In 1856, twelve babies were born on Canebrake Plantation in Adams County, Mississippi: six boys and six girls. The first, Kate, arrived on January 21, born to Beck, age thirty. The last came just before the New Year—Jenny, born to Susan, age twenty-three, on December 29. One, a baby girl born to Peggy on November 12, did not survive the month. If she received a name, we do not know it. But the rest lived long enough to be entered into an inventory of lives. There, Canebrake’s proprietor, James Green Carson, noted their names, ages, and values. He priced each baby at $25 except for Kate. He rounded her age up to one and set her value at $75. Thus, the births of 1856 became $325 in human capital at the beginning of 1857. Many years before he would begin to measure their labor, Carson had already entered them into his account books as capital.
Slaves were, quite literally, human capital, and their value could appreciate through maturation, reproduction, and health or depreciate through illness, age, and disobedience. This paper examines the different ways slaveholders sought to estimate their value. Planters used both the language and logic of “depreciation” decades before it would become a common accounting technique, and traders and auctioneers graded enslaved people into standard categories with standard prices. Though slaveholders’ calculations suggested that prices were efficient and correct, beneath their rationalizing patina was the fundamental reality that property was political—especially property in people.
