Chapter 7: Slave Exploiter
TL: Hanguk
Lincoln and Buchanan.
Meeting two future presidents and padding my fortune nicely besides, this business trip had turned out to be pretty meaningful.
But just as my own worries were deepening, American politics in 1856 was sinking into a bottomless swamp.
Charles Sumner, the anti-slavery senator, gave a fiery speech and got beaten over the head by a pro-slavery congressman, who sent him to the hospital.
Pro-slavery forces attacked Lawrence, the stronghold of the Free-Staters.
And in retaliation, the famous abolitionist John Brown awakened as a Sword Master, took up a broadsword, and carved up five pro-slavery men.
Astonishingly, all of this had happened in the span of less than a single month.
"The end of days, I tell you. The end of days. What's to become of the world?"
On the way back to Mississippi, aboard the boat, Kate read the newspaper and let out a deep sigh.
"Who knows. At this rate the country might actually split in two."
"Now, you mustn't say things like that, even as a joke. People might mistake you for one of the Fire-Eaters."
Thinking I'd made some tasteless joke, Kate laughed and shook her head.
Sorry to say, but it's not a joke. It's the truth.
Still, if even my sister reacted that way, I suppose plenty of people still believed this conflict could be smoothed over.
Even in the South, the only ones actually saying the South ought to break away from the Union were the Fire-Eaters Kate had just mentioned.
A minority, yes, but a group with no small presence, what with a former governor and even a sitting congressman among their ranks. And yet, the name alone gives it away, doesn't it?
Like the Death Eaters from a certain British magic novel, these were people whose very name was taboo, so one absolutely could not get tangled up with them.
"Sis, if anyone ever asks you to fund the Fire-Eaters or anything like that, refuse outright, no, don't. Say you'll talk it over with me and cut the conversation off there. Got it?"
"Of course. Besides, if I ever said I'd fund those people, my husband would hit the roof."
"That said, don't be too cold to them either. The way I see it, those people are going to gain a lot of ground for a while yet."
"Really? Did Candidate Buchanan tell you something?"
When Kate had heard I'd met with the Democratic Party's presidential frontrunner, she'd thought it such a waste.
And no wonder, since the chance to get a foot in with an influential politician likely to become president, of all people, didn't come along often.
"It's best not to get any more involved with that man. And sis, if you've got even the slightest hope pinned on him, just let it go now. You'll only end up feeling all the more betrayed."
"Was he that bad? Even so, my husband said that, Democrat though Buchanan is, being a Northerner makes him the man best suited to settle the current situation."
That was probably the intention of most of the people backing Buchanan for president.
And since he'd failed at it so spectacularly, that was no doubt why he'd forever be counted among the worst presidents in American history.
I made up a plausible reason why Buchanan had seemed so incompetent and gave Kate her warning.
As we talked it over and arrived back in Mississippi, the cotton fields spread out before me, stretching on without end into the distance.
The smoke curling up from the chimney of the steam house where the cottonseed was removed, and off to one side the countless huts of the enslaved gathered together.
And the enslaved bustling about the dock to load those bales of cotton onto the boats.
In a few years' time this industry, as good as a cheat code for printing money, would collapse, and the large landowners living up on that high hill would, for the most part, lose the power they once had.
Of course, that didn't mean they'd all go bankrupt or drop dead from losing every last one of the enslaved.
As long as they still held their vast tracts of land, they could put the formerly enslaved to work as sharecroppers.
But their economic power would shrink for certain, and their social standing too would become beyond all comparison with what it was now.
Truly a pity, but it was the brutal reality that the future me would have to face.
Of course, since I could invest my present surplus of money and assets elsewhere, I stood to come out ahead financially. But the important thing was for me and my family to start our second lives with our limbs intact, wasn't it?
It wouldn't be all that common a case, but in the thick of the war there would certainly be slaveholders who died in slave uprisings.
And where was the guarantee that one of those unlucky cases wouldn't be me or Kate?
So the conclusion I'd reached by the time I got this far was that I had to build a fence that would absolutely guarantee my family's safety and my own until the war was over.
The plan was grand, sure, but it actually wasn't that hard.
If the 700 enslaved under me offered me even their absolute loyalty, then no one would be able to threaten me.
But if I went around cosplaying as a warm, gentle master in some bid to win the trust of the enslaved, it was obvious the people around me would immediately rain down condemnation, demanding that traitor be dealt with.
One might say, then, that it was a problem with no answer, but that wasn't so.
Because the practical skills and knowledge I'd ground my health to dust acquiring in my past life had raised the question of whether the current cotton labor system wasn't terribly inefficient.
If I dug into this angle, then raising my plantation's profits while gathering the loyalty of the enslaved unto myself might not be a pipe dream after all.
"Sis, once we're back at the mansion I'll be busy for a while, so spend your time with your husband for now."
"Sure, that's fine, but what are you up to?"
"I'm going to do a little work on the plantation system."
This was no display of compassion toward the enslaved. It was simply the elimination of inefficiency.
Because I was James Sergent, the South's Cotton King, a man without a drop of blood or a single tear.
***
A few days had passed since I'd returned to Mississippi.
It was a blessing that I was someone who'd only just inherited the estate.
Because I could poke around under the excuse of wanting to see firsthand how the work was run, and no one would bat an eye.
No matter how grandly I meant to overhaul the plantation system, I'd still have to know exactly how the work actually flowed, wouldn't I?
"Sir, as you can see, the enslaved on our plantation are the most diligent in the South. They come out to the fields when the sun rises and work without a single moment's rest until the sun goes down."
John, the white overseer who managed the plantation, pointed proudly at the people working, sweat pouring off them.
Like every other cotton plantation, mine ran on the so-called Gang System.
To put it simply, it was a system that split the enslaved into two or three groups according to their working ability and had them labor from sunrise to sunset under the overseer's watch.
Even now, the Black enslaved drivers under the overseer's orders were cracking their whips, regulating the pace of the gangs.
Everyone lined up in a single row, bending at the waist in the same motion to pick cotton, looked from a distance like one giant machine part.
The problem being, of course, that it wasn't a precise, finely tuned machine, but a defect-riddled one with no end of places that needed fixing.
'They call it a division of labor, but doing it that way just kills efficiency.'
The problem with this forced labor was that it could give the enslaved no motivation whatsoever.
Which was why the overseer always had to carry a whip and dole out punishment to the enslaved whose pace had fallen behind.
There was no reward for finishing fast, and no getting off work early either.
They simply held out, keeping the bare minimum pace that would spare them that whip, until the sun went down.
'Absence of motivation. Wasted, unnecessary movement. Depreciation of the labor force. Honestly, I can't see anything but downsides.'
Whenever a picked cotton basket was full, each of them had to walk to the collection point, empty it, and walk back.
Just look at it, all that travel time, pure loss, isn't it?
Under the blazing midday sun their stamina dropped off sharply, and the afternoon's work efficiency was obviously going to be half what it was in the morning.
Sure enough, when I checked, the moment the sun hit its peak the people's pace clearly slowed.
"Good. This much, and there's plenty I can tear apart and rebuild."
I'd worried about what I'd do if it were a system so polished I wouldn't dare lay a finger on it, but just as I'd expected, it was a low-grade, slapdash setup if ever there was one.
Thank goodness.
***
Now I had the gist of it. The level of nineteenth-century slave labor.
It was so dull I wanted to die.
With my assessment done, I sat in the mansion's study and began laying out on paper the framework of the new system I'd been drafting over the past several days.
If I'd read alternate-history novels widely during my breaks, I could've broken through this situation more easily, but fortunately, the studies I'd poured my life into hadn't been entirely in vain after all.
Quality control, dynamic goal-setting, process specialization, how was I to dress all of this up in the language of the present age without arousing suspicion?
I'd been working the pen for a good while when, along with a knock, Leo came in.
"Master, you called for me?"
"I did. Come over here and sit a moment."
Leo, my personal attendant, came into the room, hesitated a moment, then carefully perched himself on the edge of a chair.
"My father's passed and I've become the new master. So, how's the mood around here?"
"Everyone is happy and honored to serve the new Master."
Oh, sure, like hell they are.
At an answer so textbook not even a grade-schooler would buy it, I gave a snort of a laugh and lifted my eyes from the documents.
"Leo. What are you trying to hide, between you and me? It's a fact we both already know, anyway. Everybody's praying their hearts out that I won't be an even bigger son of a bitch than my father, right?"
For an instant, Leo's eyes shook as though an earthquake had struck.
Hit the nail right on the head, did I?
Running through my memories, I'd been a pretty rotten son of a bitch myself, after all.
"No, Master! The late master was a fine man, and you, you are…"
"Enough. That's not the kind of flattery I want to hear."
Listening to face-flushing toadying with no sincerity behind it just dredges up the memories of my past life over and over and pointlessly sours my mood.
"The other enslaved are bound to want to ask you about me. If they want to know, you may tell them. But, don't tack on a single word of your own opinion."
"."
"Over the whole round trip to New York, you saw and heard and felt plenty of what kind of man I am now, didn't you? That's all there is to it. From here on I'll always treat everyone, every time, with exactly that attitude, so just relay precisely what you saw."
Keep everything rational, inflict no needless abuse, and where it aligned with my own interests, extend decent treatment even to the enslaved.
Leo studied my expression for a while before lowering his head at last.
"Understood, Master."
Watching him withdraw, I turned my eyes back to the documents.
If I suddenly announced I was overhauling the system, the enslaved would grow suspicious too, so I'd lay the groundwork ahead of time like this.
Next, I had to bring the middle manager around.
Given the treatment overseers got in this era, persuading him wouldn't be all that hard, but the important thing was keeping his mouth shut.
If that man let his tongue wag, my plantation's secrets would leak out elsewhere too, and then I might draw needless suspicion.
"I'm thinking of applying a new system to the plantation going forward."
The next day, I held out to him the operating plan I'd finished over several days.
"First we'll set aside an adjustment period of about a month and watch the trend in work output closely. If this method proves superior, then from here on our plantation runs this way."
The overseer, John, gave the documents a cursory glance and immediately voiced his concerns.
"Sir, this kind of Task System is suited to places like the food-crop farming they do over in South Carolina. Apply it to a large-scale cotton plantation like ours and output is bound to drop, no question. The enslaved will slack off the moment they've met their quota. Cotton's hard to set daily tasks for in the first place, the way ordinary farming…"
"That'd be the outdated method you know. This is the latest, advanced technique that's all the rage among the European nobility, adapted to fit our plantation. There's already no end of proven cases, so you needn't worry."
"Is, is that true?"
It's a load of bull, obviously. As if it'd be true.
Naturally, no such effective Task System existed in this era.
But in the far future it was a method that, through countless studies and social experiments, had established itself as the correct answer, so it wasn't exactly a lie on my part, was it?
Since I was so utterly confident, John backed off a step, but he still grumbled with a face that couldn't be convinced.
"Even so, it's plain as day this won't work."
Good grief, what a suspicious bastard.
I cut off his words and chanted the instant-death spell that would finish off this malcontent.
"Triple the bonus."
"Huh?"
"If this system takes root successfully and output rises more than ten percent over before, I'll triple the bonus I give you. If it rises fifteen percent, it'll be quadruple."
"Is, is that true?"
"And, in that case, I'm thinking of rating your contribution highly and guaranteeing you five years of employment going forward, rather than the usual single-year contract."
Overseers commonly earned the resentment of the enslaved, and with supply outstripping demand, single-year contracts had settled in as the standard.
In a line of work like this, five years was practically the same as an ironclad civil-servant post.
"I was even going to give you an advance, since bringing in a new method is nerve-racking, but if you still think it'll fail, then I suppose there's no help for…"
"Siiiir! I was a fool! I will devote everything I have to proving the excellence of your advanced system!"
Financial corruption, complete.
"Then tomorrow you'll make the necessary preparations, and starting the day after, we'll try applying the new system."
"Yes, sir!"
A tyrant who never rests a single moment in his drive to boost output by any means, and who ignores the opinions of his subordinates.
That's just how vicious a master I am.
*****
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