Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia

Chapter 3: Cities and Industry

50 3 Cities and Industry The harshness of a slave’s existence might be mitigated by a good mistress/master,oriftheenslavedpersonchancedtohavemixedrace ancestry. A further factor might also lessen slavery’s rigors: urban life. Just over 5 percent of Virginia’s bondpeople lived in small cities where they could experience, by associating with substantial numbers of free blacks, a wider world than that of the plantation. Slavery has sometimes been seen as incompatible with urban life; but Virginia’s urban tobacco factories depended on slave labor, and the growth of the state’s tobacco-manufacturing towns (even during the 1850s, when slave labor was in heavy demand for the booming Cotton Kingdom) suggests that there was no inherent contradiction between slavery and urbanization. Factory owners were glad to hire enslaved workers on annual contracts , and many rural slave owners were happy to send their surplus slaves to work in town. Urban life offered these slaves more autonomy than they found on the plantation, without seeming substantially to undermine the solidity of the slave system.1 Virginia’s antebellum cities were quite different from modern metropolises. They were towns whose population comprised between 6,500 and about 40,000 inhabitants, of which Richmond, with a population of just over 40,000, was the largest. In fact, by 1860 within the future Confederate states, Richmond was (except for the cotton-exporting seaport of New Orleans) the largest of all Southern cities, having just assumed this preeminence from Charleston, South Carolina.2 Richmond’s industrial prominence arose largely from its numerous tobacco-manufacturing firms, whose 3,500 workers were nearly all blacks, and mainly slaves. Petersburg (twenty miles south of Richmond) and Lynchburg— Map 2. Urban areas of “residual Virginia” (excluding later West Virginia), 1860 Table 2. Population of Five Virginia Urban Areas (1860) Urban Areas Total Slave Free black White Richmond/Manchester 40,703 12,442 2,798 25,463 Norfolk/Portsmouth 24,116 4,218 1,589 18,309 Petersburg 18,266 5,680 3,244 9,342 Alexandria 12,654a 1,386 1,415 9,851 Lynchburg 6,853 2,694 357 3,802 Total (5 urban areas) 102,592a 26,420 9,403 66,767 Percentage of the Total Population of These Five Urban Areas 100% 26% 9% 65% Source: U.S. Census of Population, 1860 a Includes 2 Native Americans Slave Free Black White * includes 2 Native Americans Total for 5 urban areas Population - 102,592* C h e s a p e a k e Ba y James River Y o r k River P o t o m a c R i v e r Norfolk Portsmouth Washington Petersburg 18,266 Richmond/ Manchester 40,703 Lynchburg 6,853 Norfolk/ Portsmouth 24,116 R a p p a h a n nock River Alexandria 12,654* Richmond 0 100 miles Urban areas of “residual Virginia” (excluding later West Virginia), 1860 Map 2: Cities and Industry 51 (one hundred miles to the west)—were the two other Virginia cities whose industrial labor force consisted primarily of tobacco-manufacturing slaves. Apart from these industrial towns, Virginia’s urban life was concentrated in old seaports. Norfolk and the adjacent town of Portsmouth had a combined population of 24,000, while Alexandria (far up the Potomac River but still a destination for oceangoing vessels) ranked, with nearly 13,000 inhabitants, as Virginia’s fourth-largest town. 52 alleviations Each of these urban areas had a black population of over 2,700 people. African Americans comprised 35 percent of Virginia’s total urban population , 26 percent of them slaves and 9 percent free. Virginia’s 26,000 urban slaves, living cheek by jowl with hundreds or even thousands of free blacks, and residing in cities where they might hope to evade the close supervision characteristic of plantation life, would have experienced slavery in a different form from that encountered by the great rural majority of slaves. The distinctive character of urban life is demonstrated by the experiences of George Teamoh, a Portsmouth slave who later—during Reconstruction in 1869, only four years after the end of the Civil War—rose to local eminence when he was elected from Portsmouth as a member of the Virginia state senate. Teamoh was by no means a typical urban slave, for his mistress was extraordinarily beneficent, and he may well have had mixedrace ancestry. Teamoh’s autobiography, begun in 1871, nevertheless indicates how urban life...