Slaves for Hire

Brian Balogh: You would think that one of the things that makes an enslaved person a slave is that they are not paid. But when Ed spoke to the historian Gregg Kimball in 2014, he described the phenomenon of hiring out enslaved persons prior to the Civil War.

Brian Balogh: In the 1850s, thousands of enslaved people from rural plantations spent at least part of the year living on their own in Richmond. Other enslaved people lived in the city all the time and moved about independently, but in most cases they remained somebody else’s property.

Gregg Kimball: It is a very strange concept. But what happened was you have say a tobacco factory owner, and he needs a certain number of hands, and he goes to sometimes a middleman, sometimes directly to the master and says, “Let’s have a dual contract and I’ll hire your slave for a year.” And the master gets that money. He is, the slave is hired to the factory for that period of time.

Ed Ayers: Would the slave get anything out of this?

Gregg Kimball: Well, typically they did not get any of the direct payment that went to the master. But you know, the demands labor, you may be in the season where you’re working a lot of hours, and it could be that the slave is only supposed to work for X hours a day, and you need them to work what we would call overtime. Well, sometimes the slave would be remunerated, you know, paid for that time directly. And that was that little crack in the system where some industrial slaves actually had cash in their pockets.

Ed Ayers: Why didn’t they just make them work harder? Why didn’t they just say, “No, you’re staying here Saturday afternoon. And I want you to come in on Sunday too and make more of these barrels.”

Gregg Kimball: Well, obviously the master would have something to say about that. And masters, while they themselves worked their slaves very hard, they were probably even more careful about how somebody else worked their slaves.

Gregg Kimball: I’ll give you an example. When the Blue Ridge tunnel was being built for the railroad through the mountains, they would not allow hired slaves to work in some of the more dangerous parts of that, particularly the blasting with black powder.s That was done by Irish migrant workers. So that’s kind of telling. You know, masters had to be careful. They had a huge investment.

Ed Ayers: So all that sounds like an advantage that you’d have the chance for overpayment. You know, if you’re a slave who’s hired out to somebody else, it’s hard work, but you’re going to be working really hard no matter what you’re doing. But would people prefer not to be hired out?

Gregg Kimball: I think it was very specific to your situation. One of the advantages to coming to Richmond would be to be part of a much larger black community. Going to, say, First African Baptist church, which had almost 3000 members in 1860, you know, provided a level of community and interaction that you probably wouldn’t get in a plantation setting. But if you were, say, a woman hired into a domestic situation in the city, it could be just as abusive and just as much surveillance as you might encounter on a plantation.

Gregg Kimball: So I think, you know, we have to be real careful with that notion of advantage. But for some industrial workers, I think it did offer a little, you know, crack where they could have a social life that was a little richer perhaps than on a plantation.

Ed Ayers: You know, at this time, the defenders of slavery, including of this system, would have pointed to what they call “wage slavery” in the North and would have said, “What you’re doing there is just as bad here. We take care of the slaves, we pay them for overtime. They can earn enough money to buy their own freedom or that of their family. How can you say that this is less fair than the brutal wage slavery of the North?” What would have been a good rejoinder to that?

Gregg Kimball: I know this will sound perverse, but they did have a point to a certain degree. You know the expression, “Nothing but freedom.” You certainly had the freedom as a working man in the North to, you know, change your employer if you wanted to do that. That wasn’t always necessarily a really practical thing for somebody to do. And in the North you have an evolution away from these craft traditions where people did control their labor to a certain degree towards something that was much more exploitative. So it wasn’t necessarily that they were right about slavery and wrong about the North. Clearly they had a very rose colored view of what they were doing, but they weren’t totally wrong about the “free labor” either.

Ed Ayers: So was slave hiring a sign of the fundamental incapacity of slavery to adapt to a modern industrial world? Or was slave hiring an example of exactly the opposite, that slavery could adapt to even the most advanced technologies? You get one choice there, Gregg.

Gregg Kimball: I think it’s that it could adapt to different circumstances, and that the hiring practice is really just a reflection of its ability to adapt.

Ed Ayers: Do you think it would have spread across the South and to other kinds of environments, or would this only work in an industrial city like Richmond?

Gregg Kimball: Well, I think that some of the more recent work on this has shown that it was more prevalent even in agricultural areas than we might imagine. And don’t forget, even though we think of agricultural industry as this, you know, again, kind of a dichotomy of these two different things, remember even in rural agriculture, particularly some types of agriculture, like sugar for instance, there is a whole processing part that is virtually industrial. So again, I think that enslaved people certainly had the skill, and manufacturers had the impetus to use slaves in these industries, and there’s no reason that those two things couldn’t go together.

Ed Ayers: It’s a truly horrifying vision. Sometimes when I’m out talking about the Civil War and people say, “Well, it would have faded away anyway, you know,” I say, “No, look at Richmond and you’re just seeing what the future would have looked, like and it would have been like South Africa.” I point out that slaves would have been great for doing the main things that happen after emancipation: Building railroads, digging coal mines, all those kinds of things. It’s scary to think about how adaptable slavery was.

Gregg Kimball: That’s absolutely right.

Ed Ayers: Gregg, thanks so much for explaining this really kind of bizarre and complicated world to us.

Gregg Kimball: Well, my pleasure. I’ve been here 28 years in Richmond, and this is one of the most fascinating pieces of its story that I can imagine talking about. So thanks.

Brian Balogh: Gregg Kimball is the Director of Education and Outreach Services at the Library of Virginia. His history of antebellum Richmond is American City, Southern Place.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history.

Brian Balogh: You’ll find thousands of BackStory segments on almost every aspect of American history @ BackStoryradio.org. Or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund: Cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 16: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joann Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.