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5. Buyers and Sellers: Work and Economy of the Slaves
- Vanderbilt University Press
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109 Chapter 5 Buyers and Sellers Work and Economy of the Slaves Of this branch of revenue the negroes come in for a share, and there is scarcely a male or female adult slave, that has not his hog. —Abiel Abbot L abor was the central defining point of the slave system on coffee plantations , as it was on other types of farms. Work most certainly dominated much of the time and therefore the lives of slaves. The labor they performed for their masters, though, did not consume their attention completely. This can be seen in the diversity of activities, including various kinds of work, that slaves performed for themselves. While there are numerous accounts of the toil extracted by slaveholders from their workers, the base of information regarding the self-directed labor of the enslaved is fragmentary. As a result, scholars have given little attention to the labor slaves engaged in outside of the domain of their masters, which they entered into for remuneration.1 Often the assumption has been that slaves did not enter into the monetary or trade economy and that most of their time was controlled by slaveholders, who used them for forced unpaid labor. Rebecca Scott argues that contrary to earlier views, slaves participated in the economy through their labor and production on provision grounds (conucos).2 Some of the most compelling evidence that slaves were creating their own economy and also participating in the wider system is the reported accrual of money by slaves. Many of the works on plantation economy have focused on broader aspects of the system, such as the sugar or coffee complex, railroads, or imports and exports .3 As a result, many of the ways that the enslaved interacted with the formal economy do not appear in these accounts. Furthermore, much of the slaves’ economic activities went unrecorded. The economic life of Africans on coffee farms was varied, as they bought, sold, and traded with passing merchants and with the farm owner or supervisor, as well as with fellow slaves. Their interactions were often off the books, and as a result, their contributions to the economy have been difficult to document and thus overlooked. Though their individual contributions may have been small, collectively they contributed to an internal economy that was more vibrant than has often been understood. For slaves to create this secondary informal economy, they needed time to grow or make goods to sell, and also time to engage in trading. As we have seen, the cafetal provided slaves more 110 Shade-Grown Slavery time than many other environments on the island. As Scott notes, one of the main foundations of slave economy was the provision grounds. It should also be noted that the conucos contributed not only to the slaves’ economy but also the general economy of the cafetales, as they reduced owner operation costs. This chapter will explore the coffee economy and the provision grounds in context, and discuss food production and consumption as well. Slaves made choices about what to grow; these offer some additional insights into the culture slaves were building . The chapter will also look at a few other examples of trading nonfood items. One of the other ways we can see the effects of the slave economy is in the accounts of slave participation in the system of coartación. This system of selfpurchase has often been dismissed as inconsequential to the story of slave freedom struggles. While I will not argue that the system freed significant numbers of the enslaved, I will show that it was more significant than has been previously been assumed. The information we have on participation in the system is important , as it shows evidence of the slave economy, and also that slaveholders and officials took seriously the participation in coartación by slaves. I am also convinced that the ability to work toward freedom created hope within the community of enslaved Africans. Taking all these things together, the chapter will demonstrate that slaves created their own economy and participated in the larger economy, thereby gaining hope and acquiring some measure of autonomy, as well as in some cases accruing sufficient capital to buy freedom. The economics of the coffee plantation is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, it was seen as the ideal of plantation life for a number of reasons. Coffee plantations typically had a wide variety of plants creating a varied landscape in contrast to the vast fields of sugar cane on...