Page 40 - 1619 Project Curriculum

The 1619 Project

the movement of capital, labor and lawyers in charge of capital alloca-

products across long distances. In tion and long-term strategy, with

other words, they were fashioning several divisional units, responsible
a capitalist economy. ‘‘The beating for diff erent operations. Rosenthal
heart of this new system,’’ Beckert writes of one plantation where the

writes, ‘‘was slavery.’’ owner supervised a top lawyer,

who supervised another lawyer,

Perhaps you’re reading this at work, who supervised an overseer, who
maybe at a multinational corpora- supervised three bookkeepers,

tion that runs like a soft-purring who supervised 16 enslaved head

engine. You report to someone, and drivers and specialists (like brick-

someone reports to you. Everything layers), who supervised hundreds

is tracked, recorded and analyzed, of enslaved workers. Everyone was

via vertical reporting systems, accountable to someone else, and

double- entry record-keeping and plantations pumped out not just
precise quantification. Data seems cotton bales but volumes of data

to hold sway over every operation. about how each bale was produced.

It feels like a cutting-edge approach This organizational form was very
to management, but many of these advanced for its time, displaying
techniques that we now take for a level of hierarchal complexity

granted were developed by and for equaled only by large government

large plantations. structures, like that of the British

When an accountant depreci- Royal Navy.

ates an asset to save on taxes or Like today’s titans of industry,
when a midlevel manager spends planters understood that their prof-

an afternoon filling in rows and its climbed when they extracted

columns on an Excel spreadsheet, maximum eff ort out of each work-

they are repeating business pro- er. So they paid close attention to

cedures whose roots twist back to inputs and outputs by developing
slave-labor camps. And yet, despite precise systems of record-keeping.
this, ‘‘slavery plays almost no role Meticulous bookkeepers and over-

in histories of management,’’ notes seers were just as important to the
the historian Caitlin Rosenthal in productivity of a slave-labor camp
her book ‘‘Accounting for Slavery.’’ as field hands. Plantation entrepre-

Since the 1977 publication of Alfred neurs developed spreadsheets,

Chandler’s classic study, ‘‘The Vis- like Thomas Affleck’s ‘‘Plantation
ible Hand,’’ historians have tended Record and Account Book,’’ which

to connect the development of ran into eight editions circulated

modern business practices to the until the Civil War. Affleck’s book
19th-century railroad industry, was a one-stop-shop accounting

viewing plantation slavery as pre- manual, complete with rows and

A photograph taken at a medical examination of a man known as

Gordon, who escaped from Mississippi and made his way to a Union capitalistic, even primitive. It’s a columns that tracked per-worker

Army encampment in Baton Rouge, La., in 1863. more comforting origin story, one productivity. This book ‘‘was real-

that protects the idea that Ameri- ly at the cutting edge of the infor-

of biodiversity exhausted the soil an ‘‘unhallowed alliance between ca’s economic ascendancy devel- mational technologies available

and, to quote the historian Wal- the lords of the lash and the lords oped not because of, but in spite to businesses during this period,’’

ter Johnson, ‘‘rendered one of the of the loom.’’ The large-scale cul- of, millions of black people toiling Rosenthal told me. ‘‘I have never

richest agricultural regions of the tivation of cotton hastened the on plantations. But management found anything remotely as com-

earth dependent on upriver trade invention of the factory, an insti- techniques used by 19th-century plex as Affleck’s book for free

for food.’’ tution that propelled the Industrial corporations were implemented labor.’’ Enslavers used the book to via the Library of Congress

As slave labor camps spread Revolution and changed the course during the previous century by determine end-of-the-year balanc-

throughout the South, production of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 plantation owners. es, tallying expenses and revenues

surged. By 1831, the country was cotton spindles in America. Fifty Planters aggressively expanded and noting the causes of their big-

delivering nearly half the world’s years later, there were five million. their operations to capitalize on gest gains and losses. They quan-

raw cotton crop, with 350 million Slavery, wrote one of its defend- economies of scale inherent to cot- tified capital costs on their land,

pounds picked that year. Just four ers in De Bow’s Review, a widely ton growing, buying more enslaved tools and enslaved workforces,

years later, it harvested 500 million read agricultural magazine, was the workers, investing in large gins and applying Aff leck’s recommend-

pounds. Southern white elites grew ‘‘nursing mother of the prosperity presses and experimenting with dif- ed interest rate. Perhaps most Photograph by McPherson & Oliver,

rich, as did their counterparts in the of the North.’’ Cotton planters, ferent seed varieties. To do so, they remarkable, they also developed

North, who erected textile mills to millers and consumers were fash- developed complicated workplace ways to calculate depreciation, a

form, in the words of the Massa- ioning a new economy, one that hierarchies that combined a cen- breakthrough in modern manage-

chusetts senator Charles Sumner, was global in scope and required tral office, made up of owners and ment procedures, by assessing the

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