Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 (32 page)

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Authors: Midori Takagi

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Page 82

as slave costs increased during the 1850s (due to high demands for slave workers), such savings decreased.

Monetary consideration did motivate some employers, but a sizable number believed slaves to be more efficient than free labor because they produced a higher output under noncoercive conditions than free workers. In fact, so many employers believed this that they hired 60.9 percent (4,929) of all slave working men and women in 1860 for their factories and workshops. In the employers' minds the efficiency of slave workers offset the high labor costs. Moreover, employers remained convinced that they could "squeeze every ounce of [slaves'] productiveness" and could make them work harder than free laborers. These intangible factors motivated employers most to maintain slave workers as the "better" of the two labor forces.
²⁹Indicative of such sentiments, one proponent of slave labor argued that slave workers were "cheaper, can be kept under better discipline, worked both in summer and winter, and the planter be relieved from those annoyances which always accompany the introduction among our plantations of contractors with hireling white labor from the north and foreign parts."
³⁰For this employer the merits of rigid social relations between employer and bondmen convinced him of the superiority of slave over free labor.

At least three other factors persuaded Richmond slave employers to maintain bond labor forces. In the case of the tobacco industry, the stigma that the work was for blacks only mitigated against white men and women from seeking employment in that field. This racial stigma helps explain why so few white Richmonders worked in the factories and why so many slave workers (as much as 90 percent of the tobacco workforce between 1840 and 1860) manufactured tobacco.
³¹

Another factor concerns the prestige and status that slave owners and employers believed they derived from utilizing slave labor. Like planters, industrialists may have felt that possessing bond men and women was an outward sign of their financial independence and success and their overall social importance within the city.
³²

Other Richmond employers shunned white workers for fear of labor militancy. The experience of the James River Company and its efforts to limit the number of white immigrant workers after a series of strikes is a prime example. The replacement of white metalworkers with slave laborers after the 1847 strike at the Tredegar Iron Works is another good example. In fact, the Tredegar strike served to unify the local press in opposition to potentially militant free white laborers and the threat they posed to Richmond's social order. The "principle . . . that the employer may be prevented from making the use of slave labor . . . strikes at the root of all the rights and privileges of the master, and, if acknowledged,

Page 83

or permitted to gain a foothold, will soon wholly destroy the value of slave property," gravely warned the
Richmond Times and Compiler.
The
Richmond Enquirer
echoed this sentiment by calling for the "whole community" to "condemn" the actions of the striking Tredegar workers on the basis that they threatened the power of slave owners and employers.
³³The press's loud condemnations of the white strikers suggest that more than economic forces influenced employers' hiring considerations.

While contradicting evidence on slave and free labor costs continued to fuel the public debate, ultimately the maintenance of the social order in addition to economic considerations drove most employers to utilize bond workers. Although a few notable businesses did switch from bond to free labor, city employers for the most part continued to hire slave workers and never fully converted to free labor. Their interest in hiring bond workers during this period is clear; census and manufacturing statistics show that by 1860, 71 percent (4,844) of slave workingmen (between the ages of ten and fifty-five) and 46 percent of slave working-women (1,490) were hired to factories and homes.
³⁴

High demand for hired slave workers reflected not only the expansion of factories in size and output but also the changes in the type of tasks that slaves performed. At the Tredegar Iron Works, for example, the number of slave hands grew in part because of increased access to the positions of puddlers, heaters, and rollers. Slave workers were promoted to these skilled positions following a recommendation made by company agent Joseph R. Anderson (later president of the firm), who calculated that if Tredegar hired twenty-two slaves as puddlers, it would save $11,181 per year, and even more if it purchased the workers.
³⁵

The placement of slaves in these highly skilled positions was unprecedented at Tredegar. Before the 1840s only white workers had performed these jobs, maintaining a racial monopoly by teaching their skills only to selected white mechanics generally their sons or apprentices of their own choosing.
³⁶This apprenticeship system allowed white mechanics to protect their jobs by barring slaves (that is, less expensive workers) from the positions and by thwarting industrialists' efforts to select their own workers. Such tactics did not escape industrialists' attention; Anderson was fully aware that "certain operations [such] as puddling, heating, rolling &c are known only to foreigners and a few Americans who have been from interest opposed to imparting this knowledge to negroes." To break the white mechanics' grip on the workforce and circumvent the apprenticeship system, Anderson hired an outside iron craftsman to "instruct such men or boys whether white or colored in the said Branch of the said manufacture of iron."
³⁷To guarantee a steady supply of slave ironmakers, Anderson continued to hire new slave workers through the

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1840s specifically to be trained in the art of puddling. White mechanics protested the presence of slave puddlers and rollers at the mill by calling a strike. Anderson's response was swift and harsh: he fired the strikers and filled their positions with slave ironmakers. He notified the strikers of their new status with a letter that opened with these words: "To my late workmen at the Tredegar Iron Works."
³⁸By the mid to late 1840s, slaves worked in all phases of ironmaking (table 15).

Not all employment changes were so dramatic. In some cases, such as the rail lines and the canal company, changes in slave jobs were much smaller and done with far less fanfare. In the Virginia Central and the Virginia and Tennessee railroads, a small of number of slave laborers in some years as many as seventy and in others as few as ten left their backbreaking jobs laying track and boarded the trains as firemen, brakemen, and cleaners as a way to reduce costs.
³⁹

Canal officials similarly promoted slave workers to the positions of stonemasons, stonecutters, and quarrymen in an effort to reduce costs, but also to end white labor difficulties. As the chief engineer explained, "In the Southern country, where mechanics are scarce, the contractor

Table 15. Slave Ironworkers at Tredegar, 184760

Year

Tredegar

Armory

Total

1847