Abstract
Although plantation records indicate that many slaves in the southern USA were artisans and craftsmen, relatively few slaves were recorded as such on the New Orleans sales invoices. Fogel (Without consent or contract: the rise and fall of American slavery. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1989, p. 57, 162) assumes that the slaves without recorded occupations were unskilled workers, concluding that skilled slaves were “less than half as likely to have been sold as were ordinary field hands.” Using data from New Orleans newspapers, we find that most sales advertisements include information about the slave’s occupation. A comparison of the advertisement with the corresponding sales invoice shows that the slave’s occupation was often omitted from the invoice. Because the slave’s market price should reflect all relevant information available at the time of sale, the informational value of the slave’s advertised occupation can be estimated using regression analysis. We find that the advertised occupation affected the slave’s market price, which suggests that newspaper advertisements were informative and not simply “cheap talk.”
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Notes
Copies of the Louisiana Advertiser & Le courier de la Louisiane no longer exist for February 1, 1830, to April 1, 1830. See the Library of Congress website: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83016782/holdings/ accessed 9/2/2013.
For more information regarding the New Orleans Notarial Archives, see http://www.notarialarchives.org/history.htm. Other authors who have analyzed these data include Phillips (1918, 1929), Fogel and Engerman (1974), Kotlikoff (1979, 1992), Greenwald and Glasspiegel (1983), Pritchett and Chamberlain (1993), Levendis (2007), Choo and Eid (2008), Pritchett and Smith (2013), and Calomiris and Pritchett (2013).
A discussion of the age and gender characteristics of the two samples can be found in the online appendix. Note that the occupational information varied by the type of advertisement. Only 60 % of the court-ordered sales (which were conducted by sheriffs, marshals, syndics, or other court officials) advertised occupational information, whereas 90 % of public auctions and private sales advertised this information. Perhaps court officials advertised less occupational information because they had fewer incentives to attract additional buyers for the slaves.
For example, the invoice indicates that on the previous day, October 25, 1830, Mary was sold “at a public sale made by Isaac McCoy, a duly commissioned auctioneer.” A corresponding advertisement for Mary was located in The Advertiser for this date. See NONA, Boswell, v. 11, p. 589.
For example, The Advertiser and The Courier advertised twenty-two Virginia slaves to be sold at public auction on November 30, 1830. Among these slaves were a mother and her three children, who were sold on November 25, five days prior to the scheduled auction. See NONA, Boswell, v. 11, p. 638.
Soundex is a phonetic index used to match names despite minor spelling inconsistencies. For more information, see “The Soundex Indexing System,” Updated May 30, 2007, http://www.archives.gov/research/census/soundex.html
We estimate alternative regression specifications by interacting age and gender and by omitting seasonal covariates. These regression results are reported in the online appendix. They are qualitatively similar to the results presented in Table 4.
Covariates indicating the slave’s advertised occupation are jointly statistically significant.
One slave was advertised as an artisan (a wheelwright) and recorded on the notarial invoice as a semiskilled worker (a carter), indicating a downgrade in his occupational status. There is not enough separate information in the sample to be able to estimate interactive terms for slaves advertised and sold with an occupation.
Listing the slave’s occupation on the invoice may have conferred an implied warranty, resulting in higher prices for these slaves.
Using plantation and probate records, Fogel and Engerman (1974) find that artisans were overrepresented among slaves in their forties and they were underrepresented among slaves in their twenties. Planters may have rewarded hardworking field hands by promoting them to higher skilled occupations. Consequently, occupational training was often delayed until slaves were older.
We also attempted to estimate the relative number of semiskilled and domestic workers using a multinomial logit. The proportions of slaves in these occupations exhibit relatively little variation by age and the results are highly sensitive to the regression specification.
Because slave prices represent the market value of a “stock” whereas slave hire rates represent the market value of a “flow,” prices are not directly comparable to hire rates. In addition, the estimated regression coefficients from the price regressions are not directly comparable to those from the wage or hire regressions. A slave’s age, for example, affects both his marginal product and the length of his working life. Because hire rates depend on a slave’s marginal productivity whereas his price depends on both the length of his working life and his marginal productivity, an increase in a slave’s age may have a different effect on his hire rate than on his price.
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Pritchett, J., Hayes, J. The occupations of slaves sold in New Orleans: Missing values, cheap talk, or informative advertising?. Cliometrica 10, 181–195 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-015-0129-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-015-0129-y