The Hoe, the Plow, and the Whip: Gang Labor and Agricultural Improvement in Plantation Economies
Lorena S. Walsh
Paper prepared for the Washington Area Economic History Seminar, December 5, 2014
Almost invariably, historians of labor management systems in early North America identify gang labor as
the primary form of labor organization which plantation owners in sugar, tobacco, and, later, cotton economies
adopted, and task labor as the prevailing system in rice economies. Although quintessentially a system developed
to coerce and intensify the work efforts of enslaved laborers, gang labor is often thought to have come into use
before slavery emerged as the dominant labor system in the tobacco and sugar colonies. This essay explores the
beginnings of the gang labor system in the seventeenth century, modes of implementation, frequency of use, and its
incompatibility with elements of later eighteenth and early nineteenth century European modes of improving
agriculture. The primary focus is on the Chesapeake region, but the study draws on comparative insights from
1
British, Caribbean, and other mainland North American agriculture.
Gang labor was an extreme and exploitative form of group labor. The main difference between organized,
but uncoerced, group labor and gang labor is that the latter was performed by unfree workers, often in groups
segregated by sex and age, under the supervision of an overseer, and at an intense pace that was enforced by
violence or threats of violence. The high degree of regimentation and discipline gang labor entailed led astonished
visitors to turn to military or machine metaphors to describe what they saw. One eighteenth-century observer
described the synchronized operation of cane holing: “The holes are dug, with hoes by the slaves, in a row, with the
driver at one end to preserve the row. They begin and finish a row of these holes as nearly, at the same instant, as
possible.” A visitor to Barbados in 1812 noted “it has often occurred to me that a gang of Negroes in the act of
holing for canes, when hard driven, appeared to be as formidable as a phalanx of infantry by the rapid movement of
their hoes. . . while I have been astonished how such habits could enable beings to persevere, so many hours in such
a violent effort.” And in 1839 Georgia plantation mistress Fanny Kemble described a group of hoe-wielding
2
women field hands as a “ human hoeing machine.”
A number of agricultural tasks--including clearing land, preparing ground (especially when done with
hoes), erecting fences and barns, and harvesting of crops--can be more quickly and efficiently performed by a group
1
For example Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, “Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture
in the Antebellum South,” and “Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South:
Reply,” in Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., Without Consent or Contract, Markets and
Production: Technical Papers, Vol. 1 (New York, 1992), 241-265, 266-303, esp. 257-261, 294; Robin Blackburn,
Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, 1997), 332-336; Ira Berlin
and Philip D. Morgan, “Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan,
eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, (Charlottesville, 1993), 1-45;
Philip D. Morgan, “Task and Gang Systems: The Organization of Labor on New World Plantations,” in Stephen
Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 189-220; Philip D. Morgan, Slave
Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998),
146-203; Peter A. Coclanis, "How the Low Country Was Taken to Task: Slave Labor Organization in Coastal
South Carolina and Georgia," in Robert Louis Paquette and Louis Ferleger, eds., Slavery, Secession, and Southern
History (Charlottesville, VA, 2000), 59-78; Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A
Short History (New York, 2001), 71-77; Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic,
1750-1807 (Cambridge, 2013), 131-160.
2
Berlin and Morgan, “Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life,” 14; William Dickson, Letters on Slavery (London,
1789(, 23, quoted in Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the
British Atlantic (Philadelphia, 2013), 207; Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation
in 1838-1839 [1863], ed. John A. Scott (Athens, GA, 1984), 156. For other examples of military and machine
metaphors see Fogel and Engerman, “Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Labor,” 257.
1
of laborers rather than by individual jacks of all trades toiling alone. Nor are the conditions of group labor entirely
negative. Working alongside others helps to relieve the monotony of jobs requiring prolonged repetition of the
same movements for hours on end. Opportunities to engage in conversation and perhaps song can rally flagging
energies towards the end of a long, tiring day. And competition between stronger or more skilled laborers may
speed up the overall pace of the group, as can the dynamics of a collective group effort in which most feel obliged
to do a fair share of the work. In free labor regimes, for the occasional, large, time-sensitive tasks that necessitated
the recruiting of unusually large numbers of workers (the annual wheat harvest or a barn raising, for example),
laborers were usually rewarded not only with higher than average daily wages, but also with abundant food and
drink. The occasions for such rare, festive gatherings were thus often eagerly anticipated, rather than dreaded for
the hard work involved. Voluntary group work has indeed been frequently celebrated as a positive element from a
lost rural past. For example, romanticized georgic harvest scenes in which the happy faces of hired European
workers show no signs of fatigue from toiling for unusually long hours, and their clean, sometimes stylish, clothing
reveal no stains from dust and dirt or from sweating on a hot summer day. Similarly, in more folksy depictions of
North American corn huskings, the not inconsequential effort of shucking appears almost incidental to the animated
3
banter, hard drinking, and sexual flirtations that are remembered as accompanying this communal chore.
But group work, voluntary or coerced was (and still is) also attractive to employers because it increases the
effectiveness and reduces the costs of supervision. Managers can more effectively monitor the efforts of a number
of workers performing the same task in the same place at the same pace than they can monitor the efforts of
individual laborers working at varied assignments over scattered locations. Group work also facilitates exploitation
even where violence is not an acceptable option. Laborers who work more slowly or less efficiently than others
can be easily identified, and forced to exert greater efforts through threats of docking wages or firing.
In seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain, agriculture was organized primarily around workers
individually performing a wide variety of tasks, often with the assistance of draft animals, either self directed or
following the orders of employing farmers or estate managers. Only on a limited number of occasions when a
larger number of workers were required to complete time-critical tasks--primarily the harvesting of wheat and hay,
threshing of grain, and spreading of manure--was group labor the usual practice, even on large farms dependent on
4
hired labor.
Similar forms of labor organization also prevailed in New England and the Middle Colonies, where farms
where usually small, and labor forces typically confined to the farm operator and members of his immediate family,
occasionally assisted by live-in apprentices, indentured servants, redemptioners, hired free day laborers, or, less
5
often, one or two enslaved Native Americans or Africans.
3
Paul A. David and Peter Temin, “Slavery: The Progressive Institution?,” in Paul A. David, et al, eds., Reckoning
with Slavery (New York, 1976), 206-207. For georgic examples see George Stubbs, The Haymakers (1783,
National Trust, Upton House;1785, Tate, London; 1794, National Museum, Liverpool) and The Reapers, the first
three reproduced in John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New
Haven, 2007), 9, 10, 39.
4
Robert C. Allen, “The Growth of Labor Productivity in Early Modern English Agriculture,” Explorations in
Economic History 25 (1988): 117-146.
5
For example, Daniel Vickers, “Working the Fields in a Developing Economy: Essex County, Massachusetts,
1630-1675,” in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 49-69; Paul G. E.
Clemens and Lucy Simler, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750-1820,” in
ibid., 106-143; Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural
Massachusetts, 1750-1850 (Chicago, 1992), chaps. 6-7); Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism:
Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, NY: 1990), chap. 1; Peter O. Wacker and Paul G. E. Clemens, Land
Use in Early New Jersey: A Historical Geography (Newark NJ: 1995); Allegra Di Bonaventura, For Adam’s Sake:
A Family Saga in Colonial New England (New York, 2013).
2
Authors of mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century British agricultural manuals devoted little space to
advice on managing agricultural laborers. Their primary interests were soil improvement, new crops and crop
rotations, and timely scheduling of agricultural tasks. Almost all authors repeated the maxim, borrowed from
classical texts, that “the farmer’s eye [or footprint] is the best manure,” but increasing the pace and hence the
productivity of farm laborers was apparently not a concern. This was due in part to the ready availability and
relatively low cost of hired labor, and perhaps also to the fact that English farm workers were already more
productive than agricultural laborers in continental Europe. Violence was never mentioned as a means for
extracting more field work. This is not to say that force was not advocated for other situations. There was
widespread agreement among the ruling class, including the new breed of agricultural reformers, that unemployed
able bodied poor should be forced to labor at socially productive tasks, but the sort of work they had in mind
involved proto-industries or public works, often in institutional settings. Coerced farm work was not part of their
6
agenda.
Exploitation and violence were also frequently the lot of live-in domestic servants in both Britain and her
colonies. They were almost always young and often vulnerable, sometimes orphaned or forcibly bound out by
local authorities because their parents were judged unable to support them. Such servants often experienced
routine beatings by masters and mistresses. Female domestics were also frequently victims of unwanted sexual
advances by heads of families, sons, guests, and fellow servants. On smaller British farms, live-in apprentices in
husbandry might have been subjected to similar physical violence, but in general servants working indoors were
much more vulnerable than those working in the fields. Colonial court records reveal similar or perhaps greater
levels of violence directed at indentured and orphaned domestic servants by both masters and mistresses, as well as
sexual predation on female domestics. The physical abuse enslaved domestics endured was likely more frequent,
more arbitrary, and more severe than that experienced by whites, and sexual exploitation of females more
widespread, but colonial slaveholders’ treatment of enslaved indoor workers can at least be seen as on the extreme
7
end of a continuum of regular abuse of domestics.
On the other hand, early in the seventeenth century indentured servants recruited to work as agricultural
laborers in fledgling colonies doubtless expected that customary English labor relations governing servants in
husbandry would prevail. This would have been especially true of those recruited by immigrating gentlemen with
whom they had some prior acquaintance. Any such expectations, however, were quickly foreclosed by the extreme
scarcity of labor, social chaos, high mortality, and bloody conflicts with Native Americans that prevailed in early
English settlements. Periods of martial law abnegated customary rights of free as well as bound immigrants, and
the quick commodification of bound laborers drastically altered relationships between masters and servants. “Sold
in the publick market, as beasts,” servants often found that they were no longer treated as members of the master’s
family, but as commodities valued only for their labor. Servants bound, according to terms specified in formal
indentures of the mid seventeenth century, to engage in “such service and imploiment” as the indentor “or his
assignes shall there imploy him according to ye Custome of the Country,” were subjected to rapidly evolving
colonial customs and laws that sanctioned less generous material provisions and harsher discipline than conditions
8
prevailing on British farms.
6
Joan Thirsk, “Plough and Pen: Agricultural Writers in the Seventeenth Century,’ in T. H. Ashton, et al, eds., Social
Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R H. Hilton (Cambridge, 1983), 295-318 (quotation 298); Gregory Clark,
“Productivity Growth without Technical Change in European Agriculture before 1850,” Journal of Economic
History, 47 (1987), 419-432; Eric Otembra, “Enlightened Institutions: Science, Plantations, and Slavery in the
English Atlantic, 1626-1720" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2012); Michael Guasco, Slaves and
Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia, 2014), chap. 1.
7
For example, Kenneth A. Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674-1744 (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1987), 68-70; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old
South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), chaps. 1-3.
8
For example, Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New
3
From the outset, indentured servants in plantation colonies complained of stingy, monotonous rations
composed almost entirely of unfamiliar starches, little or no meat, and no alcohol; of irregularly issued, coarse, and
identity-stifling standardized clothing which often did not include hats and shoes considered necessary for civilized
appearance; and of scanty bedding and crude and inadequate shelter. They also complained of being forced to
work in unaccustomed heat, and of long hours of hard, monotonous labor at the hoe, instead of the more varied
tasks to which they were accustomed, and without the aid of draft animals. Another novelty was being supervised
by an overseer, a subordinate manager tasked with organizing daily work and enforcing discipline. With labor the
scarcest factor of production, purchasers of servants wanted to extract a maximum of labor from them. Initially,
however, servants seem not to have complained of being forced to work at an accelerated pace. In the earliest
years of settlement, the task of making frequently sick and often hungry immigrants suffering from acute culture
9
shock and in constant fear for their lives to do any work at all was a big challenge.
The timing of English servants’ complaints about a forced labor pace–the early 1650s in Barbados–points
to the introduction of labor-intensive sugar as the main motivation for developing gang labor. Accompanying
consolidation of land holdings, and acquisition of large bound labor forces that included significant numbers
European military prisoners and convicts, and of enslaved Africans who lacked the minimal legal and contractual
protections European servants retained, facilitated unprecedented forms of labor exploitation. Richard Ligon, who
lived in Barbados between 1647 and 1650, noted aspects of field labor that soon became characteristic of plantation
slavery–long hours working under “severe” overseers who used physical punishment to extract ten to twelve hours
of field work each day six days a week– and in which servants as well as slaves were subject to being beaten “for a
fault that is not worth the speaking of.” For early seventeenth-century Englishmen, the most dreaded form of
regimented coerced labor with which they were previously familiar was Mediterranean galley slavery, and they
began likening plantation labor to it. In 1654 Father Antoine Biet reported that English servants as well as
enslaved Africans were forced to work at a uniform fast pace: “When they work the overseers, who act like those in
charge of galley slaves, are always close by with a stick with which they often prod them when they do not work as
fast as is desired.” Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, two royalist English prisoners of war shipped to
Barbados to work on sugar plantations in 1656 complained to Parliament of being whipped “for their masters
10
pleasure...beyond expression or Christian imagination.”
York: 1975); Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial
Chesapeake, 1607-1763 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010; Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic
Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Cambridge, 2010), chaps. 6-7; Newman, A New World of
Labor, 72-73; Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England’s slavery or Barbados merchandize; represented in
a petition to the high court of Parliament, by Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle gentlemen, on behalf of
themselves and three-score and ten more free-born Englishmen sold (uncondemned) into slavery; together with
letters written to some honourable members of Parliament (London, 1659), 17. David Galenson, White Servitude
in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, 1981), chap. 1 is an especially useful summary; for the
language of early indentures, see ibid. 190. For the equation of selling servants’ time to slavery see Michael
Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2014),
158-172.
9
For example, Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society,
1640-1700 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 123-129; Kirsten Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion,
Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens, GA, 2012); Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early
English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens, GA, 2013); Newman, New World
of Labor, chap. 4; Walsh, Motives of Honor, chap. 1.
10
Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Indianapolis,
2011), 72, 94-96, 99; Hilary McD. Beckles, “Sugar and White Servitude: An Analysis of Indentured Labour During
the Sugar Revolution of Barbados, 1643-1655,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 36 (1981),
236-246; Beckles, “English Parliamentary Debate on “White Slavery” in Barbados, 1659, Ibid, 36 (1982), 344-352;
Beckles, “Plantation Production and White “Proto-Slavery”: White Indentured Servants and the Colonisation of the
4
Thus it was a small number of large Barbados sugar planters, who controlled the island government, and
who by the 1650s were shifting as quickly as they could to an almost entirely enslaved work force, developed gang
labor as the most expedient means for controlling and compelling maximum effort from all bound workers.
Getting captive Africans, who did not share the planters’ language and culture and who had no incentives other than
shear survival, to work necessitated higher levels of violence. Already sugar plantations were being described as
machines, and laborers “were objectified as tools,” one component of a complex manufacturing process. The
unprecedented profits sugar generated, coupled with high mortality rates, served to excuse or to justify brutal
11
exploitation of all bound workers in order to generate quick returns.
The system was fully developed by the 1670s when sugar magnate Henry Drax prepared extensive
instructions for his estate manager prior to a voyage to England. (These instructions still formed the basis of a
treatise on sugar plantation management published by William Belgrove in 1755.) But other than mentioning that
field workers were divided into “watches,” overseen by enslaved overseers [i.e., drivers], Drax did not describe how
fast-paced, regimented labor was to be enforced. He expected that the manager would determine punishments for
theft and drunkenness such as “By Stocks or laying them by the neck and heels,” but field discipline was left to the
enslaved drivers. By then only slaves were subjected to this regimented labor system, for large planters like Drax
no longer assigned white servants to the fields, and indeed employed as few as possible, paying little more than lip
service to a militia law that mandated that planters employ one white worker (free or servant) for every ten slaves.
Drax, for example, owned 327 slaves in 1679, but employed only seven whites. By the early eighteenth century
observers reported that in the English sugar islands “drunken, unreasonable and savage” overseers forced slaves to
“work beyond measure and beat them mercilessly for the least fault.” Those who had not performed to the levels
deemed appropriate by the overseer would be “whipt . . . with Lance-wood Switches till they be bloody.” There is
no lack descriptions of the arduous labor sugar workers were put to and to the violence with which work demands
were enforced. Nonetheless, it takes a rare source not composed for public consumption, the diary of Jamaican
plantation overseer Thomas Thistlewood, to fully understand the levels of violence, sexual exploitation, and
12
degradation to which enslaved workers were subjected in the West Indies.
In explaining how gang labor developed, some historians have drawn comparisons to shipboard discipline
and to new forms of military training. The problem with these analogies, however, is that few plantation owners and
even fewer of the men employed as overseers had naval or military backgrounds. Estate managers on Barbados
were largely drawn from commercial classes, and overseers were primarily indentured servants or former servants.
In the early Chesapeake, overseers were primarily freed servants, and by the early eighteenth century largely
native-born landless youths with no experience of either maritime or military life. Subjecting agricultural workers
to gang labor arose from circumstances within the plantation colonies and was not adapted from European models.
English West Indies, 1624-1645,” The Americas, 41 (1985), 21-45; Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen PAGES;
Jerome Handler, “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654,” JBMHS, 32 (1967), 56-76 (quotation 66, a
translation of Antoine Biet, Voyage de la Gance Equinoxiale en L’Isle de Cayenne, entrepris par les François en
l’annè M. DC. LII... Paris, 1656); Alexander Gunkel and Jerome S. Handler, eds., “A German Indentured Servant in
Barbados in 1652: The Account of Heinlick von Uchteritz,” JBMHS, 33 (1969), 91-100; Rivers and Foyle,
England’s slavery, 5; Newman, New World of Labor, chap. 4.
11
Newman, New World of Labor, 196-197.
12
Peter Thompson, “Henry Drax’s Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-Century Barbadian Sugar
Plantation,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 66 (2009), 565-604 (quotation 587); Newman, New World of
Labor, chap. 8; Neville Connell, “Father Labat’s Visit to Barbados in 1700,” JBMHS, 24 (1957), 160-174
(quotation 168-169); Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madeira, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and
Jamaica: In Two Volumes (London 1707); Douglas G. Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica
1750-1786 (1998); Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the
Anglo-Jamaican World (2004).
5
13
Almost from the outset, some colonial agricultural practices lent themselves to new forms of labor
monitoring. In England, labor efforts were typically measured by how long it took to plow, sow, weed, or harvest
an acre in regularly laid out fields, typically with the assistance of draft animals. In the staple colonies, however,
newly cleared fields were often not surveyed and highly irregular in layout, with only the best land cleared for
cultivation and streams, swamps, gullies, and other natural impediments left out, so supervisors had to find other
ways to measure labor inputs. The practice borrowed from Native Americans of planting corn, tobacco, and,
initially, sugar, in hills afforded an alternative measure–number of hills made, seeded, or weeded per day. Since
hills were regularly spaced, managers could observe workers’ pace, even in fields with irregular boundaries. The
subsequent practices of growing sugar in rows, and eventually in squares, in more regularly laid out fields similarly
facilitated visual observation of work rhythms and speed. Moreover, since bound laborers “planteth, weedeth, and
manureth their ground all by hand,” the complication of draft animals working at varying speeds and at differing
14
paces from humans did not arise.
Chesapeake planters, however, were much slower to develop a similar system for intensifying group labor.
Analysis of the distribution of bound labor from either tax lists or probate inventories demonstrates that individual
or group rather than gang labor was predominant until at least the 1720s. Tobacco planters were not nearly as rich
as sugar magnates so their access to African slaves was restricted. More than half of inventoried estates with
bound labor in southern Maryland in the 1660s, for example, contained only two workers, and more than half of all
bound workers lived in households with five or fewer unfree laborers. In some seventeenth century Virginia
counties even elite planters commanded only between four and eight taxable laborers in any one year. Assuming
that gang work was not a regular experience on plantations with fewer than four bound laborers (black or white),
Carr and Walsh found that in another Maryland tobacco county, in both the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
gang work could never have appeared on the majority of plantations, and only intermittently on another one quarter
where there were four to six workers. Only on large plantations (just over twenty percent of all work units in the
eighteenth century) was gang labor likely. By then, however, almost half of all slaves lived on large plantations.
Gang work was also more likely when overseers were employed to supervise bound workers. But because of the
high cost of the one or more shares of primary crops with which overseers were typically compensated, it was
uneconomic to employ them to supervise fewer than seven or eight laborers. On plantations with fewer workers, it
was usually the planter himself who set the pace. The standard work day for bound laborers was quickly set from
sunup to sundown five days a week, and a half day on Saturday, with breaks for breakfast and mid-day dinner.
There is little comment on how effort throughout the day was typically enforced, although servants’ complaints
15
confirm that some were beaten for not working or for failing to work hard enough.
Field hands were expected to raise enough corn to feed themselves for the year and to make a crop of
tobacco, the expected size of which increased steadily from the 1620s through the 1690s, from around 200 pounds
at the start to 2,000 pounds at the end of the century. Before the mid 1670s increases in crop size appear primarily
due to learning by doing rather than to work speedups; crops made by bound servants were no larger than those
produced by free workers or by owner operators. Then, with a surge in direct African imports, slaves began to
outnumber servants in the bound labor force, and working conditions quickly deteriorated. Saturdays became a full
13
14
Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 260-261.
Francis Barrington to Sir John Barrington, June 5, 1655, Historical Manuscripts Commission Report, VII, 5729.
15
Russell R. Menard, “Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland,” Ph. D. Diss., University of Iowa, 1975),
252-253; John C. Coombs, “‘Building the Machine’: The Development of Slavery and Slave Society in Early
Colonial Virginia” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2003), 81-82; Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh,
“Economic Diversification and Labor Organization in the Chesapeake, 1650-1820,” in Innes, ed., Work and Labor,
144-188. Examples from the 18th and early 19th centuries in the OED suggest five or six as the smallest number to
constitute a gang.
6
workday and harsher discipline was imposed on all, increasingly by overseers rather than by planter proprietors.
Servants began to complain of being treated like white Negroes, and many fewer chose to migrate to the region.
As in the sugar islands, intensified methods for extracting labor accompanied the planter elite’s wholehearted
16
embrace of African slavery.
In the first third of the eighteenth century the higher productivity gang labor ostensibly spurred was
available only to a limited economic elite who had the resources to buy dozens and, in a few cases, scores of slaves.
Through familial and mercantile connections in Britain and the West Indies they were in a position to know about
labor management practices in sugar economies, from which some indeed had migrated. Robert “King” Carter,
who owned nearly 1,000 slaves at his death in 1732, was clearly using gang labor on his larger quarters. His letters
include repeated references to slave gangs. On any given day almost all laborers, who were by then almost entirely
enslaved, were kept to the same work, supervised by overseers who were “always to be with the people to keep
them to their work.” As was the practice in Barbados, Carter appointed an enslaved man on each quarter as
“foremen” who acted as drivers. And, as on sugar plantations, the work was entirely manual. Carter employed no
plows and had a team of oxen for heavy hauling on only six out of forty-seven quarters. The slaves had to carry all
fencing materials from the woods to the fields, tote firewood from wherever they cut it to their cabins, and haul corn
and tobacco from field to barn either on their backs of on their heads. On quarters where Carter raised wheat in
addition to corn and tobacco, slaves leveled the ground and chopped in the seed with hoes. They also rolled
tobacco hogsheads to landings and loaded ships with thousands of bushels of wheat and corn entirely by hand.
Carter’s correspondence does not discuss how field workers were to be disciplined, but a man who punished
17
repeated runaways by chopping off their toes was surely not averse to whipping.
Edward Baptist’s graphic description of the components of “the pushing system” of gang labor in the U.S.
Cotton South identifies factors that facilitated intense regimented labor in the antebellum period. These included
compelling slaves to work in lock step keeping up with the pace set in planting and hoeing by one of the strongest
workers. With geometrically laid out fields where rows of plants were aligned to a grid, white supervisors standing
on high ground or on horseback could readily identify stragglers. Enslaved drivers armed with whips enforced the
pace. In the case of cotton picking, where keeping laborers moving lockstep in line was unfeasible, work speedups
were enforced by assigning workers high individual picking quotas, and routinely whipping those who failed to
meet them. Extending the length of the work day (civil twilight rather than sunup to sundown) and shortening
breaks for eating were other measures that Baptist contrasts to less severe management practices in the early
18
nineteenth century Chesapeake.
The diary of Landon Carter (1710-1778) of Richmond County, Virginia, the fourth son of Robert “King”
Carter, covering, irregularly, 1756 to 1778, provides rare details about how an elite mid-eighteenth century tobacco
planter attempted to intensify gang labor by means similar to those outlined by Baptist. Carter learned colonial
plantation management from his father, and by mid century Landon held 35,000 acres in the Northern Neck alone
and at least 200 enslaved workers. With tobacco yields falling on long-tilled lands, Carter needed to increase
19
production of corn and wheat in order to maintain the returns per laborer that his father had realized.
16
Carr and Walsh, “Economic Diversification and Labor Organization”; Walsh, Motives of Honor, chaps. 1-3.
17
Demetri D. Debe and Russell R. Menard, “The Transition to African Slavery in Maryland: A Note on the
Barbados Connection,” Slavery and Abolition, 32 (2011), 139-141; Carter to ? [torn], Carter to ? [1729], Carter to ?,
Aug. 27, 1729, Robert Carter Letterbook, 1728-1730, fols. 1, 33-34, 36, Virginia Historical Society; Walsh,
Motives of Honor, 256-263; Jack P. Greene, ed., The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752-1778, 2
vols. (Charlottesville, Va., 1965), 1038-1039.
18
Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York,
2014), chap. 4.
19
Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 521-532.
7
Robert Carter had added several hundred new Africans to his workforce in the 1720s, and the family
continued to buy more Africans through the mid 1730s. Consequently Landon had been schooled in a labor
management system developed to break in, control, and extract work from unassimilated captives, and the majority
of the workers he inherited upon his father’ death in 1732 were African born. Over the course of Landon’s
lifetime, however, his bondspeople transitioned to almost entirely Virginia born. Still Carter largely retained his
father’s modes of slave management with only minor alterations. When Carter’s diary commences in the mid
1750s, language had ceased to be a barrier to communication. Field hands as well as domestics appear to have
been fluent in English, and Carter did not doubt that they understood complex commands (whether the commands
were carried out was another matter). Probably as a result of the demographic transition, enslaved foremen played
a less prominent role in controlling field workers than they had in his father’s time. Overseers still appointed
foremen to set the work pace, but the foremen no longer received perks such as extra grain rations, an allowance of
meat, and a separate house, a change that probably reflects their no longer having a role in disciplining other
workers. Any of the enslaved who ran away were still severely whipped and often forced to work in chains, but
sale to distant places had replaced dismemberment as a deterrent to repeated flight.
Landon did introduce some changes in agricultural practices. He began in the 1750s to embrace some
aspects of European improving agriculture, attempting to introduce “English husbandry with the tobacco planting.”
He laid out permanent, regularly shaped fields in divisions of fifty acres to facilitate plowing, and in which he began
alternating crops of tobacco with small grains. Carter reorganized his fields because that was what European
agricultural improvement manuals recommended, but regularizing previously irregular boundaries also had
consequences for labor intensification. Given regular spacing of hills, Carter could calculate the exact number of
per acre, and determine the number of hills per hour field hands could be driven to form, plant, or weed. And
straight lines of sight made it easier for overseers to observe whether lines of field hands were working at the same
20
speed.
Moreover, Carter ordered changes in corn planting to enhance observation and to prevent field hands from
spacing hills further apart than the four feet Carter demanded in hopes of reducing the number of hills per acre they
would have to work. “I will make two hands engage each row: The one standing in the space shall draw up the
opposite side of the row into a high bed and the other hand setting in behind him but in the other space shall make
holes at 2 feet distance which may do more conveniently than at present he can when the last hill is between his legs
and in a manner out of sight.” He discovered, however, that minor changes in planting techniques could impair
visual oversight, especially from horseback. Carter ordered that transplanted tobacco seedlings be covered with
soil up to their tips to improve survival in dry weather. However “a careless Overseer knowing he cannot see the
plants at a distance, concludes that they are planted when they are not.” Carter sent his waiting man into the field
on foot to inspect hills more closely, and the man found that many had no plants in them. “Carelessness,” Carter
21
decided, was “easiest discovered in the old way.”
Carter’s biographers have paid most attention to his relationships with and punishment of enslaved
domestics and artisans, rather than his treatment of field workers. Two important differences stand out. First, as
Stephen Fenaltola observed, violence was counterproductive if employed against skilled laborers whose jobs
required care and skill more than muscle and speed. Carter whipped or demoted these workers to field labor for
running away, theft, drinking, disobeying orders, defective work, or for not working at all, but almost never for
slow work. Carter was often frustrated by the amount of time enslaved carpenters and gardeners took to complete
individual jobs, but could devise few effective measures to speed their work. He ordered enslaved carpenters, for
example, to repair storage sheds only enough to make them “serviceable,” but the artisans instead took an additional
week getting plates, posts and sills “as if for a new tobacco house. . . . Thus it is each rascal will be a director.”
By observing an enslaved weaver for most of a day, Carter established the number of yards weavers were to be
20
21
For example, Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 149, 163 (quotation), 182-185, 429-430, 678-680.
Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 418-421, 681.
8
forced to produce in a day. But he found setting daily quotas for the multiple tasks artisans performed unfeasible,
and could resort only to forcing them to work as long as light permitted. Second, Carter’s interactions with slaves
working in and around the big house, whom he knew well and mentioned by name, were often contests of will to
which Carter reacted emotionally, as was often the case with many masters and mistresses. Everywhere enslaved
domestics were especially subject to punishments meted out in anger or as a result of disputes between slaveholding
22
spouses, rather than as a calculated method of forcing them to do more work.
Carter had fewer personal interactions with enslaved field hands, whom he seldom mentioned by name,
and whom he regarded primarily as tools for production. There was “nothing so certain,” he declared, “as spoiling
your slaves by allowing them but little to do; so sure are they from thence to learn to do nothing at All.” As with
the domestics and artisans, field workers were punished for running away, for theft, and for mistreating or failing to
control livestock. On the other hand, Carter not infrequently ordered whole gangs of field laborers whipped for
working too slow. He ordered overseers to “tend their foreman close for one day in every Job; and deducting 1/5
of that day’s work, he ought every other day to keep up to that. Therefore, by dividing every gang [which usually
numbered from 22 to 27] into good, Middling, and indifferent hands, one person out of each is to [be] watched for 1
day’s work, and all of the same division must be kept to his proportion.” Occasionally Carter himself spent several
hours observing gangs turning ground for tobacco hills, going from hand to hand to speed up their work. He also
demanded regimented movement. When hilling ground, “I made them set the hinderfoot right behind the hill made
and the forefoot just before it so than now each must make the same Number of hills in each row.” Carter
employed calculated violence to enforce a fast work pace that exceeded the rate demanded by either white or
enslaved black overseers. On one quarter the enslaved overseer setting the pace in weeding corn “shall receive a
sound correction, if by tomorrow he has not mended his pace,” and workers who had not kept up with the overseer
Carter ordered “all a sound whipping.” Dissatisfied with the pace of one gang, Carter put them to work with the
gang of another quarter, “and every fellow that does not work as much as the Mangorike fellows and every woman
as the Mangorike women shall be whipt to it.” And when threshers did not thresh stacks of grain quickly or cleanly
23
enough, they were “severely whipped day by day.”
Carter also extended the work day by insisting that work begin at dawn and continue until dusk with only
a half hour break for a midday meal. Moreover he cut the amount of time that mothers were allowed to nurse
infants to three thirty minute breaks during the work day, and whipped those who suckled too long. When the
number of daylight hours decreased in winter, Carter extended the workday with nighttime tasks such as stemming a
set amount of tobacco by firelight. When the enslaved threw away good tobacco in order to shorten their “task,”
Carter made “each person keep their stemms by themselves till the morning for inspection and a proper correction.”
Believing that “kindness to a Negroe by way of reward for having done well is the surest way to spoil him,” Carter
offered no incentives to encourage field laborers, and mentioned granting an extra “holiday,” on only three
occasions in the twenty-two years covered by the diary, on one of which slaves were freed from work only if they
24
attended church.
22
Feneoltea, “Slavery and Supervision in Comparative Perspective: A Model,” Journal of Economic History, 44
(1984), 635-668; Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 212, 568; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 619. For
biographies that emphasize interactions with domestics and artisans, see, for example, Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s
Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (Oxford, 2004). For the number of slaves see
Landon Carter inventory, Feb. 1779, Carter Family Papers, UVa, and Philip Morgan, “Three Planters and Their
Slaves: Perspectives on Slavery in Virginia, South Carolina, and Jamaica, 1750-1790,” in Winthrop D. Jordan and
Sheila L. Skemp, eds., Race and Family in the Colonial South... (Jackson, Miss.,1987), 37-80.
23
Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 138, 147, 358, 375-376 (quotation), 422, 425, 430 (quotation), 432, 502 (quotation),
677, 681 (quotation), 834 (quotation). The whippings Carter recorded were far from the only ones the enslaved
suffered; overseers also routinely whipped workers on their own authority.
24
Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 138, 357-358 (quotation), 399, 429 (quotation), 519-520, 691, 925.
9
From the few observations on output per laborer available for Carter’s plantations it does not appear that
his brutal attempts to institute a “pushing” system were effective. Part of the problem was that, as a hedge against
poor growing seasons, Carter typically made the field hands set out as many as two and sometimes three times more
tobacco and corn plants per worker as was customary for the area. In favorable years, Carter “overcropt,” and
overseers abandoned parts of the fields to weeds, rather than trying to make the slaves to do so much more work
than neighboring planters required. The work pace Carter demanded also exceeded the rate that either white or
enslaved overseers were willing to enforce. Despite most white overseers being paid shares of the major crops,
which gave them a strong economic incentive for driving the slaves hard, few were willing to resort to as much
systematic violence as was Carter. Carter judged white overseers “too lazy to push any gaing of nigo.” One
supervisor, although “constantly in the field” with the hoe gang, “is of no more service than a Pecking turkey; he is
forever saying the work is hard.” Another “had not diligence enough to make the people flye,” as “they did when I
spoke to them.” And enslaved overseers were simply “too easy on those people.” Whenever Carter was away,
occupied with company, or indisposed, not only the enslaved, but overseers as well worked less intensely than when
he was around. Carter lamented that “every negro, and overseer, has known I was laid up and have workt
25
accordingly.”
Carter’s white overseers lived alone on isolated quarters in cabins adjoining those of the slaves. It was
necessary, for their own safety and that of their wife and children, that they make some compromises with the
enslaved over the intensity of work and that there was some consistency in punishments for transgressions. For
those paid in crop shares, moreover, it was against to their interest to live in a constant state of war with the
workers. On one quarter where the employee refused to make such compromises, for example, Carter observed
that the overseer was so dissatisfied with the slaves and the slaves so dissatisfied with him that no work was getting
done. On another, an overseer produced little “though he had not workt them” hard, for the slaves “have been kept
out in the woods by his Severity.” On the other hand, an overseer inclined to indolence, George Washington later
observed, “to avoid working himself” would allow the slaves “to be idle, to bribe them against a discovery of his
own idleness.” As Carter knew from experience, it was easier for an overseer to make “up a Short share, by what
26
he can steal privately from his imployer,” than it was to push the workforce too hard.
In the end Carter failed to successfully integrate plow culture and many other elements of British
husbandry with staple plantation agriculture because he believed gang labor was the only viable method for
compelling work from the enslaved. In the late 1750s not only Carter’s white, but also his enslaved overseers
recognized that using plows for ground preparation and weeding would reduce human labor requirements. By then
plows and carts were familiar implements since several large planters whose quarters adjoined Carter’s had begun
using draft animals extensively as they added wheat to their crop mix. For a planter who frequently set out more
corn and tobacco than the workforce could adequately tend in favorable years, one might suppose that Carter too
would embrace plow culture. Instead he rejected it because he considered it incompatible with gang labor: “at no
work can the hands be kept together but at the hoe.” Dwelling on the fact that his father’s slaves raised large
amounts of surplus corn and wheat in addition to full crops of tobacco, Carter believed that “carts and plows only
serve to make Overseers and people extremely lazy.” Wherever they were widely used, “both Overseers and
Negroes imagine this or that work will be quickly done with the plows and Carts and of course are very little
solicitous to do their proper parts of the business.” In situations where plowmen were expected to initially break up
fields before hoe gangs further pulverized the soil and constructed hills, or where plows were to complete initial
weeding of row crops before hoe hands finished the job, the work schedules of all depended on the pace of the
plowmen. When “the plowmen and Carters see that others don’t work it must be next to an impossibility to think
25
For crops per laborer, see Walsh, Motives of Honor, 521-532; Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 200, 235, 301-302
(quotation), 325, 331, 346-347, 388, 417, 443, 451, 479, 534-535, 536 (quotation), 568, 576-577, 588, 639, 641,
687-688, 694-695, 809-810 (quotation), 828 (quotation), 1099.
26
Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 678, 743; George Washington to Anthony Whiting, 30 December 1792, Founders
Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-11-02-0355.
10
that they will work til in the end every thing is to do and of course every thing must be slubbered and harried over.”
Similarly, as a later British observer reported, “If the eyes of the overseer be off” a slave, “he sleeps; the ox and the
27
horse, driven by the slave, appear to sleep also.”
Use of draft animals introduced further elements of unpredictability which Carter could not devise means
to overcome. Single animals or teams of animals worked at their own individual paces, so plowmen could not be
kept moving together at the same rate, especially when both slow moving oxen and faster horses (and later, mules)
worked the same field. Nor could plowmen be kept continuously at work, for in hot weather, draft animals had to
be watered, and oxen, less tolerant of heat than horses, had to be rested for up to four hours in the middle of the day.
Spare animals were not available, for Carter had trouble finding food in the forage-short tidewater for even one
28
team. Often the underfed draft animals could not work a full day and lacked the strength to pull plows deeply.
With lockstep labor not an option, planters and overseers who had little experience with plow culture were
uncertain what constituted a reasonable daily output. The varying natural paces of draft animals, the impossibility
of keeping them working throughout the day, and feed constraints were just part of the problem. Previously
uncleared or excessively weedy fields took longer to plow than regularly tilled ones, and both excessively
waterlogged and excessively baked soils required more time and animal power than optimally conditioned lands.
How to judge when plowmen were slacking off by not working themselves and the draft animals as hard as they
might (and indirectly slowing the work of all), or when they were accomplishing all that could be reasonably
expected? Plowmen had to be allowed more autonomy over their work pace than a control obsessed planter like
Carter could tolerate. Consequently, when Carter did begrudgingly try plows on one or two nearby quarters, he
assigned only two or three men to plow. “On all accounts,” he concluded, “hoes are the surest and best way of
29
tending.”
The incorporation of animals into plantation work regimes also imposed restrictions on the ability of
slaveowners to discipline human workers. Plowmen might be punished for sloppy work, for breaking or stealing
equipment, for injuring draft animals, or for failing to complete an assigned task by the end of the day, but planters
recognized that it was counterproductive to whip them for not plowing at a fast enough pace. Plowmen in fear of
being beaten for working slowly would in self defense turn to beating hapless draft animals, resulting in the
30
incapacitation or loss of valuable stock at critical times in the agricultural calendar.
Many scholars have accepted Carter’s uniquely documented plantation operations as representative of elite
improving agriculture. Carter, however, failed to implement management systems designed to promote the smooth
functioning of all elements of plantation operations, instead relying too heavily on gang labor and hoe culture.
Unlike more rigorous improving planters, Carter kept no regular accounts of crops produced, no work logs, and no
systematic financial records. His continued heavy reliance on tobacco, practice of intentionally planting more
acreage in crops than often could be tended, failure to fully adopt plow culture, and penchant for harsh discipline
did not conform to the model of rational and ameliorative management increasingly promoted in the literatures of
31
agricultural improvement and of enlightened plantership.
27
Ibid. 386-387 (quotation), 408, 470-471, 483-484, 496 (quotation), 753-754, 764, 834, 1099, 1115; G. Melvin
Herndon, “Agriculture in America in the 1790s: An Englishman’s View,” Agricultural History, 49 (1975), 509.
28
Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 442; Martin A. Garrett, Jr., “Evidence on the Use of Oxen in the Postbellum South,”
Social Science History, 22 (1998),225-249; Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, Creating Abundance: Biological
Innovation and American Agricultural Development (Cambridge, 2008), 361-367.
29
30
31
Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 439-440, 442, 445, 671, 675, 683, 688.
Greene, ed., Diary of Carter, 445, 611-612.
Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, chap. 1.
11
More efficient utilization of agricultural labor became a preoccupation with improvers on both sides of the
Atlantic in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Arthur Young was among the first to address management of
agricultural labor in Britain in Rural Economy, first published in 1770. Some of Young’s recommendations for
gentleman farmers replicated practices Chesapeake slaveowners had long adopted. He advised gentlemen to
employ a bailey to supervise farm laborers, because workers would not obey a leisured gentleman “so well as a
person nearer their own level in life.” The bailey was to “attend to every motion of his laborers in every season,
hour and weather,” keeping “all the people employed strictly to their bargains; overlooking the servants as to their
hours of plowing, and other work.” In order to keep the bailey “spirited,” the employer should ride out irregularly
and without warning to see if work was being done properly. Estate agents required supervising because they had
many opportunities to cheat their employers and those “brought up totally in the common practice,” were averse to
new ways of doing things and instead of promoting innovations “would probably thwart his measures, and occasion
a want of success,” problems also familiar to North American slaveowners. Hours of work and time allowed for
meals were to be strictly enforced. Workers were to be called out in the morning with the ring of a bell, and all were
expected to have their horses harnessed and ready “for the call march forth to work.” The bailey was to keep
records of any who came late and to reprimand them. Laborers were allowed exactly one hour to eat their dinner at
a set time announced at beginning and end by a bell, and were then to remain at work until “called home” by the
32
bell–no team was to return early, whatever the weather.
Young considered one of the biggest constraints to increasing labor productivity customary expectations
about what constituted a fair day’s work, which laborers stubbornly refused to exceed. Just as British employers
needed to find ways to circumvent the “custom of the country,” so too did slaveholders strive to overturn “the
custom of the plantation,” when expectations about work pace and the size of tasks benefitted the enslaved. The
new method of rewards and punishments Young advocated, however, reveal the vast gulf between “enlightened”
methods of getting more work from free laborers and those employed to compel work from the enslaved. Young
observed that farm workers simply ignored scolding and threats, and imposed upon employers who were too mild
and took no notice of “trifles.” In order to “keep up the attention of the men,” those who obeyed orders and who
worked faster than custom demanded were to be rewarded with increased wages or with bonuses of coveted
33
consumer goods. The employer was advised to summarily discharge chronic slackers.
Additional methods Young proposed for extracting more work included the keeping of daily work logs as
well as “black books” identifying worker’s deficiencies and demonstrating the difference between “a faithful
servant who meets with his mater’s praise and rewards, and an idle or a careless one that receives his displeasure.”
Other methods that he recommended included improved field, farm yard, and building layouts that enabled work to
be carried out more efficiently with less wasted motion, and such measures as rerouting roads that crossed fields to
minimize plowmen’s opportunities for stopping to converse with passersby, and having several smaller stables
rather than one large one to minimize stable boys congregating to gossip. Close supervision, time monitoring,
monetary rewards for those who exceeded expectations, and firing of the careless or idle were the only methods
34
discussed. Violence was never contemplated as an option for disciplining free agricultural laborers.
As Justin Roberts has argued, “the working world of the plantation was transformed by new management
theories, which were in turn shaped by broader Atlantic discourses about moral reform and scientific and
agricultural improvement.” Late eighteenth-century slaveowners throughout the North American colonies,
following the lead of European improvers, embraced Enlightenment “emphasis on work, discipline, and the
restriction of autonomy as mechanisms of moral reform.” Increasing economic efficiency and ameliorating slavery
were no longer viewed as incompatible. Northern Neck improver Richard Corbin, for example, directed overseers
32
33
34
Arthur Young, Rural Economy or Essays on the Practical Parts of Husbandry... (London, 1770).
Ibid.
Young, Farmer’s Guide in Hiring and Stocking Farms, 2 vols. (London, 1770).
12
“to keep the negroes in good order and enforce Obedience by the Example of their own Industry,” which he
considered a “more effectual Method in any respect of Succeeding and in making good Crops than Hurry and
35
Severity.”
Controlling time became a major component of plantation reforms. In order to decrease costs and to
increase plantation profits, like British factory managers, slaveowners similarly accounted for, manipulated, and
organized enslaved workers’ time. For them, time management was both a tool for discipline and a means for
measuring performance. Slaveowners now expected that “every labourer (male and female)” should “do as much
in the 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health, or constitutions, will allow.” Plantation slaves
not only worked a similar number of days–between 279 and 297--throughout North America, by the 1790s laborers
in the Chesapeake worked nearly as many hours per year than did those toiling on sugar estates in Barbados.
Even if Chesapeake planters dropped labor-intensive tobacco for ostensibly less labor intensive wheat, the addition
of corn, forage, and fiber crops and new by-employments eliminated any slack periods in the agricultural
36
calendar.
In the last quarter of the century, a few large Virginia and Maryland planters like Richard Corbin, John
Tayloe II, George Washington, and Edward Lloyd IV did succeed in more fully transitioning to diversified crop
mixes that included increased amounts of small grains, improved pastures, plow culture, and extensive manuring.
The amount of hoe labor diminished, the use of draft animals increased, and the number and variety of seasonal
tasks proliferated, requiring new modes of labor management. (Landon Carter, for example, had difficulty in the
1770s keeping two plow teams working on his home plantation and nearby quarters. By the late 1780s, George
Washington, whose estate was of comparable size to Carter’s, seldom used fewer than nine plows on Mount Vernon
farms, and, at peak periods, managed to keep as many as twenty-seven going simultaneously, as well as several
harrows, carts, and wagons.) More tasks were divided by gender, with men assigned to plowing, carting, and craft
work, which was usually carried on individually or in small groups. Enslaved men were also set to work in new
side enterprises, including seasonal commercial fishing, merchant milling, whisky distilling, cutting firewood for
urban markets, and overland and waterborne long-distance transportation. Women continued to be relegated
primarily to hoeing and other manual labor, and those toiling on large plantations were likely to have been subjected
37
to regimented gang labor more regularly than men.
What the new labor management measures those who shifted from hoe to plow culture adopted and how
they were implemented requires further study, for even on even the most extensively documented Chesapeake
plantations, records are largely silent about how the more individualized tasks that diversified agriculture and the
35
Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, introduction and chap. 2 (quotations, 1, 45); Richard Corbin to James
Semple, Jan. 1, 1759, Corbin Letterbook, Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
36
Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, introduction and chap. 2; George Washington to John Fairfax, Jan. 1,
1789,” in Dorothy Twohig, ed., The Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series, I, 223. Roberts calculated
that slaves at Mount Vernon worked fewer 300 hours per year than did laborers on sugar plantations, a difference
accounted for by extensive night work during the sugar harvest. But on Chesapeake plantations where tobacco
remained a major crop, night work processing the crop had also become common. For labor requirements of
tobacco and wheat see Carville Earle, “A Staple Interpretation of Slavery and Free Labor,” Geographical Review,
68 (1978), 51-65, who calculated that producing a crop of wheat required slightly more labor than did tobacco (25
versus 23 man days), but that in tobacco the labor was spread over 75 days, while wheat required only 25 days of
attendance.
37
Carr and Walsh, “Economic Diversification and Labor Organization;”Chesapeake Planters and the International
Market, 1770-1820,” in Lois Green Carr: The Chesapeake and Beyond–A Celebration (Crownsville, MD, 1992),
205-227. Washington’s use of plows is documented in Donald Jackson and Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George
Washington (Charlottesville, VA, 1978-1979), vols. IV-V.
13
use of draft animals entailed were measured, monitored, and enforced. One indication that improving planters were
searching for new methods is signaled by a change in the backgrounds of preferred supervisors. In the first half of
the eighteenth century, large Chesapeake planters who wanted to add wheat to their crop mix imported British
plowmen to instruct slaves (and native born overseers) in the techniques of plow culture, as well, presumably, in the
prerequisite training of draft animals. In the last quarter of the century, a few would-be improvers again tried
hiring British farm managers, but invariably found, as did one of Landon Carter’s nephews, the Europeans “could
not make the slaves exert themselves to moderate labor.” But by then most improvers instead sought overseers and
managers from Maryland’s Upper Eastern Shore, where large slaveholders had successfully incorporated wheat as a
major plantation cash crop fifty years earlier. Employers typically stated that it was these overseers’ expertise in
growing and harvesting wheat that they valued. I suspect, however, it was more their experience in wresting
38
increased productivity from enslaved workers by means other than ganging.
Some scholars cite the wheat harvest as a prime example of new style gang labor, but this exceptional
event incorporated more elements of free labor management practices than did any other tasks in the agricultural
calendar. Plantation owners (including those who otherwise seldom ventured into their fields), and not overseers,
personally organized and supervised the critical few days of harvest, watches in hand. Everyone worked in
organized groups assigned according to gender, age, strength, and skill. A crucial difference, however, was that the
work pace was set by the cradlers, who almost invariably included a combination of enslaved and hired free white
men. The presence of the free workers precluded whipping to speed up the work, as hired whites would not consent
to being driven or punished like slaves. Greater efforts were instead encouraged by an abundance of food and
alcohol, incentives otherwise seldom or never offered the enslaved. George Washington also sought to speed up
the work through better organization by dividing the Cradlers and their attendants into at least three gangs: “The
Stops & delays by this means are not so frequent & the Work much better attended to as every Mans work is
distinguishable and the whole Cradles not always stopping for every little disorder that happens to each respective
one as is the case when they cut altogether.” That those delays included “whetting their Scythes, drinking, or
talking” argues against hard driving, as do slaveowners’ frequent laments about the necessity of having to hire
whites to help with the harvest, because, compared to the enslaved, they not only cost a lot, but also worked so
39
little.
That the routine field labor slaves otherwise performed had to be coerced with violence or with threats of
violence seems indisputable. Unlike slaves working under the Lowcountry task system, those in the Chesapeake had
no incentive to complete their work quickly, since they were “be at their work as soon as it is light—work ’till it is
dark—and be diligent while they are at it.” Artisans could be assigned daily or weekly production quotas which an
overseer or estate manager was expected to enforce “by fair or foul means.” Those who failed to meet their quotas
were often threatened with being “placed as common laborers under the Overseers.” Careful supervision by the
overseers was judged the most essential ingredient for extracting work from field hands. Washington, for example,
thought that “where there is a large gang of hands to Overlook” the overseer’s time “w[oul]d be better employed in
seeing them well engaged than in working himself, especially if all are not within his full view at the time.” For the
overseer’s eye to be an effective spur, he had to have developed an understanding of how long multiple tasks should
40
take, and have the authority to punish workers, in or out of view, who failed to perform adequately.
38
“To George Washington from Landon Carter, 29 November 1796,” Founders Online, National Archives
(http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-00039 [last update: 2014-10-23]). For discussions
of field labor organization in the Caribbean, see Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, chap.3.
39
“Remarks & Occurrences—in July [1769],” Founders Online, National Archives
(http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-02-02-0004-0021; “[Diary entry: 15 July 1786],” ibid.,
(http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-05-02-0001-0001-0015.
40
Washington to John Fairfax, 1 January 1789, Founders Online, National Archives
(http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-01-02-0160; to Anthony Whiting, Dec. 23, 1792, in
Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, 32, 277; to Whiting, Dec. 30, 1792, in ibid.
14
Period plantation work logs describe in great detail the kinds of work that was done and who did it, but do
record how that labor was compelled. The function of the logs, adapted from British models developed for a free
labor system, was to facilitate systematic planning; they were not designed to include a record of punishments.
Only if a slave were so severely beaten that he or she was unable to work might this have been noted. Nor were
slaveowners yet in the habit of keeping the equivalent of Arthur Young’s “black books” recording laborers’
deficiencies, as a few antebellum planters who offered end of year rewards for good behavior may later have done.
41
Even in the cotton south almost none recorded routine punishments.
Part of the reason may be that by the end of the eighteenth century, slaveholders had become concerned
about the rise of anti-slavery, and, cognizant of growing humanitarian sentiment against physically barbaric
punishments, tried “to civilize the appearance of slavery,” in language, if not in deed. Caribbean plantation
owners, for example, began to advocate less severe corporal punishments and the substitution of incarceration for
whipping, but actual practice apparently changed little. Similarly, mentions of whipping (or of the euphemism
“correction”), are strikingly absent in the correspondence of prominent Chesapeake political leaders who were
especially sensitive to the effect their treatment of enslaved property might have on their historical legacy. Elite
slaveholders did make greater efforts to rein in overseers who were too “severe,” or who whipped slaves “in a
passion.” But that whipping remained the usual mode of punishment for running away, stealing, and
insubordination is clear from the diaries and letterbooks (not intended for public scrutiny) of Northern Neck
slaveowner Robert Carter of Nomini. This Robert Carter, like his uncle Landon, retained the overseer and foreman
system initiated by his grandfather “King” Carter. Although Robert was so troubled by the injustices of slavery
that he eventually manumitted some 450 slaves during his lifetime, he could not come up with alternative means of
compelling effort other than through gang labor or of punishing slaves other than by whipping. As a Virginia
estate manager unctuously stated when accused of excessive severity, “cruelty to the poor slaves is a thing I always
Abhorred & should think myself happy could I keep them to there duty without being Obliged to correct them, but
any person that has had the management of Slaves must know that it is Impossible to manage, keep or [illegible] a
gang of Negroes without using some severity.” But in a less guarded exchange, this agent admitted that he and the
overseers had dealt with the slaves only “with that humanity that the brutes are Intitled to," and had used no “more
severity than is Absolutely necessary to keep them in Subjection.” In practice, contests over mastery necessarily
42
trumped humanitarian rhetoric.
Some portion of the dramatic increases in wheat production per laborer, which rose from an average of
around ten bushels in the first half of the eighteenth century, to thirty bushels by the 1780s for the region
overall–and as much as sixty to one hundred bushels on the Upper Eastern Shore–can be explained by more
systematic planning of agricultural work, anticipating what needed to be done rather than reacting hurriedly.
Labor, too, was more effectively organized, for example by having a team of “jobbers” available to assist whenever
quarter workforces fell behind schedule. And, as had been the case earlier with tobacco, productivity increases
could be expected from learning through doing, as planters discovered through trial and error optimal levels of
ground preparation and seeding, as well as techniques for minimizing damage from insects and diseases. But
absent significant technological or biological innovations, new methods for extracting additional hours of labor or
41
For work logs see Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 56-68; for possible records of behavior see Kathleen
M. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (Cambridge, 2014), 32-33,
142-143; for the single whipping record that has surfaced see Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time
on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974), I, 145; and Paul A. David, et al, eds.,
Reckoning with Slavery, 57-69.
42
Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 49-55 (quotation 55); Andrew Levy, The First Emancipator: Slavery,
Religion, and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter (New York, 2007); Charles Dabney to John Blair, Jr. [1769];
Charles W. Dabney Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, microfilm, Rockefeller Library, Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation. For paucity of references to punishments in Washington’s papers see Henry Wiencek,
An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York, 2003), 125-126.
15
better quality labor cannot be dismissed. Large planters made the highest gross returns (constant value) yet
realized from major cash crops between 1790 and 1818. In other instances when high profits could be attained
from regional staples bound labor was pushed harder, so this may well have also been the case in the early national
Chesapeake. How this might have been effected at a time when most planters were reducing gang labor is the
43
major question.
While evidence about negative incentives is sketchy, what is clear is that in this period positive incentives
played almost no role in eliciting productivity increases. Improving planters became assiduous in accounting for
all plantation expenditures, down to the six pence worth of rum or brandy typically issued to those who attended a
woman in childbirth. Aside from the wheat harvest, there is no evidence of extra food or clothing or of cash being
offered as incentives to harder work on early nineteenth century Chesapeake plantations. Any payments for
overwork were reserved for extraordinary occasions–laboring on Sunday, for example, or rescuing property from
fires or floods.
The one major change in the structure of incentives was the continued expansion of a robust internal slave
economy. Slaveowners had encouraged the enslaved to pursue self-sufficient activities during the Revolution to
help overcome wartime shortages, and accelerated urban growth after the war afforded slaves new markets for their
produce. Although continually worried about the opportunities for pilfering and for buying goods masters deemed
inappropriate, slaveowners were unable to check their slaves’ trading activities. And indeed, with the prices of
meat and grain escalating, allowing slaves slightly more time for tending their gardens and for hunting and fishing
served to reduce discontent over the owners’ attempts to reduce the quantity or quality of regularly issued
provisions. The expanding internal economy proved a powerful incentive to further self-exploitation, but did not
44
enhance production of cash crops.
By the 1790s a combination of more diversified crop mixes and new systems of labor management reduced
the extent to which most slaveowners relied on ganging. This was especially true on smaller plantations in the
tidewater. The majority of planters responded to severe disruptions in European tobacco markets occasioned by
the French Revolution, and to elevated prices for grains and meat due to the outbreak of war in Europe, by dropping
tobacco in favor of grains and livestock. Small and middling planters who had previously relied entirely only on
hoes now acquired plows for the first time, requiring changes in work organization. Plantation diaries for two
lesser gentry planters in Maryland who pursued mixed farming and managed workforces of eight to ten adult
laborers demonstrate that individual work assignments or work in pairs was most common, and group labor
employed only for critical crunch times in planting, weeding, and harvest. With the amount of hoe culture
45
drastically reduced, gang labor ceased to be an option for extracting maximum effort.
Organization of field labor was a central issue in discussions of late eighteenth century sugar plantation
management. Improving Chesapeake planters touted the benefits of systematic management, but, aside from the
wheat harvest, less often wrote about how field labor should be organized. Seven to eight laborers remained the
threshold below which it did not pay to hire an overseer. Because of the care some aspects of tobacco culture
required, until the mid eighteenth century fifteen laborers per quarter remained the optimal number an overseer
could supervise. But later in the century, on many elite plantations the number of hands under one overseer rose to
between twenty and twenty-five. It is uncertain whether this increase reflected a more diversified crop mix, with
43
Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake,” in Berlin and Morgan,
eds., Cultivation and Culture, 170-199.
44
Ibid. 190-192; Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of A Virginia Slave Community
(Charlottesville, VA, 1997, 183-186; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 358-376.
45
Thomas Jones Farm Books, 1779-1812, MS 517; James Wilson Farm Account Book, MS 9l5, both in Maryland
Historical Society.
16
wheat affording greater economies of scale than tobacco, or, that once most adult workers were native born,
overseers could effectively manage more laborers. Clearly the labor forces on quarters of elite planters were large
enough that gang labor continued to be a viable strategy for driving those still assigned to work with hoes.
Ganging, however, was probably most widespread among slaveowners like George Washington who were opposed
to selling slaves and to breaking up families, and who either did not own reserves of western lands or who preferred
to develop distant holdings with free tenants rather than with slave labor. By retaining hoe gangs composed
primarily of women and adolescents, such slaveowners made optimal use of the labor of all.
Increasingly, however, many elite planters began capping the size of workforces on tidewater farms, and
either sent surplus laborers to new plantations in Southside Virginia, Kentucky, or Tennessee, where they could
produce higher returns on fresh land with hoe culture and gang labor, or else sold off women and adolescents to
local buyers or to “Georgia men,” who by the 1790s were scouring the tidewater for cotton field workers. Unlike
sugar and rice plantation economies, in which, once slaveholders acquired a work force of optimal size, most had to
continually replace enslaved adults who died prematurely from disease or overwork. Higher rates of natural
increase meant that in the post-Revolutionary Chesapeake strategies for maximizing enslaved labor included both
extracting greater effort from a bound labor force steadily growing in size from natural increase, and tailoring the
size and composition of the workforce for efficient production at lowest cost. Before the war, elite slaveowners
had retained all the enslaved people whom they purchased or inherited, along with the slaves’ increase, to provide
eventual portions for heirs, a practice encouraged by laws in Virginia allowing slaves to be entailed to particular
estates. Afterwards, responding to the combination of heightened cost consciousness and increasing possibilities
for earning higher profits by forcing slaves to move elsewhere, more slaveowners decided it was uneconomic to
feed and clothe less productive slaves who were not essential to their current operations. Forced migration, sale,
hiring out, and, less frequently, manumission, emerged as new options for shaping the composition and organization
of bound agricultural labor. Consequently for many Chesapeake slaves, the westward expansion of slavery rendered
fear of sale away from family and of forced migration became more potent threats than whipping as a spur to more
46
diligent labor.
By the early 1800s southwestern cotton planters were convinced that field hands on Chesapeake
plantations were accustomed to not working as hard as cotton hands were pushed to do. It had also become
common knowledge in the slave quarters that the work regime forced migrants encountered in cotton fields was
more brutal, exploitative, and repressive. Chesapeake plantation work logs demonstrate that the difference was not
in the number of days or of hours per day worked, and increasing outputs per worker suggest there was no decline
in overall intensity of effort. The shift from primarily hoe to primarily plow culture, unique among the plantation
regions, greatly reduced the incidence of gang labor, thus affording the enslaved, especially enslaved men, a greater
degree of autonomy over the pace, if not the quantity, of work. On the quarters of slaveowners who styled
themselves farmers rather than planters, the tasks the enslaved performed were increasingly similar to those
undertaken by laborers on large estates in Britain. Despite the account books, work logs, and strategies for time
management and systematic planning adapted from European agricultural improvers, however, in the Chesapeake,
as in all other plantation regions, the whip remained the most essential tool for managing agricultural labor.
46
Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production;” Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War
in Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York, 2013).
17