Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia by John J. Zaborney (review)

BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2014 85 Weaver’s focus on the movement of people becomes a limiting factor in his work. While the narratives remain entertaining and serve to reinforce the idea that a lively trans-oceanic tradition did indeed take root, Weaver makes little effort to analyze the larger outcomes of these encounters. The cultural and material exchanges touted in the introduction never materialize, leaving the reader wanting more. This book offers a good point of embarkation into the Red Atlantic, but more work needs to be done. Justin Power West Virginia University Slaves for Hire Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia John J. Zaborney Frederick Douglass’s narrative of his journey from slavery to freedom chronicled a succession of different masters who rented his labor but did not own him. His owner sent the young Douglass to Baltimore to be a white child’s companion ; as a youth, he was hired to a notorious slave-breaker; then to a Mr. Freeland where he plotted his first escape; then sent back to Baltimorewhereheworkedattheshipyards.After becoming a skilled caulker, Douglass negotiated the privilege of contracting for his own work and living on his own, his final stop before escaping to the North. Historians have long acknowledged the presence of hired slaves in the antebellum South but assumed that most like Douglass were skilled men in industrial or urban settings. But slaveholders hired out far more slaves than they sold to traders, and John J. Zaborney’s meticulous examination of the slave-hiring system in Virginia provides a welcome addition to the growing literature on this neglected aspect of enslavement. Utilizing plantation records, guardians’ accounts, church records, and county court records, Zaboney emphasizes the effects of slave hiring on slaves, slavery’s economic viability , and the nature of class and gender relations in the antebellum South. Slave hiring, Zaborney asserts, “touched all types of slaves, all locations and occupations, and all types of whites” (3, emphasis in original ). Slave hiring—the temporary leasing of John J. Zaborney. Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. 224 pp. ISBN: 97808007145128 (cloth), $42.50. BOOK REVIEWS 86 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY slaves to another white person for a limited time, usually for a year—originated in the middle of the eighteenth century as economic diversification replaced tobacco monoculture, increasing demand for nonagricultural labor and creating a surplus of plantation workers accentuated with the natural growth in the slave population . Hired slaves became essential laborers in Virginia’s expanding industries, cities, and transportation systems as owners received rental incomes from slaves they could not otherwise profitably employ. Mixed farmers met their variable labor needs with short-term hires of neighborhood slaves. Estate administrators, orphans’ guardians, widows, slaves owned by churches, and slaveholders seeking guaranteed income supplied many slaves for hire. By creating fluid labor markets, owners and hirers maximized profits from their chattel property; slaves’ personal desires proved secondary considerations in their calculations. Analysis of gender provides some of the strongest sections of Slaves for Hire. Owners frequently hired out slave women as domestic workers , and like all such slaves they faced constant white scrutiny. Owners even rented out pregnant and nursing women and women with small children for nominal rents to avoid the expense of providing for unproductive workers. White men of modest means thus gained temporary mastery of slaves and even put small children to work. By hiring female slaves husbands relieved their wives of the drudgery of housework and elevated their status as ladies. The system provided other arenas for performing masculinity as men arranged to hire slaves that women owned, and inspected slaves’ bodies at January hiring fairs, experiences ex-slaves’ recalled in language identical to the auction block. Zaborney provides important evidence to qualify the claims of Jonathan D. Martin in Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (2004) that the conflicting economic interests of owners and hirers increased class tensions and expanded slaves’ personal autonomy and means of resistance. Although hired slaves’ experiences ranged between autonomy and subjugation and defy generalization, Zaborney notes that white men’s participation as observers, auctioneers, patrollers, guardians, transporters, and overseers created shared racial mastery that...