Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 (18 page)

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Authors: Midori Takagi

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BOOK: Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865
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Sources:
U.S. Bureau of Census, Population, 1820; Richmond, Manufacturing Census, 1820.
ploying them through the hiring system, and a distinct preference for male rather than female laborers. Between 1820 and 1840 the number of slave workingmen (between the ages of ten and fifty) increased and narrowly exceeded the total number of free white workingmen (table 8). This increase was important to tobacconists because it helped stabilize the price of purchasing and hiring bondmen by the mid to late 1820s, thereby making slave hiring affordable. Cost, however, was not the only factor that led to the predominance of male slave workers. It appears that high slave employment may have discouraged white males and females from working in the factories because they began to view tobacco manufacturing as "slave work." But it remains unclear whether employers stopped hiring white laborers because they felt it inappropriate for the two to work together, or because white workers voluntarily
 
Page 28
Table 8. Workingmen in Richmond, 182040
1820
1830
1840
Age
Slave <1445
White 1045
Slave 1055
White 1550
Slave 1055
White 1050
1,981
2,498
4,605
4,479
3,131
3,921
Source:
U.S. Bureau of Census, Population, 1820-40.
withdrew from the workforce. In any case, the number of white laborers in the tobacco industry significantly declined by 1830, and by 1840 there were almost none.
The decline of slave women and girls in the tobacco workforce is more difficult to explain. It was cheaper to hire an adult female worker than a male, and the cost of hiring children was even less. Given the widely fluctuating costs of hiring and purchasing adult male slave labor during the early 1820s because of the competition for workers among the canal and mining companies hiring bond women and children would have seemed a logical economic decision.
19
But in spite of the fact that women and children could perform some of the unskilled and semiskilled tasks, tobacco manufacturers overwhelmingly chose to hire only male slave workers.
To some extent this is unsurprising; tobacconists shared owners' ideas about female differences and generally believed women unsuitable for, and largely incapable of, factory work. There were certain tasks, such as operating the screw press, that required more upper-body strength than most women possessed. So tobacconists may have preferred male slaves because these workers could be switched at a moment's notice from tasks requiring strength to less demanding jobs. What is surprising, however, is the tenacity of such gender-based notions in the face of a growing need for more workers and compelling evidence that women were as capable as men in most jobs. On plantations slave women frequently worked alongside men out in the fields, performing many of the same tasks.
20
In those locales slave owners generally assigned jobs according to the "availability and strength of slaves," not based on their sex.
21
In the city, however, factory employers selected workers on the basis of gender, rather than ability, even though there were jobs that slave women could perform for a lower cost than free or enslaved men. In
 
Page 29
the tobacco industry, for example, there were several tasks that required little upper-body strength and relatively little skill. One such task involved stemming tobacco leaves, which one Richmond tobacco manufacturer described as a job that "a good apt boy [c]ould learn in about two months."
22
No doubt a grown woman could learn it in less time. Indeed, women were employed full-time in the tobacco manufactories after the Civil War. But during these years such reasoning apparently escaped the industry. Given the growing demand for labor, the large supply of slave women available, and the cost benefits gained by hiring women, tobacconists should have eliminated illogical and inefficient gender-based divisions. Instead, they quickly replaced the women and girls with men and boys as soon as male slave labor prices returned to affordable levels. Clearly gender rather than cost concerns prevailed. It would be another twenty years before slave women entered the halls of industry again and they would find a place in the cotton mills, not in tobacco manufactories.
23
Perhaps what most persuaded tobacconists to employ male slave labor almost exclusively was the integral role bondmen came to play in creating the industry. Slave male workers not only provided the main source of labor for the factories, over time they also helped define the manufacturing process itself. In some cases employers required them to become involved; frequently manufacturers selected older "seasoned" slave workers to train the younger hands and to monitor the quality of their work. Tobacconists preferred this arrangement because it reduced their day-to-day responsibilities, which expanded steadily as the facilities grew larger and the number of workers increased.
In other cases slave tobacco hands clearly took the initiative in defining aspects of the manufacturing process such as controlling the pace of production. Stemmers and twisters, for example, typically set the speed at which they worked by rolling and lumping the leaves in a unified motion and by singing songs to keep the tempo. Employers chose not to interfere, realizing that hastening the workers could have resulted in sloppy work and costly damage to the leaves. William Cullen Bryant, who visited a tobacco factory in Richmond during the 1840s, was quick to note the use of song among stemmers and twisters: "In another room were about eighty negroes . . . who received the leaves . . . rolled them into long even rolls, and then cut them into plugs. . . . as we entered the room we heard a murmur of psalmody running through the sable assembly, which now and then swelled into a strain of very tolerable music."
24
A more observant visitor, however, noticed that songs provided a way to set the pace of production: "In one very large room there were 120 negroes at work. . . . those who were rolling the leaf, performed with
 
Page 30
a regular see-saw motion, all in concert, not only of action, but of voice, singing in parts, a hymn, or sometimes an impromptu chant."
25
Slave prizers similarly maintained a degree of control over the work because it was their labor that kept production going. The pressers managed to set their own pace using "deep-drawn groans" and grunts to help unify their efforts while turning the "long iron arms" of the screw.
26
The integral role that slave workers came to play in the manufacturing process became the final, and perhaps most important, link between slavery and tobacco processing a link that was initially forged by tobacconists' employment preferences, the slave hiring system, and custom. The combination of these factors convinced tobacconists that it was not only advantageous but necessary to use slave labor. By 1840 slave workers no longer were viewed as an experimental labor force but had become the only group of laborers tobacconists would consider for the job.
Tobacco manufacturing was not the only industry that found slaves an attractive labor source. Following in the footsteps of the tobacco industry were the flour and cotton mills, dock and canal companies, and even the state government all eager to experiment using slaves as a part of their workforce because of their low cost and ready availability. Millowners, for example, found hired slaves best suited their rapidly changing labor demands.
27
Even though flour milling was the second most profitable industry in Richmond, stiff competition and frequent flour fires caused the closing of many mills. Between 1800 and 1840 the number of mills steadily declined from five to two as old mills burned or went bankrupt.
28
As a result, slave flour hands often found themselves looking for new jobs.
As the number of mills fluctuated, so too did the number of slave workers. In the first decade of business, the entire milling industry consisted of twenty male slaves responsible for cleaning, milling, shoveling, and delivering the flour for shipping.
29
During the next decade the number of workers peaked with seventy slave hands spread out among five mills, including ones owned by Gallego, Haxall, Bragg, and Warwick. The closure of one of the mills in the early 1830s, however, reduced the total number of slave hands to fifty-six. And by the end of this time period, 1840, only two mills remained, employing just thirty-five slave workers.
30
The dramatic changes in the mill industry made hiring slaves rather than purchasing them or employing free labor the easiest method of securing workers who could be let go if conditions worsened.
The hiring system brought slaves into a number of other unusual businesses. In 1830 a crew of thirty-five slaves began hauling coal for
 
Page 31
Smith and Govern. Not long afterward thirty-three new slave sailors took the helm for the Richmond Towing Company and began guiding ships along the James River.
31
Slaves also helped develop the city's physical landscape by building government offices and the arms manufactory, as well as roads, bridges, docks, the canal, and later the railroad.
Like the flour mills, Smith and Govern, the Richmond Towing Company, and the individual city improvement projects depended on an exclusively male slave labor force. But at businesses such as the Richmond Dock Company and the Richmond Manufacturing Company (also listed as the Richmond Cotton Factory), slaves worked with free blacks and whites. Slave dockworkers, for example, moved cargo on and off ships alongside white laborers. Slave weavers at the Richmond Manufacturing Company, which opened around 1835, found themselves working in a labor force integrated by both race and sex. Although company records no longer exist, census materials and travelers' journals hint at the extent of integration that existed within the factory. In 1835 Joseph Martin visited the cloth factory and noted that there were 70 white and 130 black employees working side by side producing osnaburg, the coarse cloth generally used for slave clothing.
32
Five years later a second visitor noted that the workforce consisted of "100 whites and 150 blacks as spinners and weavers."
33
Although neither account specifies whether the black operatives were free or enslaved, men or women, the 1840 census indicates that 36 percent (99 of 276) of the factory's workers were slaves and that the majority of slave workers (65 percent) were women between the ages of ten and twenty-four (table 9). But like the tobacco manufactories, the mill did not allow its female slave hands to remain long. In 1850, after a devastating fire, the mill closed its doors. Although another cotton and wool factory took its place shortly thereafter and may have rehired some of the Richmond Cotton Mill hands, it appears slave women were not among them.
34
The firm in charge of building the James River canal the prized water route that provided inland farmers and planters a cheap method of conveying goods and materials to and from the city also employed a mixed labor force. In fact, it may have been the first large industry to do so. According to the records of the James River and Kanawha Company (JRKC), between the late 1780s and early 1800s, the canal company employed as many as 350 laborers, of whom 150 were slaves. Company records do not indicate why JRKC initially used both free and slave labor; but it appears company officials preferred this arrangement and continued to hire a mixed labor force throughout the antebellum era. The number of slave workers fluctuated greatly, and there is evidence to suggest such shifts depended on the availability of hired bondmen. By 1830,
 
Page 32
Table 9. Slave women employed in the tobacco and cotton industries, 1820 and 1840.
Industry
(Year)
010
1024
2436
3655
Total
Tobacco
(1820)
30
25
12
3
70
Cotton
(1840)
6
51
7
0
64
Source:
U.S. Bureau of Census, Population, 1820 and 1840.
Note:
Age distribution for women in tobacco factories is based on a sample of eleven companies. In 1840 there was only one cotton mill.
for example, slaves made up 67 percent (300 of 450) of the workers employed by the canal company. In the fall of 1836, however, only thirty-eight slaves had been secured because of the great demand for slave labor by other canal, coal, and gold companies. As a result, JRKC hired immigrant laborers to supplement its workforce.
35
Between 1836 and 1837 the company sent agents to Europe who returned with nearly 300 contract workers, dramatically altering the racial balance of the workforce. And by 1837 two-thirds of the canal workers were white men.
From the outset the company's only concern was to secure a large labor force, whether free or enslaved. This pragmatic approach was necessary because the initial phases of work were arduous and required a huge number of workers. Before digging could begin, the canal path had to be cleared of trees and logs, and all rocky areas had to be blasted with explosive powder. Hundreds of workers were needed to perform tasks such as excavating the canal and digging its many drains and puddle ditches. After each portion of the canal was excavated, the men had to level the canal floor with ''carts drawn by horses, oxen or mules." Then, stone walls were built along the edges and banks of the canal to prevent erosion.
36
Finally, locks, dams, and bridges had to be built.
With no machines and only a few animals to help, the work was strenuous and unrelenting. Laborers, both free and slave, worked long hours in all weather conditions. Although there is little documentation indicating how labor was organized, it is likely that most workers labored in traditional gangs under the close supervision of canal officials, overseers, and managers. Slave and free black and white canal workers apparently were used interchangeably, except in highly skilled positions such as quarrymen, stonemasons, carpenters, and blacksmiths, which were generally filled by free laborers.
37
These skilled positions, however, were relatively scarce, with the vast majority of jobs being unskilled manual labor.

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