1. Left-handed power - the strength of the poor and the weak, the secret way of seemingly passive resistance to evil --- a new found tool of the slaves, that changed the dynamic
1.1. the dynamic between the right handed and left handed power was ever changing and planters found new ways to keep the slaves in line, added more surveilance, measured work, and used tortue to accomplish their goal of forcing the enslaved people to invent and keep inventing more efficient and profitable ways to produce their product
1.2. they not only made things more effcient for their owners, but these slaves transformed the world beyond the fields
1.2.1. the amount of cotton grew like crazy and cotton became the most important raw material of the industrial revolution which created our modern world economy
1.3. all of these expansions and growth of the economy came from the left handed power - it all came from the slaves efficient labor
2. Cotton - enslavers shared innovations and this commodity was the example that later led Alfred Marshall to discover the famous concepts of supply-and-demand curves
2.1. the industry got so big that you could share tactics with neighbors and it would not affect your output or profit - they started sharing tactics as how they treated their slaves as well
2.2. wifes went on and on about the profits of the cotton now in the field would let them continue "buying plantations and negros"
2.2.1. mkaing more money allowed one to buy more slaves, thus harvesting more cotton which meant more money
3. the new pushing system where violence was as important as water to the cotton plant
3.1. ball learned this new pushing system: was a system that extracted more work by using oppressively direct supervision combined with torture ratched up to far higher levels than he had experienced before
3.1.1. this violence created an immense growth in cotton production but at humans expense
3.2. the white men would find ways to torture even the toughest black men into the new bullwhip in a result of more cotton
3.3. they pressed their most skillful hands and contriving minds even harder because they knew they could get even more out of them
3.4. using torture, slavery's entrepreneurs extracted an amount of innovation virtually equal in numerical measure to all the mechanical ingenuity in all the textile mills in the western world
4. Plantations were places where things don't change (111)
4.1. the new work in the cotton fields was far more difficult than any slave had ever done before. entire armies of slaves were being moved to new soil - people found this new term, what economists call, efficency and the more slaves they have the more efficent production is. from here on out this is the way plantations operated and they did not change.
5. Slavery in the early 19th century was inherently new to all
5.1. slavery began to expand through a way of extension: adding new slaves, clearing new fields from the next sugar island - this led to productivity per person and planters began to notice that they could extract more production from each slave enslaved person every year and this new form of slavery was born and full of violence
5.1.1. even the whip was something Ball had never seen before and the impression it made on him lasted forever - a shocking discovery
5.1.1.1. the south's whip was to assert dominance so "educationally" that the enslaved would abandon hope of succesful resistance to the pushing system's demands
5.2. slaves caught on and their productivity was not like a machine, they could control how productivity was produced.
5.2.1. they began slowing the pace of workers when overseers were out of sight, to undermine the authority/dominent - they started using "left-hand powered" as Martin Luther called it and began to break employers tools, lied, played dumb, escaped and kept their secrets about all the crafts they could do
5.2.1.1. this secret of the slaves true trades from their owners gave them a leverage in their own dealings with their owners and it gave them a sense of power as their entire lives were stripped from them
5.3. slaves that were sent down south from maryland or that area, entered a whole new world that was very different from the slave labor they knew before - it was a new way of working and meant to occupy most of the waking moments these slaves had left on this earth
5.3.1. survivors identified these changes not as idiosyncrasies, but as an entirely new system of enslaved labor
5.3.1.1. "task systems" were made to help negotiatons between the owners and their slaves and Ball would never see that kind of "civil" slavery again
5.4. taking land from native americans, forcing congress to expand slavery - the "pushing system" was created and was a system increased the number of acres each captive was supposed to cultivate - choosing people to set the pace and you were punished if you fell behind the leader
5.4.1. innovation in violence was part of the foundation of the pushing system - enslaved people learned fast what would happen if they lagged or resisted their work
5.4.1.1. in the pushing system the whip was as important to making cotton grow as sunshine and rain was
5.5. every slave an owner had was in the field and they were all doing the exact same job which is part of the efficeny these planters created
5.5.1. everyone then had a uniform status of a cotton "hand" and the product of their labor was also uniform
6. without the millions of acres of cotton fields in the american south with the thousands of slaves, cotton would not have been the most widely traded commodity
6.1. the expanding cotton plantations allowed textile industries to escape the malthusian constraints by the adding of acres and slaves
6.1.1. the cotton pickers, slaves, produced gains in productivity similar to those of cotton factories
6.1.1.1. lower real cotton prices passed on gains in the form of capital reinvested in more effiecent factory equipment, higher wages for the new industrial working class and revenue for factory owners, enslavers and governments
6.1.1.1.1. the slaves bodies and hands were "machines" for a long time before actual machines were invented
6.2. people started to lean towards the idea of free labor in the sense that if they got paid or a reward they would work harder because of the payment/reward - most enslavers used some sort of positive incentive but that got lost during the cotton era
6.3. enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck
6.3.1. overseers shared with their peers the qoutas they made for the slaves and these quotas were what caused a rise in cotton production in the 1790s and 1860 - they shared the violence they used and made a commitment to violence to produce as much cotton as they could for the owners