In 1860 how many slaves were there

Although scholars disagree about the extent of hiring in agriculture, most concur that hired slaves frequently worked in manufacturing, construction, mining, and domestic service. Hired slaves and free persons often labored side by side. Bond and free workers both faced a legal burden to behave responsibly on the job.

Yet the law of the workplace differed significantly for the two: generally speaking, employers were far more culpable in cases of injuries to slaves. The divergent law for slave and free workers does not necessarily imply that free workers suffered. Empirical evidence shows that nineteenth-century free laborers received at least partial compensation for the risks of jobs. Indeed, the tripartite nature of slave-hiring arrangements suggests why antebellum laws appeared as they did.

Whereas free persons had direct work and contractual relations with their bosses, slaves worked under terms designed by others. Free workers arguably could have walked out or insisted on different conditions or wages.

Slaves could not. The law therefore offered substitute protections. Still, the powerful interests of slaveowners also may mean that they simply were more successful at shaping the law. Postbellum developments in employment law — North and South — in fact paralleled earlier slave-hiring law, at times relying upon slave cases as legal precedents.

Public transportation also figured into slave law: slaves suffered death and injury aboard common carriers as well as traveled as legitimate passengers and fugitives.

As elsewhere, slave-common carrier law both borrowed from and established precedents for other areas of law. Slaveowner plaintiffs won several cases in the decade before the Civil War when engineers failed to warn slaves off railroad tracks.

Postbellum courts used slave cases as precedents to entrench the last-clear-chance doctrine. Society at large shared in maintaining the machinery of slavery. In place of a standing police force, Southern states passed legislation to establish and regulate county-wide citizen patrols. County courts had local administrative authority; court officials appointed three to five men per patrol from a pool of white male citizens to serve for a specified period.

Typical patrol duty ranged from one night per week for a year to twelve hours per month for three months. Not all white men had to serve: judges, magistrates, ministers, and sometimes millers and blacksmiths enjoyed exemptions. So did those in the higher ranks of the state militia.

In many states, courts had to select from adult males under a certain age, usually 45, 50, or Some states allowed only slaveowners or householders to join patrols. Patrollers typically earned fees for captured fugitive slaves and exemption from road or militia duty, as well as hourly wages. Statutes set guidelines for appropriate treatment of slaves and often imposed fines for unlawful beatings.

In rare instances, patrollers had to compensate masters for injured slaves. For the most part, however, patrollers enjoyed quasi-judicial or quasi-executive powers in their dealings with slaves. Overseers commanded considerable control as well. The Southern overseer was the linchpin of the large slave plantation. He ran daily operations and served as a first line of defense in safeguarding whites.

The vigorous protests against drafting overseers into military service during the Civil War reveal their significance to the South. Yet slaves were too valuable to be left to the whims of frustrated, angry overseers. Overseers occasionally confronted criminal charges as well.

Brutality by overseers naturally generated responses by their victims; at times, courts reduced murder charges to manslaughter when slaves killed abusive overseers. Whether they liked it or not, many Southerners dealt daily with slaves. Southern law shaped these interactions among strangers, awarding damages more often for injuries to slaves than injuries to other property or persons, shielding slaves more than free persons from brutality, and generating convictions more frequently in slave-stealing cases than in other criminal cases.

The law also recognized more offenses against slaveowners than against other property owners because slaves, unlike other property, succumbed to influence. Just as assaults of slaves generated civil damages and criminal penalties, so did stealing a slave to sell him or help him escape to freedom. Many Southerners considered slave stealing worse than killing fellow citizens.

In marked contrast, selling a free black person into slavery carried almost no penalty. The counterpart to helping slaves escape — picking up fugitives — also created laws.

Southern states offered rewards to defray the costs of capture or passed statutes requiring owners to pay fees to those who caught and returned slaves. Some Northern citizens worked hand-in-hand with their Southern counterparts, returning fugitive slaves to masters either with or without the prompting of law. But many Northerners vehemently opposed the peculiar institution. In an attempt to stitch together the young nation, the federal government passed the first fugitive slave act in To circumvent its application, several Northern states passed personal liberty laws in the s.

Stronger federal fugitive slave legislation then passed in This occupation was often highly risky — enough so that such men could not purchase life insurance coverage — and just as often highly lucrative. Southern law governed slaves as well as slaveowners and their adversaries. What few due process protections slaves possessed stemmed from desires to grant rights to masters.

Still, slaves faced harsh penalties for their crimes. When slaves stole, rioted, set fires, or killed free people, the law sometimes had to subvert the property rights of masters in order to preserve slavery as a social institution. Slaves, like other antebellum Southern residents, committed a host of crimes ranging from arson to theft to homicide.

Southern states erected numerous punishments for slave crimes, including prison terms, banishment, whipping, castration, and execution. In most states, the criminal law for slaves and blacks generally was noticeably harsher than for free whites; in others, slave law as practiced resembled that governing poorer white citizens.

Particularly harsh punishments applied to slaves who had allegedly killed their masters or who had committed rebellious acts. Southerners considered these acts of treason and resorted to immolation, drawing and quartering, and hanging. Market prices for slaves reflect their substantial economic value. Scholars have gathered slave prices from a variety of sources, including censuses, probate records, plantation and slave-trader accounts, and proceedings of slave auctions. These data sets reveal that prime field hands went for four to six hundred dollars in the U.

Even controlling for inflation, the prices of U. Slavery remained a thriving business on the eve of the Civil War: Fogel and Engerman projected that by slave prices would have increased on average more than 50 percent over their levels.

No wonder the South rose in armed resistance to protect its enormous investment. Slave markets existed across the antebellum U. It has been a famous landmark at this original location for over years.

Established dealers like Franklin and Armfield in Virginia, Woolfolk, Saunders, and Overly in Maryland, and Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee prospered alongside itinerant traders who operated in a few counties, buying slaves for cash from their owners, then moving them overland in coffles to the lower South.

Over a million slaves were taken across state lines between and with many more moving within states. Some of these slaves went with their owners; many were sold to new owners. In his monumental study, Michael Tadman found that slaves who lived in the upper South faced a very real chance of being sold for profit.

From to , he estimated that an average of , slaves per decade moved from the upper to the lower South, most via sales. A contemporary newspaper, The Virginia Times , calculated that 40, slaves were sold in the year The prices paid for slaves reflected two economic factors: the characteristics of the slave and the conditions of the market. Important individual features included age, sex, childbearing capacity for females , physical condition, temperament, and skill level.

In addition, the supply of slaves, demand for products produced by slaves, and seasonal factors helped determine market conditions and therefore prices. Prices for both male and female slaves tended to follow similar life-cycle patterns.

In the U. South, infant slaves sold for a positive price because masters expected them to live long enough to make the initial costs of raising them worthwhile. Prices rose through puberty as productivity and experience increased.

In nineteenth-century New Orleans, for example, prices peaked at about age 22 for females and age 25 for males. Girls cost more than boys up to their mid-teens. The genders then switched places in terms of value. In the Old South, boys aged 14 sold for 71 percent of the price of year-old men, whereas girls aged 14 sold for 65 percent of the price of year-old men. After the peak age, prices declined slowly for a time, then fell off rapidly as the aging process caused productivity to fall.

Compared to full-grown men, women were worth 80 to 90 percent as much. One characteristic in particular set some females apart: their ability to bear children. Fertile females commanded a premium.

The mother-child link also proved important for pricing in a different way: people sometimes paid more for intact families. Source: Fogel and Engerman Skilled workers sold for premiums of percent whereas crippled and chronically ill slaves sold for deep discounts.

Slaves who proved troublesome — runaways, thieves, layabouts, drunks, slow learners, and the like — also sold for lower prices. Taller slaves cost more, perhaps because height acts as a proxy for healthiness. In New Orleans, light-skinned females who were often used as concubines sold for a 5 percent premium. Prices for slaves fluctuated with market conditions as well as with individual characteristics. Less than a decade later, slave prices climbed when the international slave trade was banned, cutting off legal external supplies.

Interestingly enough, among those who supported the closing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were several Southern slaveowners. Why this apparent anomaly? Because the resulting reduction in supply drove up the prices of slaves already living in the U.

Demand helped determine prices as well. The demand for slaves derived in part from the demand for the commodities and services that slaves provided. Changes in slave occupations and variability in prices for slave-produced goods therefore created movements in slave prices. As slaves replaced increasingly expensive indentured servants in the New World, their prices went up. In the period to , slave prices in British America rose nearly 30 percent.

As cotton prices fell in the s, Southern slave prices also fell. But, as the demand for cotton and tobacco grew after about , the prices of slaves increased as well.

Differences in demand across regions led to transitional regional price differences, which in turn meant large movements of slaves. Yet because planters experienced greater stability among their workforce when entire plantations moved, 84 percent of slaves were taken to the lower South in this way rather than being sold piecemeal.

Demand sometimes had to do with the time of year a sale took place. For example, slave prices in the New Orleans market were 10 to 20 percent higher in January than in September. September was a busy time of year for plantation owners: the opportunity cost of their time was relatively high. Prices had to be relatively low for them to be willing to travel to New Orleans during harvest time. One additional demand factor loomed large in determining slave prices: the expectation of continued legal slavery.

As the American Civil War progressed, prices dropped dramatically because people could not be sure that slavery would survive. Burgeoning inflation meant that real prices fell considerably more. That slavery was profitable seems almost obvious. Yet scholars have argued furiously about this matter. On one side stand antebellum writers such as Hinton Rowan Helper and Frederick Law Olmstead, many antebellum abolitionists, and contemporary scholars like Eugene Genovese at least in his early writings , who speculated that American slavery was unprofitable, inefficient, and incompatible with urban life.

On the other side are scholars who have marshaled masses of data to support their contention that Southern slavery was profitable and efficient relative to free labor and that slavery suited cities as well as farms. These researchers stress the similarity between slave markets and markets for other sorts of capital.

This battle has largely been won by those who claim that New World slavery was profitable. Much like other businessmen, New World slaveowners responded to market signals — adjusting crop mixes, reallocating slaves to more profitable tasks, hiring out idle slaves, and selling slaves for profit.

One well-known instance shows that contemporaneous free labor thought that urban slavery may even have worked too well: employees of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, went out on their first strike in to protest the use of slave labor at the Works.

Perhaps the most controversial book ever written about American slavery is Time on the Cross , published in by Fogel and co-author Stanley Engerman. These men were among the first to use modern statistical methods, computers, and large datasets to answer a series of empirical questions about the economics of slavery.

To find profit levels and rates of return, they built upon the work of Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, who in had calculated similar measures from data on cotton prices, physical yield per slave, demographic characteristics of slaves including expected lifespan , maintenance and supervisory costs, and in the case of females number of children.

They included in this index controls for quality of livestock and land and for age and sex composition of the workforce, as well as amounts of output, labor, land, and capital. Time on the Cross generated praise — and considerable criticism. A major critique appeared in as a collection of articles entitled Reckoning with Slavery. Although some contributors took umbrage at the tone of the book and denied that it broke new ground, others focused on flawed and insufficient data and inappropriate inferences.

The book also served as a catalyst for much subsequent research. Even Eugene Genovese, long an ardent proponent of the belief that Southern planters had held slaves for their prestige value, finally acknowledged that slavery was probably a profitable enterprise. Fogel himself refined and expanded his views in a book, Without Consent or Contract. They also found that antebellum Southern farms were 35 percent more efficient overall than Northern ones and that slave farms in the New South were 53 percent more efficient than free farms in either North or South.

This would mean that a slave farm that is otherwise identical to a free farm in terms of the amount of land, livestock, machinery and labor used would produce output worth 53 percent more than the free. On the eve of the Civil War, slavery flourished in the South and generated a rate of economic growth comparable to that of many European countries, according to Fogel and Engerman. They also discovered that, because slaves constituted a considerable portion of individual wealth, masters fed and treated their slaves reasonably well.

Although some evidence indicates that infant and young slaves suffered much worse conditions than their freeborn counterparts, teenaged and adult slaves lived in conditions similar to — sometimes better than — those enjoyed by many free laborers of the same period.

One potent piece of evidence supporting the notion that slavery provides pecuniary benefits is this: slavery replaces other labor when it becomes relatively cheaper. In the early U. As the demand for skilled servants and therefore their wages rose in England, the cost of indentured servants went up in the colonies. At the same time, second-generation slaves became more productive than their forebears because they spoke English and did not have to adjust to life in a strange new world.

Consequently, the balance of labor shifted away from indentured servitude and toward slavery. The value of slaves arose in part from the value of labor generally in the antebellum U.

Scarce factors of production command economic rent, and labor was by far the scarcest available input in America. Moreover, a large proportion of the reward to owning and working slaves resulted from innovative labor practices. Masters found that treating people like machinery paid off handsomely. In fact, until March , Confederate Army policy specifically prohibited Black people from serving as soldiers. Some Confederate officers wanted to enlist enslaved people earlier: Gen.

Patrick Cleburne proposed enlisting African American soldiers early in , but Jefferson Davis rejected the suggestion and ordered it never to be discussed again. Finally, in the last weeks of the conflict, the Confederate government gave in to Gen. Robert E. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV.

This Day In History. History Vault. Of the 4. A brief history Trans-Atlantic slavery began in the early sixteenth century, when the Portuguese and Spanish forcefully brought captured African slaves to the New World, in order to work for them. The British Empire introduced slavery to North America on a large scale, and the economy of the British colonies there depended on slave labor, particularly regarding cotton, sugar and tobacco output.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth century the number of slaves being brought to the Americas increased exponentially, and at the time of American independence it was legal in all thirteen colonies.

Although slavery became increasingly prohibited in the north, the number of slaves remained high during this time as they were simply relocated or sold from the north to the south. It is also important to remember that the children of slaves were also viewed as property, and apart from some very rare cases were born into a life of slavery.

Abolition and the American Civil War In the years that followed independence, the Northern States began gradually prohibiting slavery, and it was officially abolished there by , and the importation of slave labor was prohibited nationwide from although both still existed in practice after this. Business owners in the Southern States however depended on slave labor in order to meet the demand of their rapidly expanding industries, and the issue of slavery continued to polarize American society in the decades to come.

This culminated in the election of President Abraham Lincoln in , who promised to prohibit slavery in the newly acquired territories to the west, leading to the American Civil War from to Although the Confederacy south were victorious in much of the early stages of the war, the strength in numbers of the northern states including many free, black men , eventually resulted in a victory for the Union north , and the nationwide abolishment of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in Legacy In total, an estimated twelve to thirteen million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, and this does not include the high number who did not survive the journey which was as high as 23 percent in some years.

In the years since the abolishment of slavery in the US, the African-American community have continuously campaigned for equal rights and opportunities that were not afforded to them along with freedom.

The most prominent themes have been the Civil Rights Movement, voter suppression, mass incarceration and the relationship between the police and the African-American community has taken the spotlight in recent years.

Loading statistic Show source. Download for free You need to log in to download this statistic Register for free Already a member? Log in. Show detailed source information? Register for free Already a member? More information. Supplementary notes. Other statistics on the topic. Historical Data Number of United States military fatalities in major wars Historical Data Population of the United States in , by race and gender.