Multi-Millionaire..... Slaves??

Most people in America have a view of American Slavery that is primarily informed by movies like, Django Unchained.

In other words, they have a view divorced from historical fact.

Hollywood often depicts the American practice slavery as an enterprise of hatred, with no concern for resource expenditure or regard for the lives of slaves.

While certainly this kind of slavery existed, the reality is far more subtle.

Don't misunderstand, the horrors of slavery were hateful, evil, and intense. Everyone knows that, we are told it all the time.

What we are almost never told is the actual history of the slave trade in America. Data, evidence, stories, records, facts, documents, artifacts, etc.

As emotionally affective as movies are, they are rarely informative. All too often, they are plainly false.

A historical picture of the American slave trade will include a little known, but widely practiced (and equally deplorable), form of slavery called self-hire.

The practice of self-hire refers to slaves living in the South who, while legally enslaved, worked for themselves. How can this be? I'll tell you.

Divided Mastery: Self-Hire Slavery

In his book Race and Economics, economist Walter Williams describes the practice of self-hire slavery in great detail.

Beginning as early as the 16th century, many blacks began to realize that if they possessed skills considered valuable by their masters, then they themselves were valuable to their masters.

As anyone who has ever owned anything of value can tell you — torturing or destroying valuables is bad for one's self-interest.

Since enslaved blacks represented a huge portion of their master's wealth, increasing their value through the development of skills was the easiest way to avoid the sort of evils we frequently associate with slavery.

Williams describes it thus:

Despite the brutal and oppressive nature of slavery, slaves did not quietly acquiesce. Many found ways to lessen slavery's hardships and attain a measure of independence... slaves learned skills and found that they could earn a measure of independence by servicing ships as rope makers, coopers, and shipwrights. Some entered more skilled trades, such as silversmithing, gold beating, and cabinetmaking.

Wait, silversmithing? Wasn't every slave a cotton-picking field worker who was fed to the dogs after a week?

Horrifically, there were in fact slaves of that kind, but they were not the majority.

Instead, most masters saw the value in keeping their slaves alive and healthy. Out of the goodness of their hearts? No, out of the greed in their guts.

Slaves who developed skills were hired out by their masters to work on projects for others. Masters earned money by “leasing” their slaves out to various projects.

It usually made sense for a master to hire out a slave, because the costs of slave labor are very expensive, as has been well known since the days of Adam Smith.

Having to pay for someone's housing, clothing, food, and 24/7 prison guard is a steep price-to-pay for that someone to just pick cotton.

It would be much easier to simply pay a meager wage to Irish laborers, whose social status was about the same as African slaves, and frequently picked cotton alongside their African coworkers.

In most cases the costs saved by employing regular laborers far outweighed the costs of paying them a wage. This is why slaves were far less likely to be working plantations by the time of the Civil War.

This basic cost-accounting is evidently lost on Hollywood.

So, slave labor became "hired labor" as masters rented their skilled slaves to other masters for projects like ship building, road construction, etc.

This practice finally turned into "self-hired labor" as masters realized that they could avoid the expenses of slavery altogether by allowing their slaves to live and work on their own.

That's right, slaves were free to move around the South, get jobs, and earn a living for themselves. They simply paid a portion of their earnings to their masters every month in exchange.

It was common for self-hire slaves to buy their own housing, clothes, food, and other property. As long as they paid their masters, they were virtually free.

Many, many slaves even purchased their freedom — by 1664, over 44% of blacks in Virginia's Northampton County were free. Some were even landowners.

That's a remarkable statistic — 200 years before the Civil War, and over 100 years before the Revolution, almost half of the blacks in Northampton were free.

What's even more remarkable was how successful blacks were during slavery and while remaining slaves.

Below are a few examples of astounding black success in the "deeply racist" South.

Multi-Millionaire Slaves

There were grocers in New Orleans, like Francis Snaer, who were worth over $200,000 in today's dollars. They owned and operated some of the largest grocers in New Orleans.

There is the well-known Cecee Macarty, who turned $12,000 into $155,000 at the time of her death (roughly a $2 million dollar fortune today).

Walter Williams lists several pages of examples, here is an excerpt revealing the tremendous economic force of blacks in pre-Civil war America:

Another was Thorny Lafon, who started out with a small dry-goods store and later became a real estate dealer, amassing a fortune valued over $400,000 ($8 million today) by the time he died.

Black control of the cigar industry enabled men like Lucien Mansion and Georges Alces to own sizable factories, with Alces hiring as many as 200 men.

Pierre A. D. Casenave, an immigrant from Santo Domingo, was among New Orleans' more notable businessmen. Having inherited $10,000, as a result of being a confidential clerk of a white merchant-philanthropist, Casenave was in the "commission" business by 1853.

By 1857, he was worth $30,000 to $40,000, and he had built an undertaking business, catering mostly to whites, that was worth $2 million in today's dollars.

Williams also rightly points out that the ratio of skilled black workers was higher than the skilled labor ratio for Irish or German demographics in the early 1800s.

It wasn't just free-blacks either, many slaves were property owners:

By the end of the antebellum era, there was considerable property ownership among slaves in both the Upper and Lower South. Many amassed their resources through the "task" (or "hiring-out") system.

In Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia, slaves worked in tobacco factories and earned $150 and up to $200 a year, plus all expenses. By 1850, slave hiring was common in hemp manufacturing and in the textile and tobacco industries.

In Richmond, 62 percent of the male slave force was hired; in Lynchburg, 52 percent, in Norfolk, more than 50 percent, and in Louisville, 24 percent. Across the entire South, at least 100,000 slaves were hired out each year.

It is worth pointing out that the slaves mentioned in the above passage would see their hard-earned wealth destroyed just a decade later by the “holy” armies of the Union.

But I digress.

One of my favorite examples, both of black success and progressive revisionism, is the story of "Doctor Jack."

If you look up the first black doctor in America, you will get the answer: "James McCune Smith." Born in the North, he was in fact the first black to graduate from medical school and earn an MD.

He was not, however, the first black doctor.

That title likely belongs to some unknown slave, but at least we can be certain that "Doctor Jack" from Tennessee was practicing for decades before Smith.

Despite laws to the contrary, "Doctor Jack" as he was known, was a slave practicing medicine with "great and unparalleled success" in the first decades of the 1800s.

So great was his success that White doctors were losing business to his practice. As a result, they lobbied the state government to shut down his business.

Incredibly, his practice was so popular among the "deeply racist" Tennessee whites that, rather than arrest him, they amended the law to allow him to continue to practice.

Conclusion

The impact of self-hire on American slavery is hard to ignore for the historian:

Even owners with a strong ideological commitment to the institution of slavery found it profitable to permit self-hire, particularly for their most talented and trusted bondsmen.

By the 1840s and '50s, many masters were earning good returns on slaves who found employment in Baltimore, Nashville, St. Louis, Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans. In 1856, white builders in Smithfield, North Carolina, complained that they were being underbid by quasi-free blacks in the construction of houses and boats.

The fact that self-hire became such a large part of slavery simply reflects the economics of the matter. Faced with fluctuating demands for the labor of slaves, it sometimes made sense for owners to let a slave hire himself out rather than to sit idle, in return for securing a portion of his outside earnings. Slaves favored hiring out because it gave them a measure of freedom; it also provided some income to purchase goods that would be otherwise unattainable.

In the grand scheme of history, slavery as it has been practiced everywhere and at all times, is consistent with the picture of self-hire slavery in America.

Virtually every civilization has had slavery since the dawn of mankind. It is always the case that those with no skills work in brutal physical labor, while the majority earn a living in society.

If you believe the popular description of slavery in America, then you must believe that American slavery was oddly unique in history. A claim that simply doesn't square with the facts.

In truth, the most unique feature of the American institution of slavery was its relatively progressive nature.

To be clear, I am not defending slavery, nor am I suggesting that the White slave owners of the South were somehow enlightened because they practiced self-hire slavery.

To the contrary, self-hire is no less morally reprehensible. To call slaves "quasi-free" is to call them "wholly enslaved" — there is no such thing as partial freedom.

Blacks faced enormous hardships under the self-hire system, and many were cheated out of their freedom. I am no fan of the practice.

We would all agree that the self-hire slaves were just that — slaves. We would all agree that the self-hire system was morally horrendous.

Thankfully, we now live as a morally enlightened people, to whom slavery is a memory of the distant past.

Today, we live in a far more progressive society. We no longer uphold the morally deplorable institution of charging blacks a portion of the earnings of their labor.

Instead, we charge everyone a portion of the earnings of their labor, in a morally commendable system via the income, payroll, and social security taxes.

Blacks, along with everyone else, are now free in this country to live, work, and move where they will.

That is, as long as they pay their taxes, otherwise they'll be locked up in a cage and striped of their freedoms... but that’s only fair.

So why bring up self-hire at all if it's just another form of slavery? Because we do ourselves no favors to engage in fantasy and fiction when it comes to slavery.

Truth and history must prevail.

Further Reading

Race and Economics by Walter Williams

Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South by Johnathon Martin

The Economics of Slavery In the Antebellum South: Another Comment by John E. Moes in the Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 68, No.2 (April 1960)

The Underside of Slavery: The Internal Economy, Self-Hire, and Quasi-Freedom in Virginia, 1780-1865 by Loren Schweninger in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Comparative Studies Vol. 12 (1991)