Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 (29 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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Source:
Richmond, Manufacturing Census, 1850 and 1860.
a
The 1850 Manufacturing Census figures include only those businesses that produced more then $500 annually and therefore are conservative estimates of the tobacco industry.
b
The 1860 U.S. Manufacturing Census gives slightly higher amounts for Henrico County. In that report capital invested was $1,121,025; the annual product was $4, 838,995 and the number of employees was 3,370 males and 34 females.
c
The number of employees reflects only one firm. Haxall's mill did not list its number of workers in the Manufacturing Census, 1850.
 
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processing mill, Grant's manufactory measured "120 feet on Franklin [Street] and back on 19th street 50 feet . . . [and] four stories in height, with 115 windows [and] require[d] more than two thousand panes of glass to fill them." Grant's spacious facilities did not stand alone in the city skyline; flour mills built during these same years were of increasingly large dimensions as well. Warwick and Barksdale's mill, rebuilt in the 1850s after a devastating fire, measured 94 by 164 feet at ground level and was 127 feet high. It housed twenty-three "run of burrs" and about eighty flour workers.
7
Even more impressive than Grant's or Warwick and Barksdale's factories was the Tredegar Iron Works. Spread across five acres overlooking the James River, Tredegar consisted of rolling mills, heating furnaces, spike-making machines, and living quarters. On one end of the compound stood the armory rolling mill formerly owned by the state (acquired by the company during the 1840s and merged with the other parts of Tredegar), containing nine puddling furnaces and four heating furnaces to process pig and scrap iron into merchant bar iron and rails. On the opposite side of the compound stood the Tredegar mills consisting of nine puddling furnaces, seven heating furnaces, and three trains of rolls, in addition to a spike factory and a cooper shop where railroad and ship spikes were cut and packaged. A third set of buildings housed the foundry and forge used to cast, cut, and bore guns and cannons, the machine room to build and refine railroad car wheels, and the engine and carpentry shop where locomotives were built and "Tredegar workmen completed woodwork for sawmills, sugar mills and freight cars."
8
What made Richmond's economic prosperity most impressive, however and unique in the antebellum South was the thousands of slave laborers who pressed the tobacco, forged the iron, and ground the wheat. Statistics compiled by Ira Berlin and Herbert Gutman give some sense of the importance of slave labor to the city's economy during the late antebellum era: according to their study, slaves constituted 48 percent of the city's adult male working class (between the ages of fifteen and sixty) by 1860. No city had as many male slave workers, and only Charleston and Lynchburg had higher percentages (tables 11 and 12).
9
Richmond male slave residents came to dominate the workforces of key industries and were an indispensable part of most others. The tobacco-processing industry, for example, would have collapsed without slave workers. The predominance of slave labor in the industries is even more surprising given that the slave presence in the city was shrinking in proportion to the white population. In 1840 slaves constituted 37 percent of the population; by 1860 they represented just 31 percent. In
 
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Table 11. Workingmen by status, nativity, and race, 1860
Percentages
City
Number
Slave
White
Free black
Richmond
9,557
48
44
7
Charleston
7,887
51
42
7
Mobile
7,002
35
63
2
Lynchburg
1,623
60
34
6
Source:
Berlin and Gutman, "Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves," 1182.
Note:
Workingmen include all male workers between the ages of 15 and 60, both skilled and unskilled labor. White workers include all southern, northern, and foreign-born males.
Table 12. Workingmen in Richmond by status and race, 1820, 1840, and 1860, in percentages
Year
Slave
White
Free black
1820
36
55
8
1840
43
49
8
1860
48
44
7
Source:
U.S. Census, Population, for year cited.
Note:
Workingmen include all males between 15 and 60, skilled and unskilled.
spite of this decline, slave workers remained crucial to nearly all large businesses, thus giving the appearance to at least one visitor that "all the work in Richmond is done by slaves."
10
To typical visitors it would have appeared that slaves did do all the work. If they arrived by rail, a slave porter would have greeted them and stowed their luggage, and had they looked out the train windows, they would have seen crews of slave workmen maintaining the crossties and lines. Once in the city, visitors could have hailed a hack driven by a slave, or if they chose to walk, they would have crossed paths with a number of slaves running errands, going to the market, selling goods, or delivering shipments. At the hotel visitors' every demand would have been attended to not by a hotel manager but by the slave porter, waiter, cook,
 
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and chambermaid. And if visitors went searching for a new pair of boots, a suit, or a shave, they might have noticed that the shoemaker, tailor, and barber were either assisted by a slave or were slaves themselves. After a brief stay visitors could say with confidence that there were few jobs slaves did not perform.
The number of slave workers who had contact with visitors, however, was only a small fraction of the population. A greater portion of the slave workers, particularly the men, would not have crossed paths with a traveler unless the latter inspected one of the city's many factories. As slave employment patterns during the late antebellum era indicate, slave laborers were concentrated in the large mills rather than small craft shops. This is partly because industries such as tobacco manufacturing were expanding at a much faster rate than smaller businesses and therefore required a greater number of workers. Furthermore, there were few labor alternatives to obtain the hundreds of hands required for tobacco processing. As a result, slave workers continued to dominate the tobacco industry through the late antebellum era, constituting between 80 and 90 percent of the 3,000-plus workforce from 1840 to 1860 (table 13).
11
Slave workers also were indispensable to the railroad industry. By leveling the land and laying down the track, slave rail workers helped advance communication with, and transportation to, the outside world. These slaves continued the work of the generation of laborers before them, who had dredged the James River and dug the Kanawha Canal. Though complete employment records do not exist, the number of workers hired to build and lay track for the five different railroads (Richmond and Petersburg; Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac; Virginia Central Railroad; plus two additional lines by the 1850s) must have
Table 13. Tobacco workers, 184060
Year
Total no. of workers
Total no. of slaves
%
1840
981
(689)
70
1850
2,062
2,196
106
1860
3,325
(2,761)
83
Source:
Virginia, Manufacturing Census, 1840 and 1860. Figures in parentheses are from Green, "Urban Industry," 314.
Note:
The total number of slave tobacco hands for these years is based on samples of various factories. The number of firms sampled in 1840 was seventeen, for 1850 it was forty-nine, and for 1860, thirty-nine.

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