Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 (45 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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of the slave population) would be impressed from each city and county, and each slave worker would be detained for no more than sixty days.
²²Although the October act obtained a number of slave workers, many slave owners defied the law, largely because they felt the compensation was too low $15 per month per worker and the army worked their slaves too hard. Owners frequently received reports that slave laborers worked in the "rain . . . in the trenches and rifle pits in mud and water almost knee-deep, without shelter, fire, or sufficient food."
²³

If harsh working conditions worried owners, the rumors of smallpox terrified them. Reports of an outbreak of the infectious disease in Richmond (which were accurate) induced slave owners not only to withhold slave workers but to demand the return of those already impressed by the government. Such fears prompted one entire county, Brunswick, to petition the governor for the return of its slaves. Letcher flatly rejected the request, stating, "We have no contagious diseases here[,] as I am informed the law requires the slaves to be sent, & I have no power to release them."
²⁴

Owners' complaints and refusal to comply prompted the assembly to draft a third impressment law in March 1863 to correct the flaws of the previous acts. This law exempted certain agricultural counties from the slave labor draft and increased payments from $15 to $20 per month, per slave. It also guaranteed adequate housing, food, clothing, and medical care for all bondmen to allay any concerns about their treatment.

Changes in the laws, however, did little to end slave owners' fears or to encourage them to hand over their slave workers. Furthermore, these fears were fairly widespread and not limited to a handful of distraught owners. The majority of the slave owners in the second Confederate congressional district, encompassing Greensville, Southampton, Sussex, and Surry Counties, refused to send their slaves for fear that they would "immediately run off to the Yankees."
²⁵Even owners in Richmond those who possibly feared a Northern invasion the most generally refused to comply.
²⁶Governor Letcher, exasperated by such recalcitrant behavior and the failure of the Richmond Hustings Court to enforce impressment laws, eventually sent word that if the court did not force compliance, he would make an example of the justices by "first impressing the slaves of members of the Court."
²⁷

Throughout these early years the Confederate government allowed the Virginia assembly to control efforts to secure workers. By 1863, however, the Confederate Congress had become frustrated by the state's lack of success and passed its own slave draft law, which superseded all previous state legislation. This law made all counties open to impressment, including agricultural counties. Slaves in those counties, however, were

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to be impressed only if the need for labor was deemed urgent. Impressment would last sixty days, and the government could detain workers for another thirty days if necessary. Owners would receive $20 per month per slave worker if they complied voluntarily, but only $15 if forced to comply.
²⁸This was the first of several impressment laws passed by the Confederate government between 1863 and 1865. Each law sought to correct problems such as inadequate pay, but none reduced the number of slaves impressed from each county or the length of their term.

With each new impressment law, more slaves and free blacks found themselves involved in war work. Even prisoners could not escape toiling for the Confederacy. Prisoners slave and free, male and female were regularly assigned to work on the public defenses in lieu of languishing in the penitentiary or being sold to a slave market outside of the United States. To maintain a steady supply of forced labor, Letcher frequently commuted slave sentences from "sale and transportation" to "labor on the public works for life." This was the fate of a number of slaves including Ann, a slave woman convicted of arson in Amherst County. Rather than being removed beyond the limits of the country, she found herself facing a lifetime of hard labor working for the state and the Confederacy.
²⁹

Between hiring and impressing workers, the Confederate government, the Virginia General Assembly, and the city council drew hundreds of Richmond's male slaves and a smaller number of female slaves into the Confederate cause. The October 1862 law, for example, initially impressed close to 600 male slave residents. Additional measures raised this figure into the thousands by 1865. Slave workers at various innercity industries were affected by the impressment laws as well. Joseph R. Anderson of the Tredegar Iron Works sent twenty-one slave hirelings to work on the fortifications between 1863 and 1865 and later sent the same group to Drewry's Bluff for the army.
³⁰But many slave workers managed to avoid the backbreaking labor of digging trenches and building forts. Most slave women, for example, escaped public defense work and remained in private homes and businesses performing domestic chores. Slave men not claimed by the government found jobs in the few remaining factories and in trades not directly under Confederate control. Still outside the Quartermaster's Department control were a handful of tobacco manufactories, small shops such as bakeries, confectioneries, and milliners, small foundries, and businesses within the service industry including hotels, boardinghouses, taverns, and barbershops.

Hiring out to local businesses proved highly attractive during the Civil War. Not only was it safer for slave workers, it was more lucrative for owners, who raised rates in response to high demand for any sort of

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labor. Manufacturers who normally did not hire slave workers found it increasingly difficult to man their factories as white males joined the services and free black laborers were forced into public service. Purchasing slave labor was hardly an option as the value of Confederate banknotes spiraled downward and the prices of workers skyrocketed. By 1863 prices for young slave males reached as high as $5,000.
³¹One Richmond slave owner, Andrew Ellett obviously intrigued by the inflated wartime prices carefully noted in his papers some of the vast changes in slave costs between 1860 and 1865 (table 18).

Hiring costs, in comparison, were far more manageable, ranging from $100 to $400.
³²But even hiring costs were not immune to inflation, and by 1865 it was not uncommon for skilled slaves to command as much as $1,000 or $1,500 for the year.
³³In spite of these increases, however, Richmond businesses clearly preferred hiring to purchasing in most cases. Surveys of slaveholding households and businesses during the war indicate hired slaves (between the ages of eighteen and forty-five) outnumbered those directly owned by a ratio of up to four to one.
³⁴

The massive changes to the government, the population, and industries greatly contributed to a kind of military excitement that pervaded Richmond; parades, drill exercises, and grand military balls filled the

Table 18. "Costs of slave hands in Andrew Ellett's household, 1865"

Value ($)

Name

Sex

Age

1860

1865

George