The Efficacy In Efficacy

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The efficacy/inefficacy ofaccounting in controlling labour

during the transition from slaveryin the United States and British

West IndiesRichard K. Fleischman

John Carroll University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

David OldroydNewcastle University Business School, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and

Thomas N. TysonSt John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, USA

Abstract

Purpose The aim of this paper is to focus on the transition from slavery to wage workers in theAmerican South and British West Indies, and the corresponding nature of the reporting and controlprocedures that were established in both venues, in order to create a disciplined workforce, andestablish regular relations between employees and employers. It seeks to explain the differences inlabour control practices between the two regions and to discuss the impact on these practices ofaccounting and other quantitative techniques c.1760-1870. In particular, it aims to consider the centralrole played by government in the process.

Design/methodology/approach The study forms part of an archival research project, in which theauthors have consulted archives in four Southern States (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North

Carolina), three Caribbean island nations, formerly British colonies (Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica),and record repositories the length and breadth of Great Britain. The records of the Freedmens Bureau(FB), located in the National Archives, Washington, DC, have been likewise visited. These primarysources have been supported by the extensive secondary literature on slavery and its aftermath.

Findings In the USA, accounting for labour in the transition from slavery was typically ad hoc andinconsistent, whereas in the BWI it was more organised, detailed, and displayed greater uniformity bothwithin and across colonies. The role of the British Colonial Office (BCO) was crucial here. A range ofeconomic and political factors are advanced to explain the differences between the two locations. The paperhighlights the limitations of accounting controls and economic incentives in disciplining labour without thepresence of physical coercion in situations where there is a refusal on the part of the workers to cooperate.

Originality/value There is a relatively small volume of secondary literature comparing US andBWI slavery and its legacy. Likewise, the accounting implications of labour-control practices, duringthe transition from slavery to freedom, are largely understudied. The research also points to a need toassess the decision-influencing capabilities of management accounting systems in other transitional

labour settings.Keywords Government accounting, Labour control, Slavery, Emancipation, United States of America,Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, Employees, Employers, Control, Accounting

Paper type Research paper

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/0951-3574.htm

The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Bill Wootton and the two referees.They also wish to acknowledge innumerable unnamed archivists at various national archivesand university libraries, who facilitated their compilation of key primary-source materials.

Controllinglabour during the

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Received 19 July 2008Revised 22 September 2009,

11 August 2010Accepted 18 October 2010

Accounting, Auditing &Accountability Journal

Vol. 24 No. 6, 2011pp. 751-780

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited0951-3574

DOI 10.1108/09513571111155537


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IntroductionSlavery officially ended in the British Empire in 1834 and in the USA in 1863, although inpractice it is difficult to identify a clear break. The paper focuses on the transition fromslavery to wage workers in both venues and the corresponding nature of the reporting

and control procedures that were established in order to create a disciplined workforceand establish regular relations between employees and employers. The paper seeks toexplain the differences in labour control practices between the two regions and to discussthe impact on these practices of accounting and other quantitative techniques[1]. Inparticular, it considers the central role played by government in the process.

The issue of inculcating the working population with a sense of labour discipline inthe early to mid-19th century was not peculiar to the former slave economies given thespeed of industrialisation in Britain that drew a population grounded in theagricultural rhythms of life into an unfamiliar industrial environment (Thompson,1967). In the USA too there was a mass influx of agricultural labour from Europe,supplying new industry from the mid-1800s on. Certainly the New England textileindustry and American railroading were adding untrained workers in significantnumbers, particularly through immigration (Foner, 2006, pp. 417-18). The textileindustry, for example, was especially fertile ground for accounting developments in theearly 1800s[2]. It is evident that the British government in particular regardeddisciplining ex-slaves in the colonies and the working population at home as connectedas it employed similar tactics in both cases, for example penal reform and antivagrancy legislation (Holt, 1992, p. 37; Paton, 2004). In the case of the USA poor Whitescould fall victim of legislation originally enacted after the Civil War to disciplineex-slaves (Waldrep, 1996).

Instilling factory discipline into former agricultural workers was not the problem inthe Southern States of the USA or the BWI, however. The South had little or noindustry to speak of during Reconstruction and like the BWI remained predominantly

agrarian. What was distinctive about the slave economies in terms of labour disciplinewas that notions of paying the workforce or disciplining them other than throughphysical means such as restraint or flogging were largely alien. Although corporalpunishment remained an option for disciplining recalcitrant workers even afterAbolition the British Colonial Office (BCO) kept statistics, whereas the situation isnot so clear for the American South abolishing slavery meant that workers andemployers had to adapt to a radically different working environment involvingcontracts, incentives and free market economics.

Furthermore, the change was imposed at a distance by alien central authorities andnot welcomed by plantation owners locally. In the USA, the authority was the Unionistgovernment in Washington in the wake of its crushing defeat of the slave-holdingstates in the Civil War. In the case of the BWI, it was the Imperial government in

London. Here, the bitter pill of Abolition was sweetened by a 20 million compensationfund. But, the local plantocracy remained hostile. The situation was furthercomplicated by racial overtones in which White employers regarded theirdark-skinned workers as racially inferior and believed they had a natural right toexploit them. In the USA great efforts were made by certain members of the Souths oldaristocratic classes to nullify the right of freed slaves to vote through murder andintimidation (Foner, 1988, p. 432). These self same parties were in many cases theemployers. Indeed, Foner (1988, p. 428) noted cases where the Ku Klux Klan was

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deployed in the South to restore labor discipline on White-owned farms andplantations by forcing ex-slaves to turn out for work or to accept reduced crop-shares.Ex-slaves, for their part, railed at the idea of being compelled through political oreconomic pressures to continue working for their former racial oppressors (Foner, 1988,

pp. 341-3, 425-8, 442; Franklin and Moss, 2000, pp. 275-6; Shapiro, 1988, pp. 5-29).It follows that the issue of labour control in the American South and BWI following

Abolition was more complex than in the industrial regions of Britain and the USA. It wentbeyond making the workers more efficient or even about persuading them to work in thefirst place. It was concerned with creating a new social order of willing, habitual, andeconomically motivated waged workers. To be sustained, it required a fundamentalredefinition of peoples expectations and obligations. From an accounting perspective, theissue was not just about employers establishing control procedures or surveillancesystems within the workplace. It was about central government imposing layers ofregulation, accounting requirements, and social accountability mechanisms all of whichwere quite remarkable in an otherwise age oflaissez faire, at least as far as economic eliteswere concerned. The property rights of citizens were sacrosanct in British and Americanlaw and not open to interference by government (Oldroyd et al., 2008).

National accounting for these countries, in the sense of government measuring andreporting the effects of the activities of the economic actors within a nation, wasmainly a product of the twentieth century (De Beelde, 2009, pp. 354-355). De Beelde(1999, p. 356) cites works by Irving Fisher, Maurice Copeland and Robert Martin asbeing influential in the 1930s in that regard. However, the governmental accountingdescribed in this study formed part of a much earlier initiative by the Britishgovernment in particular to manage a problem of national significance for theBritish the fear was that the sugar trade would collapse following emancipation through the collection of macro economic data[3] . In the USA too, thesub-commissioners of the Freedmens Bureau compiled macro economic reports on

the condition of the freedmen in their districts (Record Group 105, roll 42).The manner in which accounting was used by the British government to forward its

colonial interests in this instance was also distinctive. Most prior research on the subjecthas focussed on governmental accounting as a technology for dispossessing ormanipulating indigenous communities. Hence, accounting was implicated in attempts bygovernment in Canada to convert First Nation Americans from nomadic hunters tosettled farmers (Neu, 1999). In Australia, governmentally imposed accountabilitysystems remain to this day a means of restricting the access of Aboriginal Australians toresources (Gibson, 2000). In New Zealand, accounting calculations provided the

justification for government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tomisappropriate Maori land (Hooper and Kearins, 2008). The present study is thereforeunusual because it reveals that it was not just the behaviour of the dispossessed Africans

and their descendents that the colonial power could seek to influence through accounts,but that of the ruling White classes also[4]. As the paper describes, this was attemptedthrough the imposition of accountability mechanisms. Here again the study is notablegiven that previous research relating to the public sector has tended to focus on themeans by which executive authorities were held accountable from below rather than theother way round (e.g. Coombs and Edwards, 1993; Funnell, 2007; Holden et al., 2009).

Thus, for accounting historians, comparison between the plantation economies ofthe BWI and American South allows us to understand more about the use of


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accounting by governmental agencies in the nineteenth century in regulating andcontrolling parties who otherwise would be unaccountable for the consequences oftheir actions because they could not be observed. The distance from events of thecontrolling central authorities alluded to above were significant here. It is probably not

accidental that of the two regions, the most effective monitoring regime wasestablished in the BWI where, as the paper will discuss, there existed a long tradition ofabsentee ownership and reporting events at a distance. The differences between thetwo localities are particularly interesting given that emancipation in the AmericanSouth occurred some 30 years later than in the BWI. Therefore, the US government hadthe West Indian experience to draw on if it wished. These were neighbouring regionson the American continent, and the extent to which the USA replicated British policy inthe Caribbean provides a contemporary comment on the British arrangements. Finally,there is the question of how effective the accounts were as decision-influencinginformation, to use modern behavioural terminology (e.g. Sprinkle, 2003, p. 290), giventhat output declined in both venues and the workforce was not maintained.

The study builds on previous work by Tyson et al. (2005), which examinedaccounting control procedures in the BWI during the interim Apprenticeship periodthat followed the abolition of slavery by the British government in 1833. It extends theprior study and makes the additional judgement of how the situation panned out afterthe end of Apprenticeship in 1838, as well as how it compared to the American positionboth before and after emancipation. As Paton (2004, p. 5) has argued, slavery is bestunderstood if the transition to freedom is studied as well. For the American side of thecomparison particular use was made of the records of the Freedmens Bureau (FB)housed in the National Archives in Washington. The holdings of the FB are immense.For the purposes of this study, we selected the Records of the Field Offices for theState of Mississippi . . . as representative of the FBs activities in the Confederate andBorder States, as well as in the District of Columbia. In the introduction to the

collection, the National Archives and Records Administration (2004, p. 3) confirm thatthe major activities of the Freedmens Bureau in Mississippi generally resembledthose conducted in other states. As far as the West Indian side of the comparison isconcerned, we looked for well-established plantations whose life-span stretched fromthe time before Abolition became a threat through the Apprenticeship period andbeyond in order to trace how the record keeping responded to the changes.

The paper continues with a comparison of the accounting records and labourcontrol procedures on plantations prior to emancipation, highlighting the significanceof absentee ownership in the BWI. It then examines the post emancipation period, inparticular central governments attempts in the two regions to regularise labourrelations and create a willing and disciplined workforce.

Management accounting information and labour control pre-emancipationUnder slavery, economic incentives and accounting controls played a small part indisciplining the workforce, physical coercion being the main means[5]. Indeed,management accounting played a very limited role overall in plantation management inboth the USA and BWI. The major points of difference between the two locations are thatplantations in the BWI tended to be larger than in the USA typically they were nearlydouble the size in terms of both acreage and numbers of slaves and crucially, from anaccounting perspective, they were almost exclusively absentee-owned and therefore

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wholly reliant on agents. Most of the American plantations were owner-managed. In theAmerican South, the plantation owner himself, sometimes supported by the chiefoverseer, maintained the routine accounting records with appraisers called in fromtime to time when more formal valuations of the plant, slaves and livestock were

required, such as for probate or loan collateralisation purposes. Meanwhile, an array ofofficials was involved in BWI in compiling the larger volume of accounting documentsdemanded by the owners in Britain to safeguard their investment. There was clearlymuch more of a reporting culture on the BWI plantations, therefore, than the Americanones where management by walking about remained an option and thus there was farless need for formalised accounting reports to assess how things were going.

Even in the BWI, however, it was usual for the various agents to report solely to theabsentee proprietor rather than to each other, meaning that he alone would have had afull picture of the operations (Higman, 2005, pp. 101-102, 112, 209). The potentialimpediment to managing the operations that this created was exacerbated by the hugedelays between sending and receiving letters. A letter dated April 1796 from James

Stothert to his attorney[6] David Hood indicates that he was still awaiting a reply to hisletter of the previous July (NAS: GD 241/189/1). A delay of ten months was exceptional,the norm being five months for the round-trip (Higman, 2005, p. 128). A letter in 1803from PJ Miles of Bristol to John Tharp of Jamaica took two months to arrive(CRO: R55/7/128 (c) 6/7/10).

Moreover, the accounts that were produced focused on the gross product of theplantation rather than return on investment. Attorneys were held to accountprincipally through accounts of produce, which formed the basis of theirremuneration (Higman, 2005, p. 42). An abstract of the accounts of the LowtherPlantation in Barbados in 1826 is unusual in basing the agents commission of fivepercent on the surplus of income over expenditure (BL: 43507/7-9). In most cases,commission was calculated on gross product (Higman, 2005, p. 81). The incentive for

the agents therefore was to maximise output rather than profits. Other key reportsdemanded by the owners in Britain were annual inventories of the slaves, mules andcattle with explanations required for lives lost. Slaves became particularly valuablefollowing the abolition of the slave trade with Africa in 1807 which made findingreplacements much harder; and the obligation on attorneys and overseers to account tothe owners for any deaths occurring helped safeguard the slaves health and safetyalbeit to a limited degree (Fleischman et al., 2004a; Oldroyd et al., 2008).

What seems to have been absent from the BWI internal accounts was a detailedattention to cost control and labour productivity even though procedures to monitorcosts must have been widely known, since piece rates and measured output were beingdocumented and in use in both the US and British industrial sectors well before the endof their respective slave eras (e.g. Hoskin and Macve, 1986; 1988; Fleischman et al., 1995;Fleischman and Macve, 2002). Instead, plantation managers relied primarily onthreatened or actual physical coercion to drive desired behaviour. Practice on plantationsmirrored what was recommended in published textbooks. Hence, the eight principalobjectives of Thomas Roughleys (1823) guide for Jamaican planters are listed as:

(1) the increase of crops;

(2) preserving capital;

(3) improving the quality and quantity of the sugar and rum;


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(4) the comfort of the slaves;

(5) the provision of adequate food and care for the livestock;

(6) keeping the buildings and manufacturing utensils in good order;

(7) shipping the produce in a proper condition; and(8) disposing of it speedily.

Reducing costs or improving productivity were not explicitly identified as objectives.Similarly, John Mairs (1763, pp. 330-331) Book-keeping Methodizedwhich was popularin both the USA and BWI specified the chief plantation account-books as the boilinghouse book, the still house book and the plantation book, all of which focused onrecording gross output and sales. The only concession to costs in these books is thatthe plantation book was noted as containing an account of all the provisions and otherthings bought, and from whom, with the emphasis being on keeping track of personalaccounts. Indeed, apart from inventories and accounts of output and sales the onlyother type of report produced on a regular basis by plantation managers prior toemancipation was the accounts current which listed payments and receipts andoutstanding debts (Higman, 2005, p. 100).

In a situation where expanding gross output was regarded as the main measure ofsuccess, what was required to increase profits was an expansion of capacity throughinvesting in more land, cattle, slaves and plant rather than improving efficiency(Higman, 2005, pp. 198, 205, 218, 223). John Tharp (1744-1804), the Jamaican planter,typified this expansionist mentality. Starting his career in the 1760s he systematicallybuilt up his familys plantation interests over the following 40 years through a policy ofland acquisitions and capital improvements (Tenison, 1971, pp. 9-10). Tharps estateagent in Cambridgeshire accurately summed up his masters business mentality in aletter to him in 1802:

I know that with your superintending eye what you project in Jamaica will be prudently, and Iwill add economically true, be the cost ever so great, for your life proves that economy doesnot always consist in expanding little (Emphasis in the original CRO: R/55/128/B/1/7).

A prudent and austere man who was continually exhorting his children toself-restraint, it is not that Tharp was disinterested in cost savings. But, learning histrade as a planter in the 1760s before the abolition movement had started to gainground and at a time when slave workers could be physically coerced to work long andhard, his belief in expansion reflected the general confidence felt amongst Britishplanters at the time in the permanence of the system.

Proprietors did interrogate their agents in the West Indies about the need for newexpenditure, especially slaves and mules. For example, the number of mules bought

and lost was a constant bone of contention between James Stothert and his agent,David Hood (NAS: GD 241/189/1). Planters also had a number of norms at theirdisposal, developed through experience, by which they could judge efficiency, such asacceptable ratios of yields to acreage, slaves to acreage, sugar to rum, transport costs todistance, mills to distance, slaves to output, slaves to working hours, and slaves tocattle (Codrington papers, n.d.; Higman, 2005, pp. 99, 111, 201, 204-205, 224-225); butdetailed costings of the activities, ex post profit statements and budgets were notusually prepared.

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As far as the workforce went, it was not that there was a lack of managementinformation produced, but that the focus was on differentiating between individualsaccording to race rather than increasing productivity. This type of attitude wastypified by the processes whereby slaves from Africa and their descendants were

valued as livestock and the conviction in the BWI in particular that racial differenceswere significant and should be accounted for. The dehumanisation of slave workers inboth the USA and the BWI was most evident in the valuation parade where somecombination of overseers, managers, drivers, appraisers, and bookkeepers wouldusually gather annually for the purpose of ascribing a value to the slave assetsalongside the cattle and mules. In the antebellum American South, relatively littleattention seems to have been paid to a slaves racial ancestry in these valuations,although it should be noted that most of the surviving examples postdate the abolitionof the slave trade in 1807 by 40 years, hence, nearly all the slaves were native-born.Occasionally, racial characteristics would be provided for individual slaves inparentheses next to the name. In the BWI, by contrast, the listings featured a separatecolumn for racial background. The usual information conveyed was whether the slavewas African or Creole (native-born), but sometimes more detailed remarks identifiedthe African tribe of origin or, in the case of Creoles, the proportion of White blood toBlack (Fleischman et al., 2011). The reasons for the greater attention paid to bloodancestry in the Caribbean inventories compared with the American ones are unclear,although it could be related to the larger size of the BWI plantations, or the preferencesof absentee-owners for long-standing classification schemes. In a situation where therewas a lack of personal familiarity with the slaves indeed, the total number ofEuropeans residing on plantations in the BWI was especially small racialcharacteristics constituted an important identifying feature in exercising physicalcontrol of the inventory, for example in reclaiming runaways.

Productivity statistics, if they existed at all, were kept sporadically. For example,

the authors have seen only one instance where a US plantation maintained individualcotton-picking records for the entirety of the 11-week season (James Jackson papers;Mississippi State Archives, n.d.) and no instances in the BWI. Best practice in the USAwas typified by Thomas Afflecks (1851) account and record-keeping book, whichhelped reassure slave-owners that they were engaging in a perfectly rational businessactivity by providing them with a uniform and apparently scientific scheme ofplantation accounting (Heier, 1988; Fleischman and Tyson, 2004a). The book wasintended as a sort ofSimplex guide for owners to complete. Although a planters use ofan Affleck book was strictly voluntary, it proved a bestseller, with many copiessurviving, and is therefore an important source of evidence of actual plantationpractices.

The impression the book created was that a meticulous attention to a variety of

accounting data signalled a well-run plantation. However, like in the BWI, theemphasis in the Affleck book was on tracking revenues with a lack of interest in costmanagement and worker productivity. The book did contain pages for the owners toenter the daily cotton-picking totals of individuals, which could be summed to arrive atthe output of the workforce as a whole; but, in practice these pages were oftendisregarded or completed with widely varying degrees of care, suggesting a limitationin their usefulness as accounting controls. Indeed, upon examining scores of survivingAffleck books in different business archives, the authors noticed that few if any of the


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books were filled out as Affleck described in his directions. There were innumerableblank pages and inconsistencies in terms of the quality and content of informationwhen a plantations record books are compared from one period to the next. The clearimpression created by these books is that quantifying labour output was not deemed

worth the effort.The one exception to the non-involvement of accounting in disciplining the

workforce prior to emancipation concerns the switch by some owners in the USA andBWI from ganging to tasking after the abolition of the slave trade with Africa in 1807.Tasking involved motivating the workers through predetermined performancestandards, in contrast to ganging, which relied on close supervision and physicalcoercion. Under tasking, slaves were free to pursue their own activities after they hadcompleted their quota of work. Accounting was involved in setting targets andmeasuring performance. Tasking was regarded as less onerous on slaves than theconstant physical bullying of the ganging system, and hence a means of extendingtheir working life in a situation where replacements were unavailable. The pattern ofadoption was uneven, however, and tasking was more suited to cotton picking in theUSA than cane-cutting in the BWI where ganging remained the norm (Tyson et al.,2004; Fleischman et al., 2004b).

In summary, the focus in the management accounts on gross output, the lack of costcontrols and the lack of attention to labour productivity and non-physical means ofdisciplining the workforce did not bode well for the plantation owners when faced witha more competitive labour environment. Landowners and government were well awareof the danger that ex-slaves would withdraw their labour once emancipated, and thenext section describes the steps they took to mitigate it.

Engineering a new society based on waged labourClearly, there were a host of variables that affected the transition process. Foner (1983)

noted that these were both internal (scarcity of land, political power of former slaveowners) and external (state of the economy, role of political authorities). However, twomajor points of difference stand out between the BWI and USA. In the first place,emancipation in the BWI was the result of a negotiated settlement involvingcompensation to slave owners, whereas in the USA it was imposed on a war-ravagedeconomy following the Civil War. Compensating the slave owners in the BWI gave theBritish government a financial lever over them as they were forced to agree to thesystemisation of work rules, pay rates, punishments, justice, and detailed accountingrecords and reporting requirements before they received any money. The interventionof the imperial government in plantation affairs was not new and thus may have beenmore tolerated. An Order in Council in 1824, for example, restricted the use ofwhippings and obliged plantation owners to keep a record of floggings administered.

Another one in 1831 regulated the slaves terms and conditions of work andempowered local slave protectors to adjudicate civil and criminal proceedings,summon witnesses, access plantations, and collect evidence. It follows that the seeds ofthe legal framework established in the BWI by the 1833 Abolition Act, which gave ahigh priority to accounting procedures, had been sown several years prior toemancipation in 1838. Plantations were now obliged to keep detailed records of workand pay as legal evidence and officials on the ground to submit regular reports toLondon involving a host of statistical data to enable the BCO to monitor the progress of

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the great experiment[7]. More specifically, each colony was required to document itssystem of fines, extra work-hour requirements, criteria for floggings, attendance, actsof insubordination, and sub-scale work performance. All of these accounting andaccounting-related data had to be recorded in a prescribed fashion in particular

journals, not only for reporting back to the BCO but also to be available to specialmagistrates during their regular visits or at special hearings, to adjudicate workercomplaints (Tyson et al., 2005).

The original plan had been to establish a transitional period of Apprenticeshipwhere the slaves would learn to behave like waged workers. This had been scheduledto last until 1840, but was terminated in 1838 owing to their demands for greaterfreedom (Tyson et al., 2005). This carefully planned and phased approach, includingthe accounting requirements, was in sharp contrast to what occurred in the USA wherethe Emancipation Act was followed by nearly two years of continued civil conflict.Southern rural economies were largely devastated in the aftermath and the plantationsystem effectively collapsed. The best efforts of the US federal government to aid thetransition of former slaves from servitude to freedom were embodied in the activities ofthe Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, (FB). The FB wasestablished within the War Department by Congress in March 1865. However, unlikethe BCO with its permanent staff of civil servants, this was an Army agency that wasalways seen as temporary, notwithstanding that its life was twice extended until thefinal cessation of operations in June 1872. Major General Oliver Howard served as theFBs Commissioner for its entire history. Although, as the paper will relate, the FBplayed a key role in regularising employer-employee relations, its concerns were widerand more immediate. These are summarised by National Archives (1781-1951, 5, p. 3)in its introduction to the Records of the Field Offices for the State of Mississippi(RecordGroup 105, n.d., ; M1907, 65 rolls):

While a major part of the Bureaus early activities involved the supervision of abandoned and

confiscated property, its mission was to provide relief and help freedmen becomeself-sufficient. Bureau officials issued rations and clothing, operated hospitals and refugeecamps, and supervised labor contracts. In addition, the Bureau managed apprenticeshipdisputes and complaints, assisted benevolent societies in the establishment of schools, helpedfreedmen in legalizing marriages entered into during slavery, and provided transportation torefugees and freedmen who were attempting to reunite with their family or relocate to otherparts of the country. The Bureau also helped Black soldiers, sailors, and their heirs collectbounty claims, pensions, and back pay.

Much of this was relief work, and it is significant that it is for relief activities that theFB now tends to be remembered. Thus, the situation in the USA followingemancipation was more pressing than in the BWI because of the legacy of war, yetmore ad hoc in terms of the structures established by the federal government to deal

with it. In particular there was an absence of anything comparable to the sustainedcentral monitoring and reporting procedures emanating from the BCO.

The second major point of difference between the two locations is that productionon plantations continued in the BWI into the twentieth century, notwithstanding thatmany businesses failed and were sold off, whereas in the USA the plantation economyessentially collapsed within the space of a few years. During and after the transition,the majority of BWI estates carried multiple mortgages, which forced their owners tocontinue production of sugar on plantations (Butler, 1995). There was also a political


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incentive to preserve the size of plantations because voting privileges werelegislatively restricted to large landowners[8]. The importation of thousands ofindentured workers beginning in the early 1840s from India (primarily) and China alsohelped boost a plantation system drained of its traditional labour-force[9]. These

workers were not unlike slaves in that their mobility was restricted and they werecompelled to complete indentures typically lasting three to five years. Although paidpiece-rate wages, they were obliged to meet stringent work-level standards in order toreceive full compensation (Mangru, 1986; Tinker, 1974).

In the USA, on the other hand, fewer than one percent of southern farms could beconsidered plantations by 1867, the disappearance of the plantation system [being]virtually complete by 1870 (Ransom and Sutch, 1977, pp. 68, 87). Unlike the Northwhere manufacturing was well developed and expanding, there was little alternative toagricultural production. It follows that other than in the rice plantations of the SouthCarolina lowlands, the plantation system was replaced by a patchwork of smallersized family farms based on share-tenancy agreements (Roark, 1977, p. 163). Thesecontracts compensated workers in permutations of crop-shares, wages, rent-free houseor land and provisions. The key point from an accounting perspective is that numbersof workers were small and labour control at the micro level depended primarily onevidencing the performance of contracts, unlike the situation in the BWI where theneed for employers to control concentrations of workers over dispersed locationsremained.

The section continues by examining the effects of emancipation on the managementaccounting systems of individual businesses before investigating accountings role inevidencing the performance of contracts. It then considers the entrenched opposition ofemployers and ex-slaves to the normalisation of labour relations and the part played bycentral government in enforcing change.

Management accountingGiven the shortage of labour that developed post-emancipation, one would haveexpected employers to focus more on improving efficiency in order to maintain output;and the surviving accounts provide some evidence in that respect in the BWI. Forexample, Higman (2005) found an improvement in the accounting arrangements on theMontpelier plantation in Jamaica. The task system which relied on accounting targetswas utilised in order to increase the productivity of labour, notwithstanding theincreased measuring and recording costs involved (Higman, 2005, pp. 235, 246).Similarly, the proprietor now required more detailed projections, taking into accountthe relative proportions in plants and ratoons, piece by piece (Higman, 2005, p. 257).For the first time, the produce accounts and accounts current were made up to the samecalendar date to facilitate ex post analysis; and the proprietor responded to the

heightened uncertainties of the post slave economy with requests for more accountingdata (Higman, 2005, pp. 268-271).

The plantation accounts of the Earl of Balcarres likewise increased in scope anddetail as Abolition approached and in the years thereafter. In the main they comprisedlists of receipts and payments and inventories prior to 1833 (NLS: Crawford 23/14/4, 6,8). However, from then on accounts of the daily pickings, pulpings and millings appearwhich itemised the daily pickings from the field by the number of Negroes employed inthe first, second and third gangs (NLS: Crawford 25/11/647, 652-655). Thus, on

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15 September, 30 Negroes in the second gang picked 25 bushels of coffee from the fieldcompared with 50 bushels on the 19th. On the 21st, the second gang,which had nowrisen to 31 in strength, produced 51 bushels. The juxtaposition of total daily pickingswith total number of pickers indicates concern over the productivity of the workforce.

The daily pickings were sub-totalled weekly, enabling further comparison of output(NLS: Crawford 25/11/652/1).

In analysing costs by category, an abstract of the accounts for 1840 displayed aninterest in tracking costs, the largest of which now related to wages. Daily pay-sheetssimilarly tracked labour costs. For example, a sheet for 22 April 1839 relating toMarshalls Pen recorded that:

. 20 employees were engaged in pruning coffee, two acres of coffee were pruned,the rate of wages was 13s per acre, and the amount paid 1/6;

. six employees cleaned coffee, one acre of coffee was cleaned at 13s/4 per acre,resulting in 13s/4 being paid;

. three employees were engaged about the works, providing one days labour at

10d per day, total payment 2s/6;. six employees supplied coffee, providing one days labour at 1s/8, amount paid

10s (NLS: Crawford 25/11/647).

These were summary documents, whose purpose was to keep track of the workundertaken, and its cost.

Some 20 years later the Tharp accounts had evolved into a comprehensive andsystematic scheme of monthly reporting on pre-printed forms containing the followingheadings:

. abstract of expenditure and cultivation;

. produce account;

. cultivation;

. stock account;

. monthly wages;

. supplies received this month;

. general remarks by the overseer on the cultivation of the property;

. state of the weather;

. rate of wages;

. behaviour of the labourers during the month.

Wages were recorded over 25 tasks again on pre-printed the forms (CRO: R55/7/127/1).

Whether the increased utilisation of accounts was the reflection of a drive for efficiencyor simply an attempt by plantation owners in the BWI to compensate for theheightened uncertainties in the post-emancipation environment by seeking moreinformation is a moot point. But it does illustrate the owners recognising the ability ofaccounting information to aid management in ways not done so previously[10].

The situation was far different in the USA because of the sudden collapse of theplantation system rather than an extended period of time to prepare for its demise.Once plantations were subdivided in the wars aftermath, there were both fewer


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$6.3712 for Winnies part of hand hire. From the remaining $35.12, $13.50 wasdeducted on the basis of accounting evidence for 18 days of missed service at $.75 perday, leaving $21.62. The degree to which this deduction served as a severe element oflabour control is reflected by the fact that 701

2 missed days of service would have

eroded her entire $52.84 of half hands interest (Record Group 105, M197, roll 43).The lost time issue and its relationship to labour and/or racial control have been

significant in other studies of plantation economies. Fleischman and Tyson (2004)found in both the antebellum American South (slave labour) and on the late nineteenthand early twentieth century Hawaiian sugar plantations (indentured labour) that theconcern of employers was less with the productive efficiency of individual field handsand more with their turning out for work and, if not present, the reasons why[14].Typical of this concern in the FB archive is the account of lost time for Ellick Gillespiewho, in November 1867, was expected to work 26 days but who, according to hisemployers records, missed 12, dates of these specifically chronicled. The record told ofwhat he was doing on these missed days. Interestingly, he spent one of these at the FB(Record Group 105, M197, roll 43).

A letter dated August 31, 1867 from W. Eldridge, Sub-Assistant Commissioner ofTupelo to a Major identified only as A.W. at Vicksburg delineated terms that weretypical in the labour contracts between freedmen and planters engineered under FBauspices. When the crop share was one-third for the freedman, the planter was tofurnish everything but clothing and medical attention. Conversely, the labourer was toprovide everything required for his/her upkeep if the share was one-half. Otherworkers toiled for yearly wages in the $150-$285 range or for daily wages of $1 to $2.Apparently, there were some unspecified supplemental health and retirement benefitsas Eldridge allowed that there were no old, sick, or infirm freed persons suffering fromwant in his sub-district (Record Group 105, M197, roll 43).

Such contractual arrangements reflected a plan conceived by Assistant

Commissioner T.J. Wood in 1867 in an effort to curb the abuses of planters fleecingtheir former slaves. However, freedmen who toiled for a portion of the crop(sharecroppers) could often find themselves the victims of creative accountingpractices[15]. Others who worked for wages were sometimes cheated out of their due,or driven off following the harvest. The plan was for the FB to standardise anarrangement for planters to pay freedmen one-third of the crop and to provide land,stock, tools, food, and seed. Clothing, medical attention, and rations for children tooyoung to work were to be deducted from the freedmens share. In 1868 a modificationtook place wherein a stipulated rent or a specified amount of agricultural producewould be paid in exchange for the use of the land. It was hoped that this newarrangement would break the debt cycle (National Archives and RecordsAdministration, 2004, p. 4).

It almost goes without saying that these contractual labour relationships gave riseto frequent disputes that required FB intervention where accounts were produced inevidence. On November 30, 1867, the Assistant Adjutant General of the 4th MilitaryDistrict (Mississippi and Arkansas) established ground rules for arbitration hearings.Each party to the dispute was to select a member for the arbitration board with thosetwo in turn choosing a third panel member. The FB felt strongly that the claims oflabourers were the most vital of matters that came before the arbitration boards. TheAdjutant General wrote: This is deemed necessary to afford encouragement to free


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labour (Record Group 105, M197, roll 43). However, there is no evidence seen by theauthors that the FB actually enforced decisions rendered by the arbitration boards or tosuggest what was done if the members hand-picked by the litigants were unable toagree on a third member for the tribunal.

Another printed document entitled Agreement with Freedmen spelled out theobligations of both parties to a labour contract and stipulated the punishments due tofreedmen for malfeasance:

And in case any laborer shall voluntarily absent himself from, or shall neglect or refuse toperform the labor herein contracted for, and the fact shall be proved to the satisfaction of theproper officer, the one-half of the wages due to said party so offending, retained in the handsof the said [planters name] as aforesaid, shall be forfeited, one-half thereof to the said[planters name] and the other half to the United States, to aid in supporting the helpless, andthe party so offending may be discharged from said employment (Record Group 105, M197,roll 42).

The fact that half the penalty for non-performance of the contract went to the

government underscores the substantial relief activities of the FB. Since thegovernment stood as beneficiary, care too might be assumed in the enforcementprocess. Such agreements necessitated planters keeping records of attendance andwork undertaken by their employees as without such evidence neglect of duties couldnot be demonstrated. A crucial consideration was the number of hours a labourer wasexpected to work per day. Apparently, this was an issue easily finessed by planterswith support from the FB. The Agreement with Freedmen document specified tenhours of work per day in Summer and nine hours in Winter with none on Sunday, butin the example we have seen, these lines were crossed out (Record Group 105, M197,roll 42). Another agreement stipulated labourers to be at work by sun rise (with theword by deleted and replaced with before) and to work until sun set (with sun setcrossed out in favour of dark). Time lost to sickness was to be deducted from the

workers wage or share, while time lost to idleness or absence without leave was to bepenalised at three times the normal rate. Again these exactions had to be supported byaccounting data to be effective in law.

The protective arm of the FB is most evident in a series of documents that providemonthly wage rates on plantations of now free labour. A document of this genreappears as Figure 1 for Spring Farm.

The heading in the document, somewhat illegible in the example, reads:

And it is furthermore agreed that any wages or share of profits due the said laborers underthis agreement, shall constitute a first lien upon all crops or parts of crops produced on saidplantation or tract of land by their labor. And no shipment of crops shall be made until the . . .Commissioner of Freedmen shall certify that all dues to laborers are paid or satisfactorily

arranged (Record Group 105, M197, roll 42).It will be noted that the labourers are classified as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, a rating system thatoccasionally appeared in slave lists in the American South. It will also be observed thatmonthly wages were linked to the operatives rating. Here the typical wage for afirst-class male was $10, with second-class males receiving a dollar less. There wasgender discrimination since first-class females typically received $8 per month.Third-class males and second and third-class females earned $4-5 a month. It appearsthat a system which had existed ad hoc in the annual valuation of slaves before the Civil

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War (Fleischman and Tyson, 2004) became formalised with emancipation. Summarydocuments also appeared in the FB archive. For example, an 1865 compendiumcontained the plantation owners and the location of their holdings along with the total ofMale Hands rated, 1, 2, and 3; the number of Female Hands likewise ranked, with thenumber of boys and girls unrated (Record Group 105, M197, roll 42).

Figure 1.Freedmen, ratings,

and wages


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provided them the highest rank and authority (Green, 1976, p. 131). In particular, theyfeared the disappearance of their workforce following emancipation, and sought topreserve the status quo through legislation and restrictive labour practices.Emancipated slaves, for their part, appeared far more interested in personal

autonomy and gaining control of their time than in receiving either cash wages, cropshares, or barter for the same work they had performed as slaves[17]. Powell (1980,p. 79) discussed why freedmen in the USA resisted wage labour in the yearsimmediately following the Civil War:

Still, the great obstacle in the way of making cotton plantations into factories in the fieldwas the work ethic of the slaves themselves. Tied to the natural rhythms of agriculture andreinforced by an African sense of time, the slave work ethic placed a high premium on thecommunitarian value of labor and on the social value of leisure. The slaves spurned the ideaof routinised work, though they were not averse to hard work, and they considered time assomething that was passed, not consumed.

Opposition to working for former slave-masters was also a matter of principle; and the

availability, with certain exceptions (e.g. Antigua and Barbados), of sufficient openlands in both the BWI and the USA for freedmen to cultivate the crops necessary tofulfil personal and family needs allowed many to opt out and become peasant farmers.

Where open lands were not accessible, freedmen in both venues had few choicesother than to perform the same tasks they had done before liberation. Moreover, evenwhere land was available, planters conspired to prevent their workers acquiring it. InBritish Guiana, for example, legislation was passed in the 1850s that prohibited landacquisition by cooperatives in order to prevent former slaves from pooling theirresources (Adamson, 1975, pp. 464-5). The paper has already referred to the practice inthe BWI of charging rents on houses and provision grounds as a device for makingworkers dependent on wages. Similarly, the provisions of labour contracts and localsharecropping arrangements in the USA were intended to tie freedmen to plantationlands in order that relatively few would be able to become fully independent farmers.

Collusion amongst employers to control the labour market was attempted in boththe US and BWI, notwithstanding that attempts at collusion by groups of US plantersto restrain wages or specify contract terms were virtually all failures (Wright, 1992,p. 90). Planters in the BWI however were much more successful at fixing terms andconditions mainly because it was they who dominated the local assemblies that createdthe uniform sets of labour regulations and contract provisions that were mandated bythe BCO. Each colonys local legislature drafted ordinances which specified task rates,punishment schemes, and vagrancy rules that were to apply to every plantation in aparticular colony. Green (1976, p. 122) described the relationship of the local ordinancesto the Abolition Act:

Although the Act of Parliament established the basic framework for emancipation, itreserved to the colonial legislatures the task of preparing the terms upon which theapprenticeship system would be regulated. Local assemblies were assigned the responsibilityfor framing rules for the classification of apprentices, for the appraisement of those whowished to purchase their freedom, for the maintenance of discipline among apprentices, andfor the prevention of indolence and vagrancy.

The nearest parallels in the USA to the West Indian ordinances were the now infamousBlack Codes. Reconstruction legislation allowed former slave states to re-enter the


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Union once they had approved the equal protection clause of the FourteenthAmendment. Regrettably, this provision became mere lip service given theinnumerable and impenetrable barriers to full and equal rights for freedmen thatwere embodied in the Black Codes established by state assemblies. Although there

was a blatantly racist component to the codes, especially in regard to vagrancyprovisions, state assemblies were not unlike their BWI counterparts in fearing thatmarket incentives would be an ineffective means of persuading ex-slaves to work(Powell, 1980). According to Clayton (2006, p. 94), the conviction thatAfrican-Americans would not work without some form of coercion was, for theWhite South, virtually an article of faith in 1865. This fear was affirmed by the factthat the number of man-hours per capita supplied by the rural Black population fell byabout a third once slavery ended (Ransom and Sutch, 1977, p. 46). Thus, the labourshortages that arose in the USA paralleled those in certain regions of the BWI.

The Black Codes delineated the activities that ex-slaves could and could not pursueand were clearly a step back for the newly freed men. They included detailed vagrancy

provisions, fines and punishment schemes, and new poll and business taxes thattogether re-established a quasi-legal form of servitude. In Mississippis Code, forexample, freedmen were specifically precluded from renting or leasing lands inunincorporated towns or cities, a provision which effectively required the vast majorityof freedmen to work as land labourers rather than to become independent farmers[18].

The Black Codes were designed, in part, to instil labour discipline among newlyfreed slaves, but by limiting their mobility, preventing their right to bear arms, andrestricting their ability to own or lease lands, the codes also restored unsavouryvestiges of slavery (Wright, 1992). For example, Wallenstein (1987) noted that thesecodes and their poll-tax requirements restricted ex-slaves opportunities and preventedthem from becoming fully free and equal citizens. However, Shlomowitz (1992, p. 665)examined the evidence on the effectiveness and persistence of the codes and concludedthat both the overt and the covert arrangements made by employers probably werenothing more than fleeting experiments on a local scale. Their lifespan was strictlylimited. Unlike BWI Apprenticeship ordinances, which lasted nearly four years andthen became the basis of future legislation, the racially specific elements of the BlackCodes were voided by the FB and then superseded by the Reconstruction Acts of 1867.Vagrancy provisions in most state codes did remain in place for decades and oftenculminated in years of peonage or penal servitude for unemployed former slaves andBlack soldiers. Nevertheless, there was nothing in these codes or subsequent legislationat all comparable to the BWIs detailed accounting-related task norms and work rulesthat were initiated during the slave era, formalised during the apprenticeship andindenture periods, and that endured well into the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In short, the conflicting interests of freedmen and employers in both the BWI andUSA threatened to undermine their central governments plan of creating a newagrarian society based on free waged labour. In this light, the sustained role of theBritish government in regulating, enforcing, and effecting change appears vital. Thiswas dependant on the ability of the BCO to hold the various parties to account for theiractions, in large part through uniform accounting procedures and periodic accountingreports. The next section discusses the role of government regulation in thedevelopment and use of accounting in both venues.

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Government regulationLandowners in both the BWI and American South looked to government for assistancein maintaining labour and racial control when slavery ended. Local and federallegislation in both venues mandated gainful employment, forbad vagrancy, created

detailed penal sanctions and punishment schemes, and created barriers to landownership[19]. As one of many examples, a late 1865 Mississippi legislative actrequired that freedmen must have written evidence of a lawful home or employmentby the second Monday of January 1866[20].

In the US immediately following emancipation federal policies favoured thefreedmen. However, these policies were never effectively enforced and were quicklyabandoned at the start of the Reconstruction period. Regulations for freed labourerswere initially developed by the War Departments Bureau of Refugees, following theEmancipation Proclamation of January 1 1863, and its initial provisions were morebroadminded and far more protective to ex-slaves than those in the BWI immediatelyfollowing Abolition. For example, plantation workers were allowed to choose theiremployer and place of residence, to sign one-year contracts, and to occupy abandonedlands that they could rent for three years and later buy (Bentley, 1970, p. 23). Acommittee of three officers was appointed to regulate the enrolment, recruiting,employment, and education of persons of color as well as to verify that labourcontracts were appropriately fulfilled. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Refugees was atemporary agency and its authority and relatively liberal policies vis-a-vis freedmenwere in force only until the war ended when it was replaced by the FB.

While the Black Codes of individual states were clearly aimed at social control, theauthors have found little evidence indicating that a uniform, systematic, all-encompassingand centrally coordinated effort was both undertaken and sustained in the USA tore-socialise former slaves comparable to the BWI experience. This does not mean that theAmerican and BWI land owners had different intentions or that the Caribbean elites were

more or less successful in controlling former slaves. Clearly, White elites in both regionssought to tie ex-slaves to plantation lands, limit their ability to become full citizens, andmaintain plantation-based economies. In the BWI, however, the effort was moreconsistent and coordinated through locally enacted legislation mandated by the colonialauthorities, and was facilitated to a much greater extent by the accounting provisions andregular reporting requirements and intervals that were associated with this legislation.For example, Burn (1937, p. 194), noted that the BCO-appointed governor in BritishGuiana authorised a committee of local planters to develop labour standards. Theresultant committee prepared scales of task-work for cane, plantain, coffee, cottoncultivation, and wood-cutting, based on what might be expected from an effectivelabourer and average weather and soils. We found nothing comparable to the interplaybetween local planters and local government in the USA.

In the BWI, a set of work rules, norms, and punishment schemes had to be vetted bythe BCO and legislated by the local colony assemblies before slaveholders werecompensated. Approving these ordinances at one central location helped ensure thatuniform accounting procedures would be adopted, detailed records would be kept, anddata would exist to enable a comparative analysis of practices and statistics among thecolonies. In essence, Orders in Council, in conjunction with the 1833 Abolition Act,created a regulatory framework that included formal record books, specific accountingreports, and normal reporting intervals. For example, CAP. V, Section 4 of the British


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Guiana Ordinance required that:[. . .] every contract between the employer and thepraedial apprenticed labourer . . . shall by such employer, be reduced into writing andentered into a book to be kept for that purpose on the plantation (British ParliamentaryPapers, 1835).Labour activity had to be documented, initially for slaves and later for

apprentices, and a set of procedures had to be both followed and recorded whenadministering punishments[21].

There was nothing comparable to this central monitoring/local enforcementapparatus, structure, and tradition in the USA, either before or after slavery wasabolished in the 1860s. Although the FB was responsible for monitoring labourpractices and working conditions on plantations, a detailed and uniform set of districtrecords was neither maintained nor reported to a central monitoring agencycomparable to the BCO. As a result, accounting records and procedures were muchmore ad hoc and far less consistent or detailed in the USA.

Because elite local planters in the BWI created the new work rules, they were able toperpetuate key remnants of slave-era polices and sustain their dominance over labour.The process was not all one way, however, in that BCO input and oversight wasintended to protect the contractual rights of ex-slaves. Thus, the BCO appointed SMswhose charge was to visit plantations, adjudicate complaints from both planters andapprentice workers, and mete out punishments. According to Holt (1992, p. 56), theseofficials combined the roles of judge, teacher, and taskmaster and were the key tothe proper functioning of the system. It is true that the maximum punishment forplanters was a fine, whereas workers could be flogged or imprisoned under the law, butthe point is that the system was both monitored and regulated. For instance, SMsverified that plantations were keeping proper pay and work records as required by thelaw, and were themselves held accountable to the BCO through monthly reports oftheir activities (Tyson et al., 2005).

In the US, the FB was similarly responsible for safeguarding freedmen from abusive

labour practices, but the FB was a temporary, war-related federal agency, and FBofficials on the ground did not have the same level of authority as BWI SMs. In the firstplace, they were hamstrung, in the early years, by the Black Codes. For example, anOctober 11, 1866 letter from T.J. Wood, Assistant Commissioner in Mississippi toGeneral O.O. Howard, Commissioner of the FB, describes the unique challenges facedby Bureau officials in the field:

Officers are required to use every means to make known to all in their districts the nature oftheir duties, and to this end are directed to put themselves in communication with prominentcitizens of either color, and with state and other officials, resident within their districts. Theymust obtain the confidence of both White and colored citizens . . . The difficulties in the wayof the performance of the duties of the officers of the Bureau are much increased by theexistence of certain State Statutes which affect the Freed people alone, and which are unjust

and oppressive[22].Second, the FB was a military operation that functioned in a very hostile environmentwith relatively little direction forthcoming from Washington. The FB undertook manyinitiatives that were clearly intended to improve the lot of freedmen. It distributedrations, established rules for labour contracts and apprenticeship indentures, set up anarbitration structure to resolve disputes, saw to the education of the young, and seemedgenerally supportive of the freedmens equality. The archive is replete with evidencethat documents these noteworthy efforts. For example, FB sub-commissioners were

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required to submit quarterly reports on the freedmen living in their districts. Thesereports were quite detailed and formed a synthesis of most FB activities. Datacategories included the number of freedmen in each county and whether they wereregistered with the Bureau or not; the number gainfully employed; the number of

contracts approved since the last report and the total number of contracts in force; thenumber of marriages registered since the last report and total number registered; thenumber of freedmen who had died and the number held in confinement; the number ofapprenticeship indentures since the last report and the overall total of apprentices; andthe number of freedmen receiving rations broken down into men, women, and children,etc. (Record Group 105, M197, roll 42).

An immense document of some 153 pages appears in roll 65 (Record Group 105)which is a register of former slaves. The entry for each freedman covers two pages ofinformation. In addition to the data that would be expected, such as name, sex, age, andresidence, an identifying trait that should no longer have been germane was colour(e.g. Brown, Black, Yellow, Mulatto). The archives also contain weekly reportsregarding the number of sick and wounded refugees and freedmen. The amount andvalue of commodities provided to individual freedmen were also recorded. Thesestatistics are wide-ranging and not dissimilar to information demanded by the BCO(Tyson et al., 2005). What is missing, however, from the FB records (unlike those of theBCO) is clear evidence of follow through and sustained effort. Did the FB take actionagainst planters who violated the terms of contracts? Was the education provided toBlack children really equal to that of White? Were actions taken to forestall plantersfrom cheating their labourers after the harvest? Were White apprentices worked ashard as Black? The extant record is mute on these pivotal questions, suggesting thatlittle was done by the FB during its seven years of operation that had lasting impact onReconstruction. BWI plantations in contrast continued to be monitored byBCO-appointed officials long after slavery had ended, and they were still required to

document activities and report them regularly to the BCO.

ConclusionThe paper has discussed the impact of accounting and other quantitative techniques onlabour control practices during the transition from slavery to waged labour in the USAand BWI at the macro and micro levels. Prior to emancipation, plantation accounts inboth the USA and BWI focused heavily on gross output rather than return oninvestment. There was a lack of attention to labour productivity and little in the way ofcost controls. There was more attention in the labour records to differences of race thanproductivity. Labour discipline was characterised by the lash or other physicalpunishments. In terms of points of difference, the fact that most plantation owners inthe BWI were absentees meant that there was more of a tradition of reporting events to

the principal than in the USA where management by walking about remainedfeasible. There was also a longer history of government intervention in plantationaffairs in the BWI, including demands for information.

Central government in both venues committed itself to the task of creating a newagrarian society based on free waged labour once the prospect of emancipation couldno longer be avoided. In order to achieve this, the authorities in London andWashington accepted that the behaviour of workers and employers would need tochange radically, and recognised the importance of accounting systems to gather


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information about their activities in order to both establish accountability and evaluateperformance against work norms. In both the BWI and the American South extensivedata were compiled. In the BWI the process was more enduring, more systematic, andwith a clearer connection between the accounting information created and the

outcomes that resulted.Although there were many similarities between the USA and BWI post-slavery

transitional periods, especially planters responses to free labour, the depth andbreadth of accounting differed significantly in these two venues. In the USA,accounting for labour was typically ad hoc and inconsistent, whereas in the BWI it wasmuch more organised, formalised and detailed, and displayed greater uniformity bothwithin and across colonies. In the authors view, the existence of a strong centralagency that accumulated reports, issued Orders in Council and mandated localordinances, and employed and trained local adjudicators best explains the greateruniformity and systematic use of accounting to sustain plantation systems in the BWI,and its absence in the USA. We acknowledge that the Black Codes in nearly everysouthern state contained innumerable provisions which impacted the freedmens dailylife, but these codes were fleeting and did not include anything comparable to themicro-level measurement, monitoring, and reporting requirements for work rules, taskrates, and punishments that occur in the BWI.

The explanation for the relative lack of government imposed control procedures inthe American South is a matter of debate, but two groups of factors stand out, onepolitical, the other economic, that help explain the difference in attitudes. The first isthe call for individual states rights and local authority, and staunch resistance to acentral control that has always been a part of the American consciousness. Before thewar, American weakness was linked to states rights and the reality that slaverycontinued to exist in the North except where it was specifically prohibited. There wascomparatively little slavery to be sure in the North because it was not feasible

economically, but at the same time relatively few congressmen were rabid on the issueexcept to advance their political ambitions. Even Lincoln was cool about the topic untilhe decided on emancipation to advance the war effort (Fleischman, 1979; Litwack,1961, pp. 274-8).

In fact, the basic political structure goes a long way towards explaining why theBritish government appeared strong and the USA weak. The USA still needed severalgenerations to mitigate the effects of states rights irrespective of the decision of theCivil War. Although British colonies were widely dispersed geographically, the USAwas much more decentralised governmentally than Britain. British colonies weregoverned internally rather than by the imperial centre as far as day-to-day matterswere concerned (Banton, 2008). However, the BCO was charged with maintaining thenational interest in the colonies and it did so bureaucratically through systematic and

comparative analysis of documented reports that were locally inspected and regularlytransmitted to London. In the US case, there was no permanent agency of governmentto deal with conquered domestic territory, nor a tradition of monitoring from afar.Hence, the military drew the short straw to enforce policies laid down by a deeplydivided Congress and an ineffective chief executive. The military was given thisresponsibility by default, and the FB, which administered the process, was alwaystemporary in design. This was an entirely different scenario from the BCO with itswell-established network of agents, permanent staff and indefinite life expectancy.

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Indeed, the long experience of the British Colonial authorities in tackling a range ofissues and colonies would have made the BCO a difficult organisation for the WestIndian planters to challenge.

It is probably true that the level of central government interference by the BCO in

the West Indies would have been anathema in Britain, notwithstanding that theabsence of a written constitution in the UK allowed the British government to legislatemore extensively than would have been possible under US law. However, governmentpapers indicate that emancipation was regarded as presenting exceptionalcircumstances. It was after all a great national experiment with a perceived highrisk of failure. Furthermore, this was not the mother country, but the colonies. MostBritish plantation owners were absentees and might have fought harder to protect theirindependence from government had they resided on their plantations.

The second point is that plantation owners in the BWI were dependent on thelargess of the British government to maintain the viability of plantations followingAbolition and therefore had a powerful incentive to comply. Not only did the 20million compensation fund help keep owners afloat, many of whom were saddled withdebt, but the payment of compensation was contingent on colonial assemblies detailingaccounting and work rules designed to regulate workers expected output andremuneration, as well as to mitigate remnants of harsh slave-era punishments thatwould surely have been sustained after slavery ended. These procedures which werebinding on both workers and employers helped insulate the latter from marketpressures to a degree. Thus, from an economic perspective, compensation may well bethe main explanation for the governments ability to demand and implement moredocumented and detailed accounting and control procedures in the BWI than in theUSA, where there was no similar quid pro quo, emancipation being a consequence ofthe Civil War.

The relative deficiency of government sponsored control procedures in the USA is

interesting considering that emancipation there occurred some 30 years later than inBWI. Therefore, the authorities in the USA had plenty of time to observe and learnfrom the British experience. Indeed, the absence of comparable procedures leads us toquestion the perceived usefulness of managerial accounting systems asdecision-influencing information at this particular time and setting, in that suchsystems were intentionally absent in the US case despite the BCO model that wasalready in place for all to observe and replicate.

However, even in the BWI, where the paper has argued that labour control wasmore effective and largely based on accounting and other quantitative data, none of themeasures taken were sufficient to stem the labour shortages that developed followingemancipation. Profits declined, many plantations were sold off, and it was not until the20th century that the Caribbean sugar trade recovered (Adamson, 1975, pp. 461-64;

Hall, 1978; Paton, 2004, p. 9). Neither regulation nor incentives were enough topersuade sufficient numbers of the former slave population to continue doing the samework as before.

Therefore, the situation provides an interesting corollary to previous work onmanagerial control systems in the nineteenth century, which has debated the relativeeffectiveness of surveillance versus economic incentives as means of improvingproductivity (e.g. Hoskin and Macve, 1988; Tyson, 1990). As far as the newly freedslaves were concerned, neither method was likely to succeed. Armstrong (1994, p. 41)


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stresses the importance of closing off the workplace to countervailing influences forpsychological control through surveillance to be feasible. In the case of the plantations,it was precisely the lack of enclosure, physical as well as psychological, following theend of slavery which made it difficult to find workers in the first place, let alone make

them more efficient through monitoring them. The psychological barrier ofsuccumbing to any perceived form of continued slavery, even in the modern formof waged labour, militated against economic incentives being effective. Thus, the paperhighlights the limitations of accounting controls and economic incentives indisciplining labour without the presence of physical coercion in circumstanceswhere there is a refusal on the part of the workers to cooperate. Government can play apart in mitigating such situations. The higher impact of accounting experienced in themore regulated environment of the BWI during the transition period compared withthe USA suggests a key role for government in situations where significantinstitutional changes are taking place. Monitoring coupled to accountability were thegovernmental tools used to effect change. However, the effort that both the FB andBCO put into establishing schools and monitoring attendance for workers childrenshows that these agencies were aware that a lot more would be needed to changeunderlying attitudes. Although education is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worthnoting that school attendance was another area where government statistics werecompiled[23].

In terms of future research, the conversion of large slave populations into wagedworkers deserves further study. The paper has argued that the decision-influencingaspect of management accounting systems was limited in the transition period in boththe USA and BWI and suggests that such a state of affairs was inevitable given theopposition of the freed slaves to continuing to work for their former masters. It wouldbe worthwhile to test this out in relation to the emancipation of slaves by othergovernments in the nineteenth century. It would also be interesting to compare the

workplace discipline of ex-slaves forced through economic necessity to continueworking on plantations with that of free agricultural workers similarly compelled towork in factories as this would shed further light on the authors view thatemancipation posed a unique problem in labour control.

There is also the question of the lack of attention to productivity and cost controlunder slavery, which seems remarkable when one considers that it was not uncommonfor Caribbean plantations to be owned by British industrialists as part of theirinvestment portfolios. Although historians have found control over labour to have beeninformal in the British industrial revolution compared to what Hoskin and Macve(1988) identified in the USA in the mid-nineteenth century, it seems equally true thatBritish industrialists compensated by tightly controlling other inputs (Fleischman et al.,1995; Hoskin and Macve, 2000; Fleischman and Macve, 2002). One means of extending

this research and taking the debate forward concerning the efficiency of the plantationsystem, therefore, would be to compare the accounting arrangements in plantationsand industry where there was common ownership. Aside from the British situation,future study might also explore whether the American carpetbaggers referred toearlier in the paper employed task-rate accounting incentives in their northernfactories. If they actually did so, then two follow-up questions arise:

. Did these incentives produce significant behavioural change?

. Were the incentives maintained once the workforce became permanent?

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Last, the finding that management accounting systems were clearly limited inproviding decision-influencing information, if only by their absence in the USA afteremancipation, suggests that further research is needed to identify the conditions(e.g. entity size, product diversity, etc.) necessary for such systems to be implemented

voluntarily and thus be perceived as exceeding cost/benefit thresholds.

Notes

1. Distinguishing accounting from other quantitative techniques is problematical given its lackof independent existence in nature (Miller and Napier, 1993). All of the practices consideredin the paper relate to the measurement and control of economic resources.

2. The decision-usefulness of the accounting has been hotly debated (Tyson, 1998; Hoskin andMacve, 2000).

3. To take British Guiana as an example, data included returns of transfers of land to formerslaves, quarterly and annual returns of the quantities of sugar, rum, molasses, coffee andcotton exported from the colony with prior period comparatives, and reports listing the

numbers of men and women emigrating to the colony by place of origin (NA: British GuianaOriginal Correspondence CO 111/182). Other statistics were produced on the number ofcommunicants receiving the Holy Sacrament in church, the number of marriages, and thenumbers attending daily, afternoon, or Sunday schools (Tyson et al., 2005).

4. In the case of the American South the authority was the US Army.

5. Playing on the superstitions of the slaves was also used to control the workforce, as was thecase in Jamaica where hangings and mutilations were commonly carried out beneath thecotton tree, which Afro-Creole Jamaicans believed had the power to trap the spirit (Paton,2001, p. 941).

6. The attorney was the agent holding overall responsibility for the management of theplantations in the owners absence.

7. The BCO existed as a separate entity from 1854. Prior to that it was part of the War and

Colonial Department (Banton, 2008).

8. For example, Adamson (1972, p. 23) noted that: During the period of slavery thequalification for elective office [was] . . . the ownership of twenty-five or more slaves. Whenslavery was abolished this was changed to the possession of eighty acres of land, of whichforty had to be in cultivation . . . In 1850, for example, there were 916 qualified voters in atotal population of 127,695.

9. Although there were similar labour shortages in the USA, foreign workers never became aworkforce of major significance. See Foner (1988, pp. 213-214) for a discussion of the reasons.

10. Unsurprisingly, therefore, accounting in the BWI was designed to play an important role inmonitoring the efforts of indentured labourers that later came to dominate the workforce ofcertain of the plantation economies in place of the slaves, notwithstanding that it neverachieved its anticipated benefits in incentivising workers to become more productive(Laurence, 1994, p. 133; Tyson and Davie, 2009).

11. Record Group 105, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands;Washington Headquarters: Records of the Commissioner. Annual Reports of the AssistantCommissioners . . . 1866-68. Box 3, Document entitled Report by Assistant CommissionerAlvan C. Gillen, Col. & Bvt. Major General for year ending October 14, 1867.

12. It should be noted that freedmen were subject to fines and debt imprisonment (peonage) andforced to labour as convicts well into the twentieth century in many locales in the South. SeeBlackmon (2008) and Daniel (1972) for details.


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13. This 1865 reparation applied only to coastal areas of South Carolina, Georgia, and Floridaunder the command of General William Sherman. The bequest was later rescinded andbecame a symbol for the federal governments forcing of freedmen into tenancy andsharecropping.

14. This pattern of focusing on labour turnout rather than efficiency in situations where thelabour supply was constrained was also evident in the Nova Scotia coal mines in the 19thcentury (Fleischman and Oldroyd, 2001).

15. For example, Schlomowitz (1979, p. 559) concluded from his review of monthly FBsub-commissioner reports that, The most frequent complaints related to inaccurate planteraccounts. They [freedmen] alleged being charged for goods which they had not bought fromthe planter and having had deducted from earnings forfeitures for lost time during the yearwhich they had not incurred.

16. See Tyson et al. (2004, 2005) and Tyson and Davie (2009) for more details and manyexamples of the specific accounting data used by Special Magistrates in their adjudications.

17. Foner (1988, p. 104) provided several reasons for the unwillingness of freedmen in the USA towork for wages: The desire to escape from White supervision and establish a modicum ofeconomic independence profoundly shaped Blacks economic choices during Reconstruction,leading them to prefer share tenancy to wage labor, and leasing land for a fixed rent tosharecropping.

18. Record Group 105, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands;Washington Headquarters: Records of the Commissioner. Miscellaneous Records, 1865-71,Box 21, P1-174.

19. Turley (1993, p. 110) noted that in both the British West Indies and the American Southsimilar loose definitions of vagrancy were applied to freed people.

20. Record Group 105, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands;Washington Headquarters: Records of the Commissioner. Miscellaneous Records, 1865-71,Box 21, P1-174.

21. One must be careful not to assume that every legislative requirement translated fully intopractice. Laurence (1994, p. 168) noted that while British Guianas regulations required sixdays of work per week, It seems however, that in practice no one who had done five dayswork in a week was ever prosecuted for being absent on the sixth.

22. Record Group 105, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands;Washington Headquarters: Records of the Commissioner. Annual Reports of the AssistantCommissioners . . . 1866-68. Box 3, File named Mississippi 1866-68.

23. See Tyson et al. (2005) for more details about social and educational control measurementsthat were imposed during Apprenticeship.

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