Accounting for slavery during the Enlightenment: Contradictions and interpretations

Property rights

John Locke (1632–1704), one of the predominant early Enlightenment thinkers, argued that the right to own property was essential to the pursuit of happiness, which according to Anchor (1967) was perceived as “the most basic natural right” (p. 9). In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke (1988: para. 270) specifically stated that “Every man has property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” Thereafter, David Hume, Adam Smith, and all other major Enlightenment philosophers supported this core belief. Hume (1888), for example, asserted that property rights were essential to the orderly conduct of society rather than seeing them as natural or inalienable (Treatise on Human Nature, III, part ii, 2, 1739). Hume’s contemporary and fellow Scot, Adam Smith (1981: 138), similarly argued in his Wealth of Nations (1776) that “The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable” (Wealth of Nations).

Montesquieu (1989: 247) followed by Blackstone (1826: 423) extended the concept of property rights to slavery via the law of contract. According to Stanley (1998: 2), the notion of the contract became “a metaphor for freedom.” The contention that selling slaves was unlawful under contract law because the slaves received nothing in exchange for the value given became a major issue in the abolition debate (Oldroyd et al., 2008). Later, Thomas Clarkson (1823: iii), a leading abolitionist and founder member of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, equated the idea of property to a “common justice” in his unequivocal appeal to the humanistic side of the Enlightenment:

If you put into one scale the gold and jewels of the Planters, you are bound to put into the other the liberty of 800,000 of the African race; for every man’s liberty is his own property by the laws of Nature, Reason, Justice, and Religion [emphasis added].

As Davidson (2015) observed,

The right to be the subject of property … [became] critical to political subjectivity in liberal thought, and the fact that in law, slaves were both treated as property and excluded from property rights was, for some nineteenth-century anti-slavery campaigners, a crucial part of the wrongness of slavery. (p. 48)

However, the defense of plantation owners was that they too had legitimate property rights over their slaves given that these had been acquired under lawful contracts, with due consideration paid to the vendors. The law did not have an answer to this paradox. The approach adopted by William Blackstone, the foremost commentator on English common law in the eighteenth century, was to say that while “absolute and unlimited power … over the life and fortune of the slave” was unlawful, this fact would not free slaves from the master’s rights to their service, providing these had been obtained lawfully (Oldroyd et al., 2008: 773). The American Constitution similarly fudged the issue, preferring to use the term “person held to service or labour” rather than “slave” (Tyson et al., 2016). For this reason, it was necessary for the British government to pay £20 million compensation to the plantation owners for the emancipation of their slaves, whereas in the United States, the Confederate rebels were regarded as having forfeited their property rights over their slaves’ labour under the laws of war (Tyson et al., 2016).

The humanity of slaves

There was an especially notable religious component to the debates concerning the common humanity or otherwise of slaves. Nonconformist and evangelical Christian groups took the lead in opposing the depravations and cruelty inflicted on slaves, whom they claimed were part of God’s redemptive plan in common with humanity at large. The famous emblem of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade which showed a kneeling African in chains surrounded by the motif “Am I not a man and a brother?” was originally a Quaker design. Indeed, according to Walvin (2000), “the influence of Enlightenment writing (most notably Montesquieu) and the development of British nonconformity and evangelicalism” were the twin pillars on which the abolition movement was founded (p. 68). By the late eighteenth century, concern for the most disadvantaged members of society became the touchstone for those advocating the humane side of the Enlightenment. Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others called for more compassionate treatment and ultimate abolition of bonded labor in the British Americas. Clarkson (1823) often referenced Biblical teachings to bolster his argument for greater justice:

A power in the master to make his slaves do what he orders them to do, even if it be wrong, must be admitted to be directly opposed to the Scriptures, whose authority we venerate, unless we will contend that his slaves, though born moral agents and accountable creatures, as soon as they became slaves were deprived of their condition of moral agency and lost their responsibility as men. (p. 9)

Unsurprisingly, such arguments were rejected by the slave-owning lobby who viewed the increasing presence of Christian missionaries in the West Indies after 1800 as a threat. Most planters, in fact,

discouraged the dissemination of Christian doctrine, forbade marriage, and restricted slaves’ social and recreational prerogatives in the interest of preserving a disciplined, subordinate slave labour force. (Green, 1982: 280)

Those opposed to abolition likewise cited the Bible for support (Dumas, 2012: 148). Hence, in 1785, 266 Virginia slave owners petitioned the Virginia General Assembly against manumission with a case based “squarely on the Bible. Abraham, after all, had kept slaves” (Outram, 2013: 73). A popular myth that persisted throughout the Enlightenment (and indeed into the twentieth century in apartheid South Africa) was that Black Africans were the cursed descendants of Noah’s son Ham. The Book of Genesis relates how the line of Ham had been condemned by Noah to a state of perpetual servitude to the other races as a punishment for his son disrespecting him. Despite the objections of theologians opposed to slavery, this myth was especially popular in the American South in the years leading up to the Civil War (Kidd, 2006: 36–41).

One of the most common counter arguments put forward by the anti-abolitionists to the Biblical contention that “in the veins of Adam, the first great father of all mankind, the blood of the negro race, as well as the blood of the other races flowed free full” (Kidd, 2006: 38) was that Black Africans were a sub-species and were therefore not fully human (Oldroyd et al., 2008). This idea gained ground in the second half of the eighteenth century, fueled by a new scientific interest in the natural history of Africans that began with the publication of Georges-Louis Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle in 1749. Essentially, there were two theories: one that Black Africans had originated as a separate sub-species; the other that they shared a common ancestry with the rest of humanity but had degenerated as a result of exposure to factors such as tropical heat and disease (Curran, 2013: 169–171). In either event, few writers believed Africans were not racially inferior to Europeans. The entry of the “Negro” in the first American edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1798) reflected this common misconception:

Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race … are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself. (Kramnick, 1995: 669)

The doctrine of White superiority, to which some of the major writers who condemned slavery such as Hume and Kant also subscribed, ⁵ provided fuel for the anti-abolitionists. According to Curran (2013), the argument that Africans were inferior to Europeans became the dominant “rationale for African chattel slavery” in the second half of the eighteenth century, surpassing even the religious and economic justifications (pp. 168, 177). In likening the aptitude of African slaves in the “mechanic arts” to that of the “orangutang,” James Long (The History of Jamaica, 1764, included in Kramnick, 1995: 645) was agreeing with Jacques-Phillibert de Surgy (Mélanges Intéressans, 1765) that Africans were closer to the “animal kingdom” than to White men and were therefore well suited to the “condition [of slavery] … to which they have been reduced” (Curran, 2013: 178). Such logic legitimized the view of African slaves as property as well as their cruel and inhumane treatment.

Economic incentives

Slave owners claimed that slavery was in the national economic interest. To counter increasing criticisms of slavery’s inherent inhumanity, slave owners and their constituents proffered largely pragmatic rationales to support a slave-based business model. They argued that Britain’s overall well-being as a major world power required the use of slave labor. In this regard, Davis (1984) noted that “proslavery MPs emphatically and convincingly argued that the slave trade and slave produce in the colonies were vital elements in maintaining and ensuring Britain’s financial prosperity” (p. 11). The sheer scale of the trade in sugar, tobacco, and slaves lent credence to their claims. Other factors included the merchant marine, ports, manufactures, banking, and insurance services that had grown up to support these activities (Walvin, 1993: 6–7).

However, the triangular trade in sugar, tobacco, other cash crops, manufactured goods, and slaves between Europe, the west coast of Africa, and the Americas was part of a protectionist, mercantilist system that came under increasing criticism in the second half of the eighteenth century from advocates of free market competition, such as François Quesnay in his General Rules for the Economic Government of an Agricultural Kingdom, 1758 (Kramnick, 1995: 496, 500–501) or Adam Smith (1981) in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. Other advocates included the Marquis de Mirabeau, in his “runaway bestseller” of 1757, L’Ami des Hommes, ou Traité de la Population (Curran, 2013:179). Returning to the theme of the supposedly brutish African, Mirabeau argued that slavery could be supplanted by a policy of free trade as this would attract “a new, industrious, and superior group of European settlers” to the colonies, who inevitably would produce an alternative range of goods and services for export better than anything the slaves would be able to achieve (Curran, 2013: 180).

Adam Smith added an important dimension to the Lockean principle of property rights in The Wealth of Nations by arguing that the competitive pursuit of happiness by autonomous, self-interested individuals increases collective wealth and is thus beneficial to society at large (Kramnick, /1995: 505, 507). According to Craton et al. (1976: 198), Smith issued the most profound challenge to slavery by questioning its value in terms of morality and utility, arguing that

Society was based on the mutual working of morality and utility, with morality seen in terms of a concern for the welfare of others and utility in terms of rational pursuit of individual self-interest.

As far as the self-interest of slaves was concerned, Smith (1981) wrote that

A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as much and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own. (pp. 387–388)

Likewise, “a slave … who can acquire nothing but his maintenance, consults his own ease, by making the land produce as little as possible over and above that maintenance” (Smith, 1981: 389). Aside from the lack of economic incentives for slaves to work efficiently, Smith also argued that slaves were more costly to their masters than “free servants” in terms of wear and tear and that “in the end” the work “done by freemen comes cheaper” (Smith, /1981: 99). These arguments were not lost on abolitionists as evident in Thomas Clarkson’s comment (1823):

Now it is an old maxim, as old as the days of Pliny and Columella, and confirmed by Dr Adam Smith, and all the modern writers on political economy, that the labour of free men is cheaper than the labour of slaves … [emphasis added]. (p. 44)

The “defenders of slavery,” for their part, some of whom had grown very wealthy on the back of slavery, were keen “to accept self-interest as the guiding principle in human affairs” (Fox-Genovese and Genovese, 2005: 670), so long as that meant non-government interference in the practice of slavery rather than the abandonment of the protectionist policies which Adam Smith and other free traders were arguing against. They also disregarded the fact that free labor was central to Smith’s theory and that he viewed slavery as intrinsically inefficient. The corollary to the laissez-faire argument which reached its apotheosis in the first half of the nineteenth century was that slave owners and industrial capitalists should be free to pursue the policies necessary to increase their wealth without compunction or government interference. This was certainly the case for Thomas Jefferson, whose extravagant lifestyle was derived and sustained from his extensive and profitable slave enterprises, including the sale and rental of bondsmen, which helps explain his unwillingness to manumit his slaves even at the time of his death.

Self-improvement

Slave owners rationalized the use of harsh discipline as an essential tool to compel attendance and sustained work effort among a captive and unwilling labor force on the grounds that it was to the slaves’ moral advantage. To support their use of physical coercion, slave owners frequently argued that African bondsmen were uncivilized, lazy, and superstitious and that they lacked the intellectual capacity and self-discipline needed to become effective contributors to society. According to Roberts (2013: 5), slave owners “stressed the need to discipline the unenlightened” and that “they conceptualized work, forced or free, as an innate good because it contributed directly to economic progress and inculcated habits of industry that would be morally redemptive.” In similar vein, the 1798 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica listed the vices of Africans if left to their own devices as “idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance” (Kramnick, 1995: 669).

The importance of and ability to maintain a disciplined yet largely unregulated workforce was a pervasive social value during the Enlightenment and not limited to bonded laborers. It laid the foundation for the Victorian doctrine of “self-help” among a variety of marginalized and/or disadvantaged social classes. For example, Ó hOgartaigh, et al. (2012) noted that

At the time when the 19th century English and Irish poor laws were debated, the dominant political economists of the era [such as Jeremy Bentham, Nassau William Senior, John Stuart Mill] prioritised individual achievement and a laissez-faire attitude towards government intervention on behalf of the poor. (p. 231)

Roberts (2013) similarly argued that

During the Enlightenment and through the early stages of industrialization, a particular set of positive moral values about discipline, time thrift, and work habits became increasingly prevalent …. Punctuality became a virtue. Enlightenment thinkers maintained that poor relief should be accompanied by a loss of liberty and forced labor, an assertion that helped to support the creation of workhouses for paupers. (pp. 49–50)

The idea that reform of criminals and malingerers was possible to the betterment of society was an important Enlightenment ideal. Jeremy Bentham is particularly notable in this respect:

Disturbed by the social evils of his time, supported by a legal system he considered to be brutal, costly and incoherent, he developed the ideas of writers such as Beccaria, Helvétius and Hume, to form a doctrine Utilitarianism, which would serve as an effective philosophical basis for social reform. (Hyland, 2003: 223–224)

From an utilitarian perspective, punishment in the penal system needed to be considered in terms of its “efficaciousness” and “profitability” to society (Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789, included in Kramnick, 1995: 542, 544). John Howard’s detailed survey of the State of the Prisons in England and Wales, 1777, was instrumental in highlighting the urgency of prison reform as was the ending of transportation to the American colonies in 1775, which meant more people would now need to be incarcerated. Bentham responded by designing a model penal institution, the Panopticon, first proposed in 1786 which, according to Munck, (2000: 155) promoted a “routine of heavy labour” as the pathway to reforming the convicts’ behavior. Likewise, the pro-slavery lobby argued that work discipline of slavery was efficacious to the moral reform of Black Africans, given the common belief in the degenerate nature of their race.

Abolitionists did not necessarily disagree that African slaves were morally degenerate. However, the difference in their eyes was that, if it were true, it was slavery that had reduced them to such a state, not inherent traits. This was the line taken by the Marquis de Condorcet in his 1781 denouncement of slavery, Reflexions sur L’Esclavage des Nègres:

It is not to the climate, nor the terrain, nor the physical constitution, nor the national character that one must attribute the laziness of certain peoples; it is to the bad laws that govern them …. It is not toward [black slaves] that we should direct our reproach, it is towards their masters. (Curran, 2013: 202)

Abolitionists in Britain and France such as James Ramsey, Thomas Clarkson, and Benjamin Frossard were quick to adopt de Condocet’s argument (Curran, 2013: 202), and the counterpoint for abolitionists to the claim that slavery was morally redemptive was that far from making Africans better people, slavery actually held them back. Thus, Clarkson (1823: 57) noted that the oppression of slaves denied slaves not just their liberty but any possibility of improvement. Addressing slaveholders rhetorically, he wrote,

You, on the other hand, have no code of justice but for yourselves. You deny it to those who cannot help themselves. You hinder liberty by your cruel restrictions on manumission; and dreading the inlet of light, you study to perpetuate ignorance and barbarism [emphasis added].

The next section of the article illustrates how the accounting practices employed in the BWI and United States plantations supported the owners in keeping their slaves in bondage and thus were markedly one-sided in reinforcing the darker, pro-slavery side of the Enlightenment. Unsurprisingly, the use of accounting appears unequivocal in support of the capitalist/slave-owner perspective. In our view, these practices did not adjust to reflect the spirit of scientific progress to measure and improve productivity or to acknowledge that every individual had a right to own property, have personal liberty, and pursue happiness even as abolition became more likely. What accounting did was to sustain a business model that enabled certain slave owners to realize a lifestyle of leisure and luxury, and for a select few like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, to provide uncompensated public service to a newly independent nation. ⁶

Property rights

The plantation accounts in the BWI and American South were unequivocal in their rejection of the Enlightenment argument that it was the slaves who lawfully owned the property rights in their own persons rather than the plantation owners. From the planters’ perspective, the slaves had been acquired under lawful contracts with due consideration paid to the sellers. Thus, the Jamaican cash account of the Earl of Balcarres recorded his various purchases of slaves as simply another outlay alongside his various purchases of goods and services. ¹⁰

In both the BWI and the American South, the key report that was produced in relation to the workforce was the inventory, which reflected the slaves’ status as chattels given that these documents were used for sale, bankruptcy, insurance, collateral, or inheritance purposes. Most of the surviving evidence of inventories in the United States postdates 1851, and the publication of Thomas Affleck’s popular The Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book provided blank schemata of accounts for plantation owners to complete. The correspondence between agents and absentee owners shows that inventories were common in the BWI throughout the slave era (Fleischman et al., 2004; Fleischman and Tyson, 2004). In many cases the slaves were given a monetary value, which correlated to their rental value, particularly in the BWI, where there was an extensive hire market. The inventories recorded the slaves by name, age, occupation, physical condition, and characteristics. Lists of Negroes from the York plantation in Jamaica, for example, identified the condition of slaves (e.g. “healthy,” “weakly,” “has yaws,” etc.) and country of origin (e.g. “Eboe,” “Congo,” “Creole,” etc.). ¹¹ In the case of creoles of mixed race ancestry, the ratio of whiteness to blackness was occasionally chronicled with such designations as “sambos, mulattos, mustees, and quadroons” (Fleischman et al., 2004: 55). At Old Montpelier Plantation in Jamaica, slaves were rated on a 0–5 continuum according to their ability. ¹² The inventories also served as a physical control over the proprietors’ assets given that owners often had multiple holdings and needed to track the whereabouts of their slaves within the operations. Thus, the inventories were commonly taken by location. The distinguishing features noted in the documents were also useful in identifying captured runaways and ensuring they were returned to the rightful owner.

The humanity of slaves

This idea that the slaves were a lesser type of human being was legitimized in the accounts, particularly in the BWI, by treating them as livestock in the inventories (Fleischman et al., 2004). An inventory of the Thomas River Estate in Clarendon, Jamaica which had originally been acquired in 1767 for £9,600 is typical. First came the land and buildings followed by the livestock, comprising the Negroes (now amounting to £10,122), steers, bulls, and mules. ¹³ Likewise, an inventory of the Grange Estate in Jamaica, 1771, listed the Negroes followed by the mules and steers. ¹⁴ The correspondence between owners and agents which juxtaposed slaves and livestock confirms they regarded the slaves in this way. A letter from James Stothert of Dumfries to his agent, David Hood in September 1792 is typical:

I do not intend to buy any more negroes for some time. I hope there will be no occasion to purchase more mules or stock after what has been putting on annually for some years back to a very considerable amount. ¹⁵

The process by which the inventories of slaves was prepared was in itself dehumanizing as it required all the slaves, young and old, able and infirm, to be paraded before appraisers for inspection as in a cattle market:

Here an individual whose life had been stripped of value by the slave plantation system was being appraised for the benefit of persons totally foreign and frequently unknown to him. Decisions as to this value were being rendered on the basis of information that was typically incidental to a person’s true intrinsic worth in any human terms. For the superannuated slave, the reward for a lifetime of toil was a valuation of zero and a descriptive of useless [emphasis added]. (Fleischman et al., 2004: 52)

Thus, the slaves would be physically examined by three or four White appraisers, and their value debated in front of them. ¹⁶

Absentee owners in Britain demanded the added refinement from their agents in the Caribbean of an annual schedule specifying the increases and decreases of slaves, with explanations required for any deaths. For instance, a schedule for the Thomas River Estate in Jamaica in 1780 recorded that “Little London” had died from “eating dirt,” a common form of slave resistance. “Betty, a new negro wench [was] afeared to have brought a venereal complaint with her, which brought her into a bad habit that killed her.” Ned died “of a dropsy” and “Little Quashy of worms.” ¹⁷ The increases and decreases in slaves were routinely juxtaposed with the increases and decreases in livestock. This was the case at the North Hall, Thomas River, and Broadland Penn properties in Jamaica in 1798 and 1799¹⁸ and at the Newton and Seawell Plantations in Barbados in 1801 and 1802. ¹⁹

Slaves were the most important productive asset on the plantations, and preserving their utility was of prime importance to the owners particularly after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, when replacements were harder to find. The purpose of the schedules of increases and decreases in stock was to hold agents accountable for the maintenance of the inventory’s value, and thus may have helped safeguard the slaves from abuse. However, this conclusion is thrown into question by the relatively lack of mention of punishments in the agents’ correspondence with the owners, which suggests either concealment by agents or disinterest by owners. Narrative, anecdotal, and literary evidence indicates a consistently high level of floggings, as do the punishment logs that plantations in the BWI were compelled to maintain following the 1824 order in council (Fleischman et al., 2011a; Oldroyd et al., 2008a). Although keeping an account of punishments was intended to act as a safeguard against extreme abuse, it reflected the owners’ absolute power over their slaves vis-à-vis their right to inflict floggings without the need for judicial sanction and their rejection of any notion the slaves had human rights.

The degree to which the use of the whip diminished on plantations in the BWI under amelioration is debatable. For example, Ford (2009) noted that “it was during these years that at least some slaveholders began to see their slaves as humans rather than purely as property” (p. 145). Alternatively, Burn (1937) concluded that in the BWI,

the whip was not only the means of enforcing discipline and coercing labour on extraordinary occasions, but it was the means used, on many estates, on every occasion and for every offence. (p. 60)

In any case, humane legislation was continually rebutted by colonial legislatures. St Aubyn Gosse (2012) observed that

The majority of Jamaican planters, despite the withering of the economic protection that they badly needed and the decreasing sugar prices in London in the early 1800s, nevertheless refused to adhere to ameliorative reforms. (p. 5)

Clarkson (1823) similarly concluded that slaveholders in the BWI continually resisted attempts to ameliorate their behavior:

In short, the Acts passed in our different Islands for the alleged purpose of bettering the condition of the slaves have been shamefully neglected; and they are as much a nullity as if they had never existed. (p. 3)

Economic incentives

The extant plantation records in the BWI and the American South confirm Adam Smith’s (1981: 387–388) criticism of plantation owners for the slaves’ lack of economic incentives and the dependence of the owners on physical violence to motivate them. Physical punishment in the form of floggings, mutilations, executions, aggravated executions, or incarceration remained the corner stone of disciplining the slave workforce rather than economic incentives throughout the entire slave era; notwithstanding that, the range and severity of punishments in the BWI was regulated under amelioration (Paton, 2001). ²⁰

Cost-effectiveness as an explanation for the preference of plantation owners in the BWI for physical punishments over economic incentives seems unlikely given the lack of attention the owners paid to cost control discussed below. Rather, what stands out is their inability to see beyond physical coercion as the only effective means of labor discipline in the context of a captive labor force. The collapse of the plantation system in the United States and BWI following emancipation possibly vindicate this assessment. The American experience was different to the BWI in the sense that slavery was abolished at a stroke as a consequence of the Civil War rather than through a phased, legislated transition. The US government recognized the potential of economic incentives to induce the freed slaves to work by establishing a labor contract system, albeit one that was compulsory. However, the attempt was thwarted by former slaveholders, who continually resisted federal attempts to reduce barriers to freed people to achieve equal socio-political rights as well as unencumbered employment (Tyson et al., 2016). Violence against former slaves to force them back into work continued unofficially, aided and abetted by ineffective state judiciaries, and the imposition of swinging penalties for those without a job, such as incarceration or forced labor (Farmer-Kaiser, 2004; Hayden et al., 2013: 14–15).

Unsurprisingly, given plantation owners’ lack of reliance on economic incentives, accounting played relatively little part in disciplining the workforce throughout the slave era in both the BWI and United States. From our own extensive archival research, accounting records were rarely used to measure efficiency, incentivize individual workers to increase their productive efforts, or reward them for achievements. The periodic inventories were about tracking the whereabouts and condition of the workforce and the schedules of increases and decreases about holding the agents accountable for maintaining the value of the stock, but neither type of report had incentive properties in terms of improving productivity. This impression is confirmed by a range of supplementary reports in the BWI and American South that recorded the total daily or weekly output of the various gangs, with no figures for the individuals (Fleischman et al., 2011a, 2011b). ²¹ In neither the BWI nor the American South was it normal practice to track the output of individual field hands. Thomas Affleck’s ready reckoner–type journal contained blank pages for the owners to record individual output, but these were rarely completed (Fleischman et al., 2011a).

One must be cautious in adjudging the plantation accounting records inadequate for not focusing on labor productivity, given that British industrialists have received similar criticism for paying a lack of attention to labor control during the same period. This appears in marked contrast to their utilization of accounts to control other costs, coordinate large-scale industrial enterprise, appraise the efficiency of new technologies, and inform managerial decision-making (Fleischman and Parker, 1997: 283–288; Oldroyd, 2007: 150–151). However, the difference between the British iron, textile, coal, and engineering sectors compared to the plantation economy of the BWI and American South was that the former promoted efficiency of the workforce through economic incentives, commonly piece rates, whereas the latter relied predominantly on physical coercion and did not possess the compensating accounting features mentioned above relating to cost control, planning, and decision-making. Cost accounts, budgets, and projections are conspicuous by their absence in the multiple plantation archives the current authors have examined in the Caribbean, United States, and Britain. Both sets of plantation records “reflect a basic disinterest in the productivity of individual slaves and maximum concern with their daily whereabouts” (Fleischman et al., 2011a: 780). In both, there were few explicit costing records which, for example, could have been used to determine the marginal profitability of particular crops or enterprises (Fleischman and Tyson, 2004). Also, there was rarely any capital accounting (e.g., depreciation of plant assets and tangible property).

Aside from the inventories and schedules of increases and decreases, the main accounting reports produced on plantations in the BWI were the accounts of gross produce that were used to calculate the agents’ commission and the “accounts current” which recorded receipts, payments, debtors, and creditors (Higman, 2005: 42, 100). The fact that agents were commonly rewarded on the basis of gross product rather than net again testifies to the owners’ lack of recognition of economic incentives. There was also a variety of miscellaneous schedules produced, such as accounts of deliveries to the wharf; ²² charges for hiring slaves from other plantations at daily, monthly, and yearly rates; ²³ lists of bond debts; ²⁴ annual summaries of the sugar and rum crops shipped and sold; ²⁵ schedules of food rations distributed to slaves; ²⁶ schedules itemizing the location of the slaves in the operations; ²⁷ charge and discharge statements; ²⁸ and statements of agents’ commission. ²⁹

It follows that a large amount of aggregated, uniform accounting data were compiled in the BWI compared to the United States, but the primary purpose of the accounts was to track the inventory, debtors, and creditors and not to optimize efficiency. The quantity and quality of the gross output and the preservation of the slaves’ value were regarded by owners as the main measures of success. It is not the case that proprietors were disinterested in costs as their correspondence with agents attests. The replacement cost of slaves and mules was a particular bugbear (Fleischman et al., 2011b). As Higman (2005) noted,

Absentees, unable to observe directly the condition of their property and its transactions, depended heavily on accounting documents, letters, written reports, lists and land surveys to safeguard their interests against dishonest practice by tracking rights and obligations, and to take the measure of their wealth and income. (p. 94)

However, the information that was conveyed to owners contained a lack of systematic cost analysis, and the effectiveness of what was produced was impeded by the usual five-month delay between sending a letter across the Atlantic and receiving a reply (Higman, 2005: 128).

In the BWI, during the latter part of the amelioration period, emancipation appeared inevitable and colonial assemblies moved away from broad resistance to grudging acceptance of humanizing procedures – but only after they learned that a compensation fund would be provided for their loss of property. As a condition of receiving compensation, each colonial assembly had to create a set of work-related practices and dispute-resolution procedures that were vetted by the BCO. One might have expected, naively or otherwise, that accounting records detailing individual slave productivity would have increased as the use of physical coercion declined, but that was simply not the case, at least as far as our examinations of the records is concerned. In the United States, there was nothing comparable to the role played by BCO in coordinating record-keeping and managerial practices or in the creation of a compensation fund. Each American state established its own procedures and, few if any, abridged a slaveholder’s capability to physically coerce work effort.

Planters compensated for the lack of management and accounting information at their disposal with tried and tested knowledge acquired through experience of what was and was not possible on plantations. In some cases, this was translated into ratios which they used as benchmarks, such as “yields to acreage, slaves to acreage, sugar to rum, transport costs to distance, mills to distance, slaves to output, slaves to working hours, and slaves to cattle” (Fleischman et al., 2011b: 756, citing Higman, 2005). However, these norms were backward rather than forward looking because they reflected what had been achieved in the past and hence, did not consider the potential for improvement. In such a situation, the rate of productivity on plantations was unlikely to change. Short-term gains could be achieved by driving the slaves harder than the norm at potential cost to their health; longer term ones by acquiring new plantations to expand capacity. Higman (2005: 101–203, 225) provided an example of the former at the Golden Grove estate in Jamaica, where for a time, the proprietor insisted the slaves be driven beyond the accepted levels of their physical endurance to increase output. John Tharp, a multiple plantation owner in Jamaica is an example of the latter. Up until his death in 1804, he was continually looking for new opportunities to expand his plantation holdings financed by borrowings (Fleischman et al., 2011b). By the time of his last acquisition in 1803, he was an elderly 59 year old plagued by gout. Interestingly, he was not deterred by the prospects of abolition and had no difficulty in raising the £100,000 capital required. ³⁰

The other strategy for improving productivity in the long-term was to treat slaves more humanely to extend their life spans. There were frequent debates as to whether greater productivity improvements could be elicited through more humane treatment as opposed to the threat or actual use of physical coercion. ³¹ Referring to the American South, Chapin (1990) opined that

It was during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth that they [slaveholders] made the discovery that blacks were fellow humans deserving of humane treatment. ³² (p. 299)

For Wiencek (2012) the motivation was entirely selfish: “Kindness, fairness, and gentleness – core human values – became useful tools for enslavement” (p. 124). Chapin (1990) similarly argued that

The principle of humanity modified plantation slavery, but did so by subjecting blacks to a psychologically manipulative form of control that avoided the appearance of physical cruelty … [and] allowed whites in the lower south to substitute a gentler but no less effective form of slave discipline for a harsher one. (pp. 300, 311)

The diminished use of the whip, at least by some slaveholders, may have resulted from an acceptance of abolitionists’ appeals against cruelty. However, a more likely rationale, especially after 1807, was that a less coercive approach was considered the more pragmatic way to conserve slave assets once the ability to replace them through importation had ended. Thus, Stewart (1823) described his firsthand experiences in Jamaica and accredited the end of the slave trade as a key determinant in behavioral change:

The abolition of the slave-trade has perhaps done more towards substantially improving the condition of the slaves than all the laws which have been enacted for that purpose …. The man, who wishes to preserve his property unimpaired, or who would improve its value, must now devote his attention to the means of keeping up, if not increasing, the number and efficiency of his slaves. (pp. 228, 230)

However, St Aubyn Gosse (2012) held a different view on the impact of the abolition of the slave trade on slave well-being:

One of the purposes of the 1807 Abolition Act was the prevention of more enslaved Africans being brought to the Caribbean. Plantation managers throughout the British West Indies would be forced to initiate ameliorative and other necessary measures to procure their labour supply through natural means. The management at Worthy Park did not make such a readjustment, choosing instead to continue the same eighteenth-century paradigm by overworking their enslaved Africans and replacing them with new labour. (p. 76)

The main difficulty in assessing whether the use and severity of physical coercion diminished over time is the lack of documentary evidence. Punishments were only recorded systematically in the BWI, following the 1824 order in council, and there was nothing similar in the United States. Irrespective of a possible decline in the level of violence, the roles of accounting appear to have remained constant. Accounting was used to measure the economic output of the plantation enterprise to monitor labor turnout rather than efficiency and to value “in the aggregate” slaveholders’ physical and human property. Clearly, accounting was an essential element of the monitoring systems that slave owners, especially those who were absentee, required, and particularly over time, considering declining sugar prices, increasing pressures to reduce physical coercion, and unrelenting competition from unregulated sugar economies that continued to rely on slave labor.

Interestingly, by way of afterword, Thomas Jefferson seems to have been an exception to the above in his utilization of accounts and avoidance of punishments. Wiencek (2012) noted that “measuring and counting everything, Jefferson devised numerous expedients for saving money and labour and maximizing productivity” (p. 92). Jefferson was a meticulous accountant who made detailed calculations about the productivity of his agricultural operations, including labor productivity. ³³ He is also reported to have rarely used the whip to increase productivity but instead make frequent cash payments to his slaves as incentives, suggesting that he may have been influenced by Adam Smith’s views on economic incentives. A more benign approach may also have helped him reconcile his moral dilemma of keeping slaves while proclaiming the Enlightenment ideal that “all men are created equal” (US Declaration of Independence, 1776). ³⁴ It might also be argued that Jefferson’s treatment of his slaves was not particularly different from the way that a rich landowner would have treated persons working for him on landed estate during the eighteenth century in any part of the British Empire. In any event, Jefferson’s use of accounting appears unique and not at all representative of the typical slave owner’s management and accounting practices. ³⁵

Self-improvement

The fallacy of the Enlightenment argument that slavery taught Africans the virtues of hard work and self-discipline and was therefore morally redemptive to an idle, degenerate race is undermined by the certainty of planters, the British government, the US federal government, and the state governments in the American South alike and that the freed slaves would depart the plantations en masse and opt out of work altogether if emancipation became a reality. The approach taken by the British government to try to prevent this happening was to institute a transitional period of “apprenticeship” during which the ex-slaves would remain tied to their plantations, coupled to an education program, during which they would be taught how to behave as free workers (Tyson et al., 2005). The US government opted for a different system based on enforced contracts that was again linked to education (Fleischman et al., 2014). Both systems failed, confirming the reality of the situation that the experience of slavery alienated rather than endeared its victims to the idea of regimented work patterns.

Likewise, the previous section has shown that far from encouraging the slaves to work harder, there was little incentive in the accounts for them to do more than to turn out for work at the right time in the right location. The one exception to this is the increased adoption of tasking, after that the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 in place of the traditional ganging system. Under ganging, slaves were driven in the field by a bullying driver and the working day did not end until the appointed hour, whereas under tasking, slaves were allocated a daily production quota. The main motivation for tasking was to reduce wear and tear on the slaves and hence extend their working lives as it was perceived as less physically taxing than ganging (Fleishman et al., 2011b). It also provided slaves with the incentive to work faster, as once the daily quota was achieved, their time was their own. From an accounting perspective, tasking is significant because of the employment of measurable performance targets. The customary norms referred to above would have been useful in setting targets, as in the case of the Betty’s Hope plantation in Antigua in the 1780s, “where various tasks were cost in terms of the number of Negroes required, the time in days, and cost per day” (Tyson et al., 2004: 762–763). There is also evidence of slaves being involved in the negotiation of task rates (Tyson et al., 2004: 762–763). Therefore, the introduction of tasking in some plantations is an important rider to the general conclusion that accounting played a limited role in incentivizing the slaves. However, tasking was more suited to cotton-picking than cane cutting, and the take-up of tasking was spasmodic, especially in the BWI, where ganging continued to dominate (Fleischman et al., 2011b).