Carville Earle, "A Staple Interpretation of Slavery and Free Labor," Geographical Review LXVIII (1978): 51-65.

SYNOPSIS:

Earle argues that slavery was economically effective only when applied to staple crops such as cotton and tobacco. He distinguishes between the intensive need to attend to these staple crops and other crops such as wheat which demanded intense bursts of attendance for short durations. Slavery was efficient for the former and wage workers for the latter. Earle traces the change in agricultural production in the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the eighteenth century from tobacco to wheat and in the Lower Midwest in the nineteenth century from wheat to corn. Earle characterizes corn as a crop requiring fairly intense cultivation and as easily adaptable to the efficiencies of slave labor. He argues that in the Lower Midwest the transition to corn brought with it pressure to use slave labor in these border states and made the region a key battleground over slavery in the 1850s.

EXCERPT:

"Slavery was headed to the North in the wake of a corn economy." (52)

"The decisive factor in the farmer's choice of either slave or free labor came down to the annual labor requirements of his staple crop: crops such as wheat, which required only a few weeks of attention, lent themselves to wage labor; whereas crops such as tobacco or cotton, which demanded sustained attention during a long growing season, lent themselves to slave labor." (51)

"The economically rational antebellum wheat farmer almost always employed wage labor because the few days of labor required times the daily wage rate usually fell below the cost of slaves." (55)

"Wheat was produced more efficiently with freemen than with slaves." (56)

"By the mid-1850s, slave labor probably was less costly than free labor in the production of corn, a multiple-day staple crop." (62)

RELATIONSHIP:

We agree with Earle that slavery was used across a range of crops, especially corn. While wheat required fewer man-hours and was not as efficiently produced with slave labor, its production was only part of a larger economy in Augusta. Earle's calculation of slavery's utility in wheat production does correspond to our findings. We found that the most successful Augusta plantations were slave-based and concentrated in relatively higher wheat production, but that wheat production on average in Augusta was not nearly as productive as in Franklin. In corn production, a more labor-intensive crop, Augusta's farmers, both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, were far more productive than their Franklin counterparts.

"On a per capita basis, Franklin farmers grew far less corn and more wheat than their counterparts in Augusta, and their commitment to wheat was seen by many as both the symbol of the North's wealth and the evidence of its superior labor system."

"The richest farm households in Augusta, however, had a high correlation with relatively high wheat production and low corn production, and slavery enabled even greater success on these farms."