The management of slaves formed an integral part of the management of the Southern plantation as a whole. Aside from questions of ethics and morals, the economic value of using slaves as a labor force in the South has been a matter of controversy. Nevertheless, both agricultural production and the running of plantation households depended heavily on the labor of black slaves. The structure of plantation life presupposed the organization of slaves into efficient work units under the authority of white men, and in some cases white women. The effective management of the plantation included means foracquiring additional slaves, and for selling surplus slaves or their labor. In addition, it included institutions designed to control the the social relations of slaves among themselves, and for deciding the disposition of the children born to slaves. Even in the antebellum South, many perceived slavery as a dirty business, but it was a business, nevertheless, a "peculiar institution"1 with its own peculiar techniques.
The plantation economy of the antebellum South had evolved from practices that began early in the process of colonization. The standard practice of employing both black and white bondsmen as laborers of essentially equal status changed in the late seventeenth century. By the early eighteenth century, slavery had become a social institution that, through force of law and custom, involved a distinction between white and black servants. Blacks, who had been brought to America involuntary and who were generally not protected by written agreements limiting the period of their servitude, were designated as chattel and permanently consigned to their owners as property. In addition to degrading blacks on racial grounds, the institution of slavery erected a permanent barrier between those whites who could afford to own slaves and those who could not. "Thus, the master class, for its own purposes, wrote chattel slav...