Accounting for Control: Commercial Calculation in Antebellum America

Book-keeping was the financial language of nineteenth-century American business—at once itself a kind of knowledge and a technology through which other information moved.  This paper, part of a larger project on the development of commercial numeracy, explores the physical technology of accounts through vignettes from three different settings: common schools, urban commercial colleges, and slave plantations.  Each reveals something different about the way early Americans used numbers to make sense of their surroundings. 

I begin by describing the explosion of book-keeping textbooks for common schools, particularly in New England but also in the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest.  Proponents of practical education printed and distributed dozens of texts to schools and families.  Touting accounting as both useful and virtuous, schoolbooks cloaked book-keeping in the language of independence and self-sufficiency. 

Alongside schoolbooks were manuals targeting urban young men on the make.  These books could be used alone, making “every man his own teacher,” or in the commercial colleges that were becoming common by mid-century.  Offering short courses ranging from a few weeks to six months, colleges promised students marketable skills.  Where common schools taught the flexible theory of double-entry, these colleges focused on the practical exigencies of daily business.  

Finally, I turn to a dramatically different setting: slave plantations, where pre-printed accounting blanks enabled planters to control their overseers’ record-keeping practices.  Elaborate preformatted volumes combined a variety of forms into a single volume that culminated in a final balance sheet.  More comprehensive than anything available to Northern businessmen, such books found a regular market among southern planters.