Human Capital Interview Summary

Slavery has been a major component of human civilization all throughout history. People turn to slavery for many reasons, such as fear of different ethnicities and fear that these new foreign people will take over land that is not theirs. The conditions under which slaves work and live varies greatly by the time and location of which the slaves lived. Slaves play a major role in their society and contribute greatly to their communities, often forming one of the largest masses of the population. Though the accuracy of the information from primary sources may be tainted with exaggeration and bias, it is easy to deduce from primary works the treatment of slaves and the working and living conditions surrounding them. According to many sources,

Plantation owners were acknowledged as the economical, social, and political elite in southern society. According to the textbook, plantation owners intimately tied their authority and power to the ownership of slaves. They masked their authority with an aura of mastery and gentility while resting their economic power on family relations.

These assumptions include: farmers had to compete with industries for workers; the emancipation of slaves left farmers with no workforce, forcing them into industry jobs; and income taxes drove farmers into debt. After our hypothesis was written, we consulted Mr. Nelson on advice in moving forward. With him, we created a list of variables to focus on: taxes, land, population, and crop production. We chose to focus on Al Valorem Taxes, as a farmer’s business depends on their land. We also chose to focus on cotton production because cotton farms were the most successful and thus biggest of farms. We filtered through data from the National Archives and U.S. Census Bureau to separate data related to these variables, and then created a separate graph for each topic. After analyzing the data trends, we researched the reasons behind these trends, and then looked for other problems related to our argument that we did not include in our assumptions.

Fogel and Engerman´s ¨The Quality of Slave Labor and Racism¨ explains the economics behind slavery and which methods produced the most accurate and efficient results. Fogel and Engerman explained that one of the most important technological advances within the agricultural sector of the South after 1800 was in the realm of management, particularly in the “development of organizational methods which permitted southern planters to capture the potential benefits of economies of large scale operation.” (Fogel 278). On the plantations everything was setup to produce the best results, it was said it was organized as in a factory. Everybody was assigned to a certain tasks, that would keep him busy throughout the year. The various hands on a plantation were set up in gangs or teams which consisted of five different

“Planter not only held the majority of slaves, but they controlled the most fertile land, enjoyed the highest incomes, and dominated the state and local offices and the leadership of both political parties” (Foner 411). There were fewer than forty-thousand families that possessed about twenty or more slaves that qualified them as planters. There were also fewer than two-thousand families owned about a hundred slaves or more. The ownership of slaves provided the route to wealth, status, and influence. Slavery was the profit-making system, and slave-owners kept a close watch on world priced for their products to invested in enterprises such as railroads and canals.

There was a growing demand for workers in the cultivation of these profitable crops such as tobacco, rice, sugar cane and cotton specifically, which was in large demand especially after the invention of the cotton gin. However, “ The lust for profits led southerners to ignore concerns over the morality of slavery” ( Tindall & Shi 361). The severe savagery and racism that followed with the quest for profit was just another conflict over the expansion that led to the Civil War. The horrendous treatment of slaves in the Old South was exposed in a variety of articles and readings, one being the famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that supported abolition, “ Exposé’s of the dark side of southern culture portrayed the planters as arrogant aristocrats who raped enslaved women, brutalized slaves, and lorded over their communities with haughty disdain” (Tindall and Shi 361 ). Slavery became a large source of this mass economic development, so it is no surprise that “ the twelve richest countries in the U.S. by 1860 were all in the South” (Tindall & Shi 365). While history was created by changes in the economy and the political realm, it is the social problems expansion created that are most remembered regarding

Between 1800 and 1865, slaves lived in the Southern States and worked in the tobacco, wheat, rice, corn and cotton plantations. Essentially, slavery was an economic institution with far-reaching benefits to slaveholders, since the value of slave labor was considerably more than the cost of their maintenance. Demands for democratization, respect for human dignity and American Civil War presented a major turning point in the institution of slavery as farmers turned to lesser labor-intensive production methods such as the use of Eli Whitney 's Cotton Gin. This paper analyzes different ways in which institution of Slavery affected the development of American South between 1800 & 1865, and the lives of people living in the region. In doing so the paper considers economic, political, social and cultural implications of the institution.

(Cobb, 2015) The south also use one crop plantations, this system was based on agricultural mass production usually a few staple products grow on large plantations such as cotton, tobacco, sugar rice indigo. With the one crop plantation system, slaves was expropriated, while white benefits from crops that were being grown and sold. The term planter has no universally accepted definition but historically in the, Antebellum south Planter generally defines as a person owning property and twenty or more slaves. (Boudless, 2014) It was too hard and expensive for planter (land owner) to grow the crops for themselves to make a decent living. Slaves rights was oppress through free enslave labor to perform and learn mass production distribution. Whites and indenture servant’s and Indians fail to comply for different reason, causing whites to enslave Africans. Slavery was use prominent in the sixteen thorough eighteen century in the south, slaves worked in the fields of the plantations and inside master homes. Plantation economy reap economical off the scale but have historically relied on slavery labor to accomplished profitability particular in the American south. (Boudless, 2014) With slaves doing all the worked, land owner had more fluctuation to experiment and with the crop,

Throughout the history of our United States, many factors have contributed to the ultimate growth and development of the magnitude of our present-day economy. None, however, could be the compared to the size of the impact attributed to the institution of slavery in the Antebellum South during the 1800’s. And although slavery is considered today to be “the most inhumane institution,” there is no denying the fact that its existence substantially benefitted the prosperity of the American economy during the time of its practice. The account of one man during this time, a slave, shows us another glimpse into the period which was so heavily influenced by slavery and another point of view from which we can interpret and hope to use in order to understand

The South’s agriculture was predominantly dependent on slave labor prior to the Civil War. Although the North continued to industrialize and improve its technology to advance their farming, the South stuck to their tradition of using slaves, which proved to be inefficient. By 1860, the productivity of the North was almost double of that of the South, and the reason is revealed in this article. When he was traveling short distances, he found the slaves to be completely inefficient. Only few slaves on a farm were capable of working for their masters, others were often too young, too old, or too ill to work. The white men didn’t like work because of their belief that work was meant for slaves, and the slaves that worked never gave their best effort, for they were lacking

One of the plantation records describes a servant working for three years to “… teach two of your negroes to make potts and dripps..." (43) under the agreement between the plantation manager & the potter. During this period, servants were used to teach slaves skills that were needed in the plantation. Although the servants were going to get replaced by slaves due to cheap labor, they obeyed for whoever they were working for just for money. On (page 44), the author displays statistical data used to represent the number of male servants & slaves that worked on the plantation during the year of 1768 on Table 1. The table portrays the trend of the slaves overtaking the servants’ population and job wise as the slaves were more in number & more involved with jobs in the plantation rather than the servants were. This would display the overturning of the indenture system as many owners desired slaves due to their cheap costs rather than servants & the servant’s skills that were being taught to

The past couple semesters we have focused on theories, techniques, role-plays, etc. However, I think learning more about the human services profession as a whole is extremely beneficial. For this assignment, I conducted an interview with a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW) named Joshua Feinberg at Chestnut Ridge Hospital. Joshua has been working as a social worker for four years. He enjoys the counseling aspect more than anything as being a social worker. At Chestnut Ridge Hospital, LICSW are technically called a “Clinical Therapist”. They are called clinical therapists because they mostly do counseling at this facility. During the course of the interview, the questions focused on the professional roles, positives, negatives,

[In 1830, the United States’ annual production of cotton was about 750,000 bales. By 1850, when Eli Whitney’s cotton gin had been widely adopted across the South, the amount of cotton produced rose to an incredible 2.85 million bales, the vast majority of the production of which was focused in the South. The efficiency of the gin increased the profitability associated with planting large amounts of cotton. The fact that the cotton gin allowed for much faster processing led to the establishment of enormous plantations in the southern United States. These plantations grew to sizes that would have been impossible to maintain prior to the introduction of the cotton

The Cotton Gin transformed the slaved based South completely in the early 1800’s; such an invention drew plantation owners away from agricultural crops and focused their attention on cotton. With such a rising interest in cotton, slaves were then in high demand to preform the laboring process of this cash crop. The South eventually became highly dependent on cotton, and in

Such a dramatic switch as the one from indentured servants to slaves was not the only transformation in American slavery. Slaves underwent many integral changes as the years of servitude progressed. The slave-owner relationship directly represented how times changed for slaves while working. As they were brought over to America and were in culture shock, they were often treated like absolute dirt. The inferiority of slaves is illustrated as Kolchin states that “It was easy to look upon Africans in an instrumental manner: they were “savages” imported to work, and few planters expressed much interest in their lives, except for a lively concern with training them in that work or securing their obedience (p. 59).” As time progressed however, and less slaves were directly from Africa, the ideology towards slaves changed. Kolchin writes that “Slave owners were changing too: just as the slaves were becoming America-born, so, too, were the masters (p.59).” Slave owners started to look at slaves at as people instead of objects. This was a very monumental step in slavery. Slaves began to gain more freedoms from their masters. These freedoms included religious Sundays off, family visitations, and the ability to make money on the side. While some slaves were still met with the hardships of harsh southern slave owners beating them, as time went on, slaves became more of