been staggering. The Virginia Central Railroad, for example, employed several slave work crews as general laborers in the workshops and depots and as newly appointed brakemen and firemen. The largest group, however, was the maintenance crew consisting of "1 timber and wood inspector, 1 master carpenter, 1 principal overseer, 1 extra overseer, 9 section overseers, and 100 negro men."
12
This was a single crew at one rail company; the number of slave hands for all the companies must have been in the thousands.
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Slave workers remained crucial to the flour industry as well. During the late antebellum years, the number of slave employees at the Gallego and Columbia mills the city's largest increased steadily to meet growing market demand. The Gallego mills employed approximately 80 slave hands during the 1840s and 140 by 1860. The Columbia mill reported a similar increase in workers from 30 in 1840 to 108 two decades later. On the eve of the Civil War, 248 slave hands worked in the two mills, comprising nearly 70 percent of the mills' total workforce.
13
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Nonindustrial businesses also sought slave labor. The city government, for example, employed slave workers to provide essential city services, including street paving and cleaning, maintenance of the Capitol grounds, and trash removal jobs that white workers frequently shunned. Between 1840 and 1860 as many as thirty-six slaves worked as full-time sanitation laborers, and even more were hired during health emergencies, such as the 1849 cholera epidemic. During this crisis the city hired extra slave hands to clean the streets with lime, nurse the sick, and bury the dead.
14
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Slavery in Richmond had all the hallmarks of a successful and prosperous system. Richmond's slave community reached an all-time high of 11,699 in 1860, up from 7,509 in 1840. This increase is even more dramatic when compared with the corresponding figures for other cities (table 14). In several of the largest southern cities, slave populations decreased during the late antebellum era, but not in Richmond.
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Interest in hiring out slave workers appeared quite strong as well. Throughout the late antebellum era, the pages of the
Daily Dispatch
and the
Richmond Enquirer
were filled with notices such as these: "Negroes for hire Two house servants 1 Driver 3 Likely Men. . . . Wanted One or two good hands (slaves) for Engineering service. A Liberal hire will be given and the slaves will be well treated. . . . Wanted thirty laboring hands on the line of the R.F. and P.R.R. [Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac] about 12 miles from Richmond, to lay track."
15
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The annual slave-hiring period immediately after Christmas became a chaotic time with thousands of potential employers and employees roaming the streets in search of one another. According to one local
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