ery, the caste system, and color prejudice into American custom and law."2
Consequently, the institution of slavery, wherever it appeared throughout the South, constituted a crucial part of a larger social system. Despite differences in geography, in their size and in crops they grew, as well as differences among states in the regulations that governed slavery, plantations were similar from region to region within the Old South. Similar constraints on the techniques necessary in employing slave labor, and in addressing slaves as social individuals who could interact and reproduce, dictated the emergence of a more or less uniform pattern for slavery within the context of plantation life.3
The treatment of slavery as an social institution meshes with its treatment as an economic institution. It is possible that, as some authorities have claimed, slavery outlived its economic usefulness. In the pre war years, pro slavery writers used the supposed economic marginality of slavery to demonstrate that its survival depended upon the inability of blacks to live as free citizens. Current evidence suggests that, although the economic feasibility of slavery was waning during the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of plantation owners were still operating in their own economic interest in continuing to use black slaves as their main source of labor.4 The economic importance of slaves explains, in some respects, both how they were treated and the multi dimensional role they played on the plantation.
Because slavery in the antebellum South was primarily a system of labor, the slaveowner attended closely to the efficient deployment of his labor force. Although both the ideology and the institution of slavery are dehumanizing, those responsible for using slaves as laborers did not wantonly ignore the importance of human motives and subjective perceptions in determining the quantity and quality of slaves' wor...