Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 by Midori Takagi Read Free Book Online Page A

slaves began hauling coal for

 

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Smith and Govern. Not long afterward thirty-three new slave sailors took the helm for the Richmond Towing Company and began guiding ships along the James River. 31 Slaves also helped develop the city's physical landscape by building government offices and the arms manufactory, as well as roads, bridges, docks, the canal, and later the railroad.
Like the flour mills, Smith and Govern, the Richmond Towing Company, and the individual city improvement projects depended on an exclusively male slave labor force. But at businesses such as the Richmond Dock Company and the Richmond Manufacturing Company (also listed as the Richmond Cotton Factory), slaves worked with free blacks and whites. Slave dockworkers, for example, moved cargo on and off ships alongside white laborers. Slave weavers at the Richmond Manufacturing Company, which opened around 1835, found themselves working in a labor force integrated by both race and sex. Although company records no longer exist, census materials and travelers' journals hint at the extent of integration that existed within the factory. In 1835 Joseph Martin visited the cloth factory and noted that there were 70 white and 130 black employees working side by side producing osnaburg, the coarse cloth generally used for slave clothing. 32 Five years later a second visitor noted that the workforce consisted of "100 whites and 150 blacks as spinners and weavers." 33 Although neither account specifies whether the black operatives were free or enslaved, men or women, the 1840 census indicates that 36 percent (99 of 276) of the factory's workers were slaves and that the majority of slave workers (65 percent) were women between the ages of ten and twenty-four (table 9). But like the tobacco manufactories, the mill did not allow its female slave hands to remain long. In 1850, after a devastating fire, the mill closed its doors. Although another cotton and wool factory took its place shortly thereafter and may have rehired some of the Richmond Cotton Mill hands, it appears slave women were not among them. 34
The firm in charge of building the James River canal the prized water route that provided inland farmers and planters a cheap method of conveying goods and materials to and from the city also employed a mixed labor force. In fact, it may have been the first large industry to do so. According to the records of the James River and Kanawha Company (JRKC), between the late 1780s and early 1800s, the canal company employed as many as 350 laborers, of whom 150 were slaves. Company records do not indicate why JRKC initially used both free and slave labor; but it appears company officials preferred this arrangement and continued to hire a mixed labor force throughout the antebellum era. The number of slave workers fluctuated greatly, and there is evidence to suggest such shifts depended on the availability of hired bondmen. By 1830,

 

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Table 9. Slave women employed in the tobacco and cotton industries, 1820 and 1840.
Industry
(Year)
010
1024
2436
3655
Total
Tobacco
(1820)
30
25
12
3
70
Cotton
(1840)
6
51
7
0
64
Source: U.S. Bureau of Census, Population, 1820 and 1840.
Note: Age distribution for women in tobacco factories is based on a sample of eleven companies. In 1840 there was only one cotton mill.

for example, slaves made up 67 percent (300 of 450) of the workers employed by the canal company. In the fall of 1836, however, only thirty-eight slaves had been secured because of the great demand for slave labor by other canal, coal, and gold companies. As a result, JRKC hired immigrant laborers to supplement its workforce. 35 Between 1836 and 1837 the company sent agents to Europe who returned with nearly 300 contract workers, dramatically altering the racial balance of the workforce. And by 1837 two-thirds of the canal workers were white men.
From the outset the company's only concern was to secure a large labor force, whether free or enslaved. This