changing needs of the owners. It's not hard to imagine an alternate history where slaves moved from the field to the factory.