Slave Productivity in Cotton Production by Gender, Age, Season, and Scale

Social scientists have devoted considerable effort to understand gender and age productivity differentials. In American economic history the gender productivity gap has important implications for key issues ranging from the relative efficiency of plantations versus free farms and the pace of industrialization (Wright 2006, Goldin and Sokoloff 1984). Yet the magnitude of such differentials in antebellum cotton production remains contested. We use a new data set to provide direct physical measures by gender and age of productivity in cotton picking—critical peak activity of a cotton plantation's production cycle. Our specific findings include that (1) in the plantation sector, females and males performed essentially equal shares of the picking work; (2) the gender differentials in daily picking rates were very narrow, with adult females picking only in the 7-11 percent less than adult males in the late antebellum period; the gap was even narrower earlier; (3) productivity in picking, an activity conducted on an individual basis, was higher on larger-scale units; and finally (4) many planters whose examples are quoted in support of the gang-labor assembly-line-efficiency hypothesis, behaved in ways that either directly contradict the hypothesis or, at best, are in accordance only by happenstance.

[1]  R. McConnell,et al.  Hugh Davis and His Alabama Plantation , 1950 .

[2]  P. Rhode,et al.  Productivity Growth and the Regional Dynamics of Antebellum Southern Development , 2010 .

[3]  L. Craig,et al.  Slavery in the Development of the Americas: The Relative Efficiency of Free and Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum United States: A Stochastic Production Frontier Approach , 2004 .

[4]  Gavin J. Wright,et al.  Slavery and American Economic Development , 2006 .

[5]  J. Mokyr,et al.  The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. , 1979 .

[6]  K. Sokoloff,et al.  Manufacturing Where Agriculture Predominates: Evidence from the South and Midwest in 1860 , 1997 .

[7]  R. Ransom,et al.  One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation , 1979 .

[8]  J. Burnette.  Gender, work and wages in industrial revolution Britain , 2008 .

[9]  P. Rhode,et al.  Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy , 2008 .

[10]  S. Engerman,et al.  Time on the Cross , 1974 .

[11]  C. Raguet-Bouvart.  R. W. Fogel. — Without Consent or Contract: the Rise and Fall of American Slavery , 1991 .

[12]  R. Sutch.  The Profitability of Ante Bellum Slavery: Revisited , 1965 .

[13]  Megan Sorenson,et al.  Library , 1958 .

[14]  S. Engerman,et al.  Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South: Reply , 1977 .

[15]  S. Tadier.  Diary , 1988, BDJ.

[16]  Thomas L. Haskell.  Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South: A Reply to Fogel-Engerman , 1979 .

[17]  Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. , 1991 .

[18]  R. Gallman,et al.  Slaves as Fixed Capital: Slave Labor and Southern Economic Development , 1977 .

[19]  W. N. Parker.  The Structure of the cotton economy of the antebellum South , 1971 .

[20]  Kenneth L. Sokoloff,et al.  Agricultural Seasonalily and the Organization of Manufacturing in Early Industrial Economies: The Contrast Between England and the United States , 1997, The Journal of Economic History.

[21]  Gavin J. Wright.  The Efficiency of Slavery: Another Interpretation , 1979 .

[22]  Peter Temin,et al.  The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times . Edited by David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr and William J. Baumol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 566. $49.50. , 2010, The Journal of Economic History.

[23]  J. L. Watkins.  Production and price of cotton for one hundred years / by James L. Watkins. , 1895 .

[24]  C. Anker.  The political economy of new slavery , 2004 .

[25]  John Campbell.  The gender division of labor, slave reproduction, and the slave family economy of southern cotton plantations, 1800-1865 , 1988 .

[26]  Claudia Goldin,et al.  Understanding The Gender Gap , 1992 .

[27]  Victor B. Howard.  Born in Bondage: Growing up Enslaved in the Antebellum South , 2000 .

[28]  Heywood W. Fleisig.  Slavery, the Supply of Agricultural Labor, and the Industrialization of the South , 1976, The Journal of Economic History.

[29]  Kenneth L. Sokoloff,et al.  The Relative Productivity Hypothesis of Industrialization: The American Case, 1820-1850 , 1981 .

[30]  李幼升,et al.  Ph , 1989 .

[31]  Elbert Hilliard.  The Mississippi Department of Archives and History , 2003 .

[32]  R. Gerber.  Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery , 1974 .

[33]  J. Wahl.  The Economics of Slavery , 2010 .

[34]  Peter G. Peterson,et al.  Understanding the Gender Gap : An Economic History of American Women , 2009 .

[35]  J. Foust,et al.  Productivity and profitability of antebellum slave labor; a micro-approach , 1970 .

[36]  J. Metzer.  Rational management, modern business practices, and economies of scale in the ante-bellum southern plantations , 1975 .

[37]  W. Stephenson.  A Quarter-Century of a Mississippi Plantation: Eli J. Capell of “Pleasant Hill” , 1936 .

[38]  U. B. Phillips,et al.  Florida plantation records from the papers of George Noble Jones , 1927 .

[39]  N. S. Cardell,et al.  Without consent or contract : the rise and fall of American slavery : evidence and methods , 1989 .

[40]  E. A. Davis,et al.  Plantation life in the Florida parishes of Louisiana, 1836-1846 , 1943 .

[41]  U. B. Phillips,et al.  American Negro Slavery , 1918 .

[42]  J. Meyer,et al.  The Economics of Slavery: and Other Studies in Econometric History , 1965 .

[43]  Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (review) , 2008 .

[44]  Kenneth L. Sokoloff,et al.  Women, Children, and Industrialization in the Early Republic: Evidence from the Manufacturing Censuses , 1981, The Journal of Economic History.

[45]  L. C. Gray.  History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 , 1933, Nature.

[46]  Robert W. Lovett.  Of Manuscripts and Archives. , 1973 .

[47]  L. Kotlikoff.  The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans, 1804 to 1862 , 1979 .

[48]  Labor of love, labor of sorrow : black women, work, and the family, from slavery to the present , 1986 .

[49]  L. Craig,et al.  Industrialization and the Earnings Gap: Regional and Sectoral Tests of the Goldin-Sokoloff Hypothesis , 1993 .

[50]  Michael P. Johnson.  Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South , 2000 .

[51]  J. Meyer,et al.  The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South , 1958, Journal of Political Economy.

[52]  J. Breeden,et al.  Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South , 1980 .

[53]  Stanley Lebergott,et al.  The Americans: An Economic Record. , 1985 .

[54]  W. N. Parker,et al.  The Political Economy of Slavery, Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. , 1967 .

[55]  Elizabeth B Field.  The Relative Efficiency of Slavery Revisited: A Translog Production Function Approach , 1988 .

[56]  J. Moore.  Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi , 1959 .

[57]  J. Moore.  The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770--1860 , 1988 .

[58]  Y. Yasuba.  The Profitability and Viability of Plantation Slavery in the United States , 1961 .

[59]  Edward Saraydar.  A NOTE ON THE PROFITABILITY OF ANTE BELLUM SLAVERY , 1964 .

[60]  J. Toman.  The gang system and comparative advantage , 2005 .

[61]  J. Foust.  The Yeoman Farmer and Westward Expansion of U.S. Cotton Production , 1967, The Journal of Economic History.

[62]  Franklee G. Whartenby.  Land and labor productivity in United States cotton production, 1800-1840 , 1963 .

[63]  E. Genovese,et al.  The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South , 1966 .

[64]  M. H. Heycock,et al.  Papers , 1971, BMJ : British Medical Journal.