Some Characteristics of the Alabama Slave Population in 1850

Abstract

D IFFERENCES in density and composition of a population can generally be explained by variations in economic opportunity from area to area or by differences in the stage of economic development. Such discrepancies are normal manifestations of population mobility within a nominally free society. However, the ante bellum slave population of the United States was not subject to these free-society controls, and its distribution and composition should have principally reflected control of the owner class. If this owner class regarded the slave only as a unit of labor, as the present-day farmer regards his tractor, there should have been a pronounced relationship between the type of economic activity, its organization and productivity, and the type of slave labor force. A slave, however, was more than a unit of labor. His creation was subject to inherent biological vagaries, his productive capacity changed with age, and his power of self-reproduction was an asset not yet duplicated by the John Deere factory. Even the most callous slaveowner must subconsciously have admitted that his labor force was human, and that he himself was subject to such human frailties as the desire for status symbols and services beyond the demands of necessity. Although these human qualities of both slave and owner may have decreased the interrelation between slave-population characteristics and the physiographic and economic factors of productivity, there should have remained, nevertheless, distributional and compositional patterns that can be explained only by the economic verities of an economy in which one segment of the population arbitrarily controlled another. In agriculture, which engaged about 78 per cent of the slave labor force,' such control should have concentrated the best units of labor on the most productive units of land. For a test of this thesis, the slave population of Alabama in 1850 has been analyzed. Alabama was chosen as a type study because it possesses distinctly diversified physiographic regions (Fig. 2), and because the agricultural pro-