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The Demographic Cost of Sugar:
Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas
MICHAEL TADMAN
When 18 months complete their growth,
Then the tall canes' rich juices fill;
And we, to bring their liquor forth,
Convey them to the bruising-mill.
That mill, our labour, every hour,
Must with fresh loads of canes supply;
And if we faint, the cart-whip's power,
Gives force which nature's powers deny.
A. Opie, The Black Man's
Lament (1826), an antislavery tract for children.
| This
study is concerned with explaining some remarkable
population patterns and with examining the very extensive implications
of these patterns. Among North American slaves, births greatly exceeded
deaths, so that the slave population expanded rapidly. In sharp
contrast, across the slave societies of the Caribbean and Latin
America, the persistent experience was one not of natural increase
but of dramatic natural decrease. Indeed, the North American pattern
was probably, with a few local and sometimes short-term exceptions,
unique in the history of slavery. As C. Vann Woodward wrote: "So
far as history reveals, no other slave society, whether of antiquity
or modern times, has so much as sustained, much less greatly multiplied,
its slave population by relying on natural increase."1
Why, then, did North American slaves experience such rapid natural
increase (excess of births over deaths), and why did slaves in the
rest of the Americas fail to increase naturally? |
1 |
| The
contrast between North America and the rest of the Americas is a
fundamental one. For example, over the many years of the African
slave trade, Jamaica imported some 750,000 slaves, but at the time
of emancipation in 1838 its black population numbered only just
over 300,000: North America, in contrast, imported only about 427,000
Africans, but at the time of emancipation in 1865 the U.S. black
population had grown to more than ten times that number.2
In the antebellum period, U.S. slaves showed a natural population
growth of some 25 percent per decade (and indeed, North American
slaves had established a pattern of natural growth by about 1710).
In sharp contrast, Caribbean and Brazilian slaves commonly suffered
rates of natural decrease of 20 percent per decade.3
|
2 |
| The
North American slave experience is perhaps even more remarkable
when compared with free white populations. From the later eighteenth
century, and possibly before that even, and until the Civil War,
the rate of natural growth of North American slaves was much greater
than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly
twice as rapid as that of England. By the 1850s, the rate of natural
increase was higher even than that of the white population of the
United States. This was a remarkable outcome because, as Thomas
Malthus suggested as early as 1798, white Americans expanded with
a rapidity "probable without parallel in history."4
|
3 |
| Anthropometric
studies (which use the average height of a population to infer the
quality and abundance of its diet) have led some researchers to
underline the U.S. slave pattern even more boldly. Writers such
as Robert Fogel have asserted that adult U.S. slaves were remarkably
tall (and therefore well fed). Supposedly, they were taller than
contemporary Africans and taller than Caribbean slaves. Not only
this, anthropometricians have claimed that they were taller than
European workers of the period and that they were almost as tall
as white Americans, the latter apparently being the tallest population
of the era. If these anthropometric findings are reliable, it might
begin to seem that, in important material aspects of their lives,
the experience of North American slaves was better than that of
Africans, better than that of Caribbean slaves, and better even
than that of the mass of free workers of Europe. It might also begin
to look as though diet had a significant role in explaining the
natural increase patterns of the Americas. |
4 |
| The
significance of the contrasting experiences of natural increase
and decrease in the Americas is far from being limited to the concerns
of specialist demographers. These contrasts both grew out of special
structures and attitudes in the regimes concerned and in turn set
up special features in those regimes. Not surprisingly, then, these
demographic patterns have been, for scholars, the starting point
for fundamental assumptions about the nature of these slave societies,
about relations between owners and slaves, and about relations within
the slave communities. Later in this essay, much more will be said
about these attitudes and experiences, but for the time being let
us simply note some of the broad outlines. |
5 |
| As
we shall see, evidence on positive increase and on the stature of
its slaves has led some, like Fogel, to conclude that the North
American slave system, though morally indefensible, was materially
strong and progressive. Indeed, it seemed to Fogel to represent
a pioneering model of modern efficient capitalism, where the material
conditions of life were good for the free population but also surprisingly
favorable for slaves, too.5
Positive natural increase was also crucial in Eugene Genovese's
formulation of nineteenth-century U.S. slavery as a historically
unique society, based on pre-bourgeois values and on a web of paternalistic
relationships that connected slave and master. Genovese wrote: "The
paternalism encouraged by the close living of masters and slaves
was enormously reinforced by the closing of the African slave trade,
which compelled masters to pay greater attention to the reproduction
of their labor force. Of all the slave societies in the New World,
that of the Old South alone maintained a slave force that reproduced
itself."6
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6 |
| The
literature on British Caribbean slavery has, compared with that
for North America, generally placed far less emphasis on paternalism,
and the supposedly greater commercial ruthlessness of West Indian
owners is seen as having been closely linked to the demographics
of slavery. Often, for the British Caribbean, the claim is made
that owners were uninterested in natural increase, indeed, that
they vigorously discouraged slave women from bearing and bringing
up babies. Curiously, in the case of the literature on Latin American
slavery, the significance of similar natural decrease patterns to
those of the British West Indies has, until quite recent years,
tended to be ignored. The traditional disinclination to link natural
decrease to the broader interpretation of Latin American slavery
has stemmed from a longstanding attachment to the myth that Latin
America was, even under slavery, a "racial democracy," especially
tolerant of color difference.7
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7 |
| The
influence of the demographic experiences with which we are concerned
also reached far into the lives of the slaves and into the nature
of their families and communities. In order to expand its slave
population, North America relied far less than the rest of the Americas
on African slave importations, and this meant that the Creole (local-born)
proportion of the slave population was far greater in North America
than elsewhere. In 1800 and even later, Africans made up a majority
of the slave populations of the British and French Caribbean and
of Brazil. In North America, by contrast, there was a Creole majority
by 1740, and by the last years of U.S. slavery less than 1 percent
was African-born.8
This situation was of great importance for the nature of religion
and slave cultures in different regimes. The demographics of slave
regimes also had important implications for slave families and for
the possibility of finding spouses, intensive African importation
being associated with male-dominated populations and with special
problems in finding marriage partners. Intensive importation of
young-adult African males also had implications for white conceptions
of slaves and for the nature of resistance by enslaved blacks. |
8 |
| This
essay is concerned with the wider patterns and experiences associated
with slave demography, but the core of the article is an attempt
to establish what caused the fundamental contrast between the North
American demographic experience and that of the rest of the Americas.
As the next section will show, many factors influenced natural increase
patterns. The central argument, however, is that plantation crop
was the essential influence in determining patterns of natural increase
and decrease. More specifically, I shall argue that sugar planting
systematically brought together a lethal combination of factors
that persistently and almost inevitably produced natural decrease
among slaves. Significantly, sugar planting, while dominant in the
rest of the Americas, was always of very minor significance in North
America. |
9 |
| In
North America, the commercial planting of sugar only began in the
1790s; it never employed more than about 6 percent slaves; and it
was almost entirely confined to a group of parishes in southern
Louisiana. My study will show that the demographic experience of
Louisiana's sugar slaves was unique by U.S. standards. The sugar
parishes stood out as a miserable island of natural decrease in
the midst of the otherwise consistent pattern of natural increase
that stretched across the cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations
of the United States. In the Americas as a whole, however, sugar
was the great plantation crop, with at least some 60 to 70 percent
of all Africans who survived the Atlantic voyage to the Americas
ending up on sugar plantations.9
And across the Americas, as we shall see, the demographic impact
of sugar was even more severe than in the Louisiana parishes. |
10 |
| It
should be noted that although this article focuses on the demographic
role of sugar plantations, sugar was not the only crop associated
with poor demographic results. Even so, no other crop or economic
activity had the potential to create natural decrease on the scale
that sugar did. After sugar, coffee was the plantation crop that
seems to have produced the worst demographic rates, but its labor
regime was significantly less demanding than sugar. More important
still, it accounted for only a fraction of the number of slaves
that sugar did. Rice, too, has been associated with poor demographic
rates. Still, with rice, the pattern was one of low but positive
natural increase, not natural decrease. Moreover, rice was quite
a significant crop in parts of North America, and across the rest
of the Americas it only accounted for a tiny percentage of slaves.
Mining, mainly for gold and silver, has also been associated with
poor demographic performance, indeed with natural decrease, but
it was mostly a very localized activity. For instance, it was not
a significant employer of black slaves in the British Caribbean,
so it cannot explain natural decrease in that region.10
|
11 |
| As
far as the creation of natural decrease is concerned, then, this
study points to the dominant role of sugar plantations and sugar
planters. When turning to another part of the demographic puzzleNorth
America's outstandingly high rates of natural increasethis
article does not support Fogel's optimistic claim that good diet
was a significant factor. Instead, I shall argue that natural increase
in North America was the product of circumstances equivalent in
important ways to those associated with modern "Third World" populationsthat
is, populations where very high death rates are compensated for
by even higher birth rates. North American natural increase came
about despite an experience of bitter exploitation and suffering. |
12 |
| While
this study acknowledges that many factors were at work in producing
the demographic contrasts of the Americas, the argument is monocausal
in that it maintains that only sugar is a sufficient explanation
of these contrasts. The search for a sharply focused explanation
seems, moreover, to be important because knowledge of the particular
pattern of causation has an impact on the interpretation of many
aspects of slaveryfor example, on slaveowner motivation, on
slave morale and culture, and on the slave family. The argument
focuses on sugar, but it is not intended to amount to geographic
determinism or to what might be called crop determinism. It was
the setting of sugar within specific contexts that was crucial,
and the particular approach taken in this articlecombining
quantification with a critical case study (the Louisiana sugar enclave)seems
to provide an analytical breakthrough that shows the specific nature
of the sugar process. |
13 |
| What
was necessary to set up the long-run pattern of natural decrease
was the combination of sugar, slavery, and access to a slave trade.
Slavery on its own would not have produced vast regional patterns
of natural decrease, and sugar without slavery was not enough,11
nor was the combination of sugar and slavery without a slave trade.12
Although labor on sugar plantations could take a heavy toll on health
and on fertility, what was lethal was the combination of sugar with
the slaveowners' ability to buy slaves and to choose a male-dominated
labor force, rather than being content with family labor. In other
words, the demographic problem stemmed from the priorities of the
sugar planter. Sugar planters, unlike the great majority of owners,
calculated that they could maximize profits by continually skewing
their labor force toward men, and far-reaching demographic and social
consequences and costs stemmed from this. Of course, owners who
farmed other crops suited their own economic interests in the way
they worked and recruited slaves, but their interests were not so
demographically destructive. This article, then, focuses specifically
on sugar planting but is intended more broadly as an interpretation
of slaveholders, economic self-interest, and the consequences of
profit-based decisions for life and labor under slavery. |
14 |
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| In
reviewing research on the problem of slave natural
increase, John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard commented: "The
task is important . . . Moreover, the explanation for
this growth is intrinsically difficult, demanding the examination
of numerous factors affecting natural increase . . . Data
are sparse and intractable, especially for the pre-Revolutionary
era. Nevertheless, some progress has been made, and given the intensity
of work on the issue, more can be expected in the near future."13
C. Vann Woodward, in an earlier but still valuable review of the
field, pointed to the |
15 |
difficult . . .
problems of locating and weighing the almost unlimited number
of influences that played a part in determining population growth.
The mention of a few such problems will serve to suggest the complexities
and difficulties involved. Without regard to priority or relative
importance, there come to mind the equations of man-land ratios
and man-woman ratios, land fertility and human fertility, rates
of mortality and natality, the incidence of disease and famine,
the relative advance of medicine and hygiene, comparative health
conditions in tropical and temperate zones, tribal origins and
mating customs of slave populations, and religious and legal traditions
of masters. Complicating all these influences would be comparative
stages of economic and technical development . . . On
top of these would be added the imponderables of master-slave
relations, the patriarchal ethic in tradition and practice . . .
Beyond these determinants lies the whole range of cultural limits
to security of family [and so on].14
|
| McCusker
and Menard added a further complication to the debate: "In a sense
the West Indies-mainland divergences are deceptive, however dramatic
they might seem. Slave populations in all of the chief plantation
areas of British America [and they could have added of the Americas
more widely] exhibited a similar growth process." The process was
one of long periods, sometimes centuries, of substantial slave importation
and natural decrease, but of a movement into natural increase, with
the transition to natural increase occurring in Maryland and Virginia
by about 1710 (and probably somewhat later in South Carolina), in
Barbados not until 1810 (after the ending of the slave trade), and
in Jamaica only by about 1840 (after the ending of slavery itself).
As McCusker and Menard suggested, |
16 |
The distinction between
the continental [North American] plantation districts and the
West Indies was not a function of the ways that change occurred,
which seems to have been everywhere similar, for whites as well
as for blacks. Rather the differences depended on timing, on how
long it took for a reproducing creole majority to emerge and to
reverse the net natural decline . . . Recognition of
this shared experience changes the issues to be resolved: the
need is not only to account for the differences between the West
Indies [together with the rest of the Americas] and the mainland
but also to explain why a similar course took longer to complete
in some regions than others.15
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| When
trying to resolve the problem of slave demography in the Americas,
the factors to be considered are therefore numerous, and the issues
are complicated. Partly, the question is, why was the demographic
experience of Caribbean and Latin American slaves so bad? Partly,
the question is, why was slave natural increase in North America
not just positive but spectacularly positive? But partly, too, we
need to consider why, despite fundamentally different outcomes,
the North American demographic pattern actually seemed, for long
periods, to run in parallel with that of the rest of the Americas. |
17 |
| Although
a great many factors have been cited by researchers, we can conveniently
group interpretations into three basic lines of argument. First,
there is the argument that natural increase was strongly influenced
by factors largely extraneous to slavery, including the nature of
disease environments and patterns of natural abundance. Second,
there is the argument, or set of sometimes conflicting arguments,
that increase patterns were determined by factors much more directly
under the control of slaveowners. Here, we might include the attitudes
of owners toward slave buying, toward families and children, toward
welfare and profit, and owners' decisions about which crop to grow.
A third type of argument, and one that has grown in influence in
recent years, emphasizes the behavior of slaves, especially their
attitudes toward family and toward traditions that might limit fertility.
Although, in practice, historians have often combined elements from
more than one of these broad classifications, the three-type division
of arguments still provides a useful framework for developing the
present analysis.16
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18 |
| Indispensable
research by Philip D. Curtin focused significantly but not exclusively
on the role of disease environments, one of the forces extraneous
to slavery.17
Curtin argued that the problem with migration was not the climate
that one encountered but the disease environment. He noted that
an unfamiliar disease environment, in whatever climate, is potentially
lethal since natural resistance will not have had the chance to
build. Curtin argued that, because slaves could be bought cheaply
in Africa, slaveholders in the Americas bought extensively (buying
mainly males), but he added that this pattern of slave recruitment
set up a train of interactions. Slaves imported into a new disease
environment suffered enormously high mortality (perhaps one third
dying within the "seasoning" period of the first year or so).18
Moreover, birth rates were low for those who survived, because ill
health would inhibit fertility and because there were relatively
few women to bear children. |
19 |
| As
a result of the interconnections he outlined, Curtin argued that
the "South Atlantic System" tended to develop a two-stage pattern.
First, in periods of rapid economic development, there would be
intensive importation of new Africansbut there would also
be very marked natural decrease (because of the encounter with an
unfamiliar disease environment and because of the other factors
just mentioned). Theoretically, a second stage might develop, when
a period of slower economic expansion brought a reduced rate of
African importation and brought lower mortality, more women, a higher
birth rate, and a movement toward natural increase. |
20 |
| Curtin's
model is of great importance in highlighting many of the processes
at work in plantation demography. We should, however, not minimize
the fundamental differences between the demographic experiences
of the Americas. There was in fact no inevitability about the process
of moving from reliance on the slave trade. Sugar planters would
always demand a male-dominated labor force and would always try
to import slaves whenever a supply was open to them. In Louisiana,
even when the importation was internal (from the Upper South and
not from Africa), the sugar plantations still experienced persistent
natural decrease. |
21 |
| Disease
environment, especially following Curtin's work, forms a part of
many academic explanations of slave demography, but especially in
the British West Indies there has been a long tradition of emphasizing
the direct and negative role of slaveholders. For example, Orlando
Patterson, in his classic study of Jamaica, argued that Jamaican
owners drove so hard for profit that the slave experience was close
to the Hobbesian state of nature, with life being "nasty, brutish,
and short." Patterson, like many other writers, argued that owners
preferred to buy, not breed. Owners, supposedly, were not interested
in slave families, and found child-rearing a wasteful distraction
from the woman's role as worker. Consequently, Jamaican planters
adopted an "anti-natalist" attitude, often punishing women who became
pregnant and discouraging women from spending time rearing children.
Furthermore, he argued, the rigors of the regime meant that the
slaves were so demoralized that they, too, were uninterested in
family and in looking after children.19
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22 |
| In
the case of the United States, some historians, for example Richard
Sutch, have argued that owners interfered with fertility, but in
this case it has been claimed that they did so in order to promote
rather than to discourage the rearing of children. Indeed, a long
abolitionist tradition maintained that U.S. natural increase was
so high because slaveholders, on the supposedly worn-out lands of
the Upper South, made their profits by "breeding" slaves for the
Lower South market.20
These and other arguments will be reviewed later in this essay. |
23 |
| In
a series of publications stretching over many years, Robert Fogel
and Stanley Engerman have not only rejected the idea of U.S. slaveholders
as manipulative slave breeders, but they have seen owners in the
United States as providing a rather benign material environment
for their slaves. Indeed, the cumulative effect of Fogel and Engerman's
work has been to suggest that the great demographic contrasts of
the Americas (or more specifically in much of their work, the contrast
between the United States and the British Caribbean) did not come
about because of the negative or manipulative influence of the slaveowners
of the United States and elsewhere. Instead, the contrasts are said
to have been produced partly by the supposedly benign material environment
that was provided in U.S. slaveholdings and partly by the influence,
in the West Indies, of African cultural traditions (concerning breastfeeding),
which are supposed to have greatly reduced fertility. |
24 |
| In
North America, then, Fogel and Engerman argue, slaveowners encouraged
families and welcomed the natural increase of their slaves.21
The diet of their adult slaves, supposedly, was abundant, and this,
Fogel and Engerman argue, was reflected in the exceptional average
height of U.S. slaves.22
They argue, too, that the West Indian problem was not one of exceptionally
high slave mortality. Indeed, they suggest that slave mortality
was only slightly higher in the Caribbean than in the United States.23
What they see as making the great difference was not mortality but
fertility. West Indian slave fertility was low, and they attribute
this to a great extent to the cultural traditions of imported Africans.
Africans, they suggest, brought over traditions of long periods
of breastfeeding (usually breastfeeding for at least two years).
They suggest that this practice inhibited fertility and was to a
great extent responsible for natural decrease in the West Indies.24
A later section of this essay will critically review this argument.
My own interpretation differs very much from Fogel and Engerman's:
it points to slaveowners, the profit motive, and to the different
crop regimes of the Americas. |
25 |
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| The
Louisiana sugar parishes provide a very special
opportunity to interpret the demographics of slavery. In slave regimes
outside the United States, it is nearly always impossible to gain
access to detailed and essentially reliable census data on slave
populations. The Louisiana sugar parishes, however, are closely
documented, decade by decade, by excellent census data. This evidence
allows us to calculate crude population growth rates, ratios of
children to women, and (with other evidence) numbers of slaves imported.25
From this sort of evidence, we can then establish the approximate
rate of natural decrease of the sugar parishes. (For the location
of the thirteen Louisiana sugar parishes that accounted for the
vast majority of U.S. cane sugar production, see Figure 1.)
In fact, the Louisiana case study allows us not just to establish
the broad conclusion that sugar planting produced persistent natural
decrease, but it also makes it possible to show how that decrease
came aboutwith evidence on the relative contributions made
by excess adult mortality, a sex imbalance, and the shortage of
children. |
26 |
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FIGURE 1. The shaded area indicates the thirteen leading
sugar parishes. In 1850 and 1860 respectively, these parishes
produced about 80 and 70 percent of Louisiana's sugar: Ascension,
Assumption, Baton Rouge West, Iberville, Lafourche, Plaquemines,
St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. James, St. John Baptist, St.
Mary, Terrebonne, and Jefferson.
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| Later
sections of this essay will demonstrate in more detail the Louisiana
sugar parishes' specialized and highly significant pattern of slave
importation, but two essential elements should be noted at this
stage. First, throughout the antebellum period, these parishes imported
massively, but, unusually for the sugar regimes of the Americas,
the slaves were not from Africa and the Atlantic slave trade.26
Instead, these were American slaves, bought from long-established
slaveholding states such as Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas.
The second key feature of the sugar parishes' importations is that
two-thirds of the slaves were males. Such a pattern, though routine
in the Atlantic slave trade, will be shown to be unique in the interregional
slave trade of the United States. All other parts of the Lower South,
including the neighboring cotton parishes of Louisiana, bought roughly
equal numbers of males and females. |
27 |
| The
sugar planters of Louisiana, unlike those who grew cotton, tobacco,
or ricethe dominant U.S. staplespersistently imported
far more males than females, and they did this because they wanted
a male-dominated labor force. Such an unbalanced force could not
be achieved naturally but only by importation. These labor requirements
meant that there was a routine pattern across the Americas: everywhere,
sugar planters demanded a male-dominated work force, so wherever
a trade in slaves was available, they would seek to tap into that
trade. The insistence on a mainly male work force came about because
of the extreme physical demands that sugar planters imposed on their
workers, demands that will be documented in the next section. And
the combination of severe labor demands with a male-dominated population
was demographically lethal. In the Louisiana sugar
parishes, excessive labor meant that "net nutrition" was far from
adequate.27
It also meant "excess" (above average) adult mortality, and that
women were often not fit enough to produce healthy children. Of
course, the regime also meant that the population had few women,
so there were few potential mothers. We shall see, then, that the
labor regime in the Louisiana sugar parishes meant a persistent
pattern of deaths exceeding births. |
28 |
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FIGURE 2. Grinding sugar cane in a windmill. Reproduced
by permission of the British Library, reference number 1786
C.9.PLV.
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| Local
agricultural societies routinely reported intensive slave importation
combined with natural decrease among slaves. Indeed, evidence later
in this essay suggests that slaves on the region's plantations suffered
natural decrease of about 13 percent per decade.28
We know, however, that even this experience would have been better
than that of typical sugar plantations of the Caribbean and South
America. In those areas, the problems that Louisiana experienced
would have been greatly compounded by the fact that the imported
slaves nearly always came from Africa, and so suffered the dreadfully
high mortality levels of the "seasoning" period. |
29 |
| It
is not new to point to the connection between sugar and natural
decrease, but previous work has not been able to establish that
it was essentially sugar that made the difference in the demography
of slaves across the Americas. It has also not been at all clear
how far the problem was sugar plantingand how far it was,
for example, the African slave trade or the tropical environment
in which sugar cane was usually grown. In addition, if sugar planting
was to blame for natural decrease, it has not been clear why slaves
in Barbados, an important sugar island, managed to achieve positive
natural increase by about 1810.29
Moreover, much quite recent work, especially by Fogel and Engerman,
has tended to take the focus off sugar and the severities of labor
and to put it instead on African traditions and the special circumstances
of the United States. |
30 |
| Barry
Higman has conducted detailed and important work on slavery and
demography in the British Caribbean but has pointed only very cautiously
to the major role that sugar might have played in producing natural
decrease. Some brief comments on his primary source base will show
the problems of drawing decisive conclusions from the published
primary sources of the British Caribbean. Higman's source base was
the great mass of slave statistics that, in the last few years of
slavery in those colonies (after the closure of the African slave
trade in 1807), the British Parliament demanded. These "Registration"
records, however, by covering the period after the African slave
trade had been ended, represent an exceptional phase of Caribbean
slavery. With the "seasoning" of new Africans no longer a factor,
mortality levels would have been far lower than usual, and, with
the African slave trade closed, male-female ratios would have been
much more balanced (which would have tended to raise the birth rate).
Higman therefore found various anomalies in the British Caribbean
evidence after 1807. He observed, "Wherever slaves were not engaged
in the production of sugar their chances of survival were greater."
But his overall conclusion was cautious: "The complexity of the
interactions involved in the strongly contrasting patterns of fertility,
mortality, and natural increase found in the British Caribbean after
1807 suggests that any attempt at monocausal explanation is doomed
to failure. The most that can be expected is a more
precise ordering of the variables, only some of them quantifiable,
and a clearer understanding of the differentials."30
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31 |
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FIGURE 3. Slaves working in a sugar-boiling house. From
an eighteenth-century print.
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| The
evidence that can be developed for the Louisiana sugar parishes
has major advantages over the West Indian "Registration" evidence,
and allows me to be much more certain that it was sugar that set
up the great demographic contrasts between North America and the
rest of the Americas. This case study allows control of the influence
of factors like the African slave trade, disease environments, sex
imbalance, African lactation (breastfeeding) traditions, and slaveowners'
attitudes. A detailed examination of the Louisiana sugar enclave
will be developed, first by examining the nature of the labor regime
on sugar plantations and the overall composition of their slave
populations, and then by exploring the character and scale of slave
importation. By calculating the extent of its importation (and scaling
down the population of the area accordingly), it will be possible
to estimate the sugar parishes' rate of natural decrease. After
these calculations, the final sections of this essay will return
to the wider framework of the Americas, and will reflect on the
overall demographic and social impact that the sugar regime had
on slave societies. |
32 |
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| Visitors
to Louisiana often commented on the severities
of the sugar plantations, and, among slaves, the cane fields were
places of dread. Throughout the year, the crop involved much exhausting
work in such tasks as ditching and draining, digging out old cane
and making holes for new ones, spreading manure, and chopping and
hauling wood for the sugar house. But the "grinding season," usually
from October to January, was by far the cruelest time for sugar
workers. Then, the cane cutting and hauling had to be synchronized
so that grinding and boiling at the sugar mill could go around the
clock. Unlike cotton, the sugar crop would not keep: it could not
be stored until a neighbor might lend labor or equipment to prepare
it for market. A sugar planter had to invest heavily in the machinery
of the sugar mill and, to generate good profits, had to use that
machinery to the optimum. In this way, the crop, when cut, would
not be wasted, and the canes still standing could be milled before
severe frosts destroyed them. These extreme labor demands meant
that sugar planters wanted strong workers, especially adult males.
As U. B. Phillips noted, "All the characteristic work in the
sugar plantation called mainly for able-bodied laborers. Children
were less used than in tobacco and cotton production, and the men
and women, like the mules, tended to be of sturdier physique."31
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|
| |
|
|
|
FIGURE 4. Images of the sugar plantation from an antislavery
tract. Amelia A. Opie, The Black Man's Lament (1826).
|
|
| In
1833, Thomas Hamilton, a British visitor to Louisiana, recorded
his impressions of the sugar plantations. He noted that the sugar
cane, when ripe, was not considered safe "till it is in the mill,
and the consequence is that when cutting cane begins, the slaves
are taxed beyond their strength, and are goaded to labour until
nature absolutely sinks under the effort." Similarly, R. W.
Harris and other expert witnesses testified in evidence to the U.S.
Treasury in 1846, "The cultivation of sugar requires more indefatigable
labor than any other production . . . not a moment must
be lost; [it] requir[es], also, about seventy days' labor, of eighteen
hours each, during the boiling season." Slaves across the South
had also heard of Louisiana and its sugar plantations. A slave song
noted down by Edward S. Abdy, a British traveler, reflected the
infamy of the sugar plantations: |
34 |
I born in Sout' Ca'lina,
Fines' country eber seen.
I gwine f'om Sout' Ca'lina,
I gwine to New Orleens.
Ole boss he discontentum,
He take de mare, Black Fanny,
He buy er peddler wagon,
He bound fer Lousy Anna.
Chorus:
Ole debble Lousy Anna,
Dat scarecrow fer po' nigger,
Where de sugar cane grow to pine trees,
An' de pine tree turn to sugar.32
|
| The
antebellum period saw a dramatic expansion in Louisiana's sugar
production and in its slave population. Table 1
plots the rise in the area's slave population from about 20,000
in 1820 to about 90,000 in 1860. The advance of the sugar kingdom
was especially dramatic between 1818 and 1830, with contemporaries
estimating that for much of this period sugar planters bought new
slaves (from the eastern states) at the rate of 5,000 per year.33
The 1830s saw some slackening in pace, but in the 1840s there was
a massive increase in the volume of the sugar crop (and a leap of
200 to 250 percent in its value). This latter growth could only
have been achieved by a very high level of slave importation. The
1850s saw great annual fluctuations in sugar production, but overall
there was a further doubling of output (and a 150 to 200 percent
increase in value).34
Again, massive slave importation was required. |
35 |
|
TABLE
1
Natural Growth Rate of the U.S. Slave Population Compared
with Total Growth Rate (Including Imported Slaves) of Louisiana's
13 Leading Sugar Parishes
|
| |
 |
|
Source: Derived
from U.S. Census.
|
|
| Behind
these production trends lie highly significant demographic patterns.
First, in the booming 1820s and 1840s (see Table 1), the sheer number
of importations into the leading sugar parishes was so great as
to create crude growth rates something like twice or four times
the natural increase rate of the U.S. slave population as a whole.
In aggregate statistics, sugar's underlying natural decrease problems
were buried by massive importation. But in the 1830s and 1850s,
despite extensive slave buying, the area was not even able to achieve
the growth rate expected for a population that had no importations. |
36 |
| Table
2 allows us to investigate this situation further
and focuses on birth-rate problems. This table points to three key
contrasts between sugar slaves and slaves in the United States as
a whole. What stand out in this birth-rate evidence for the sugar
parishes are a significant shortage of women, an extreme shortage
of children, and very low fertility rates. All of these are intimately
linked to the area's highly selective interstate importation of
slaves. The shortage of women for childbearing would have restricted
population growth, and the low fertility of the women who were present
would have exacerbated the problem.35
|
37 |
|
TABLE
2
Demographic Comparisons between Slaves in Louisiana's 13
Leading Sugar Parishes and Total U.S. Slave Population
|
| |
 |
|
Source and notes: Derived
from U.S. Census.
*for
ages specified
The
1820 census used a 013 years categorization, and these
data were scaled to estimate the numbers of ages 09.
|
|
| We
can gain a preliminary indication of the significance of these factors
by taking a snapshot of the area's population in 1860 and comparing
it with the typical pattern for the South's slaves. Compared with
what might have been expected in a typical southern slave population
of the sugar area's size, the sugar parishes in 1860 had 13,500
fewer children. Low fertility and excess mortality among the children
under ten seem to have accounted for some 60 percent of this deficiency,36
with the shortage of potential childbearing women being responsible
for the remaining 40 percent.37
These figures suggest that child shortages were a major part of
the sugar area's demographic problem.38
Evidence in the next section will also point to problems of excess
adult mortality. |
38 |
|
|
| The
special character of the sugar crop shows up
very clearly in the interstate slave trade of the United States.
As slave traders' records indicate, the domestic trade to all parts
of the South was age selective (concentrating mostly on teenagers
and on young-adult slaves).39
But a study of thousands of traders' bills of sale shows that only
in the case of southern Louisiana was the domestic traffic sex
selective. As I noted earlier, the trade to the cotton parishes
of Louisiana, and indeed to all parts of the South except southern
Louisiana, carried approximately equal numbers of males and females.40
Demographic calculations using the "survival rate" technique allow
detailed sex-specific (and age-specific) estimates of interstate
slave movement, and these calculations emphasize the uniqueness
of domestic importations into the sugar area.41
Table 3 uses this technique for the 1850s and shows
that males comprised over 67 percent of importations into the thirteen
leading sugar parishes. It also shows that in the remainder of the
state, because it only produced some 30 percent of the decade's
sugar crop, males accounted for no more than about 54 percent of
importations. |
39 |
|
TABLE 3
1850s Slave Importations into Louisiana's 13 Leading Sugar
Parishes Compared with Importations into the Rest of the
State: Data Indicates the Sex and Age Composition but Not
the Full Extent of Importations
|
| |
 |
|
Sources and notes:
Calculations are derived from the U.S. Census, and use the
"survival rate" method. This method, because of the sugar
parishes' "excess mortality," will very seriously underestimate
the scale of slave importation into that area (see footnote
41). It does, however, indicate the essential age and sex
patterns of its importations.
*Excludes
totals with minus sign.
The
minor sugar areas account for the raising of the male percentage
above 50. The 13 leading sugar parishes produced about 70%
of the state's sugar in 1860.
|
|
| Slave
trading to the sugar parishes was specialized since not only were
there far more male than female slaves but the slaves had to be
especially sturdy, and an exceptionally low proportion of children
was carried. An important part of this traffic was a well-organized
coastal trade from the Chesapeake ports to New Orleans, and the
printed circulars of the several large-scale Richmond (Virginia)
auctioneers regularly pointed up the need for specially selected
"shipping Negroes" for the New Orleans trade.42
One such circular, in October 1850, reported that several major
New Orleans traders had arrived, and "good shipping men are
in demand." Similarly, a Pulliam&Davis circular of October 1854
began: "This is to inform you that negroes are selling as follows
. . . No.1 young men 1822 years mostly in demand
also girls 1620 years heavy set and very smart, suitable for
shipping purposes." Thomas A. Clark, like the thousands of other
traders, was well aware of the special nature of the New Orleans
market, and in February 1846 wrote to a Richmond auction house:
"I am sorry that I have not got any good negroes on hand that will
suit the New Orleans market . . . Likely young men such
as I think would suit the New Orleans market are very hard to find
and also stout young women." A Betts&Gregory circular for January
1861 again reflected the trading community's awareness of the New
Orleans phenomenon. It reported, "Our market continues dull except
for first rate negroes. There are several persons here now making
up lots for the New Orleans market and if you have any on hand now
is the time to bring them in."43
|
40 |
| The
South Carolina trader John H. Charles also knew all about the requirements
of the sugar planters, and in April 1859 wrote from New Orleans:
"There is some [men] looking after [buying] negroes the last two
or three days and if I had 4 or [5] good men and women [I] could
have sold them at fair prices. But they are sugar planters who want
them mostly and they want stout black negroes."44
The reference to "black" Negroes was also significant, planters
associating the darkest skin with the toughest workers.
The fact that across the Southfrom the Chesapeake, to the
Carolinas, and to Kentucky and Tennesseeslave traders' advertisements
referred to buying slaves "suited to the New Orleans market" suggests
not only that this market was special but that suppliers everywhere
knew what its special characteristics were.45
|
41 |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
FIGURE 5. Newspaper advertisement of Kentucky slave trader
buying for the New Orleans market. J. Winston Coleman, Jr.,
Slavery Times in Kentucky, copyright 1940 University
of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
|
|
| Appendices
to this study give detailed estimates of the numbers of slaves imported
into the sugar parishes in the 1840s and 1850s. These estimates
take account of several supply routes. Many of the area's slaves
were bought at slave pens in New Orleansand that city was
supplied not only by the coastal trade from the Chesapeake and the
eastern parts of the Carolinas but also by the overland trade from
the Atlantic seaboard states and by the traffic down the Mississippi
Valley from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. In addition, some
traders bypassed New Orleans and took their slaves directly to the
sugar parishes. No single document type, taken on its own, gives
anything like a full picture of the extent of the trade, but by
combining various sourcesincluding ships' manifests of the
coastal trade and traders' estimatesa major part of the traffic
can be reconstructed. Appendix 2 outlines the primary sources used
in calculating importations. |
42 |
| A
detailed calculation of the volume of importation in the 1840s is
outlined in Appendix 3, and that appendix combines the totals brought
by the coastal, overland, and Mississippi River routes. This calculation
suggests that in the 1840s the leading sugar parishes imported a
total of at least 27,000 slaves. Scaling down the area's 1850 population
to allow for these 27,000 or more importations gives the level of
natural decrease experienced by sugar slaves in that decade. It
suggests that, instead of the typical 1840s natural increase
rate of 27.8 percent, the sugar area experienced at best a 6 percent
natural decrease (and in fact the situation was probably
substantially worse than this).46
|
43 |
| Slave
importations in the 1850s must also have been high, and again in
these years there must have been major natural decrease. Preliminary
indications of the high levels of 1850s importations are given,
as we have seen, by the fact that sugar production expanded massively
in this decade (requiring much new labor),47
and heavy importation is also indicated (see Table 2) by the high
proportion of males in the sugar area's working-age population of
1860. Appendix 4 gives detailed evidence on the level of importation
in the 1850s and suggests that the total would have been at least
27,000. Similar calculations to those used already for the 1840s
reveal that, in the 1850s, these parishes would have experienced
a rate of natural decrease of over 13 percent. This contrasts dramatically
with an expected positive rate of natural increase of 23.4
percent (see Table 1) for typical U.S. slaves in the 1850s.48
Evidence on importation indicates, then, that deaths greatly exceeded
births among slaves in the main sugar parishes. The 1840s importation
figure (of at least 27,000 slaves) probably represents a significant
underestimate of the real rate of decrease because it incorporates
a conservative estimate for the overland supply route. Actual rates
of natural decrease in both the 1840s and 1850s, therefore, were
probably at least 13 percent. |
44 |
| Having
established the approximate levels of natural decrease on the Louisiana
sugar plantations, we can now consider the relative importance of
excess adult mortality and child shortage in bringing about this
decrease.49
An extreme work load and inadequate net nutrition meant that slaves
working on sugar plantations were, compared with other working-age
slaves in the United States, far less able to resist the common
and life-threatening diseases of dirt and poverty. An imbalance
of the sexes, together with a shortage of potential mothers, would
have been important in creating the sugar plantations' great shortage
of children. In addition, the women who were present in the sugar
area had far fewer children than those elsewhere in the United States.
Indeed, they had far fewer than was the norm even for a slave-importing
state, and an excessive work load would have contributed greatly
to this.50
Slave women throughout the South faced the problem of insufficient
relief from strenuous work during pregnancy, but on the sugar plantations
the nature of work would have had a particularly damaging impact
on fertility. This combination of pressures for women on sugar estates
would have produced a particularly grim catalog of irregular fertility,
still births, low birth weights, and poor infant survival rates. |
45 |
| Detailed
calculations (see Appendix 5), taking the example of the 1850s,
allow a fairly clear weighting of factors involved in producing
natural decrease on Louisiana's sugar plantations. These calculations
suggest that excess "adult" mortality (in this case, mortality among
those who would have been age 10 years and over by 1860) accounted
for some 44 percent of the gap between the sugar area's demographic
performance and that of U.S. slaves generally. It follows that the
shortage of children (ages 0 to 9 years by 1860) contributed the
remaining 56 percent. We can also break down the child shortage
into its component parts (again see Appendix 5). This disaggregation
suggests that the scarcity of potential childbearing women would
have been responsible for some 40 percent of the child shortage,
so the combination of low fertility among the women present and
high child mortality would have accounted for the remaining 60 percent.
Overall, then, the child shortage was statistically more important
than excess adult mortality, but both were major factors, and both
were part of the extreme burdens of sugar slaves in Louisiana. |
46 |
|
|
| Moving
back from the Louisiana test case to the overall
debate on slave demography in the Americas, the detailed Louisiana
evidence allows us to reflect on, and criticize, some of the interpretations
outlined earlier in this studythe role of disease environments,
anti-natalism, slave breeding, and the combination of arguments
proposed by Fogel and Engerman. From the basis of the Louisiana
evidence, it now seems to be possible both to reassert the case
for the dominant role played by sugar planters and sugar plantations
and also to resolve the puzzle concerning the timing of the transition
to natural increase in different regimes. |
47 |
| First,
let us consider the possibility that disease environments might
explain the great demographic contrasts of the Americas. The Louisiana
case study is very helpful here.51
It is true that southern Louisiana was, even for whites, not a healthy
place, but it is also clear that the labor regime of the sugar crop,
regardless of the local disease environment, was in itself sufficient
to cause deaths to exceed births. New Orleans was known as the yellow
fever capital of North America, but, even though yellow fever was
dreaded in New Orleans (and in other American cities), it only rarely
attacked plantation districts and accounted for only a tiny percentage
of plantation deaths.52
Cholera, too, was never of major statistical significance on the
sugar estates, and although it continued to affect New Orleans,
it had disappeared from the sugar plantations by the early 1850s.53
|
48 |
| Malaria
was for Louisiana slaves a far more significant problem than either
cholera or yellow fever: even so, it did not dictate the natural
decrease of slaves on the sugar plantations.54
It turns out (as Figure 6 shows) that almost all
of the western half of Louisianaincluding a massive tract
of parishes that produced cotton, not sugarwas in the same
high-risk malaria belt as the sugar parishes.55
Nevertheless, the demography of the cotton parishes, in similarly
malaria-prone areas to the sugar plantations, was very different.
Cotton areas did not have significantly more male than female slaves.
And, crucially, while the fertility rates of slave women in the
sugar parishes were exceptionally low by any U.S. standards, ratios
in the western Louisiana cotton parishes were very high. Despite
malaria, the cotton parishes, unlike the sugar plantations, had
no child shortage.56
Malaria brought many deaths and much debility, but it took the labor
demands of sugar to produce natural decrease.57
The local disease environment of the Louisiana sugar parishes was
not what caused the pattern of natural decrease. |
49 |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
FIGURE 6. "Malarial Disease Deaths per 1,000 Population,
1870." This map is based on the Ninth U.S. Census,
and is reproduced by permission of Cambridge University
Press from Frank C. Innes, "Disease Ecologies in North
America," in Kenneth F. Kiple, ed., The Cambridge
World History of Human Disease (Cambridge, 1993), 527.
|
|
| At
the start of this essay, I also noted arguments that owners directly
influenced fertility, either negatively in the Caribbean by discouraging
slave births or positively in the United States by adopting systematic
slave breeding. There is, however, little evidence to support either
of these arguments. The fact that slave infants in the British sugar
plantations had a positive cash value suggests that most owners,
far from being anti-natalist, would have welcomed the birth of slave
children. Indeed, in the British West Indies, the price of a one-year-old
slave was about 5 to 10 percent of that of an adult male, and this
was very similar to the situation in the United States, as well
as to that of the Americas in general.58
It is significant, too, that Patterson's references to the anti-natalism
of the slaves themselves came from the most unreliable of sourcesracist
slaveowners who sought to shift the blame for lack of increase onto
blacks. Thus owners routinely claimed that slaves were irresponsible,
had no sense of family, and were not prepared to care for children.59
|
50 |
| In
North America, abolitionists sometimes made the claim that slavery
in the Upper South depended for its economic survival on stud farms,
which bred slaves for sale to the Lower South market. There is little
doubt that slaveowners took a great interest in the value, and therefore
number, of their "stock." The fact that I have found, in thousands
of highly detailed letters by interstate slave traders, no reference
at all to breeding farms, suggests, however, that the slave-selling
states did not adopt such specialist child-production farms.60
|
51 |
| Fogel
and Engerman, sometimes in separate publications, sometimes in jointly
written studies, have combined several elements in their demographic
argumentan emphasis on fertility (not mortality) differences
between the United States and the West Indies, a claim that the
Caribbean slaves' fertility was low because of African traditions
(not planters' actions), and an argument that North American slaves
enjoyed a particularly good diet and that this diet contributed
substantially to the health, stature, and natural increase of those
slaves. Each of these important claims demands attention. |
52 |
| Fogel
and Engerman's claim that mortality rates were not substantially
higher in the British Caribbean than in the United States was based
on an adjustment of Higman's data for Jamaica in 1817 to 1834, but
this selection of evidence raises problems.61
The period chosen was one, after the ending of the slave trade in
1807, when the extreme mortality levels associated with the "seasoning"
of imported slaves were no longer a factor. Fogel and Engerman's
findings on mortality are also surprising since sugar was vastly
more important in Jamaica than in the United States, and Fogel and
Engerman themselves found that mortality was particularly high on
sugar plantations. Given the importance of sugar planting in Jamaica,
one would have expected to see a strong reflection of this in the
U.S.-Jamaica comparison.62
|
53 |
| Fogel
and Engerman's second claimthat the U.S.West Indian
fertility gap was brought about by the operation of African cultural
traditions in the West Indiesdoes not fit with the Louisiana
evidence. The slaves of the Louisiana sugar plantations suffered
from very low fertility, just as those in the West Indies did, but
in Louisiana African lactation practices were not an issue. Louisiana
had imported its slaves from the Upper South, and they would not
have had significantly more contact with Africa and its traditions
than would typical U.S. slaves. Fogel and Engerman based their argument
on lists of children with their mothers and on the age gaps that
they found between (surviving) children. The greater spacing in
the Caribbean compared to the United States does not, however, seem
to have been significantly influenced by special lactation practices.
Instead, what would seem to account for the longer gaps between
the ages of surviving West Indian children are factors that were
also at work on the Louisiana sugar plantations: high child mortality,
high numbers of stillborn children, poor health and net nutrition
of women (and therefore a reduced ability to conceive), and interrupted
fertility resulting from the death of husbands in an environment
of overall high mortality. |
54 |
| Fogel
and Engerman's third claim relates to the height of slaves. They
have drawn on evidence from several scholarsusing height samples
from the coastal domestic slave trade to New Orleans, from manumission
documents, and from Union Army records. These various samples have
all indicated that the average height of adult male slaves in the
antebellum United States was about 67 inches. These results suggest
that, by any population standards of the time, U.S. slaves were
tall (and therefore well fed).63
However, all three of the data sets on height seem to use atypical
samples, so the anthropometric evidence does not, in practice, appear
to sustain the thesis that North American slaves enjoyed outstandingly
good diets. |
55 |
| For
instance, the sample of the New Orleans trade was developed by Richard
Steckel, using ships' manifests describing slaves brought from Virginia
and the Upper South.64
There is, however, extensive evidence that slave traders generally
(and even more so those supplying New Orleans) sought a carefully
selected subset of the slave population. They sought "likely," "prime,"
strong slaves, and they screened out as difficult to sell those
who were "undersized," unhealthy, or weak.65
This suggests that typical slave men in the United States were not
as tall as the 67-inch average found in the ships' manifests. |
56 |
| A
further height sample, using Maryland certificates of manumission,
was developed by John Komlos, and these data also suggested that
men averaged 67 inches.66
This sample, too, is likely to exaggerate the height of slaves,
since it is probable that those who enjoyed manumission would have
been among the most privileged, and therefore best fed and tallest,
of U.S. slaves. Robert Margo and Richard Steckel have used a third
main data setrecords of the height of blacks recruited into
the Union Army during the Civil War.67
Again, it seems that the sample must have had an upward bias. The
army normally had a minimum height requirement, and, in its recruitment
of blacks, it is likely to have discriminated against those who
were significantly below average height. |
57 |
| The
data sets that Fogel and Engerman based their assumptions on all,
therefore, seem to carry strong upward biases. It is extremely difficult
to get direct samples of the height of typical field slaves, but
the process of making shirts for two 1850s slave gangs has left
detailed lists of the height, age, and occupation of fifty-five
slaves (all of the males age 20 years or over in these two gangs).
This sample is too slender a base for confident generalizations,
but still the results are interesting. The average height for these
fieldhands was 64.6 inchesfar shorter than that for the trade
and other samples mentioned above.68
The combination of direct evidence from these lists and reservations
about samples taken from the trade and elsewhere suggests that slave
men would not have been as well fed as has recently been claimed
by Fogel and Engerman, and suggests that they would have been significantly
shorter than 67 inches on average.69
The diet of U.S. slaves does not, after all, seem to be the cause
of that population's exceptional rates of natural increase. |
58 |
| We
can go further than this. If we compare some key demographic indicators
for slaves and free whites, the explanation for the very high natural
increase of U.S. slaves seems to be far more gloomy than that suggested
by Fogel and Engerman. It is true that natural increase among U.S.
slaves was, by the 1850s, higher than that of U.S. whites, but the
life experiences of slaves and whites contrasted profoundly, and
the causes of natural increase were very different for the two populations.
Slaves experienced far higher rates of infant, child, and adult
mortality than did whites, and this mortality, as in "Third World"
countries, was compensated for by a very high birth rate. "Third
World" population patterns do not suggest that slaves were especially
privileged. |
59 |
| Work
by Richard Steckel has revealed the dreadful childhood experience
of U.S. slaves. He found that, as a result of overworked mothers
and of desperately poor net nutrition, average birth weights for
U.S. slave babies were very low (typically, less than 5.5 pounds),
and the rate of still births among U.S. slaves was very high (probably
no less than 11 percent). He also found major contrasts between
the child mortality of whites and slaves. After discounting still
births, he found that 28 percent of the antebellum southern whites
died before age 15, but 46 percent of slaves died before reaching
that age.70
|
60 |
| Moreover,
it is not just in child mortality where major contrasts between
U.S. whites and slaves appear. Despite far higher infant and child
mortality among slaves compared with whites, the slave and free
southern populations showed basically similar ratios of children
to women.71
This similarly suggests that, to balance its excess child mortality,
the slaves' birth rate must have been far higher than that of the
whites.72
A further statisticthe fact that there were relatively few
slaves age 50 or oversuggests, too, that adult mortality was
significantly higher for slaves than for whites.73
|
61 |
| Data
on height suggest another contrast in health. Oaths sworn by former
South Carolina planters in the 1860s show the height of those slaveowners
to have averaged 68.6 inches. If the "shirt lists" used in this
study are anything like a useful indicator of typical slave heights,
they suggest that owners would, because of far better net nutrition,
have towered over most of their slaves by several inches.74
U.S. slaves, then, reached similar rates of natural increase to
whites not because of any special privileges but through a process
of great suffering and material deprivation. |
62 |
| The
evidence presented in this study does not, therefore, support arguments
that focus on the disease environment, anti-natalism, African cultural
traditions, or especially favorable circumstances in the United
States. North American slaves were driven very hard by their owners,
but the special demands imposed by the sugar planters of the Americas
were even more lethal. Sugar, of course, did not account for all
slaves in the rest of the Americas, and pockets of natural increase
were possible. Recent work shows, for example, that in the nineteenth
century the Minas Gerais region of Brazil developed a diversified
economy oriented largely toward domestic markets, and that the region
is remarkable for the fact that its slaves experienced natural increase.75
Crucially, Minas Gerais was not a sugar region. It seems likely
that further work will show that other non-sugar regions in the
Americas also experienced natural increase. Nevertheless, sugar
plantations dominated the Americas, dominated its demographic patterns,
and dictated too that natural decrease would dominate. |
63 |
| Sugar
planters, as we have seen, combined extreme labor demands with a
long-term insistence on a predominantly male work force, and the
combination of burdens they imposed was lethal. The Louisiana case
shows that sugar produced natural decrease even when the labor force
was American-born. Where (in Brazil or Jamaica, for example) sugar
planters bought their slaves from Africa, natural decrease would
have been even worse than in Louisiana. Sugar and the Atlantic slave
trade represented the worst of all worldsthe extreme demands
of the sugar plantation, the urge to import (so as to maintain a
male-dominated labor force), and the intensive sucking of Africans
into an unfamiliar, and therefore hostile, disease environment. |
| |