[xhkkffbf]

Capital was actually a big part of it. The plantation owner didn't just need to capitalize the cost of the land, but the labor as well. When someone purchased a slave, they were paying up front for the remaining labor that could come from that body. This was often pretty expensive when the body was young. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the biggest banking centers of the US because of all of the borrowing.

People often make the mistake that the labor was "free". It wasn't to the people who bought slaves. It wasn't even really free to the slave traders because of the cost of transport.

It was a horrible system in many ways, but it was also a outrageously expensive because of all of the banking and loans involved.

[Breza]

I highly recommend the book Accounting For Slavery to anyone even remotely interested in this topic.

You talked about the costs of buying a human being, which is already horrible. But once an enslaved person was owned outright, they were used as collateral in loans to expand operations.

[parineum]

Reading this post made me wonder if there were "temp agency" type businesses for slaves. Having to own the labor would make your it very difficult to expand and contract your workforce.

Morality aside, it really doesn't seem like a great system.

[Breza]

This was incredibly common here in Washington DC. Think about construction. Building the Capitol required a ton of temporary labor, for example, so Congress contracted for both free and enslaved labor for its construction.

[xhkkffbf]

Yup. This is why it failed.

I think it was fairly common for plantations to loan, rent, or trade slaves just as they treated any other asset.