Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 Read Online Free PDF

other cities, however, was how the emerging industries and slavery became intertwined and affected the development and character of each other. The result was the creation of a city, an industrial center, and an urban slave system unlike any other in the South.
Origins of Urban Industrial Slavery
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the use of slave workers as the main source of labor in craft shops and preindustrial factories was rare, and in some business circles practically unthinkable. Richmonders

 

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were used to seeing individual slave workers hired to shoe a horse, build a table, or hem a garment and knew that slave artisans provided a wide range of craft services on most large plantations. But the idea of a workshop manned entirely by bondmen would have been considered radical and dangerous.
Much of the trepidation concerning industrial slave labor came from the popular belief among whites that free white laborers were best suited to skilled positions and factory jobs. As the argument went, not only were free workers more capable of performing highly technical jobs, but they needed fewer incentives to do good work. Furthermore, to replace white artisans with slaves or to ''put liberty and slavery side by side" would "degrade" and "depress" the former and encourage them to leave the state in search of better employment opportunities. Finally, to employ slaves as artisans in shops was considered folly because it would give them a great deal of freedom and inspire them to demand more perhaps even by force. 6
The strength of this belief did not deter all Richmond business owners. Some city residents were willing to experiment with slave labor in their emerging factories and workshops. Moreover, slaves already had been performing some of the rudimentary steps of processing tobacco on plantations. 7 Other businessmen received encouragement from the examples of slave employment that occurred during the Revolutionary War. During that conflict the war industries in Richmond employed slave workers extensively to produce much needed items such as sails and ropes. An equally persuasive factor, and one that became key to adapting slavery to the urban and industrial milieu, was the use of unusual labor practices. These practices included leasing slave labor (also known as hiring out), requiring slaves to secure their own lodgings (living apart), rewarding workers with a portion of the money earned (cash payments), and providing opportunities to earn overtime bonuses. Of the four practices, hiring out had by far the greatest effect on city businesses.
The hiring-out system entailed leasing slave workers to individuals or businesses for cash or payment in kind. In some areas wealthy plantation owners had been known simply to lend their slave workers to poorer neighboring farms during harvest periods as an act of noblesse oblige. 8 Hiring-out transactions in Richmond, however, generally involved some form of payment. During the American Revolution, for example, the Virginia war industries hired slave workers and paid owners in specie and in tobacco leaves.
Hiring out made slave labor extremely flexible, attracting businesses that never would have considered purchasing slaves. Contracts typically lasted one year, but businesses could hire workers for periods as short

 

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as one month, one week, or even a single day. This flexibility was enormously attractive to business owners who needed an extra hand or two to complete a specific job or task. The hiring system also appealed to larger employers because it allowed them to adjust their labor force to meet market demands, although there is some question as to whether hiring slaves on a long-term basis, that is, for several years, was actually less expensive. This feature was particularly helpful to tobacco manufacturers, whose businesses were vulnerable to dramatic fluctuations in the market caused by droughts, fires, and at the other extreme, bumper crops. No