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3. “there Are objections to Black and White, but one Must Be Chosen” Managing Farms and Farmhands in Antebellum Maryland Between 1845 and 1847, Arthur W. Machen, a slaveholder in Fairfax County, Virginia, peppered his father with questions about the composition of his workforce. Like other landowners in this northern Virginia county, Machen was reeling from economic reverses. Soil exhaustion, languishing commodity markets, and increased competition from western wheat producers had reduced many area farmers to a hardscrabble existence. Amid these catastrophes, Machen attempted to salvage his fortunes by restructuring his labor force. His growing family and five slaves could handle some of the routine chores, he reckoned, but he worried about the additional hands that would be needed over the course of the year. “What can be done?” Machen asked his father. He knew that it was imperative to “reduce my force, change its description, or to divide the profit of the farm with someone who, under a prescribed system, would defray the entire cost of cultivation,” but the choice among slaves, tenant farmers, and free laborers proved vexatious. Hired slaves were an option, but he feared that they would “ruin” his slaves’ morale. Tenants or sharecroppers could be engaged, but Machen believed that the depressed market would make such arrangements unprofitable. White farmhands were available, but “the universal testimony of farmers is that a white hand worth having is the rarest of characters.” Moreover, his father feared that whites—especially Irishmen —might refuse to work alongside blacks. Exasperated, Machen concluded, “There are objections to black and white, but one must be chosen.”1 In theory, the decision should have been straightforward. While Machen pondered the composition of his workforce, a steady drumbeat of agricultural 92 chapter 3 reformers and political economists was declaring that slavery was incompatible with the diversified agriculture practiced on the farms and small plantations of the Upper South. “There is but one element in the agriculture of Maryland to which slavery is attached with any affinity, and that is tobacco culture,” proclaimed antislavery writer John L. Carey in 1845. “The rude hands of servile labor” could wield hoes on tobacco plantations, but they could not plow the wheat fields, tend the livestock, or operate the machinery on farms like Machen ’s.2 Unlike free laborers, slaves lacked the “delicacy of touch” necessary for more complicated operations. “In grain growing districts, counties where a scientific agriculture prevails, where the mind of man as well as the hands of labor find employment in the culture of the ground, the rearing of trees, the improvement of breeds of cattle, horses, and swine,” Carey contended, “there slavery cannot dwell. It is not compatible with such scenes.”3 Many historians have echoed this argument, maintaining that slavery and wheat production were an imperfect fit. “The economically rational antebellum wheat farmer almost always employed wage labor,” concludes historical geographer Carville V. Earle, because the crop’s seasonal labor requirements made hired farmhands “decidedly cheaper and more efficient than slaves.”4 Still, Machen’s dilemma should give us pause. Although he had declared that one system of labor discipline “must be chosen,” Machen was in fact promiscuous when it came to constructing his force. Between 1843 and 1850, he employed hired slaves, free black and white farmhands who labored under annual and short-term contracts, and a welter of day laborers.5 Each system of labor discipline had its flaws, but like an alchemist, Machen struggled to fuse them into an efficient, productive whole. Machen’s was not the only dissenting voice against the emerging free labor orthodoxy. Washington County planter John Blackford was disillusioned with workers of all stripes. Having dealt with drunken farmhands, both free and enslaved, and witnessed their shoddy work, he condemned both in the same breath, blasting his “lazy worthless negroes” and his hired hands, whom he called “inattentive disinterested characters.”6 Some farmers expressed a strong preference for bound labor. James P. Machen, who managed the family farm during the 1850s, made extensive use of hired slaves. He grumbled about the “exorbitantly high” wages they commanded but hastened to add that “labor of some kind must be had, and can any better and cheaper than slave be obtained?”7 Others steered a middle course between slavery and free labor, creating modified forms of slavery that were more responsive to the region’s changeable labor needs. Harford County farmer Ramsey McHenry proposed purchasing an “estate of large extent in the northern part of Maryland” and [3...

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