The culpability of accounting practice in promoting slavery in the British Empire and antebellum United States

Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 764–784

The culpability of accounting practice in promoting slavery in the British Empire and antebellum United States David Oldroyd a,∗,1 , Richard K. Fleischman b,1,2 , Thomas N. Tyson c,1,3 b

a University of Newcastle Business School, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK Department of Accountancy, John Carroll University, University Heights, OH 44118, USA c Department of Accounting, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY 14618, USA

Received 1 March 2005; received in revised form 1 November 2006; accepted 1 November 2006

Abstract The paper considers the culpability of accounting users and practitioners in the practice of slavery in the British Empire and antebellum U.S. from the perspectives of virtue in accounting; 18th and 19th century political opinion on humanity, justice and property rights; and finally accounting’s potential to support emancipation in society rather than repression. Through the eyes of contemporaries it shows that accounting can be condemned as morally unjust in its support of slavery for its alienation of the intrinsic property rights of individuals. However, the role of accounting was not entirely negative. On the one hand, it attempted to align the objectives of the agents with the health and safety of the slaves in order to conserve life and preserve the value of the inventory. On the other, it facilitated emancipation in the lead up to freedom, and through the compensation process that was intended to align the objectives of the owners with those of the abolition movement. The manner in which

∗

Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 191 2227586; fax: +44 191 2228758. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (D. Oldroyd), [email protected] (R.K. Fleischman), [email protected] (T.N. Tyson). 1 These authors are members of the Cultures, Imperialism and Accounting Practice research group at Newcastle University. 2 Tel.: +1 216 397 4443, fax: +1 216 397 3063. 3 Tel.: +1 585 385 8431, fax: +1 585 385 8094. 1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2006.11.005

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accounting was utilised by both supporters and opponents of slavery illustrates its potential as an agent of social change. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Accounting virtue; Emancipation; Ethics; Justice; Property; Slavery

1. Introduction In a recent series of papers, Fleischman, Tyson and Oldroyd have argued that accounting practice played a key role in sustaining slavery in the United States and the British West Indian (BWI) colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the U.S., it was instrumental in “commodifying, objectifying, and dehumanising” an entire class of people through practices such as valuing slaves, maintaining data on labour-turnout, productivity, slave rentals, etc. (Fleischman and Tyson, 2004). The valuations are an interesting case in point. In the BWI and American South, the slaves were valued alongside the livestock as economic commodities, helping to obscure their humanity and re-enforcing the commonly expressed view of planters that slavery was essentially about business, not exploitation. Similarly, the popularisation of a scientific approach to slavery-accounting in the U.S. in the 1850s, at a time when the continued existence of slavery in that country was seriously under threat, suggests that accounting was being used to legitimise the institution by promoting it as a normal, and indeed scientific, business activity. The majority of plantations in the BWI were owned by absentee merchants and gentry in Britain, who could not have invested without a regular flow of accounting data to control the activities of their agents in the Caribbean (Fleischman et al., 2004a). Accounting also played an important role in sustaining slavery once it was threatened with abolition in the 19th century.4 From 1807, for example, it was no longer possible to fully replenish the wasting slave population with new imports from Africa as a consequence of the British and American governments abolishing the slave trade. Plantations in both venues responded by switching from ganging to tasking in order to reduce the wear and tear on slaves. Tasking involved monitoring the performance of slaves either individually or in gangs against pre-set standards, i.e. utilising accounting controls to maintain output, as opposed to ganging, which depended on close supervision and physical coercion, and was typically more exacting on the slaves (Tyson et al., 2004). Finally, the abolition of slavery in the BWI in 1834 was followed by a 4-year period of transition in which the “freed” slaves, now termed “apprentices”, were still obliged to work for their former masters whilst they learnt how to behave like responsible waged-workers. The British government created a complex synthesis of punishments, incentives and indoctrination to effect this change. The system could not have operated without accounting to police it by measuring the apprentices’ work effort, any lack of which would lead to prosecution in the courts. The fundamental nature of accounting as an instrument of coer4 It should be stressed that it was slavery rather than the plantation system itself which fell into decline in the early 19th century. The profitability of the Caribbean and U.S. slavery economies is still highly debatable.

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cion during the apprenticeship period is illustrated by the fact that corporal punishment meted out on the basis of accounting evidence remained the ultimate deterrent for noncompliant workers (Tyson et al., 2005). In the U.S., accounting played a less prominent role following emancipation in the mid-1860s because of the absence of a central agency comparable to Britain’s Colonial Office, which produced a set of codified and institutionalised record-keeping practices. There can be little question, therefore, that accounting practices were complicit in facilitating slavery in the U.S. and BWI, and in helping to sustain it in the face of mounting pressure for its abolition. Demonstrating complicity, however, is not the same as saying that the agents or planters who prepared or made use of the reports deserve to be castigated for their support of slavery. Fleischman et al. (2004a) took the view that a transcendent standard of justice exists relating to the treatment of humans against which accounting practitioners can be judged culpable. In particular, it could be argued that they were contributing to genocide in the sense that slavery, with its high mortality rates, created a perilous demographic situation, and, thus it is legitimate to adjudge its collaborators guilty of crimes against humanity (Fleischman et al., 2004b). As we shall see, the notion of a transcendent standard of justice for humankind, either derived through religion or moral philosophy was well known to contemporaries. However, Fleischman et al. (2004a) also left the issue open, and suggested three key questions that need to be addressed before one can even approach a definitive answer: • Can accountants be held culpable for their involvement in slavery in the absence of a profession to regulate them? • To what degree can personalities of the past be held responsible for actions that were not necessarily immoral in the environment in which they operated? • Did accountants have the power to influence managers toward more moral action and decision making? Because neither an accountancy profession nor a professional code of ethics existed in the U.K. or U.S. prior to the abolition of slavery (Margerison, 1980, p. 10–1; Matthews et al., 1998, p. 36–7; Previts and Merino, 1998, p. 131–49; Vangermeersch, 1996, p. 477–8; Walker, 1994, 2004a; West, 1996),5 Fleischman et al.’s (2004a) first question regarding the additional ethical responsibilities incumbent on a profession is hypothetical. It is true that firms of accountants did exist earlier that were involved in slavery. For example, the plantation records of the Tharp family include reports from agents in the Caribbean ca.1830–1834 that are noted as having been examined by W. Blake, “Accountant and Co”, 37 Southampton Buildings (CRO: R55/7/130/48–72). The examination seems to have comprised scrutinising the list of expenses, and noting items overcharged, or ones where more information was required. However, firms such as these were not bound by the ethical standards of a professional body of accountants, which in the U.S. were not fully developed until well into the 20th century (Marquette, 1996, p. 233; Preston et al., 1995). Whether it would have made any difference to the willingness of accountants to become involved in slavery had an organised profession existed with a modern code of ethics is a moot point, but such a 5 Slavery remained legal in the British Empire until its abolition in 1834 and in the U.S. until the Emancipation Act of 1863.

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question is counterfactual and therefore beyond the scope of this particular study which focuses on the actual historical situation. Fleischman et al.’s (2004a) other questions are entirely relevant to the problem in hand, however. The second question speaks of judging the morality of slavery both from a modern-day and contemporary perspective. We shall argue that virtue in accounting is a philosophical construct that is historically contingent on the social context and practice of the time. Therefore, to deem accounting practices opprobrious becomes primarily a matter for contemporaries to judge. Fleischman et al.’s (2004a) third question raises the possibility of accounting being deployed in society in order to reduce oppression. Such a situation would provide an interesting foil to previous studies which have tended to emphasise the repressive use of accounting by social elites as an implement of social and moral control over the disadvantaged classes (e.g. Funnell, 2001; Neu, 1999; Walker, 2004b). We shall argue that accounting’s role with regard to slavery was ambiguous in this respect, serving not just to facilitate the practice of slavery but also to regulate the health and safety of the slaves, as well as to eventually promote their emancipation. If wider implications regarding the social potential of accounting practice can be drawn from the study, it is mainly from this last point, because it demonstrates accounting being successfully deployed to help engineer a fundamental change in social policy through promotion of alternate incentives. The present study seeks to address these issues specifically in relation to slavery in the British colonies and antebellum U.S. It proceeds first by reflecting on the notion of an inherent virtue in accounting practice, and second, on 18th and 19th century political opinion regarding the relationship between humanity, justice and property rights. The paper then examines the antithetical proposition that accounting practice also served as a force for good in moderating the treatment of slaves and in facilitating their emancipation, before reaching a general conclusion.

2. Virtue in accounting for slavery The second question posed by Fleischman et al. (2004a) of the degree to which personalities of the past can be held responsible for actions that were not necessarily judged immoral in the environment in which they operated suggests that ethics may be contingent on particular historical situations and raises the issue of moral judgements in history. Looking at the question of historical contingency first, Lovell (1995) considered the possibilities of an inner moral base to the practice of accounting and the accounting profession, following Kohlberg’s six-step taxonomy of the stages of moral reasoning. He argued that while accounting practice exists in a wider social, economic and political context, which helps to shape it, it is inadequate to excuse its moral base on the grounds that it “reflects the prevailing values and beliefs of modernity” (Lovell, 1995, p. 61). According to Lovell (1995, p. 74), the accounting profession currently stands at the lowest self-interested level of Kohlberg’s table – fear of antagonising the business community and the State causes it to leave its members “to resolve ethical dilemmas as private issues” – whereas it should be aiming towards the higher levels where “the notion of living within a community assumes increasing significance” (Lovell, 1995, p. 61). The ultimate aim, which few persons or organ-

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isations attain, would be “a universalistic, principled notion of reasoning”, going beyond “legally defined laws” or even “notions of a social contract”, and assuming a quasi-spiritual dimension (Lovell, 1995, p. 61, 64). For Lovell (1995), virtue stems primarily from the individuals’ level of moral maturity, which they will apply to accounting in common with all their other activities. This is not entirely useful, therefore, to a discussion of virtue in accounting practice per se, or of its inherent potential to be deployed in society in a moral way, because it is the accounting practitioners supported by the profession who are the ones that are seen as capable of generating virtue, not the practice of accounting itself. Furthermore, accounting behaviour is regarded by Lovell (1995, p. 68) as a function of the “moral atmosphere” – “the social political and economic contexts through which the moral agent has moved, and in which he or she currently operates” – and is therefore very much contingent on the historical situation. The same is true of Jones’ (1991) model of ethical decision-making employed by Lippman and Wilson (2004) to theorise the behaviour of Nazi accountants in the Holocaust. Here the key factor was the “moral intensity” of the issue in question, which depends on such variables as social consensus and the psychological closeness of perpetrator and oppressed. By way of contrast, Francis (1990) recognised accounting’s potential to be used as an agent for improvement in society by arguing that particular virtues can be derived from performing accounting excellently. Following Aristotle and MacIntyre (1984), he held that accountants realise virtue not just through personal development, but through the attainment of a mix of internal rewards peculiar to the practice of accounting. These he identified as honesty, concern for the economic status of others, sensitivity to the value of both co-operation and conflict, the communicative character of accounting practice, and the dissemination of accounting information. Concern for the economic status of others implies reflection on the part of the accountant on “how accounting is used to effect economic relations between people” (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 9). This is certainly relevant to accounting for slavery which directly impinged on economic relations between planters and slaves. Honesty too was a virtue for attorneys and overseers, where the presumption on behalf of the plantation owners was that their agents would act dishonestly without an elaborate system of reporting requirements to hold them in check. Roughley (1823, p. 5–25, 28), for instance, railed against the general ignorance, unreliability and selfmotivation of attorneys in the Caribbean, which he said could only be corrected by requiring them to lay before the proprietor “plain legible accounts” made up to the end of every year. 6 Certain others of Francis’ (1990) internal rewards are not so easy to translate to accounting for slavery, however. Sensitivity to the value of co-operation and conflict, for instance, stems from the existence of modern management accounting practices such as standard costing, budgeting or transfer pricing where accounting operates “at the boundary between co-operation and conflict”, acting both as a mediator and contester (Francis, 1990, p. 10). Tyson et al. (2004) found some evidence of this behaviour in the negotiation of task-rates, akin to standard-costs on some plantations, but this type of role for 6 According to Higman (2005, p. 91–3) this was a stereotype popularised by contemporary authors which was not borne out by reality, although the number of surviving returns attest to the importance of accounting as a control measure over agents’ activities.

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accounting was not well developed. Similarly, the virtue to be gained from disseminating economic information relates to modern “pluralistic societies” where “accounting’s virtue lies in a capacity to tell multitudinous economic stories about organisations to the multitudinous audiences interested in the discourse” (Tyson et al., 2004, p. 11). In the British Caribbean and antebellum U.S. plantations, however, virtually all the accounts were prepared on behalf of the plantation owner alone. Francis (1990) never claimed his list of internal rewards leading to virtue from the practice of accounting to be comprehensive. But the point is that they stem from the practice of accounting, which is dynamic, and are necessarily themselves subject to change. Lovell (1995, p. 74) too recognised the difficulties of examining the moral base of a practice within a broader social context which spans millennia. How, therefore, can one judge virtue in accounting historically if it appears contingent as a philosophical concept on the social context or practice of the time? Wiencek (2003, p. 135) maintained that the obvious objection to many modern inquiries into the morality of slaveholding is that they apply modern standards of ethics to the people of the past in a way that is manifestly unfair, illogical, and futile. To conduct a just inquiry, we would need an advocate of moral law from that time. Most historians in fact eschew explicit moral judgements primarily because they are “extraneous” to the “theory and methodology of history”, which seeks to uncover and understand the past, rather than to judge it in moral terms (Evans, 1997, p. 49). In this respect, one could argue that even to ask the question of accountants’ culpability in the practice of slavery is dubious, notwithstanding the reality that moral judgements in history abound, even amongst leading proponents of an explicitly impartial approach (Evans, 1997, p. 50–1). Indeed, the preclusion of contemporary biases and agendas from the analysis is probably not realistic (Fleischman, 2004). There is a tendency in history to use the past to justify the historian’s view of the present (Oldroyd, 1999), which is especially relevant to the history of slavery given the emotive nature of the subject-matter when viewed against a background of racism and race-relations in the modern world. Atoning for the past is, for example, a current issue for Brown University, built in part on the proceeds of slavery (Walters, 2004), and for those private companies in the U.S. that are being sued for their misdeeds by the descendants of slaves some 150 years on. Much of the furor that was engendered by Conrad and Meyer’s (1958) and Fogel and Engerman’s (1974) perceived justification of slavery arose not simply through opposition to slavery per se, but through concern over the place of African Americans in the history of the U.S., and their place in society in the civil-rights and post civil-rights eras (Fleischman et al., 2004b). However, slavery in the Caribbean and American colonies and antebellum U.S. reached maturity in the Age of Enlightenment, where it became the subject of moral debate. Furthermore, as the 18th century progressed it was increasingly judged immoral by a ground-swell of popular opinion. The legacy of the wide public exposure that the issue attracted is a mass of documentary evidence relating to the ethics of slavery. To a large extent, therefore, the question of judging the past through the eyes of the present is not relevant. Following Wiencek (2003, p. 135), the study can debate the issue of the morality of accounting for

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slavery on the basis of contemporary attitudes alone, and in this respect becomes fully justified as history.

3. Humanity, justice and property rights The most emotive issue in the abolition debate was the level of cruelty that was being inflicted on the slaves. Indeed, it is difficult to gain an accurate picture of the truth of the matter from contemporary tracts alone, because whilst the abolitionist propaganda emphasised the cruelty of slavery (e.g. Clarkson, 1789, p. 12; Crafton, 1792, p. 4–13; Gentleman Long Resident in Jamaica, 1792, p. 3; Hollingsworth, 1788, p. 15; Houldbrooke, 1792, p. 3; Wilberforce, 1792, p. 12–4), the charge was disputed by the plantation lobby (Francklyn, 1789, p. viii, xviii–ix; Speeches of Mr. Wilberforce, 1789, p. 8). Edwards (1798, p. 195), for instance, whilst not denying that some of the accounts of “whippings, mutilations, & c.” were true, asserted that “in general terms . . . the treatment of West Indian slaves is mild and indulgent”. A Plain man (1792, p. 5) intoned that the slaves were fortunate for in England they would be hanged for the same crimes for which they were now whipped, or “sent to starve to death in Botany Bay”. However, here there is a case for arguing that the agents who prepared the accounts were culpable for hiding the severity of the punishments that were being inflicted on the slaves. We know, for instance, that the punishments were brutal from the system that was implemented in the West Indies by law during the apprenticeship period following abolition – punishments were logged for the first time7 – which, whilst still appearing to us extremely cruel, was intended to protect the apprentices from the excesses they had formerly endured (Tyson et al., 2005). And yet the returns we have seen of the increases and decreases in slaves that were submitted by the agents in the Caribbean to the owners in Britain made little mention of punishments. These returns were designed to render the agents accountable for the health and safety of the proprietor’s “stock” (Fleischman et al., 2004a); and the lack of information about punishments being sent back to Britain suggests concealment on the part of the agents who prepared these accounts. Narrative and literary evidence, such as the eye-witness testimony of Prince (1831; see also Clarkson, 1808), suggests a far higher level of disciplinary violence against slaves. Whiteley (1833, p. 4, 7), for example, who visited Jamaica in 1832, found that all of the slaves on a pimento plantation had at some time been whipped for coming in short of quota. Whether or not slavery was cruel in the minds of contemporaries depended to a large extent on whether they believed Africans to be fully human. Writing some 100 years before the modern eugenics movement was born, the argument that Africans were “a distinct and inferior species” was seen by one abolitionist as the best defence available to the pro-slavery lobby, could it be proven (Anon, 1790, p. 128). In commenting on “the dull stupidity of the Negroe” compared to the “quick sagacity of the [American] Indian”, Knox (1789, p. 14) speculated on whether this was because “the Creator [had] originally formed these black people a little lower than other men”. This was not just prejudice, but reflected a

7 In several plantation books we examined, the preface indicated that floggings were not to exceed a specified number of lashes, so accounting both recorded and delineated physical punishments numerically.

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lack of scientific knowledge about Africa, on why Africans had dark skins, for instance. Hollingsworth (1788, p. 12) described anatomical researches [which] seem to ascribe it to a more remote and unknown cause . . . [than] a long succession of generations, immediately beneath the sun’s keenest rays. Thus, a Select Committee of the House of Commons took evidence in the 1790s on whether Africans were capable of feelings and affection and moral behaviour (Select Committee, 1791, p. 82–5). The myth that slaves were not as human as Europeans was one that the abolition lobby had to dispel. Gisborne (1792, p. 28), for example, affirmed with a hint of irony that the Negro is a human creature. He has some powers of understanding; he has organs of articulation; he has a language not altogether unintelligible to European ears . . . His purpose was to answer a section of the pro-slavery propaganda which had reasoned Negroes down to a level with the Ourang-Outangs; or rather the Ourangs up to, or above the Negroes (Gentleman Long Resident in Jamaica, 1792, p. 5). The religious lobby was particularly vehement in emphasising that slaves shared a common humanity with the rest of mankind (Randolph, 1788, p. 13). Thus, Douglas (1792, p. 3–4) stressed that “the swarthy sons of Africa, and the savage tribes of America in their native wilds” had all been created in the image of God alongside “the fair and ruddy European, and the proudly pompous Asiatic”. Slaves were “equally the objects” of God’s “paternal care” (Douglas, 1792, p. 4), and “were entitled to the same immortality and salvation” (Knox, 1790, p. 2). One of the most poignant images we have encountered is a description in a letter of the hapless faces of the female slaves a Mr. Thisley kept as curiosities in his London house – “herds of people” flocked to see them like in a zoo – gazing out of the windows on to the alien streets below (CRO: R/55/7/128 (a)1/21, 23). The writer referred to them as “these coloured race of beings”, whom she likened to “animals”. Such attitudes were common amongst slave-owners. Thomas Jefferson, himself, believed Negroes to be racially inferior (Davis, 1999, p. 166, 194). But the myth that slaves were less than human was one which agents and bookkeepers helped to perpetuate through commonly classifying them with the mules and cattle in inventories and valuations as livestock (Blackburn, 1997, p. 324–5). Physical stock checks of animals alongside slaves were commonplace, the latter being subjected to a parade before appraisers in which their characteristics were noted and evaluated. The correspondence between absentee plantation owners and their agents in the Caribbean also tended to group the slaves with the animals (Fleischman et al., 2004a). The three-fifths clause that was included in the American Constitution until the 13th Amendment was passed in the late 1860s institutionalised the inferior nature of slaves. This clause was introduced at the time of the U.S. Constitutional Convention, not at the end of the Civil War, so it occurred when slavery was still in its flower rather than as a verdict of the war (Blackburn, 1988, p. 124). It enabled Southern states to count each slave as three-fifths of a free white person for the purposes of determining seats in the House of Representatives. The existence of these three-fifths human beings, who were themselves

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denied the vote, ensured that U.S. presidents from slave upholding states served in 50 of the 62 years following the election of George Washington. Unsurprisingly, they failed to pass legislation that would have outlawed slavery in the South. However, the plantation owners were unable to capture the moral high-ground from the abolitionists in the popular imagination at least, their main arguments being based on the promotion of national and colonial economic interests and the protection of planters’ property (Adair, 1790, p. 191, 200; Anon, 1788, p. 5, 1789, p. 10–9; Clarkson, 1788, p. 10; Innes, 1789, p. 8; Member of Parliament, 1792, p. 4, Member of the House of Commons, 1793, p. 4; Othello, 1790, p. 5–9; Planter, 1789). For Innes (1789, p. 17), private property was “sacred”, and the planters had equal rights to its protection as any other British subjects. Protection of property was fundamental to the dominant code of ethics in Britain and America at the time which came from Biblical theology. The earliest surviving written codes of English law, for example, derived from the Old Testament (Whitelock, 1979, p. 408). Blackburn (1997, p. 36) argues that Christian theology gives tacit support to slavery, notwithstanding the leading role played in the abolition movement by Christian sects such as the Baptists, Methodists, Quakers and Anglicans in particular (Anstey, 1980, p. 20–2; Clarkson, 1787, p. iii; Davis, 1999, p. 213–54; Turley, 1991, p. 17–25, 33–5). Senex (Glasgow Courier, 1792, p. 3–4), for example, used Mosaic Law and examples where the Children of Israel had kept slaves as property to challenge the “utter abhorrence” the Church of Scotland in Glasgow had recently expressed towards the slave trade. The Reverend Harris of Liverpool, a constituency with one of the strongest vested interests in the export of slaves, did likewise (Francklyn, 1789, p. ix; Ranby, 1790, p. 2–3; Sugar Planter, 1788, p. 3; Turley, 1991, p. 23). However, the numbers of church writers who used the Scriptures to justify slavery were probably in the minority. More typical were the views of the Reverend Randolph (1788, p. 15), who argued that such use of the Bible was “adding blasphemy to our iniquity”. Protection of property is achieved through accounting. Funnell (2001) considered the triangular relationship between accounting, justice and property drawing on the writings of contemporary political-economists such as Adam Smith, Hume, Locke and Bentham. He argued that in capitalist societies accounting is concerned with justice on the basis of entitlements derived from property, and that the preservation of property is enshrined in law as the ultimate end of justice. The ongoing relationship between accounting, property and entitlements is in fact much older than capitalism, dating back to the invention of agriculture in prehistory (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992). The periodic returns sent by agents in the Caribbean to absentee owners in Britain were commissioned by the plantation owners and designed to protect their interests. Notions of need and fairness to the slaves were therefore irrelevant to these accounts which provided “justice” to the property owners. In this respect one could argue that they were not morally opprobrious, as at first sight they appear consistent with the accepted code of ethics at the time. Opponents in the House of Commons of the 1792 Abolition bill stressed the link between “justice” and the “preservation” of the planters’ “property” (Gisborne, 1792, p. 24). However, the relationship between property and justice was also seized on by the abolitionists. Slavery was not necessarily adjudged immoral because of the conditions under which slaves laboured. First, they did have some rights in law, notwithstanding that the law failed to safeguard them from abuse (Africanus, 1788, p. 85; Knox, 1790, p. 7; Ranby, 1790,

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p. 8; Wilberforce, 1792, p. 18), and second, their living conditions were not unfavourable compared with those of the labouring classes in Britain (Anon, 1788, p. 7; Member of the House of Commons, 1793, p. 6; Plain man, 1792, p. 4–5; Prinsep, 1800, p. 121–2; Randolph, 1788, p. 10).8 For example, Clarkson (1787, p. 14), a champion of abolition, conceded that on some plantations the Negroes were both well supplied and “treated with humanity”. Edwards (1798, p. 192–3) argued their living conditions were “preferable to that of the peasantry of a great part of Europe”. What distinguished slavery as unjust from a political perspective was that the slaves were regarded as the property of someone else, i.e. slavery did not recognise the slaves’ innate property rights over their own persons. Hence, Roscoe (1788, p. 8) could argue that “no title to perpetual servitude of another can be supported by purchase; for the origin being unjust, the right cannot be validated by transfer”. The theme of the law of contract was continued by Tucker (1796, p. 9–11, 24), a professor of law at William and Mary University, during the debate over abolition in Virginia. Quoting directly from Blackstone (1826, p. 422–3), the foremost 18th century commentator on English common law, he argued that selling slaves offended the laws of property because the slaves themselves received nothing in exchange for the value given. This implied that only the individual enjoyed property rights over their “life and liberty”, and that slavery was incompatible with the principles of liberty on which the revolutionary American government had been founded. Blackstone (1826, p. 422–4), himself, whilst arguing that pure and proper slavery . . . cannot subsist in England . . . whereby an absolute and unlimited power is given to the master over the life and fortune of the slave, stopped short of concluding that slavery contracts should be forfeit. Although the law would protect a slave in England “in the enjoyment of his person and property”, it would not free him from the property rights of his master to his service, providing they had been lawfully acquired. Blackstone (1826, p. 423) was borrowing from the French political theorist, Montesquieu (1989, p. 247) in his view that selling slaves went against the law of contract because the slaves themselves received no “quid pro quo” from the transaction. Indeed, in adopting Montesquieu’s account and understanding of the English constitution, Blackstone helped popularise his ideas. Blackstone’s work was especially influential in the drafting of the American Constitution, for example, as it provided a quasi-official record of the otherwise unwritten English version that could be consulted as an exemplar (Shklar, 1987, p. 112). However, the debate on slavery at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 centred on practical issues of taxation and representation rather than ethics, notwithstanding that most of the states in the union passed anti-slavery measures in its aftermath (Blackburn, 1988, p. 123–6). Contemporaries were not unaware of the inconsistencies between the political aspirations of the Declaration of Independence and the practice of slavery. According to Ramsay (1789, p. 38), the case for liberating “the poor African” was “much stronger” than that of the American colonies in their secession from Britain, applying the logic that had been espoused during the revolution. The New-Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (1793, p. 8 Statistical analysis of mortality and fertility rates in fact suggests that living conditions for slaves were harder in the BWI than in the American South (Blackburn, 1997, p. 260; Engerman, 1975; Fogel, 1989; Fogel and Engerman, 1974, vol. I, p. 25–9; Higman, 1976; Ward, 1991).

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3–4) agreed. The major problem was the pragmatic one of keeping the Southern states, with their plantation economies, on board (Davis, 1999, p. 166, 320–2; New-Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 1793). Blackstone’s Commentaries dated from the 1760s. Some 100 years later, Bagehot (2001, p. 153), the leading Victorian commentator on the English constitution, used the property argument in reverse to show the dangers slaves faced following their emancipation. Writing at the time of the conclusion of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the South, he maintained that slaves had been “formerly protected” because they were “articles of value”, whereas now no one had an interest in their preservation but themselves. The notion that only individuals had property rights over their own persons was not new, and had been developed extensively by John Locke in his Second Treatise on Civil Government published in 1690. Locke exercised a dominant influence over 18th century political thought, especially through the doctrine that sovereignty ultimately rests with the governed rather than absolute rulers (Locke, 1764, Chapter 4, p. S.22), which became the corner-stone of the American Constitution. He argued that protection of self was the rationale for humans in a “state of nature” to form themselves into societies. His definition of property, therefore, was the “preservation of lives, liberties and estates”, and he regarded men’s lives and liberties as the chief parts of their property (Locke, 1764, Chapter 9, p. S.123–4). Furthermore, he referred to slavery explicitly as being incompatible with the concept of property (Locke, 1764, Chapter 4, p. S.23).9 This is what was understood by “Africanus” (1788, p. 79, 85) when he spoke of slavery as contravening the “laws of Nature” or “the rights of man”, which he defined in terms of “the privileges . . . of protection”. Thus, Houldbrooke (1792, p. 3) could assert that slavery overturned both “the system of Nature and of God”, and Nickolls (1788, p. 5) that “no body of men hath any right for the purposes of interest and convenience to captivate, or enslave, or oppress any other”. Even Henry Dundas (1796, p. 24), who opposed the 1796 Abolition Bill on pragmatic grounds, accepted the moral argument that the slave-trade was “contrary to the principles of justice and humanity”. The fact that Ranby (1790, p. 4–5), an opponent of abolition, felt it necessary to challenge the tenet “that every man has by natural right an unalienable property in his own person” is evidence of its potency at the time. Other pro-slavery activists attempted to subvert Locke’s argument by maintaining that slavery was more conducive to “the preservation of the lives” of the slaves than life in Africa (Planter, 1789, p. 4; see also Nickolls, 1788, p. 10–1; Plain man, 1792, p. 5). The contentions that liberty was “the birthright of every man” (Hollingsworth, 1788, p. 11), and slavery “incompatible with the nature of man” (Anon, 1791) were common abolitionist themes (see also Anon, 1793, p. 9 According to Blackburn (1997, p. 263–5, 329) and Davis (1999, p. 45), Locke was ambiguous in his opposition to slavery. His real concern was the relationship between Englishmen and the royal power, rather than slavery in the colonies, which he supported both as a colonial administrator and investor in the Royal African Company. His contention in his Second Treatise on Civil Government that slavery represented “the state of war continued, between a lawful Conqueror, and a Captive” was therefore an opt-out clause allowing for the continuation of slavery in the colonies (Locke, 1764, Chapter 4, p. S.23). This is certainly not how it was read by the abolitionists, however, who quoted him directly in their anti-slavery arguments (e.g. Roscoe, 1788, inside cover). Indeed, Locke was writing about the development of society in general, not just in England, and the passage in question was referring only to the “perfect condition of slavery”, which Locke defined as the situation where a criminal who “deserves death” is enslaved as a substitute for lawful execution.

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iv). Locke’s assertion that liberty was so integral a part of the nature of man that it was not in his power to part with it “by compact, or his own consent” (Locke, 1764, Chapter 4, p. S.23) was picked up by the abolitionists (e.g. Anon, 1790, p. 130; Roscoe, 1788, p. 8). According to Locke, slavery could only be acceptable as a substitute for execution, in a situation where the individual had forfeited his right to live by committing “some act that deserves death” (Locke, 1764, Chapter 4, p. S.23). This enabled abolitionists to argue further that slavery was “unjust” because its victims had “not forfeited their right to freedom by committing felony” (Gentleman Long Resident in Jamaica, 1792, p. 6; see also Douglas, 1792, p. 4–5). It also helps explain the emphasis in the abolitionist literature and evidence presented to the British Parliament on the manner in which the slaves were first procured in Africa through “unjust wars” or kidnapping by local despots (Anon, 1790, p. 93–4; Clarkson, 1787, p. 5–10, 1789, p. 4–12; Crafton, 1792, p. 4–5; Edwards, 1798, p. 177; Wilberforce, 1792, p. 3–7). It was not just that the practice was cruel, but that most of the victims were not criminals. Therefore, “reason” proved that to deprive them of their liberty was morally unjust. Hence, the first two resolutions of the Edinburgh Society for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade that slavery is, in its very nature, inconsistent with the first principles of justice and humanity . . . [and] that the injustice and inhumanity of this Traffic is greatly heightened, by the means used for procuring Slaves (Speeches in Parliament, 1789, p. 113–4). To sum up, judging the past in relation to the present may be questionable from a philosophical or historiographical perspective. But the personalities of the past who engaged in slavery or generated the accounts that protected their interests can still be seen to have acted unethically when weighed against a standard of justice linked to the protection of property entitlements, to which accounting was key—an entitlement which was soundly critiqued and widely understood by leading thinkers and social critics of the time.

4. Accounting and emancipation The final question posed by Fleischman et al. (2004a) about whether accountants have had the power historically to influence managers towards more moral action and decision making suggests a more positive role for accounting practice. Work has already been undertaken relating to the issue of accounting and “emancipation” by Gallhofer and Haslam (2003), who cite cases where labour activists utilised accounting data to fight repression. Herbert Hyde Champion, for example, used published accounting data in the 1880s to campaign for better wages at the match manufacturer, Bryant and May by contrasting the workers’ terms with returns to shareholders (Gallhofer and Haslam, 2003, p. 71–82). This is an example where accounting was deployed to reduce exploitation of the poor by social elites, although this was not the original intention that lay behind the company’s accounts. Reducing social exclusivity is a related issue, and Brackenborough (2003) similarly demonstrated how the annual income and expenditure accounts published by the Newcastle Corporation in the 19th century were employed by the ship-owners and traders on the Tyne to wrest control of the river away from the narrow oligarchy which controlled the city. In this instance, the issue at stake was not the exploitation of the disadvantaged, but competition between

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different social elites for control of resources. Whether the outcome could be regarded as social progress would depend on the perspective of the interests served, but it does illustrate accounting being deployed effectively by interest groups as an agent of social change. Accounting data were likewise used for lobbying purposes in the debate over the abolition of slavery, although it tended to be the pro-slavery lobby rather than the abolitionists who made use of it in this way in order to demonstrate the economic perils of abandoning slavery. As the issue of abolition gathered force in Britain in the later 18th century, a range of accounting statistics was presented to the various parliamentary committees, which once in the public domain, were seized upon by the protagonists to support their arguments. In 1789, for example, a tract made use of “accounts laid before Parliament” on imports, exports, and British and East Indian “manufactures” in order: to prove to the conviction of every rational British subject, that the abolition of the British trade with Africa for Negroes, would be a measure as unjust as impolitic, fatal to the interest of this nation, and ruinous to its sugar colonies (Anon, 1789, p. 10–7). The raw data were extrapolated to estimate the effects on local economies such as Birmingham or Manchester: The article of guns alone for the African trade, as appears by Mr. Whately’s evidence before Lord Hawkesbury, employs between 4 and 5000 persons in Birmingham, whereas an estimated “18,000 persons” were employed in Manchester in supplying manufactured goods to Africa with which “to buy slaves” (Anon, 1789, p. 11). The moral import of the plantation accounts themselves is not clear cut. In the first place, the question of whether the agents and bookkeepers who kept the accounts on the Caribbean plantations had the power to influence the owners towards more moral action towards the slaves – better conditions, greater freedoms, more humane treatment, etc. – does not wholly apply because it was the self-same attorneys, overseers and bookkeepers who had power over the slaves’ daily lives, with most of the owners residing overseas. Similarly, in the U.S. where plantations were generally smaller, it tended to be owners themselves who kept the books. Most of the British Caribbean accounts that have survived were returns submitted to the absentee owners, who used them in an attempt to control the actions of these officials, whom they mistrusted. Whilst we have suggested that there was some concealment in these returns of the brutal nature of the treatment being meted out to slaves, it is probably also the case that their situation would have been worse had the agents not been compelled to regularly account for the increases or decreases in numbers with explanations for lives lost. The first priority of the absentee owners was to avoid punishments that would have incapacitated slaves or made the females less fertile. Therefore, the accounts were intended to align the economic interests of the agents with the health and safety of the slaves. If the agents maintained the value of the stock it would help secure their position and even attract reward, if it declined they risked punishment. A clear illustration of this comes from the accounts of the Lowther plantations, which show the agent’s commission being adjusted by 5% of the increase or decrease in the inventory of slaves occurring during the year (BL: 43507/9–25). Thus, although accounting practices helped sustain slavery, plantation accounts also served the moral end of helping to protect the lives of

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slaves by providing the managers with appropriate incentives, albeit from the purely selfinterested motive of preserving the value of the plantations’ most important productive resource. Turning now to the demise of slavery in the British colonies, accounting served as an emancipatory force in a very direct way because without it the slaves could not have been emancipated. Tyson et al. (2005), for example, show how accounting was employed to regulate the transition from slavery to waged-labour (ca. 1834–1838). Although the reality of the situation may have been to maintain the oppression of the so called “apprentices” in the interim – they were still bound to work for their former owners and liable to corporal punishment for lack of effort – neither the owners nor the local judiciary were allowed by the Colonial Office in London to act with impunity. The apprentices now received more protection under the law against abuse, and incidents in Jamaica in 1834 and British Guiana in 1842 reveal them confident enough to appeal to the law for redress when their rights had been transgressed (Tyson et al., 2005, p. 227). The whole process was “built on a hierarchy of accountability” stretching upwards from the workers, planters and judiciary to the British government, with accounting serving to coerce the various parties to comply with the colonial apprenticeship regulations (Tyson et al., 2005, p. 225). Accounting played a more significant role still in facilitating emancipation in the British colonies through its involvement in the compensation process. The plantation owners would not have agreed to emancipation without compensation—the “sacredness” of private property in the British constitution meant that it would have been morally unjust as well as politically inexpedient for the government to have withheld compensation (Davis, 1999, p. 113; Innes, 1789, p. 17–8). To suggest otherwise was “absurd” and absolutely contrary to the Faith of all Charters and Acts of Parliament, granted for the Protection of the Colonies, and for the general Benefit of this Country (Innes, 1789, p. 6–7). The alternative of freeing the slaves without compensating the owners was only tenable in the American South because of the Civil War. Compensating the West Indian planters was also considered vital by the British government to ensuring the continued survival of the local plantation economies. A letter from the Colonial Secretary of State, Stanley four months before abolition was due to take place illustrates the high level of uncertainty at the time about the consequences that would result from emancipation. He describes emancipation as a great national experiment, to the success of which the country looks forward with much anxiety . . . [which] can be accomplished only through the residence and prosperity of the white population. If the planters, many of whom were heavily in debt, were not adequately compensated, it was feared they would emigrate and cultivation in the West Indian colonies cease [NA: CO 318/118/55]. Accounting was actively deployed by the British government in the negotiations over compensation, as well as in the administration of the actual process. It was used by the Treasury, for instance, in the negotiation of a £15 m loan from Rothschilds to fund the

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bulk of the compensation (Return relating to West India Compensation, 19 August, 1836, British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 83, p. 2–28). Slave owners, for their part, were required to classify the slaves they held on 1 August 1834, the date the Abolition Act came into effect, into designated categories, each of which was assigned a standard value. Knowing that the slaves would be rated according to their economic value again created an incentive for the owners to maintain their health. Thus, the 474 slaves at Martin’s Hill and Marshall’s pens in Jamaica were listed by sex under the headings of head-people, tradesmen, superior tradesmen (praedial), field labourers, inferior field labourers, children under 6 years on 1 August 1834, aged, diseased and otherwise non-effective. The total compensation claim resulting amounted to £24,775 sterling, and was attested by Messrs. Robertson and Ridgard, attorneys [NLS: 25/11/652/1]. Claims had to be attested by two disinterested parties or government officials. A similar printed form exists in the Cecil Jane papers, Antigua. Here the claim for compensation was the subject of a dispute over who owned which slaves, the resolution of which would depend on accounting evidence [BL: 42808/1]. It follows that accounting was fully integrated in the compensation process, which the British government used to align the objectives of the planters with those of the abolitionists. Of course, the absence of a compensation process in the U.S. precludes any comparative discussion on this matter.

5. Conclusion The paper has considered whether it is justifiable to hold accounts’ users and practitioners in the British Empire and antebellum U.S. culpable for their involvement in slavery, but the answer is unclear. On the one hand, previous studies demonstrate the complicity of accounting in promoting slavery, and we have further argued that the agents and owners who were involved in this process transgressed the dominant code of ethics at the time. By the 18th century, justice was commonly understood to stem from the protection of property entitlements, to which accounting was key. However, by the 18th century the notion of property had been developed to embrace property rights over one’s own person – this was a concept that was generally understood and widely accepted in political circles – and was therefore incompatible with slavery. On the other hand, slavery was eventually abolished, and accounting was actively deployed by the British government to gain the acquiescence of the planters and to facilitate emancipation. Moreover, while slavery lasted, accounting was also deployed to protect the value of the owners’ stock of slaves, and thereby contributed indirectly to promoting their health and wellbeing. Thus, one is looking at two concurrent accountings working in opposite directions, the one to oppress, the other to sustain life or liberate. There are perhaps two general inferences that can be drawn from this dichotomy about the social agency of accounting practice, notwithstanding the danger this creates of imposing present beliefs on the past (Miller and Napier, 1993), which the paper has sought to avoid by debating the ethics of slavery first and foremost from a contemporary perspective. The first point concerns the role of accounting as a lobbying tool. Once information enters the public domain it becomes available for lobbying purposes by interest groups. This is especially true in the multimedia society of the 21st century, which governments and other interested

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parties have learnt to manipulate through the selective release of information. However, it was also true of the campaign for the abolition of slavery, described by Trevelyan (1966, p. 599) as “the first successful propagandist agitation of the modern type”. From an accounting perspective, exposing organisations to greater public scrutiny by obliging them to be more open in their disclosures about the effects of their activities increases the likelihood that the status quo will be challenged by pressure groups. As in the case of slavery, a shift in public opinion can be used by government to justify direct political action that once would have been deemed unacceptable, whatever the underlying causes.10 Manipulating the demos for political ends is certainly not new and would have been well known to Julius Caesar or Demosthenes, for example. But the abolition campaign provides a pertinent object lesson regarding the social agency of information disclosures, including accounting that is still relevant today. The second argument concerns the relationship between accounting and economic incentives. Maintaining a healthy workforce that was capable of reproducing itself organically was not incompatible with slavery in the U.S. or BWI given the costs of procuring and transporting new slaves from Africa.11 It was in the interests of investors to maintain the economic value of the workforce, and as we have seen, they utilised accounts to translate this incentive to their agents. The need to preserve the workforce became especially critical after 1807 when new imports of slaves were banned by the British and American governments. Some slave-owners responded by switching from “ganging” to “tasking” production systems, the latter relying less on physical coercion and more on economic incentives – a greater amount of free time if the preset task was completed early – to elicit satisfactory performance from the workforce (Tyson et al., 2004). During the apprenticeship period in the West Indies slaves were given the opportunity to purchase their freedom in advance of full emancipation. However, planters used accounting valuations to inflate the price they would have had to pay, thereby discouraging them from trying. Conversely, the apprenticeship regulations attempted to give workers the incentive to work hard for their former masters by paying them for any labour provided in excess of their basic quota (Tyson et al., 2005). Finally, accounting was employed by the British government to create the incentive for the owners to agree to abolition by compensating them for the resulting loss of value. Accounting was instrumental in all of these initiatives – imposing rewards and punishments, setting targets and monitoring efforts, valuing slaves – and thus, revealed itself capable of being used to promote different incentives for slaves, agents and owners as the economic and political circumstances changed, even to the extent of supporting opposite positions. In the 1990’s a dispute arose over the renovation of the frieze above St. George’s Hall in Liverpool, which depicted a grateful Negro kneeling with shackles broken beneath the figure of Britannia who had liberated her slaves. The revisionists argued that the image should be torn down and replaced as it misrepresented history. It was deemed wholly inappropriate for 10 Blackburn (1988, p. 521) argues that the abolition of slavery in the West Indies was linked to a relative decline in its economic importance compared to new markets that were opening up elsewhere for manufactured goods. 11 The situation was different to slavery in Nazi Germany, for instance, where there was little economic incentive to preserve life owing to the availability of a ready supply of slave-labour from the Jewish and Slavic peoples at minimal cost (Funnell, 1998).

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modern multi-cultural Liverpool; it was Britannia, after all, who had enslaved the Negroes in the first place.12 Should we be grateful to accounting practitioners for facilitating the emancipation or should they be condemned for supporting slavery during the previous 200 years of its existence? The fact that accounting could serve both ends through advancing the values of the various accounts’ initiators illustrates its flexibility as an instrument of social control, which in the case of slavery, eventually helped promote and facilitate significant social change.

Archival sources British Library (BL), Cecil Jane papers, Antigua relating to the compensation of slaves 1834–1835. British Library (BL), Lowther papers. Cambridgeshire Record Office (CRO), Tharp family papers. National Archives (NA), West Indies Original Correspondence, 1624–1951, Colonial Office papers. National Library of Scotland (NLS), Crawford papers.

Acknowledgements The authors are grateful for funding support from the Jack Wasmer Fellowship at John Carroll University. The input of participants at the 17th Business History Research Conference (Cardiff), especially Warwick Funnell, and the two anonymous reviewers for Critical Perspectives on Accounting, is gratefully acknowledged.

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12 Hammond (2002, p. 124–5) relates another interesting case of symbolism relating to slavery. The social attitudes which excluded African Americans from the role of CPA were encapsulated on the Mississippi certificate until the mid-1980s by their portrayal in the corner of the document picking cotton.

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