Selling slave families down the river: property rights and the public auction.

• Author: Thornton, Mark
• Position: Essay

Historians, sociologists, and economists have long emphasized the detrimental effects of slave owners' power to sell their slaves and in the process separate husband from wife, parent from child, and relatives and friends from one another. This power to break up slave families was certainly a destructive and disruptive force in the antebellum slave society. In the interregional slave trade, hundreds of thousands of slaves were moved long distances from their original home and birthplace as the slave economy migrated from the eastern seaboard to Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. (1)

Researchers have long been concerned with the extent and effects of the interregional slave trade. In the late 1980s, Robert Fogel reviewed this debate and used it to support his claim that quantitative measurement would resolve this issue and many more puzzles regarding antebellum slavery (1989, 167). These issues remain matters of quantitative dispute, but the general consensus is that the slave trade was extensive and had significant negative cultural effects on the black family.

Researchers have been less concerned, however, with the rationale behind the destruction of families in the slave trade. Slave owners might have sold their slaves simply because other people valued those slaves more highly than they did, and profitable sales were therefore possible. However, this motivation is far from a clear-cut explanation for the extent of family breakup in the slave trade, especially considering that some historians have argued that slave owners generally acted paternalistically to preserve family units and expended great effort and resources to protect the slaves they owned.

We argue that neither the profitability of slave breeding nor paternalism is the most important determinant of the breakup of slave families. Slave owners had an economic interest in maintaining stability in slave families and plantation societies in order to minimize the number of runaways. Security was the most important consideration of slave ownership because slaves represented a highly valuable but risky asset. Maintaining extended families with young children and elders suppressed the likelihood of runaways. Breaking up families, in contrast, encouraged runaways.

If owners had a powerful incentive to maintain slave families intact, what caused the slave family breakups? Specifically, why were slave owners willing to break up slave families in certain circumstances, but unwilling in other circumstances? Researchers have until recently generally ignored this aspect of the problem, but we think it is the major consideration for understanding the breakup of slave families. The answer lies in the different legal and property-rights environments at public and commercial auctions. Our research leads us to conclude that government-generated slave sales-for example, probate and bankruptcy-related sales at public auctions--led to the breakup of the bulk of family units, whereas purely private exchanges, including commercial auctions, tended to maintain family units.

Selling Slave Families "down the River"

The simple economic logic of selling slaves may be usefully examined in relation to free labor-market practices. (2) If a firm finds itself with a relative abundance of a specific type of labor, it may be able to profit by returning that labor to the market. In the case of free labor, the worker is fired, but in the case of slave labor, the worker is sold to a new owner, who places greater market value on the slave than did the original owner. Likewise, a firm experiencing a relative shortage of a specific type of labor will turn to the market to alleviate that shortage. In the case of free labor, the firm hires an additional worker of that occupation, whereas in the case of slave labor the firm buys a specific type of labor, such as a field hand or a cook. The simple logic of labor economics and firm management therefore can explain the necessity of viewing labor in individual units, each with its own productive characteristics, and the resulting need to trade these units in pursuit of maximum profit. The plantation owners' specific labor needs would seem to require that specific units of labor, not families, be bought and sold.

However, the economic logic of free labor-market practices does not necessarily or completely apply to the organization of slave labor because of fundamental differences between the free and slave labor systems. For the slave owner, slaves represent not only labor, but also a type of capital asset. Slave owners have to consider such issues as slave maintenance and the valuation of the slave's output throughout the slave's entire life. In contrast, the buyer of free labor need be concerned only with the laborer's productivity during a specific labor contract. But the most important difference between free labor and slave labor is that managers of slave labor must prevent slaves from running away. Managers of both slave and free labor must monitor their workers' "on the job" productivity, but slave labor managers must also provide for security because slave labor represents a capital investment that may decide to flee from the firm at any time. The plantation had characteristics of a socialist firm because managerial decisions had to be...