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gungadin09 -> RE: The South shall rise again??? (1/15/2011 7:58:53 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
I wasnt asking to be bitchy. Nor did i mean for it to come across as such. I really wanted to simply get you to look.
Oh, i know. i wasn't trying to imply that you were.
quote:
ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
The cost of a slave, if the amount back then was 950 dollars, would be in real money today around 30000 to 40000. Thats a huge investment. Imagine a plantation with 30 slaves. We arent talking nickles and dimes here.
i found that too, $30,000 to purchase a slave. Their life expectancy was 20 years. They worked 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, so 60 hours a week. Their food, housing and medical varied from region to region and plantation to plantation, and i didn't find any hard numbers. i got the idea that accomodations were pretty minimal, although still livable, and arguably better than what many of them would have experienced in Africa- ESPECIALLY NEAR THE TIME OF THE CIVIL WAR. In previous generations (1600s, 1700s), the conditions were simply horrendous, and slave owners simply worked their slaves to death because it was cheaper (at that time) to buy new ones than to maintain adequate living conditions for the ones that they had.
That had changed by the time of the Civil War. The prices of slaves had gone up (doubled), and the intense nature of the agriculture had gone down (farms changed from producing bumper crop monocultures of tobacco, etc. to more sustainable crops once their fields began losing fertility). As a result, there was less work for the slaves to do, and being more valuble, the landowners had to treat them better to protect their investment. This was the beginning of the end of slavery, and if it hadn't been for the cotton boom in the deep South. In the years preceding the war, most high south states were making the money by shipping slaves off to work in factories for wages.
i was unable to find whether most slaves food, housing, and medical treatments were considerably worse then their poor white counterparts at the time of the Civil War. They had housing, but virtually no possessions. They had food, but it was the cheapest possible materials, and, probably, not enough. In particular, the field workers weren't given an adequate number of calories. Slaves had access to medical treatment through the plantations, but they made it a point to avoid the doctors and instead relied on other slaves to care for them and applied their own herbal remedies for medicine. i suspect that some of the poor white farmworkers were living in similar conditions, or only marginally better, in terms of economics.
Apparently, the rich plantation owners were a small minority of the Southern population. Most Southerners did not own slaves, and most who did owned only one or two. There was a kind of oligarchy with the poor whites and slaves making up the majority, and yet having no social mobility or real power. The real tragedy is that the South did not educate their population (outside of the oligarchy), did not develop their own infrastructure (preferring to trade with Europe for comodities instead of engaging in trade locally, which would have made for a much healthier and more balanced economy), and because of racism used slaves only in agriculture instead of factories and such. Those mistakes came back to haunt them in the Civil War.
i didn't find any evidence about whether it would have been cheaper for the slaveowners to pay slaves wages, as free agents, than to purchase them as slaves and provide their food, housing, and medical. i suspect there was no such thing as minimum wage in the rural South. In my opinion, the most well treated of the slaves, and the worst off of the poor white farmworkers were probably living in similar conditions. It may be that for much of the Southern population, the terms "slavery" and "freedom" referred more to a state of mind, and a degree of status and respect within the community (or lack thereof), rather than any real economic or political "freedom".
i haven't provided a bibliography. Sorry, i'm too lazy. But anyone who is curious about this stuff is welcome to look it up for themselves.
pam
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