Many plantations used a standard accounting system described in Thomas Affleck’s Plantation Record and Account Books. These books contained several advanced techniques, including instructions on how to calculate depreciation. Some scholars think depreciation took off with the railroads in the late 19th century. But by the 1840s planters were depreciating their slaves. They appraised their inventory at market value, compared that with its past market value to assess appreciation or depreciation, calculated an allowance for interest, and used this to determine their capital costs. In a sense they were marking slaves to market. It’s really as sophisticated as what most firms do today.
Slaveholders also developed an equivalence unit called “the prime field hand.” They assigned certain capabilities to the prime hand, such as expected production per day. Workers were measured against this standard and given values such as “half hand” and “quarter hand.” Owners used these units as benchmarks across plantations. If one slaveholder reported that he had 13 hands who were the equivalent of 10 prime hands, other slaveholders would have known exactly what that meant in terms of production.
HBR: Considering the context, these techniques seem disturbingly cold and dehumanizing.
It’s completely chilling. Many of these planters were absentee owners. So you imagine them in London, getting reports in the mail about their plantations and just crunching the numbers over lunch, not so different from modern board members. It’s so easy for someone at a long distance to forget about the humanity of the labor. Think of the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh earlier this year.
HBR: Is there a direct link between slave management and Frederick Taylor?
I’m researching that. Plantations were tied reasonably directly to the types of textile mills that figure in the prehistory of scientific management—cotton came from plantations. This is not new; scholars have been debating the links between slavery and the Industrial Revolution for years. Whether there is a more direct link is still unclear. Right now I’m studying two of Taylor’s close associates who were born on plantations, including Henry Laurence Gantt, inventor of the Gantt chart.
HBR: How have these account books stayed hidden for so long?
Part of it is a library thing. Someone studying accounting wouldn’t come across Thomas Affleck’s books because they’re not catalogued as accounting manuals. They’re part of individual plantations’ records. But there’s also a disciplinary divide between business history and southern history. Historians of slavery have long known about these records and have used them to reconstruct slaves’ day-to-day lives. But very few scholars who used them had ever looked at northern account books, so they didn’t know how remarkable the records were. I learned about them because a mentor of mine who studies slavery suggested I look at them.