What was the difference between slave labour and free labour?
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Estimates of the cost of culture by free labor, compared to slave labor, were necessarily conjectural, and therefore, uncertain, and usually of but little exactness. By one pre-war estimate slave labor was totally unprofitable when used for cultivating grain crops. By one estimate the average first-class laborer in Louisiana in the 1870s would earn $400 a year in some sections of the State. The cost of that man before the war to the planter was not over $100 a year. Therefore the planter was paying four times the cost of the former slave labor.
In all standard works upon political economy, the institution of slavery has been considered from this narrow point of view, and, for the most part, they concur in maintaining the negative, that under all circumstances it is less advantageous to employ slave than free labor. The folly of this notion is demonstrated by the fact that throughout the entire south there was no instance of a large plantation cultivated by hired free labor. Wherever agriculture was sufficiently profitable to induce large investments of capital the labor of slaves was preferred, and it was only the small farms in the south which were worked by free labor, generally by that of the owner and his sons. The universal preference given to slave labor in agricultural enterprises was due to several causes.
In the first place, it was on hand, and from generation to generation the habit of cultivating the earth by servile labor had become invincible. The slaves could not be employed conveniently and extensively in other pursuits, which require more intelligence, and which make it necessary to collect them together in dangerously large numbers; and there was, besides, little demand for slave labor except on the plantations.