Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 (38 page)

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Authors: Midori Takagi

Tags: #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #test

BOOK: Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865
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Page 94
price, however. For many slave women laundering or catering was a third job, performed after a long day of working in the masters' or employers' households and taking care of their own families. The long hours women worked and the heavy burdens they shouldered make it reasonable to question whether the extra income gave many of them the sort of "mobility" and "autonomy" commonly enjoyed by slave men. For some slave women participating in the market economy clearly offered a way to improve their lives. For others, the extra work seems to have provided little discernible benefit.
Slave women who prospered by providing household services on a cash basis enjoyed unprecedented options, including the means to buy a range of goods such as fancy foods, clothes, small trinkets, and in some cases, their freedom. The point was, as one historian states, "that these decisions were theirs to make."
71
Having cash added to slave women's strength within the community by allowing them to contribute financially to the church, fund a support society, or help organize large social events. Most important, however, in seeking extra income slave women exercised a degree of control not found in the rest of their lives. They had the choice of accepting or rejecting certain jobs and had the ability to negotiate the terms of their work and wages.
Richmond's spectacular economic rise propelled by the tobacco, flour, and iron industries forced the rest of the country and particularly the northeastern states to take notice of this southern city. The type of products produced, its manufacturing output and annual profits, and the type of labor employed made the city a strong competitor with certain northern industries and a highly unusual but greatly valued asset to an overwhelmingly rural South. Richmond's success, however, came with a price: increased vulnerability to national and international competition, rising slave labor costs, and widely vacillating market prices.
Every economic fluctuation reverberated through Richmond's communities, slave and free, with frequent devastating consequences for the former. Certainly all slaves faced the possibility of being sold away from family and friends, but with crippling recessions and increasing labor costs, the potential grew dramatically. For many Richmond slave workers, however, particularly prime male hands, the chances were slightly more in their favor of remaining in the city because of high industrial demands.
For the thousands of slave laborers who remained in the city, economic change affected nearly every aspect of their working and living conditions. Increased labor costs, for example, encouraged the use of the hiring system; about half of all slave workingwomen and nearly three-
 
Page 95
quarters of slave workingmen labored for employers rather than owners. Those employed in the factories found themselves working under new forms of slave management. At the Tredegar Iron Works slave hands were promoted to highly skilled positions with greater responsibilities and control. In the tobacco manufactories, however, changes in supervision and production resulted in a loss of control for workers. With managers and longer working hours that resulted in greater output, fewer slaves had the ability to supervise themselves and determine the pace of production.
No doubt the thousands of slave women who went from household to household on a regular basis as hired hands found the changes stressful. Not knowing where they would end up the following year or if their children would remain with them made their lives tenuous and uncertain. Yet even under these tense conditions, the women were able to find a few opportunities that brought a small degree of control over their labor and some "autonomy" as consumers.
Ironically, as industrialists expanded their use of slave workers, they unwittingly made themselves more vulnerable to challenges from them. It appears that each new change either allowed bond men and women to maneuver into positions with greater leverage and control or threatened to rescind privileges, prompting a fight to preserve them. In either case the authority of the employer and owner was severely tested and in some cases undermined. It is ironic that the very success of the city's industrial economy relied on the widespread use of labor practices that helped slaves defy their masters.
 
Map of Richmond, Virginia, 1859. (Courtesy of The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia)
 
"A Slave Auction in Virginia. From a Sketch by Our Special Artist,"
Illustrated
London News
38 (Feb. 16, 1861). (Courtesy of the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia)
 
"The James River and Kanawha Canal, Richmond, Virginia," sketch by J.R.
Hamilton,
Harper's Weekly
9 (Oct. 14, 1865). (Courtesy of the Valentine
Museum, Richmond, Virginia)
"Twist Room" from "In a Tobacco Factory,"
Harper's New
Monthly Magazine
47 (1873): 718. (Courtesy of The Library of
Virginia, Richmond, Virginia)
 
''View of the Interior of the Seabrook Tobacco Warehouse at Richmond, Virginia,"
Harper's Weekly
9 (1865): 709. (Courtesy of The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia)
 
African-American laborers. (Photo War and Conflict no. 202, Brady Collection, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; courtesy of the Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia)
 
Page 96
Five
Formation of an Independent Slave Community
With the expansion of the industrial sector and the urban slave labor force, changes in slave living conditions were inevitable. Most notably, features of city slave life that had been considered irregular in 1820 and common in 1840 became ubiquitous by 1860. One such feature was separate slave housing. Whereas boarding out or living apart had been considered somewhat unusual in the early nineteenth century, by the late antebellum years it was deemed essential. Few businesses had the space or desire to accommodate the more than 5,000 male tobacco, iron, and flour workers and the few hundred female industrial laborers. As a result, industrial slave hands were free to seek lodging anywhere they could find it. In contrast to the previous period, however, slave housing in the 1840s and 1850s caused the widespread creation of racially segregated residential enclaves.
1
During the late antebellum era, slave (and free black) residences became increasingly concentrated in two areas that bordered the edges of the city. The larger of these enclaves was in the extreme northwest corner of the city between Fourth and Belvidere streets from Broad to Leigh (later established as Jackson Ward in 1871).
2
Little is known about this early neighborhood except that it was primarily a residential section. There slave workers found housing by sharing homes or renting rooms from free black residents even though it was illegal for them to do so. Free blacks such as Lucy Moore willingly opened their homes to slave
 
Page 97
workers in violation of the law either to accommodate family members and friends or to make extra income.
3
More is known about the second enclave down by Shockoe Creek near the docks, tobacco manufactories, foundries, and train depots. During the 1830s and 1840s this area housed workers of all races, classes, and ethnicities including German and Irish immigrants, native-born whites, free blacks, and slave city dwellers. By the 1850s, however, most of the European immigrants had moved to more comfortable residences on Union Hill and Oregon Hill. Black residents (free and enslaved) did not follow the immigrants into these new areas because white home-owners made it clear they were not welcome.
4
But the Shockoe Creek area remained open to poor workers of all backgrounds and colors and to small businesses owned by black and white residents, including cookshops, groceries, and grogshops. Though no legal barriers prevented different groups from living in the Shockoe Creek region (or in the Broad and Leigh Street area), white Richmonders began to view the neighborhood as exclusively for black workers and as a symbol of abject poverty and depravity. Evidence of this view came to light when Eliza Wilson, a white single mother of three children, was discovered residing in the neighborhood. Horrified that a white woman was living in a "large tenement filled with negroes," the
Daily Dispatch
pleaded with wealthy white residents to help this "family worthy of their sympathy."
5
The fact that women like Eliza Wilson who lived in other neighborhoods never received such attention from the local press strongly suggests that it was her residence in a black neighborhood, not her financial problems, that Richmonders found remarkable.
The earliest slave residents living in this waterfront area chose it because housing was fairly cheap, plentiful, and close to their jobs. Even though omnibus transportation was available after 1856, no lines went to the Broad and Leigh Street area. As a result, a slave hand living in this neighborhood would have had to travel by some other method or walk the mile or so to Thomas's or Grant's tobacco manufactory down by the docks.
6
Living in a tenement by Shockoe Creek, however, placed laborers within minutes of work. No doubt this advantage persuaded William and Fleming to live in a tenement on Cary Street just five blocks from their jobs at Poitiaux Robinson's tobacco factory. Moses and Jack lived even closer to their jobs at Quarles's brickyard, having to traverse only three blocks every morning and night.
7
Slave housing in the factory area ranged from nearly uninhabitable to tolerable, at best. Slave workers lived in shacks and tenements located in alleyways that were unpaved, filled with open sewers and garbage, and

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