Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 (2 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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Page v
For Asaye Takagi, and to the
memory of Shigeo Takagi
 
Page vii
Contents
List of Illustrations
viii
List of Tables
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction
1
1
Inauspicious Beginnings
9
2
The Road to Industrialization and the Rise of Urban Slavery, 1800-1840
16
3
Behind the Urban "Big House"
37
4
Maturation of the Urban Industrial Slave System, 1840-1860
71
5
Formation of an Independent Slave Community
96
6
The War Years, 1861-1865
124
Epilogue
145
Notes
149
Bibliography
168
Index
180
 
Page viii
Illustrations
between pages 95 and 96
Map of Richmond, Virginia, 1859
"A Slave Auction in Virginia"
"The James River and Kanawha Canal, Richmond, Virginia"
"Twist Room"
"View of the Interior of the Seabrook Tobacco Warehouse at Richmond, Virginia"
African-American laborers
 
Page ix
Tables
1. Breakdown of Richmond's population, 1800-1840
17
2. Tobacco and flour industries, Richmond and Henrico County, 1820 and 1840
18
3. Urban slave populations in Virginia, 1800-1840
19
4. Sex distribution of slave population, 1820-40
19
5. Age distribution of slaves, 1820-40
20
6. Slaveholding patterns, 1800 and 1840
21
7. Age and gender distribution of tobacco slave workers in selected tobacco manufactories, 1820
27
8. Workingmen in Richmond, 1820-40
28
9. Slave women employed in tobacco and cotton industries, 1820 and 1840
32
10. Richmond tobacco, flour, and iron industries, 1840-60
73
11. Workingmen by status, nativity, and race, 1860
75
12. Workingmen in Richmond by status and race, 1820, 1840, and 1860, in percentages
75
13. Tobacco workers, 1840-60
76
14. Change in slave population in various southern cities, 1840 and 1860
78
15. Slave ironworkers at Tredegar, 1847-60
84
 
Page x
16. Slaveholding patterns, 1840 and 1860
87
17. Age and gender distribution of slave community, 1840 and 1860, in percentages
88
18. "Costs of slave hands in Andrew Ellett's household, 1865"
131
 
Page xi
Acknowledgments
Many people helped me during the process of writing this book. First and foremost I wish to thank my adviser, Eric Foner, for his sharp analysis, guidance, and patience. Without his help, my Ph.D. would have remained a dream, and this book, a mere wish. I also would like to thank the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship Program at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, for their support, which was crucial to completing this study. Both the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, generously opened their archives to me and sponsored my travel to their collections.
I also would like to extend a hearty thanks to Conley Edwards, Minor Weisiger, and other members of the staff at the Library of Virginia in Richmond. Their expertise, knowledge, and guidance helped me through the many months I spent searching through boxes of Hustings Suit papers, wills, and estate inventories.
Lee Furr also deserves credit; her careful research in tracking down references, selecting artwork, and handling important paperwork helped find errors in my manuscript.
My family also played an important role in this process. Their emotional, financial, and culinary support was immeasurable. Finally, I especially wish to thank my husband, Jonathan Hamilton, without whom this could not be.
 
Page 1
Introduction
The image of slaves tilling the soil of a large plantation under the watchful eye of an overseer has been indelibly printed on American minds as the North American slave experience. To a great extent this image is accurate given that 90 percent of African-American slaves lived in rural areas. But the remaining 10 percent a small but significant segment of the slave population worked and lived in urban and industrialized areas of the South. During the antebellum era as many as 400,000 slaves lived in cities such as Charleston, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Richmond.
Slavery in these southern urban centers, and particularly in Richmond, differed from rural slavery in its location, working and living conditions, and character. In Richmond slave men and women worked in tobacco factories, iron foundries, flour mills, and a number of manufacturing businesses producing goods such as chewing plugs, locomotive engines, milled wheat, shoes, and candy. But perhaps more unusual than their jobs were the conditions under which urban slaves worked. In an effort to adapt slave labor to the urban industrial setting, employers turned to the unusual practices of hiring out and living apart. Bondmen who were hired out were temporarily employed away from their owners as skilled artisans, house servants, firefighters, road pavers, and factory hands. Although most hiring negotiations were handled by professional slave brokers, there were instances in which slaves ''hired their own time," needing neither owner nor broker to negotiate agreements.
 
Page 2
Wages generally were paid in cash, and in many cases slaves were able to keep a portion of what they had earned. The practice of living apart permitted many slaves, especially those who were hired out, to reside outside their owners' household. As a result, it became common for urban slaves to live with their own families in separate communities that included slave and free black residents.
To slave owners and employers these practices constituted a break-through in city slavery because the traditional slave system had proved far too rigid for the rapidly changing labor demands of emerging industries. Hiring and living out helped make slavery more flexible and adaptable to the city and factory setting. For slave owner and employer alike, urban industrial slavery was a resounding success. It was slave labor that made tobacco manufacturing (the backbone of Richmond's antebellum economy) a multimillion-dollar industry by 1860 and greatly contributed to the growth of a range of other industries.
Many slave residents also found that hiring out and living apart offered benefits, such as the ability to decide where they worked and lived. Furthermore, city life offered advantages over the rural environment; Richmond's large, dense population (nearly 12,000 by 1860) provided bond men and women with anonymity and the ability to travel unnoticed, to socialize with white, free black, and other slave residents, or simply to relax over a brandy in an illegal grogshop.
Through its very success, however, the use of bond workers in industries altered the character of slavery in Richmond so that it only loosely resembled its counterpart on plantations. The result was a system that brought tremendous profits but relinquished a degree of slave owners' control and weakened the bond between slave and owner. The practices and privileges used to adapt slavery to the city factory system also enabled bond men and women to build a community organized around family and kinship networks, segregated neighborhoods, all-black churches, mutual aid organizations, secret fraternal and financial societies, and shared work experiences. Through these institutions slave residents educated and politicized themselves and in all likelihood acquired expectations of full control over their labor and lives. At the very least these developments provided slave residents with economic, psychological, and emotional support to combat the oppressive nature of slavery; at most, urban conditions threatened to undermine the slave system by refuting the moral and ideological foundations supporting the "peculiar institution."
This book, then, is as much a human drama as it is the history of a city and slave system. Although it takes a chronological approach to the intertwined development of urbanization, industrialization, and slavery,
 
Page 3
I made a concerted effort to keep the focus on the human forces that created Richmond's antebellum society and its institutions. Keeping such a focus proved difficult at times because human nature and life often defy logical, progressive patterns; but I remain convinced that black and white Richmonders, slave and free residents, continually used the battles, the successes and losses of the previous generations as building blocks for the future, but with glaring differences. While white Richmonders used the past to strengthen the urban industrial economy and slave system, black slave men and women workers used previous experiences to build larger and stronger forms of resistance for each new generation.
This book examines the city of Richmond and its slave system from 1782, when the city was first incorporated, to the end of the Civil War in 1865. I chose to focus on this one location and for such a lengthy period of time in order to see the larger changes in population, occupation, and economic growth. By scrutinizing this eighty-three-year period, I also was able to chronicle the lives of the slave residents and how those factors affected them and the development of their community. I believe such a case study is important because it furthers the discussion of urbanization in the "backward" South, further demonstrates the diversity of North American slavery, and shows the African-American experience as an integral part of urban industrial history. Furthermore, this study helps to demonstrate the long tradition of urban black communities, for nineteenth-century urban black residents were not ghetto dwellers but city residents, factory workers, families, friends, church members, and political leaders, and their lives need to be examined within those contexts.
For all of the factors mentioned above, Richmond was, without a doubt, an anomaly in the predominantly rural antebellum South. Yet it was not unique. As studies by Richard Wade, Robert Starobin, Claudia Goldin, Barbara Fields, and Mary Karasch demonstrate, elements of Richmond's experience, such as the hiring systems, factory employment, and cash payments, existed in other southern cities as well as more rural factory towns. The ten southern cities Wade examines in his work,
Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860,
for example, all featured the systems of hiring out and living apart. Yet the very fact that so few cities and urban slave systems emerged in the South strongly indicates how exceptional Richmond became. And it is on this point that much of the historical debate about city slavery has pivoted: the compatibility of slavery and urbanization.
With a few exceptions, most historians agree that the overall number of southern urban slave residents declined during the late antebellum

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