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Plantation Management in the Chesapeake, 1620–1820

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Lorena S. Walsh
Lorena S. Walsh
Affiliation:
Research Fellow, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, VA 23187.
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Extract

Over the course of two hundred years Chesapeake planters sought to make the most of scarce labor while exploiting abundant land. Large planters were able to offset a secular decline in tobacco crops per laborer with productivity gains in grains, thus maintaining or enhancing revenues per hand in constant value. Intensification of the labor process and a switch from hoe to plow culture account for most of the increase; agricultural improvements, very little.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 393 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1989

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References

This study draws especially on the work of Lois Carr, Paul Clemens, Carville Earle, Lewis Gray, Allan Kulikoff, John McCusker, Russell Menard, Edward Papenfuse, David Percy, and Joseph Robert, as well as upon country studies, biographies of individual planters, and works on Chesapeake merchants and economy. I am indebted to these authors, although not always in agreement with them.Google Scholar

1 The crop outputs per laborer, termed “shares per hand” in most contemporary records, include both exact observations of crop divisions and estimations. The exact observations report size of total crop on a given plantation, the number of field laborers, their ranking as full or half shares, and the number of shares awarded the overseer. Estimations come from probate inventories and plantation accounts that report the size of the total crop and the approximate number of field hands. Only “reasonable” estimations, those that fell within the range of exact observations, were used. My definition of a hand is that universally used by planters themselves—any able-bodied adult man or woman. Planters rated only older or partially disabled slaves or youngsters between ages 12 and 15 as half shares. I have followed this rating in estimations. Overseers, where present, were counted as one laborer in the crop; yields were recalculated if overseers received more than one share. Shares retained by planters for drafts animals, where present, were reallocated among the labor force. These crop share estimates are thus standardized, but not gender specific. There is no evidence in contemporary plantation records that Chesapeake planters rates female field hands any differently from males. Only William Tatham asserted that women were counted as three-quarter hands (Tatham, William, An Historical and Practical Essay on the Culture and Commerce of Tobacco [London, 1800],Google Scholar reprinted in Herndon, Melvin G., William Tatham and the Culture of Tobacco [Coral Gables, FL, 1969], pp. 101–102). Still, interpretation must take into account shifts in the gender and age composition of the labor force as well as increases in the hours of work per day and the number of days worked.Google Scholar

2 This becomes clear when mean tobacco shares are compiled annually by county and the results compared with data on the character of the bound labor force found in probate inventories.Google Scholar

3 Carr, Lois Green and Walsh, Lorena S., “Economic Diversification and Labor Organization in the Chesapeake, 1650–1820,” in Innes, Stephen, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 144–88.Google Scholar

4 Differences between oronoco and sweetscented regions are discussed in Walsh, Lorena S., “‘To Labour for Profit’: Plantation Management in the Chesapeake, 1620–1820” (unpublished manuscript). Sweetscented crop shares are not always equivalent to oronoco shares. Sweetscented was often stemmed before packing which resulted in a loss in weight of 25 to 30 percent over leaf. Not all sweetscented was stemmed, the choice varying from year to year, and plantation to plantation, depending on the quality of the crop, forwardness or backwardness of the seasons, the availability of labor, changing legislation, and changing buyer tastes. Oronoco was almost never stemmed.Google Scholar

5 The 10-barrel figure was derived from plantation records that detail the allocation of total crops between slave and livestock food, overseers' shares, seed, and marketed surplus. Maize yields over 2 ½ but less than 10 barrels per hand might produce surpluses as well, depending on the composition of black and white laborers and dependents on the plantation.Google Scholar

6 Plantation accounts indicate that slave rations almost never included any wheat and that white families (except for those who kept great establishments) consumed no more than two to five bushels of wheat per year. The propotion of the remainder required for seed varied from as little as 11 percent to as much as 100 percent.Google Scholar

7 Inventories show that the poorest planters, those worth less than £50 sterling (constant value), were unlikely to make surpluses of anything aside from tobacco. Plantation records that include accounts with tenants and other poor neighbours show that such folk had a greater variety of options for supplementing agricultural income than inventories alone might suggest. See, for example, Walsh, Lorence S., “Land, Landlord, and Leaseholder: Estate Management and Tenant Fortunes in Southern Maryland, 1642–1820,” Agricultural History, 59 (07 1985), pp. 373–96.Google Scholar

8 Values were converted from Maryland or Virginia currency into sterling using exchange rates from McCusker, John, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978), and deflated by a sterling commodity price index developed for the St. Mary's City Commission by P. M. G. Harris, with base years 1700 to 1709. Averages are compiled from observations of revenues on individual plantations. Much of the evidence comes from records of crop divisions between planters or stewards and overseers. While such records survive only for large planters, I have no reason to suppose they are biased toward more successful farmers. Everyone who employed an overseer had to come to some kind of accounting.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Walsh, “‘To Labour for Profit,’” chaps. 5, 6.Google Scholar

10 Conclusions for the period 1790 to 1820 are tentative.Google Scholar

11 While scholars have studied tobacco marketing extensively, wheat marketing arrangements, probably equally complex, remain unexamined.Google Scholar

12 Parkinson, Richard, A Tour in America in 1798, 1799, and 1800 (London, 1805), pp. 161–82, 218–22, 405–7;Google ScholarThe American Farmer, Nov. 26, 1819; and The American Farmer, Dec. 3, 1819.Google Scholar

13 Compare Rothenberg, Winifred B., “The Emergence of a Capital Market in Rural Massachusetts, 1730–1838,” this Journal, 45 (12 1985), pp. 781–808.Google Scholar

14 The inappropriateness of indicators of agricultural efficiency other than crop yields, especially ones based on the use of the latest English techniques, is underscored in Allen, Robert C. and Gráda, Cormac Ó, “On the Road Again with Arthur Young: English, Irish, and French Agriculture during the Industrial Revolution,” this Journal 48 (03 1988), pp. 93–116.Google Scholar

15 Bliss, Willard F.. “The Rise of Tenancy in Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 58 (10 1950), pp. 427–41;Google Scholarand Walsh, “Land, Landlord, and Leaseholder.”Google Scholar

16 It is likely that reported crop shares are biased toward more efficient producers from the 1790s on when many planters switched from paying overseers a proportion of the crop to paying them a set wage. Records of crops per hand become scarcer, and with the need to settle with overseers removed, “improving” planters were more likely to keep crop records than were indifferent managers. To counter this bias, I am comparing inventories of ordinary planters.Google Scholar

17 In two of the oldest tidewater countaries, York. VA, and St. Mary's, MD, many small planters did not use plows until the 1790s. In St. Mary's Country nonslaveholders' most marked response to changing times was a dramatic increase in the propotion using oxen. This did not reflect simple an increase in numbers of cattle nor a change in terminology, for all inventories listing oxen also had ox yokes, while none without oxen had yokes. On scarcity of forage see the frequent discussions in issues of The American Former for the years 1819 through 1821; and Rubin, Julius, “The Limits of Agricultural Progress in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Agricultural History, 49 (04 1975), pp. 362–75.Google Scholar

18 Papenfuse, Edward C. Jr, “Planter Behavior and Economic Opportunity in a Staple Economy,” Agricultural History, 46 (04 1972), pp. 297–311;Google ScholarMiller, Henry M., “Transforming a ‘Splendid and Delightsome Land’: Colonists and Ecoligical Change in the Chesapeake 1608–1820,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 76 (09 1986), pp. 173–87; and Walsh, “Land, Landlord, and Leaseholder.”Google Scholar

19 Fitzpatrick, John C., ed., The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799 (Washington, DC, 1931–1944), Vol. 29, pp. 47–52.Google Scholar

20 Bruce, Kathleen, “Virginian Agricultural Decline to 1860: A Fallacy,” Agricultural History, 6 (1932), pp. 3–13;Google ScholarCabell, N. F., “Some Fragments of An Intended Report on the Post Revolutionary History of Agriculture in Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 1st series, 26 (01 1918), pp. 145–68;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcCallum, John, Unequal Beginnings: Agriculture and Economic Development in Quebec and Ontario until 1870 (Toronto, 1980);CrossRefGoogle ScholarCathey, Cornelius Oliver, Agricultural Developments in North Carolina, 1783–1860 (Chapel Hill, 1956);Google Scholar and Gates, Paul W., The Farmer's Age: Agriculture 1815–1860 (New York, 1960).Google Scholar

21 Fenwick, Athanasius, “Address to the Agricultural Society of St. Mary's Country,” The American Farmer, Sept. 10, 1819.Google Scholar

22 Walsh, Lorena S., “The Rationalization of the Chesapeake Tidewater Labor Force, 1720–1820” (paper presented to the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, Oct. 1986).Google Scholar

23 James R. Irwin found that in 1850 and 1860 there were probably scale effects in wheat production. See Irwin, James R., “Exploring the Affinity of Wheat and Slavery in the Virginia Piedmont,” Explorations in Economic History, 25 (07 1988), pp. 295–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Washington, Writings, vol. 30, pp. 175–76; Washington, Writings, vol. 36, pp. 110–14; and Thomas Jones Records Books, MS 517, and Wilson, James Farm Account Book, MS 915 (Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore).Google Scholar

25 Menard, Russell R., Carr, Lois Green, and Walsh, Lorena S., “A Small Planter's Profits: The Cole Estate and the Growth of the Early Chesapeake Economy,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 40 (04 1983), pp. 171–96; and Fenwick, “Address.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar