Social Structure and Hierarchy of the Plantation

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Historians have devoted a great deal of attention to the culture of the enslaved, slave resistance, and the lives and social and political world of the slaveholding class, from which we have learned much. But the actual work of slaves has received less study. By 1860, the southern plantation was a vital engine of the southern and US economy and a global market that stretched from the rice, cotton, and sugar fields of the American South to the cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts and Manchester, England.

A Cotton Office in New Orleans, Edgar Degas, 1871
An image of a cotton office in New Orleans in 1871.

The plantation was a world unto itself, a self-contained economic unit, and intrinsically connected to a national and international market. It was the largest wealth-producing sector of the southern economy and gave rise to the most powerful slaveholding class in the western world.

Like any business enterprise, the purpose of the plantation was profit maximization. Slaveholders, thus, no less than northern manufacturers, had to concern themselves with such matters as financial and labor markets, global commodity prices, transportation costs, storage, land and other structural costs, and the legal environment.

However, in a world where free labor and free markets increasingly predominated, the plantation was distinguished by its reliance on the labor of millions of enslaved men, women, and children. This fact set it apart from the world around it and was the foundation of the South’s social structure and hierarchy. The plantation was at once a business enterprise and a means of organizing a social world. Its literal and symbolic terrain captured the essence of a southern way of life and the proslavery ideology that governed it.

The plantation is typically defined as an agricultural unit employing 20 or more slaves. By this definition, the men and women who made up the planter class were comparatively few in number. Only some 385,000 of the southern white families were slaveholders. Fewer still — 12 percent — owned plantations with 20 or more slaves. Some 88 percent of slaveholders owned fewer than 20 slaves, while 72 percent owned less than 10, and 50 percent owned less than five slaves. At the very top were 10,000 families with fifty or more slaves, 3000 owning 100 or more, and 14 owning 500 or more.

This means that just as there were comparatively few “planters,” there were few “plantations.” But the social structure and the hierarchy of these few had an outsized impact on the economic and social fabric of the entire southern region — from patterns of migration and urbanization to wealth distribution in land and in slaves. Put another way, slaves and members of slaveholding families constituted half of the population in the South in 1860, and in the Lower South, 66 percent.

By 1860, the social structure and hierarchy of the plantation had settled into fairly fixed patterns. Over the course of decades, slaveholders had refined their methods of production and management. Foremost among the managerial tasks before them was how to best organize enslaved laborers for maximum utilization. In countless articles in publications like Prices Current, planter journals such as De Bow’s Review, and at meetings of local agricultural societies, slaveholders gathered information. Of particular concern were the financial markets and commodity prices in New York and London, the prices slaves were selling for, and most importantly the best slave and plantation management practices.

How many hours could slaves be worked? How many acres per hand was a feasible goal? How much labor was required to produce a certain number of bales of cotton or barrels of sugar cane? How much food was minimally required to sustain slaves? How much time off should be allowed to enslaved women during and after childbirth? How best might children too young to work in the fields be employed and cared for while their parents labored in the fields or the big house?

Under what circumstances did it make economic sense to hire slaves out? When and how should slaves be punished? What systems of surveillance were necessary to keep the enslaved on the plantation and sufficiently submissive to get the cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco crops cultivated? What degree of regimentation was required of the slaves’ lives in the quarters after work?

Over time, slaveholders systematized work routines. The gang and task systems of labor organization came to predominate. Within these broad categories, the labor requirements and work routines varied by crop. The different growing seasons of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco required different methods of organizing labor.

Tobacco Harvesting; Processing Sugar; Weeding Rice; Picking Cotton; US South, 19th Century
Four images showing slaves processing tobacco, sugar, weeding rice, and picking cotton.

The requirements of rice cultivation in the lowlands of South Carolina differed immensely from cotton and cultivation in alluvial lands of the Mississippi Valley, and differed even more from upland cotton cultivation or tobacco in Alabama or Virginia. Plantations with 16-50 slaves were the most productive. In some areas, such as the South Carolina rice parishes, slaves were worked by the task system. Here, slaves were given a prescribed amount of labor to complete each day. A plowing or hoeing task, for example, involved plowing or hoeing so much ground per day.

Rice culture on the Ogeechee, near Savannah, Georgia, 1867
Eight images within an image depicting tasks on a rice plantation near Savannah, Georgia.

The vast majority of plantations used the gang-system. One important superiority of the gang system, Robert Fogel writes in Without Consent or Contract (1989), was that it “produced, on average, about 39 percent more output from a given amount of input than either free farms or slave farms that were too small to employ the gang system.” Ten slaves were considered the “threshold number for the successful operation of a gang."

In all cases, however, planters rated their "hands" — prime, full, half, and so forth — as a means of allocating labor. Further specialization was achieved through the division of the enslaved labor force into sub-gangs: plow hands (generally males in their 20s and early 30s), hoe gangs (generally women, boys, and older men), and picking where women predominated by a ratio of five to four over men.

Scenes on a Cotton Plantation: Sowing, engraving from Harper's Weekly, February 2, 1867
An engraving showing the sowing of cotton seeds on a plantation. Image from Harpers Weekly in 1867.

Slaves on plantations were worked about 76 percent more intensely than slaves on farms of less than 16-20 slaves. All four major cash crops — cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco — used the gang system, sugar most extensively. Gang labor also distinguished the majority of the cotton and rice crops operations. Tobacco cultivation on the other hand provided fewer opportunities for labor specialization. Nearly one half of all slaves in 1860 worked in gangs and the vast majority on cotton plantations, which employed an estimated 1,400,000 slaves aged ten and over.

Slaves on plantations were worked most intensely. Owners used these workers about 76 percent harder than those on farms with less than 16-20 slaves. All four major cash crops — cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco — used the gang system. Sugar growers relied on it the most. Gang labor was used in most cotton and rice operations. Growing tobacco, however, provided fewer opportunities for labor specialization. Nearly one-half of all slaves in 1860 worked in gangs. Most of them were on cotton plantations, which used about 1.4 million slaves aged 10 and over.

Some 250,000 were artisans, managers, and semi-skilled workers, and domestic workers supplemented the work of field laborers on the plantation. Slaves put to work as blacksmiths, coopers, carpenters, and on sugar plantations, boilers, were overwhelmingly male. Enslaved women were similarly assigned to such traditionally gendered tasks as spinning, weaving, sewing, and cooking.

Spinning Wool, Virginia, ca 1853; Sugar Boiling House, Louisiana, 1853; Barber Shop, Richmond, Virginia, 1853
Three images of spinning wool, a sugar boiling house, and a barber shop, all from 1853.

Central to plantation management were the overseers. On large plantations, slaveholders typically relied on white overseers to direct work in the fields and manage the overall planting and cultivation of the crop, sometimes with the aid of black men called drivers. No comparable system of management was used in the plantation household. A few slaveholders hired household managers but mainly relied on mistresses to manage and govern slaves in the household.

Popular literature at the time depicted the slave overseers as violent men who were ruthless in the running of southern plantations. In the illustration from Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 1849 a slave is being punished for disobeying the overseer.
An image depicting the punishment of a slave for disobeying the overseer.

The numbers — the statistics of land and slaves purchased, of crops produced and sold, of territories and markets conquered — tell but part of the story. To become the leading producer of cotton and major producers of rice and sugar, slaveholders ruthlessly calculated the value of the lives of the enslaved and drove them hard. The making of a plantation in the Southwest or in an older area like the low country of the Carolinas required clearing hundreds of acres of land. Preparing rice fields required backbreaking work in deadly swamplands, toppling massive trees and erecting miles of embankments along the rivers. Indeed, writes William Dusinberre, “Callousness toward the slaves’ welfare was the hallmark of this system . . . The governance of slaves rested on despotism.”

Knowing this, slaveholders yet maintained that slavery was, according to Congressman John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, “instead of an evil — a positive good,” that not only enriched the planters but was also of positive benefit to the enslaved. To those who would criticize the institution of slavery, he hailed the superiority of the southern way of life, “where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together.”

John C. Calhoun, ca 1835
A quote from John C. Calhoun from 1835 stating the he thinks that slavery is a positive good when two races are brought together.

This argument was, at bottom, a racial one. “Southerners measured their rank in society by counting their slaves,” as Kenneth Stampp wrote. Distancing themselves from their slaves counted as much.

The institution of slavery’s social structure and its hierarchy pivoted on ideologies of paternalism and racial superiority. The plantation was at once an industrial and commercial concern for the making of cash crops and a political and social space for the making of race. Slaveholding men and women maintained that African Americans were a people best, even perfectly, suited by temperament and low intelligence for enslavement in the rigors of plantation agriculture. As Eugene Genovese wrote, they “stoutly defended slavery as a system of organic social relations that, unlike the market relations of the free- labor system, created a bond of interest that encouraged Christian behavior.”

The sketch, "The Last Daughter" was published in Memoirs of a Fugitive by Richard Hildreth in 1852.
An image of a child being sold away from a mother and the owner using the whip to get the mother away from her daughter.

By this reasoning, only brutality and neglect from the hands of masters and mistresses, not a desire for freedom, would prompt slaves to rise up or resist. Yet, slaveholders also cautioned that the management of slaves required constant vigilance and sometimes stern repression. Thus, no matter how frequently or insistently slaveholders spoke of “our family, black and white,” paternalism’s fictions were exposed every time a slave was bought, sold, whipped, killed, or denied the right to read or write.