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Prices of Antebellum American Slaves

Controlling for inflation, the antebellum period from 1815 to 1860 saw a dramatic increase in slave prices. This price increase was, for the most part, connected to cotton prices on the global market, and as cotton prices rose so did slave prices. However, in the 1850’s, as a result of the increasing speculative nature of the market, “slave prices in the Deep South became unmoored from cotton prices, indicating that enslaved people were being purchased not so much for the value of their labor products as for how much they could bring at auction in six months or a year.” Indeed, the unmoored price increase was so steady, that Fogel and Engerman initially argued that if the Civil War had not happened, slave prices would have increased even more, an average of more than 50 percent by 1890.

Slave pricing was an individual endeavor in which broad parameters were set by the perceived market value of a given individual down to the hundreds of dollars. The more specific amount was set by a host of other minute details. The vital information of an enslaved individual—the age, sex, and height particularly—set a broad price range at a given moment. Scholars such as Daina Ramey Berry and Caitlin Rosenthal have argued that the price of an enslaved person appreciated and depreciated depending on these factors and that the pricing of enslaved people, particularly women, was made “in much the same way that the railroads were beginning to value trains and tracks” in modern accounting techniques. Not only were enslaved people priced in life, but also in preconception and death. This “ghost value” allowed slave traders across the South to price women based on their reproductive potential as well as the dead for their value in a growing national cadaver trade. In life, the minutiae of value ranged within these broad parameters—dollars and cents were determined not only by the decisions of slave traders to “hold out for top prices” or sell immediately upon entering the market, but also within the market by intrusive and violent personal examinations. Enslaved men, women, and children alike were scoured for any ‘physical’ or ‘mental’ defects. These examinations forced enslaved people to expose themselves, from the insides of their mouths to their genitalia, as traders, speculators, and buyers haggled over scars and other ‘defects’ that indicated misbehavior, rebelliousness, or an incapacity to work.

As the number of people forced into the trade increased as the antebellum period progressed, prices were increasingly categorized into informal grades among buyers and sellers. In developing this market language, “Number 1” or “Prime” individuals indicated those who would fetch the highest price. These grades continued numerically until they reached a ‘refuse’ or ‘trash’ grade—usually reserved for persons with disabilities, infants, and the elderly. Such grading reflected the increasingly speculative nature of the slave market and slave prices, and even as there were no formal institutions governing the latter, the former came under scrutiny by local and state governments. Speculators in enslaved people and slave traders more generally were seen and depicted as stock characters and isolated marginal scapegoats in Southern slave society’s culture. Historians such as Michael Tadman argue that making these stock characters served a broader purpose of legitimizing the antebellum interstate slave trade by insulating the family separations and dehumanization endemic to slave trading into one figure, rather than as a societal practice with the participation of all. As Tadman argues, slave traders were well-integrated into Southern society, often serving as leading businessmen and politicians. The slave market, then, lay at the core of Southern society through the application of the ‘chattel principle,’ or the reflex to assign a person a price.

Despite the profound impact that traders and speculators alike had on slave prices through their participation in slave trading and their examinations of enslaved people, broader market fluctuations beyond any individual control ultimately governed the slave market. The conditions of the market led to shocks in the supply and demand of slaves, which in turn changed prices. For example, slaves became more expensive after 1808, when no more could be imported from Africa or the Caribbean. The market for the products of their work also affected slaves' economic value as long as cotton and slave prices interacted with one another: demand for slaves fell with the price of cotton in 1840 in wake of the Panic of 1837 and ensuing depression. Anticipation of changes also had a huge influence on prices. As the American Civil War progressed, there was great doubt that slavery would continue to be legal, and prime males in New Orleans were sold at $1,116 by 1862 as opposed to $1,381 in 1861.

The increasingly speculative nature of the market and especially rising slave prices in the dozen years leading up to secession and civil war led to political tensions between Upper South states such as Virginia and North Carolina and the ‘Lower South’ states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and later Texas. These conflicts took the form of debates on re-opening the Atlantic slave trade in the late 1850’s and other “perceived long-term consequences” of the market and of slavery in general. Not only was there the perception that increased prices led to an increasingly narrow slaveholding class, but the perceived drain on the Upper South’s enslaved population led to Lower South states questioning the loyalty of the Upper South to slavery as an institution, as the sectional crisis intensified between 1856 and the election of 1860. In order to relieve both the problem of high prices and perceived disloyalty, commentators in the Lower South began to increasingly agitate for expansion and annexation of new territory (particularly in Cuba and Nicaragua) and re-open the Atlantic slave trade, which had been banned in 1808. Ultimately, these efforts failed to attract support beyond Lower South Fire-Eaters, but they represented the power that the slave market held over Southern slave society.