Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction

Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865

Midori Takagi

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780813929170
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

RICHMOND WAS NOT only the capital of Virginia and of the Confederacy; it was also one of the most industrialized cities south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Boasting ironworks, tobacco processing plants, and flour mills, the city by 1860 drew half of its male workforce from the local slave population. Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction examines this unusual urban labor system from 1782 until the end of the Civil War. Many urban bondsmen and women were hired to businesses rather than working directly for their owners. As a result, they frequently had the opportunity to negotiate their own contracts, to live alone, and to keep a portion of their wages in cash. Working conditions in industrial Richmond enabled African-American men and women to build a community organized around family networks, black churches, segregated neighborhoods, secret societies, and aid organizations. Through these institutions, Takagi demonstrates, slaves were able to educate themselves and to develop their political awareness. They also came to expect a degree of control over their labor and lives. Richmond's urban slave system offered blacks a level of economic and emotional support not usually available to plantation slaves. Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction offers a valuable portrait of urban slavery in an individual city that raises questions about the adaptability of slavery as an institution to an urban setting and, more importantly, the ways in which slaves were able to turn urban working conditions to their own advantage.

One

Inauspicious Beginnings

In 1782 when Richmond received its formal recognition as a city, it had only a thousand inhabitants and hardly resembled a bustling metropolis; incorporated or not, it was little more than a small port town. But Richmond’s newly conferred status did portend the greatness the city would achieve within the next eight decades. During those years Richmond would evolve from a sleepy town to one of the most important political and economic centers of the South.

Many factors contributed to this change. One was the relocation of Virginia’s capital in 1780 from Williamsburg to Richmond, a city less vulnerable to enemy attacks during the Revolutionary War. The arrival of the state government acted as an early catalyst for population growth. One study estimates that Richmond’s prewar population of 640 increased by 63 percent to 1,031 by 1782.¹

Politicians, society figures, office seekers, and their entourages were drawn to the new capital, as were a number of businesses hoping to supply this new wealthy populace with goods and services—as evidenced by the sudden availability of silver and gold items, plush coaches, European fashions, and exotic wines and foods. Any doubt that the influx of wealth and people was caused by the city’s newfound political status can be removed by looking at Williamsburg. The relocation sounded the death knell for that once bustling town, which, lacking politics, was left with little more than “grass, and several cows, pigs, horses, mules and goats.”² But for Richmond, being the capital of Virginia or even, as it would later become, the capital of the Confederacy had less impact on the city’s growth than several other factors, among them its geographic location.

Situated on the James River just below the rapids, Richmond had access to the ocean and the interior of the state. The river snaked through the upcountry and into the hinterlands, providing planters and small farmers with a means to transport their goods on rafts and bateaux. Richmond was a natural stopping point because of its location just below the fall line. The rapids prevented ships from sailing beyond Richmond either up or downstream. As a result, Richmond, like other river cities such as Alexandria and Fredericksburg, became an ideal spot for commerce and for shipping goods to and from the interior of Virginia.³ Once their goods were in Richmond, farmers traded or sold them to merchants and European agents who then transferred the goods to larger ships bound for the eastern coastline or England.

Richmond’s location close to the rapids also gave it the distinct advantage of being able to harness the energy that flowed from the rushing waters. The falls provided residents with a cheap, dependable source of power that helped them mill wheat and corn and in later years run machinery. This energy source would prove crucial to the many emerging factories in Richmond during the antebellum era. Later, when the Kanawha Canal was built around the James to allow navigation, two sources of waterpower became available. With this increased energy, factory owners were able to expand their businesses and production greatly.

Crucial to Richmond’s development were the staple crops grown in the surrounding countryside. The two major ones, tobacco and wheat, greatly influenced the nature of Richmond’s growth by requiring certain kinds of processing, packaging, and shipping. In the eighteenth century tobacco had been picked, dried, and stemmed on the plantation before being sent to Richmond by cart or bateaux in large wooden hogsheads. Once in Richmond the tobacco was stored in warehouses, its quality inspected by state officials, and its price negotiated with European agents. But by the late eighteenth century, market changes, stricter inspection laws, and increased European demand changed the method of processing and shipping.

The stringent tobacco inspection laws passed during the nineteenth century required that all tobacco exports be reviewed and graded by state-appointed officials on the docks.⁴ This was an attempt to upgrade the quality of exported tobacco by eliminating trash (lower-grade) weeds. These laws also precluded the more informal tobacco trade among small farmers, country merchants, and ship captains. And because all export tobacco was required to be lodged in warehouses prior to shipment, tobacco agents and ship captains congregated at these sites. As a result, Richmond became an important center for inspecting, negotiating, and selling the lucrative leaf.

In addition to the inspection process, other tobacco-related businesses and services flourished in Richmond. Attendant industries such as coopering and stave making set up near the wharves and tobacco warehouses to meet the demand for hogsheads and boxes used to ship tobacco. Hotels, boardinghouses, and taverns appeared to lodge the inspectors, ship captains, and agents.

The changes in European tastes had an additional effect on Richmond’s economic development. By the turn of the century European preference for a smoother, more refined tobacco product encouraged greater processing of the leaf. Tobacco growers and later tobacco manufacturers—who had little to do with the growing process—began to stem, boil, press, flavor, and twist the leaves into licorice-flavored plugs. As shops providing such services sprang up, more craftsmen and laborers came to Richmond seeking employment. The earliest manufacturing census of Richmond illustrates the industrial growth: in 1820 twenty tobacco manufactories employed a total of 760 workers. By 1850 there were nineteen manufactories employing 1,406 workers. During the next decade, the number of tobacco-processing factories and tobacco workers nearly tripled.

The growth of tobacco manufacturing was fairly steady even though the counties surrounding Richmond turned to other crops, such as wheat. Many local farmers diversified their crops because of soil exhaustion and wildly fluctuating tobacco prices, causing the nation’s major source of raw tobacco to shift toward the lower piedmont region of Virginia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Despite the increasing distance to tobacco farms, Richmond continued to receive large shipments of raw tobacco for processing. By 1820 the city was firmly established as a hub for tobacco processing and shipping, and it retained that position throughout the antebellum era.

The other staple crop that affected Richmond’s development, though to a lesser degree than tobacco, was wheat. Wheat cultivation in the tidewater area throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encouraged the growth of flour milling in Richmond, which was a prime location for such an industry because of its abundant waterpower. Although wheat never commanded the prices or profits of tobacco, wheat processing and exporting proved an important industry for the city.

The increase in European demand for flour, the steady rise in grain prices in comparison to unstable tobacco prices, and the rapid exhaustion of soil from tobacco growing encouraged many farmers to grow more wheat. Most of this wheat was for export and required a certain amount of processing and storage prior to shipping. To meet this need, the flour and gristmill industry moved from quaint riverside grinding shops to large, bustling mills.⁵ By 1860 Richmond possessed the second and third largest flour mills in the country (the largest mill was in Oswego, New York), producing, respectively, 190,000 and 160,000 barrels of flour per year.⁶

In addition to tobacco and wheat there was another “crop” that greatly affected Richmond’s urban and industrial growth: coal. The city was located only miles from the eastern Virginia coalfields, which made the area one of the few mining centers with access to coastal vessels.⁷ More important, coal was essential to the production of iron, a product with even greater economic implications for the city. Bituminous coal and its by-product, coke, were needed to heat the furnaces that made iron. Without them, iron could not be melted or cast into products. Iron foundries in Richmond were first established during the American Revolution to produce goods for the war, such as shells, castings, pikes, nails, and cannonballs. After the war the iron industry became an integral part of other Richmond businesses, providing them with parts for coaches, carts, machinery, tools, and most important, the railroad.

The city’s three major products, combined with iron manufacturing, further stimulated industrial and commercial activity by creating a need for numerous attendant industries and businesses. New businesses that supported the tobacco, wheat, and iron industries quickly arose, producing goods such as barrels, tobacco boxes, machine parts, wagons, tobacco cutters, grain-grinding machines, sheet iron, and farm tools. In addition, a number of businesses and services appeared to serve the growing population. Among businesses that flourished were those producing clothing, shoes and boots, soap and candles, guns, hats, sashes and blinds, and furniture. There also was explosive growth in the service sector with the arrival of lawyers, doctors and hospitals, auctioneers, commission merchants, and slave traders.

Together, tobacco, wheat, coal, and ironmaking contributed greatly to Richmond’s status within the eastern Virginia region. And because of these crops and products, Richmond did not remain merely a shipping or trading port. The tremendous volume of processing, marketing, and shipping of these goods, as well as the extensive development of attendant industries and services, allowed Richmond to diversify and become a commercial, industrial, and political center.⁸

Essential to Richmond’s development was the system of slavery. Slaves provided the labor for nearly all aspects of Richmond’s economic, urban, and industrial growth, from cultivating and manufacturing tobacco and wheat to building supporting industries and creating the physical structures of the city.

Tobacco, for example, could not have been cultivated in such high volume without slaves. Their labor was crucial at every juncture in the growing, harvesting, and manufacturing of the plant. From the painstaking activities of planting, picking, and drying to stemming, pressing, and twisting the brown leaves, slaves constituted the majority of the workforce throughout the antebellum years. As a result, at every stage of cultivation and production slavery and tobacco became intertwined.⁹

Slavery and tobacco cultivation became linked initially during the late seventeenth century when the numbers of white immigrant laborers who earlier performed these tasks began to decline rapidly. Several factors precipitated this decline, including improved employment opportunities in Europe and in northern colonies that proved more enticing than a stint of indentured servitude in Virginia. As a result, planters in need of a cheap source of labor began to substitute African slaves for white servants.¹⁰ By the turn of the eighteenth century, most large tobacco farms were fully manned by slave labor.

By the early to middle nineteenth century, slave labor had become equally important to the processing of the leaf. As tobacco production moved from plantations to factories, so did the labor force. Slaves frequently were purchased or hired by tobacco manufacturers to process the dried leaves into flavored chewing plugs. Manufacturers, like planters, employed slaves because they were viewed as a cheaper and more tractable source of labor, because many slaves already were skilled at processing tobacco (having been trained on the plantations), and because there were few white laborers willing to do such labor.¹¹ For all of these reasons, there was little resistance to the use of slave labor in tobacco factories.

Slaves also played a major role in the harvesting and processing of grains, both in the countryside and in the city of Richmond. Not only did they manage the wheat fields surrounding the city, they were responsible for turning the grain into flour. In the water-powered mills beside the James River, slaves could be found grinding the wheat into several grades of flour as well as making the barrels in which the product was shipped.

The increase in wheat cultivation in the immediate countryside had an additional impact on Richmond’s slave system: the creation of a labor surplus. As more farmers began growing wheat instead of tobacco, they found themselves with more workers than they could use because the new crop was far less labor-intensive. Rather than keeping idle hands on the farms, planters began to hire out their slaves to other farms or to Richmond businesses, including the tobacco manufactories. This transfer of surplus slave labor was an important part of Richmond’s industrialization. The intermittent labor demands of wheat cultivation and the resulting release of slave labor greatly encouraged practices such as hiring out.

A third important factor that influenced the development and growth of slavery in Richmond was the prior use of slaves for industrial tasks beginning in the Revolutionary War. Although bondmen had been working for ironworks and other craft shops across Virginia as early as 1721, it was not until the 1770s and 1780s that industrial slave employment took hold in the city.¹² During those decades slave workers from the city and nearby counties were forcibly moved from households and crafts shops to state-owned industries. The public ropewalks in Warwick and in Richmond were manned entirely by slave workers who spent long hours “manipulating the dressed hemp [and twisting] the strands into rope.”¹³ A major portion of the workforce at the lead mines run by the government during the Revolutionary War was slave labor with duties that included chipping the lead from the earthen walls, removing the gravel from the shaft, and separating ore from rocks through coarse grinding. Construction of the capital also was based on slave labor. Most if not all of the government buildings such as the State Capitol, the governor’s mansion, and the new arms manufactory were built by slave workers.

The extensive use of slave labor in the various wartime industries and public projects was hailed by the state government as a resounding success. Encouraged by this, the Virginia government not only continued to purchase and employ slaves but demanded that all public development projects of the late eighteenth century do the same. The James River Company was quick to respond to the governor’s wish; in 1791 its directors wrote that “having been instructed to make the purchase of negroes for the use of the Company, & wishing to comply therewith at a sale shortly to be made in the county of Gloster, we have to request of your Excellency & the Hon’ble Board for supply of money, or tobacco at the present value, as will enable [us] to make the purchase.”¹⁴

The use of slaves in war-related industries—and later public projects—set an important example that encouraged other employers to consider slave labor. A range of documents indicate the private sector’s response was enthusiastic. Colonel Davies, who was in charge of the state ropewalks, was approached by several businesses interested in hiring the slave rope makers. In a letter to the governor in 1782, Davies informed the executive council that a local rope-making company presented such an offer: “Drawing attention to the condition of the Public works at War wick, little or nothing is done there at present, and yet there are ‘the hands kept there’ belonging to the state, who could be hired out to advantage, most of them are Rope-makers, but as the public rope-walk is burnt, the proprietors of the private rope-walks near Richmond are very anxious to hire these negroes and will give high wages for them.”¹⁵

The ropewalk was not the only company interested in hiring state slaves. During that same year the original lead mine owners petitioned Governor Harrison, through Thomas Madison, for the return of the mines and specifically asked to hire the state slaves who had been working there since the war. Harrison gave his reply to Madison and specified the terms of his agreement: “Sir, I am ready to receive proposals from the proprietors of the lead mines for delivering up the said mines to them, and hiring the public negroes provided they will furnish the state with one hundred tons of lead.”¹⁶

From these few documents it is clear that government use of slave workers during the war did help city employers and slave owners see the potential of slave labor for a variety of nonagricultural businesses. By providing solid evidence that slaves could be used effectively and efficiently in industries that brought profits to both the owner and employer, the state helped open t...