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5. Tobacco and Iron: The Foundations of Industrial Slavery
- Louisiana State University Press
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159 5 Tobacco and Iron The founDaTions of inDusTriaL sLaVery Beginning in 1852, Tom Bragg worked for Petersburg brick layer and contractor Daniel Lyon. Bragg was likely a suitable skilled worker, for Lyon continued to employ his services through 1858. Unfortunately, Bragg did not receive wages as a reward for his hard work because he was a slave owned by local tobacconist Charles F. Osborne. Lyon leased Bragg, paying an annual hire fee that increased from $87.50 in 1852 to $130 by 1858.1 Enslaved men and women, including Tom Bragg, formed an important component of the working class in Petersburg. Tobacco factories and the growing iron foundries and railroad car shops employed large numbers of Petersburg’s enslaved workers, but as in other southern cities, slaves worked in many industrial capacities, ranging from highly skilled craft workers to basic manual laborers. This chapter considers the implications of the growing industrial economy and its need for slave labor. As demand for labor grew, the rising costs of purchasing or leasing enslaved workers had important ramifications for industrialists and independent artisans of both races. However, unlike the case in most southern cities, the large free black population of Petersburg offered an alternative source of labor for industrial employers. When other southern cities turned increasingly toward immigrant workers, or paid the increasing cost of enslaved labor, Petersburg industrialists and artisans hired free blacks, who dominated the city’s unskilled labor pool. Nevertheless, industrial slaves made an important contribution to Petersburg’s antebellum industrial growth and prosperity, and slavery was intimately tied to the lives and livelihoods of the city’s skilled artisans. Across the South, approximately 5 percent of slaves worked in industrial occupations. They labored in tobacco factories, iron foundries, and coal mines, and worked as blacksmiths, carpenters, and joiners. Rural areas and plantations , as the locus for much of southern industry, also employed the majority of 1. Auction Sales Record Book, 1847–1854 and 1854–1867, Branch & Company Records, 1837–1976, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va. (hereafter ViHi). artisan workers in the upper south 160 industrial slave labor. Only about 15 to 20 percent of urban slaves toiled in industry ; in cities employment in domestic service was more common. Most industrial slaves were men, but some businesses and factories employed the labor of enslaved women and children.2 Enslaved men, women, and children made up nearly one-third of the population in Petersburg. In 1850 the slave population was 4,729 and split nearly evenly along gender lines.3 It is impossible to accurately calculate the number of slaves employed in Petersburg’s industrial operations and artisans’ shops, but it is clear that they worked in all segments of the economy and were especially critical to tobacco manufacture and iron founding. Tobacco manufacturing relied heavily on enslaved labor, with slaves owned and slaves hired making up most of the factories’ workforces. Late in the antebellum period, many tobacconists also employed a significant number of free African Americans. In 1850, across Virginia as a whole, tobacco factories hired about 40 percent of their slave workers under an annual contract, with the figure jumping to nearly 50 percent by 1860. In some areas, such as Richmond , tobacconists relied almost exclusively on enslaved labor. Examination of census manuscripts suggests that about one-third of Richmond’s adult male slaves worked in tobacco factories or iron foundries. The rising cost of slave labor made hiring more popular among industrialists. In 1860, 87 percent of the slaves working for manufacturers in the capital city’s first ward belonged to other slave owners, mostly from plantations in the surrounding region.4 In 1835, 6 tobacco factories operated in Petersburg with predominantly slave labor. Over the next two and a half decades, the pace of expansion in tobacco manufacture led to a concomitant increase in the number of slaves employed. By 1850, 13 tobacco factories owned 467 slaves, amounting to almost one-tenth of the slave population of Petersburg. Each of the firms or individuals held at 2. Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 9–12. 3. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United States in 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Robert Armstrong, printer, 1853), 258. The census enumerated 2,376 male and 2,353 female slaves. 4. Claudia Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820–1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 25–27; Midori Takagi, “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction...