Economic Life

By: Peter Eisenstadt, Graham Russell Gao Hodges

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Economic Life

Work has always characterized African American life in the Americas. From the first arrivals in the 1610s blacks came or were brought to the New World to labor. During the seventeenth century, Africans in North America, initially free but later largely enslaved, were important workers in subsistence economies. In the eighteenth century, as the American economy matured, enslaved blacks labored in staple crop agriculture, in seaboard trades, or as skilled assistants in small-scale industry. During the American Revolution a significant fraction toiled in the military services, while most continued in their former roles. After the Revolution, with the massive growth of the cotton industry, many blacks in the South became agricultural workers, with a few in urban areas turning to the arts, while in the upper South enslaved people worked in cereal agriculture. Blacks in the North faced a long-term crisis as rising immigration from northern Europe forced them out of traditional jobs as domestics and sailors, and crowded them from agricultural labor and work as artisans. By 1830 racism in the North had made African Americans peripheral laborers even as they remained the primary workers in the southern plantation economies.

The arrival of European settlers in North America made necessary large numbers of laborers to build and maintain the fledgling economies. During the first decades of these settlements, Africans or Creoles cleared forests and built fortifications, docks, roads, and housing for the tiny European depots along the Atlantic Coast. Because the English and Dutch did not have slavery at home, black Americans held a variety of statuses. Many, as in New Amsterdam, were enslaved as prisoners of war but later received emancipation and the plots of land they had occupied for generations. In the Chesapeake, blacks also were prisoners of war and indentured servants; they were also free, independent farmers, who paid taxes, voted, served in wars, and were often equal to their white neighbors. In New England blacks were servants and worked in the fisheries, on small farms as laborers, and occasionally as domestics. In the early decades of South Carolina black and white laborers toiled on small farms and in the pine tar industry. As the international slave trade largely bypassed North America in the seventeenth century, the act of forcing Africans into a state of perpetual servitude remained only a peripheral part of the coastal economy until the last quarter of the century. Before that time, blacks enjoyed decades of promised or actual freedom in societies that had slaves but did not fully depend upon them.

Enslavement became the dominant economic and legal status of black life in the late seventeenth century. Whether its origins lay in Peter Stuyvesant's decision in the 1640s to make New Amsterdam the principal slave depot in the American economy, or in the decision by the English Board of Trade following Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 to change the supply of laborers from white indentured servants to enslaved Africans, or in the general demand for tobacco workers in the Chesapeake and indigo laborers in South Carolina, an economic and legal revolution created slave societies and paved the way for the plantation economies of the next century.

By 1740 African Americans and newly arrived Africans had made South Carolina “like a negro country,” with black majorities in the low country parishes working in huge gangs on the rice plantations. Many blacks labored but only a few whites joined them; in Charleston the prosperity built on black labor gave whites immense riches and created a demand for servants. In Charleston blacks could carve out semi-independent lives as artisans or by dominating the truck trade in food and fuel. Overwhelmingly, however, in South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, the economic function for African Americans was to work on staple crops that made the colonies profitable for the Crown and for the colonial gentry.

In the northern cities and countryside, blacks remained core laborers, albeit in smaller numbers and less concentration than in the South. Small farm slavery in which blacks, usually male, were general laborers for farmers characterized the cereal economies of rural Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. In Philadelphia and New York enslaved blacks worked on docks and ships, as domestics, and as assistant artisans. In New England, though there were attempts to create sizable plantations in Connecticut, blacks, fewer in number than in the mid-Atlantic, worked in the seaport economies of the towns and cities and often as farm hands. New England's dominant system was family labor, but blacks frequently joined poor whites as temporary help.

The American Revolution set up the binary system of free and enslaved work in North America. The egalitarian messages of the Revolutionaries combined with growing religious discontent with the morality of slavery to doom the institution in New England and Pennsylvania. The process took longer in New York and New Jersey, home to most northern blacks, but by 1804 gradual emancipation was a fact in every state north of Delaware. The advent of gradual emancipation, which made all northern blacks at least legally free by 1830, did not insure a place in the burgeoning northern economy. Now free, blacks in large cities could create small niches in every artisan skill; however as the industrial revolution transformed most northern skilled labor into a proletariat by 1850, racism and job discrimination meant that blacks constituted only 2 percent of factory labor. Similar negative change occurred in domestic and seafaring work as Irish immigrants seized positions traditionally held by blacks. In rural areas blacks remained important laborers. Freedom took longer in New Jersey, New York's Hudson Valley, and Connecticut. Lacking financial help from their former masters, unable to gain credit, blacks could not purchase land and often served as cottagers, an early form of sharecropping, for their old masters. Many drifted into the cities in fruitless searches for work. The huge influx of immigrants meant that black percentages of northern populations, which had ranged from 5 to 20 percent of the total in the colonial eras, now dropped below 2 percent in the cities and were little higher in the countryside by 1850. Core laborers in the colonial period, blacks were shunted to the side in the profitable northern state economies of the early nineteenth century.

If there was no room for blacks in the northern states, the South, from Virginia to Georgia and west to New Orleans, built its economies around the labor of enslaved African Americans. After nearly being abolished in the 1780s, slavery boomed in the South with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the expansion of white society into Native American territories above the Gulf of Mexico. Virginia became a cereal economy and found large profits in selling excess slaves to the surging economies across the southeast. Charleston, South Carolina, continued its colonial era dependence on rice but took advantage of the twenty-year extension of the international slave trade to import over 100,000 people before its expiration in 1807. While some enslaved Africans remained in South Carolina, many more were sold to would-be gentrified white farmers living in the interior. The Mississippi Valley economies, stagnant in the eighteenth century, boomed with the rise of King Cotton and quickly became dependent on the hard work of tens of thousands of enslaved African Americans. The few cities of the South also used slave labor to man the docks, work as artisans, serve as domestics, and do the work of the slavocracy. If in the northern states civil freedom translated into job discrimination and economic marginality, in the South slavery brought ample work but no freedom whatsoever.

There were vast changes in the economic status and lives of African Americans between 1830 and 1895, most obviously in the abolition of southern slavery in 1865. Despite these changes, there were also significant continuities in African American economic life over this eventful sixty-five-year period. Agriculture and personal service continued to be the principal means of earning a living for the vast majority of African Americans in 1895, as in 1830. And whether African Americans were enslaved or free, racism in all of its diverse forms, including discriminatory legal restrictions, hampered their efforts to make the most of their economic opportunities.

Antebellum Slavery

The 1830 federal census enumerated 2.3 million African Americans in the United States, of whom about 2 million were enslaved. By 1830 the abolition of slavery in almost every northern state had created the familiar antebellum dichotomy of the free North and the Slave South. Most slaves worked in agriculture. Although tobacco in the Chesapeake region, rice in the Georgia and South Carolina lowlands, and sugar in Louisiana were also important crops, by 1830 cotton had become the dominant agricultural product of the Slave South. The cultivation of cotton underwent tremendous expansion during the latter antebellum decades, with annual production rising from 178,000 bales in 1810 to over 4 million bales in 1860. Cotton requires two hundred frostless days a year, which largely confines its cultivation to the Deep South. By 1859 four states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia—produced 79 percent of the nation's cotton output. The growth of the cotton economy bolstered that of the entire Slave South, in large part through raising the price and value of slaves. Between 1790 and 1860 as many as 1 million slaves were either sold or transferred from the Eastern Seaboard to western regions within the Slave South.

Cotton cultivation had relatively few economies of scale, and the crop was grown on both large plantations and relatively small farms. About one-quarter of the 8 million southern whites lived in slaveholding families. In 1860 roughly one-quarter of slaveholders owned from one to nine slaves, about half owned between ten and forty-nine slaves, and one-quarter owned more than fifty slaves. The average size of the slaveholding differed greatly from state to state. The median holding in Louisiana (a state that produced most of the sugar grown in the United States, a crop that required great economies of scale) was 49.3 slaves, and half of all slaves lived on plantations with 175 or more slaves. Slaveholdings in the Upper South were far smaller. In Delaware the median slaveholding per owner was 6.3 on the eve of the Civil War.

Slaves generally worked from dawn to dusk, six days a week. Men, women, and children (as soon as they were capable) all worked in agriculture. The nature and intensity of the work differed from crop to crop and from season to season. Rice cultivators in the Carolina Lowcountry often were given a daily task, upon successful completion of which they might have as much as half a day left for their own pursuits. Sugar and cotton cultivation was generally more regimented. Slaves worked in gangs and under the direct supervision of overseers. Harvests were the time of the most intense work on most plantations. Both field and house slaves, the young and the old, engaged in the time-critical tasks of gathering the crops. Between 50 percent and 75 percent of slaves on large plantations worked as field hands. The remainder worked as domestics or as carpenters, millwrights, or blacksmiths and at other artisanal occupations required on the largely self-sufficient plantations.

Slavery was not confined to agriculture. By the 1850s between 160,000 and 200,000 slaves, about 10 percent of the adult slave population, worked in industry—for example, in textile manufacturing, iron foundries, tobacco processing, and sawmills and gristmills. Some slaves worked in mines, on canals, and on railroads. Often the industrialists themselves directly owned the slaves employed in their operations. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, the largest rolling mill in the South, owned and used the labor of hundreds of slaves. In southern cities most slaves worked as domestics (black women outnumbered men in most cities), while others were dock workers, artisans, and day laborers. Most urban slaves enjoyed more autonomy than their rural counterparts. Frederick Douglass, who before escaping slavery spent much of his childhood in Baltimore, later wrote that “a city slave is almost a free citizen” compared with those in rural areas. But urban slavery was not thriving in the late antebellum period. Between 1840 and 1860 the proportion of slaves in the total population of the eight largest southern cities declined from 18 percent to 7 percent.

In many areas of the South, especially in the Carolina and Georgia lowlands, with their large black majorities, slaves directly participated in the market economy. They raised crops on their garden plots, and from the proceeds they sometimes accumulated property. At times slaves received cash bonuses or trading privileges from their owners. Some of the trading by slaves was known to their masters; other trading, involving the expropriation of property, was surreptitious. Some skilled slaves, especially in urban settings, were able to hire themselves out, paying their masters a percentage of their earnings. Within the oppressive environment of the slave system, the ingenuity of African Americans often found means of economic advancement as a means of asserting their autonomy.

Slavery on the eve of the Civil War was a profitable economic system and, except in some border states (like Delaware), showed little indication that it was in decline. There were almost 4 million slaves in 1860, with a market value to their owners commonly estimated at about $4 billion. Despite the abundant supply of enslaved persons, the result of the natural population increase of southern blacks, the price of a prime field hand had steadily increased over the late antebellum decades, rising from roughly four hundred to six hundred dollars in 1800 to almost three thousand dollars by 1860, an indication of slave owners' voting with their pocketbooks in the future of the slave system. If the North and South had been separate economies in 1860, the southern states would have been the fourth-largest economy in the world. The Civil War brought this system tumbling down, but slavery collapsed through its inhumanity, not because of its inefficiency.

Free Blacks

In 1830 there were roughly 300,000 free blacks in the United States, with about 60 percent of them living in slave states. Free blacks in the South were often concentrated in urban areas, and a large proportion were skilled artisans, such as carpenters and blacksmiths—one-quarter to one-third of free black men in the Upper South and as much as 75 percent in urban areas in the Deep South. Free black women worked as domestics, laundresses, weavers, and spinners. On the whole the economic status of free blacks in the South was somewhat higher than that of their counterparts in the North, in part because of less competition from immigrants. However, free blacks in the South suffered from a tight skein of restrictive legislation that greatly limited their ability to move freely, read or write, enter into certain professions, or meet without supervision. These restrictions prevented free blacks in the South from developing civic and political institutions akin to those in the North—although, as the historian Ira Berlin has suggested, without these outlets they often put their energies into economic advancement. In 1860 there were 16,172 free black property owners in the South, whose real estate holdings were worth over $20 million, or more than $1,250 per property owner, a remarkable achievement in the face of great obstacles.

Some free blacks achieved considerable wealth in certain areas, especially New Orleans and elsewhere in Louisiana. There was a separate mulatto caste in the state that included industrialists, real estate investors, physicians, and composers and constituted a “brown elite.” One free black family in Louisiana owned five hundred slaves on the eve of the Civil War. Despite these extraordinary exceptions, most free blacks in the South, especially in rural areas, were extremely poor, scratching out a meager existence through hunting, foraging, and odd jobs, trying to keep the slave system at arm's length. The anomalous situation of free blacks in the South, especially the Deep South, grew increasingly precarious after Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia in 1831 and the rise of abolitionism in the same decade. The relative freedom of southern free blacks made them suspect, and their role was increasingly circumscribed.

In the North blacks tended to work as laborers or in forms of personal service, such as coachmen, teamsters, hod carriers, stevedores, porters, sailors, barbers, house servants, waiters, cooks, seamstresses, and dressmakers. Free blacks in the North were concentrated in urban areas, and by 1860 about 60 percent of northern blacks lived in cities, making them among the most urbanized ethnic and racial groups in the region. In rural areas farm labor and work as domestics were common occupations. Patterns of pervasive discrimination made it difficult for blacks to enter the skilled professions. Fugitive slaves often found it difficult to practice their accustomed trades in the North. Frederick Douglass, an experienced ship caulker, found that white caulkers in New Bedford, Massachusetts, would not let him work with them when he arrived from Maryland, and he survived for a year performing odd jobs before beginning his abolitionist career.

As Douglass's case shows, it was unusual for northern whites and blacks to work together in the same profession, and this resulted in separate labor markets for black and white men (and, to a lesser extent, for black and white women). If certain careers—for example, those of barbers, hairdressers, and waiters—were identified with African Americans, many vocational choices were not available, especially in burgeoning areas of industry such as textiles, iron and steel, and glassmaking. There were few state or municipal government jobs for blacks, with teachers in segregated black schools being one of the few exceptions. In New York City in 1860 only 10 percent of blacks worked in skilled professions, a much lower figure than for free blacks in southern cities.

One consequence of this pervasive discrimination was that many free blacks became self-employed entrepreneurs, such as dealers in secondhand clothing (this had been the militant abolitionist David Walker's occupation in Boston), hucksters of oysters, or purveyors of coal. Most self-employed blacks remained petty entrepreneurs, but some achieved great success, such as the hairdresser Pierre Toussaint in New York City, the sailmaker James Forten in Philadelphia, and Thomas Downing, the proprietor of a famous restaurant in Manhattan. Furthermore, despite discrimination, blacks in the North could enter professions closed to them in the South. By 1860 there were northern black printers, typesetters, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and even a few officeholders.

Post-Emancipation Agriculture

As the slave system crumbled in 1865, blacks in the South rejoiced at their freedom and worried about their future. In many ways their economic opportunities were bleak. In the immediate aftermath of Emancipation many southern states passed black codes that severely restricted the economic freedom of the former slaves. In Mississippi, for example, freedpersons were prohibited from owning farmland. They were also banned from leaving their employers for the duration of their labor contracts—and any black without a labor contract could be arrested and assigned to work. The black codes in their harshest forms were soon repealed, but some of their provisions lingered in the law codes for many decades, and others were reintroduced after the end of Reconstruction. Other economic problems abounded. With the failure of land reform, most slaves were now landless and without property. The economy of the South had been devastated by the Civil War. Between 1860 and 1870 the value of all real property (which excluded the loss in slave property) had declined by 30 percent, and in the latter year the output of all staple crops stood below their prewar levels.

A number of different systems of agricultural work developed after the Civil War. In many places in the South, the desire by former slaves for greater work autonomy, as well as the long-term insolvency of many planters, led to the development of a system of sharecropping, in which individual or small groups of blacks would work a parcel of land in return for a percentage of the crop. In the sharecropping system, tenant farmers were paid once a year, after the crops were harvested. The “settlin' time” had much potential for exploitation by landowners, who would determine the size of the payment and subtract from that whatever debts the sharecropper had accumulated in the course of the year. Many sharecroppers, unable to earn enough to cover their debts, found themselves in a condition of debt peonage, reinforced by laws that prohibited tenant farmers who owed debts from leaving the land. A tenure similar to sharecropping was land rental for an agreed-upon fee (such as several bales of cotton). Renters, unlike sharecroppers, owned their crops outright. In 1890 about three-quarters of black farmers in the South either rented or sharecropped.

There were other forms of agricultural land tenure. Some farm laborers, especially on large sugar plantations in Louisiana, worked for regular wages. In the decades after the Civil War a growing number of blacks owned their farms. In Georgia in 1900, for instance, 14 percent of all black farmers owned their own farms. However, much of the farmland purchased by black farmers was in small plots and on marginal land, and their holdings were often precarious, providing only the appearance of economic independence.

Whatever the form of land tenure, the vast majority of black agricultural laborers from 1865 to 1890 were dependent on white landowners and deeply impoverished. Black women living on farms often had two jobs—the care and feeding of their families and whatever farm work needed to be done. Rosina Hoard, born in 1859, told an interviewer late in her life, “I had my house work and de cookin' to do and to look after the chillum, but I'd go out and still pick my two hunnert pounds ob cotton a day.”

Nonagricultural Labor

The 1890 census recorded occupations for about 3 million African Americans, representing most of the nation's adult black population. About 57 percent worked in agriculture and other extractive industries, compared with 40 percent for the population as a whole. African Americans were also overrepresented in domestic and personal service, which accounted for 31 percent of black workers, in contrast to 19 percent of all workers. The occupational patterns of African Americans reflected both the continuation of traditional forms of employment and pervasive patterns of discrimination. Domestic and personal service was by far the largest category of nonagricultural work. Women slightly outnumbered men in this category in the 1890 census. For black women, especially in urban settings, domestic service was the predominant form of work. For example, 98 percent of black female wage earners in Atlanta in 1880 were domestics.

Younger single women tended to work in the houses of their white employers as maids or nurses. Older women often worked as cooks or laundresses. Washerwomen generally worked from home, since laundry work could be interspersed with child care and other domestic duties. The wages of domestics in the South ranged from about four to eight dollars a month, and most domestics worked at least six days a week, from morning to night.

Outside the South, African Americans also continued to work in domestic and personal service in large numbers, but in some occupations they found themselves increasingly crowded out of the main categories by competition from immigrants on the one hand and a decline in white patronage on the other. New racial attitudes that discouraged relatively “intimate” personal contact between the races closed down some of the traditional avenues for black petty entrepreneurship, such as barbering and food service. For instance, in the mid-nineteenth century blacks ran a large percentage of the barbershops catering to whites in cities such as Philadelphia or New York. By the early twentieth century this was not the case. Shut out of the larger market, black businesses were increasingly limited to a black clientele.

Apart from agriculture and personal and domestic service, African Americans were substantially underrepresented. Most critically, in the 1890 census only 5 percent of blacks worked in manufacturing and mechanical industries, whereas 22 percent of all American workers had jobs in heavy industry. With only a few significant exceptions, African Americans were shut out of work opportunities in the industrializing America of the late nineteenth century. Among the areas of industrial and semi-industrial employment open to African Americans were railroad construction in the South (folklorists still debate whether the famous legend of John Henry is based on actual events), lumber-mill and turpentine operations in the Deep South, and the nonfarm tobacco industry in the Upper South. But in the industrial North, African Americans were largely absent from industries as diverse as iron and steel manufacture, meatpacking, and the garment, chemical, and skilled construction industries. Their concentration in nonunionized and “unskilled” employment meant that as new waves of European immigrants arrived in urban areas, the relative position of African Americans declined, confined as they were largely to nonunion and low-paying work. What the historian Roger Lane has written of late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia can be extended to urban areas throughout the country, namely, that “most blacks were still doing the kind of jobs that had been done by the bottom layer of urban society in the Middle Ages.”

Atop the vocational pyramid in black America in the late nineteenth century was a small group of entrepreneurs and professionals. A few rare individuals had considerable success as bankers, real estate investors, or owners of insurance companies. At the end of the period a few women were beginning to make considerable fortunes in the hair care industry. In the 1890 census almost thirty-four thousand African Americans were classified as professionals. Of those people, more than one-third were in the clergy, and an additional seven thousand were teachers, along with a scattering of lawyers, doctors, and dentists. Almost all African American professionals worked within the internal African American economy.

The economic situation of black America in 1895 was in many ways bleak. The efforts at progress made in many areas of economic life were increasingly limited by the tightening hand of Jim Crow and economic exclusion. Black leaders of the time expressed a range of views on how best to address the situation. By far the most influential was the position adopted by the educator Booker T. Washington, which received its most famous statement in September 1895 in his so-called Atlanta Compromise speech. At the core of Washington's view of race was his positive evaluation of the economic progress of southern blacks. Starting with nothing in the way of goods and property, Washington argued, they had fashioned their own economic progress and now numbered among their ranks entrepreneurs, publishers, editors, and bankers.

Whatever one thinks of Washington's broader views, he was surely correct to praise the tenacity and ingenuity of African Americans seeking economic self-advancement in the decades after the Civil War. His overall message was one of caution and conservatism. He urged blacks to keep in check their demands for equality under the law or extravagant dreams of economic advancement. He also urged blacks to remain in the South, where they would face less competition from new immigrants. Most blacks, Washington argued, were likely to be manual laborers for the foreseeable future and therefore needed to learn how to do those jobs in the most effective manner.

Washington's message that blacks make the best of a bad economic and disastrous political situation was subtler than many critics suppose, but in time many would come to question his view that economic advancement for blacks could be separated from their need for civic and political equality. In many ways Washington's sobering view of the political and economic realities that faced black southerners in 1895 was a cry of despair disguised in optimistic platitudes. Of all of Washington's exhortations in the Atlanta Compromise speech to his fellow blacks, it was no doubt the suggestion that “it is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top” that they found the easiest to follow.

See also Discrimination; Douglass, Frederick; Downing, George Thomas; Entrepreneurs, Forten, James; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Freedmen; Freedmen's Bureau; Gender; Jim Crow Car Laws; Laws and Legislation; Mulattoes; Racism; Reconstruction; Sharecropping; Slavery; Urbanization; Washington, Booker T.; and Work.

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