Slaves for Hire

ED: We’re going to finish out our show today with two stories from the American South, stories that bookend the Civil War. Today’s minimum wage debate is at least in part a result of a shift from an industrial to a service based economy. Well as it turns out, the shift to an industrial economy in the first place also raised fundamental questions about the best way to compensate workers.

PETER: Early on, and well before the Civil War, the question was, who would do this factory work and what would be the rules governing the new industrial workplace? In southern cities, like Richmond, Virginia, many forward thinking business owners turn to an ancient institution for answers. They hired enslaved men and women to do their factory work.

ED: Gregg Kimball is a historian who has written about this practice of slave hiring. He told me that in the 1850s thousands of slaves from rural plantations spent at least part of the year living on their own in Richmond. Other slaves 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 middle man, sometimes directly to the master and says, let’s do a contract. And I’ll higher your slave for a year. And the master gets that money. The slave is hired to the factory for that period of time.

ED: 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 the demands of labor, you be in the season 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, 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: 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. So 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 used to work in some of the more dangerous parts of that, particularly the blasting with black powder. That was done by Irish migrant workers. So that’s kind of telling. Masters had to be careful. They had a huge investment.

ED: So all that sounds like an advantage, that you would have this chance for overpayment. If you’re a slave who’s hired out to somebody, 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 First African Baptist Church, which had almost 3,000 members in 1860, provided a level community and interaction that you probably wouldn’t get in a plantation setting. But if you were say, 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. So I think we have to be real careful with that notion of advantage. But for some industrial workers, I think it did offer a little crack where they could have a social life that was a little richer perhaps in a plantation.

ED: 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 or that of their family. How can you say that this is less fair then 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 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 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 quote, unquote free labor either.

ED: So was slave hiring a sign of the fundamental incapacity of slavery to adapt to modern industrial world, or was slave hiring an example of exactly the opposite, that slavery could adapt even to 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: Do you take it would have spread across the South into 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 an agricultural areas, then we might imagine. And don’t forget, even though we think of agricultural industry– as this is, again, kind of a dichotomy of these two different things. Remember even in rural agriculture, particularly in some types of agriculture, like sugar for instance, there is a whole processing part that is virtually industrial. So again, I think, enslaved people certainly had the skill. Manufacturers had the impetus to use slaves in these industries and there’s no reason that those two things couldn’t go together.

ED: 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. I said, no look at Richmond, and you would have just seen what the future would have looked like. And it would have been like South Africa. I pointed out that slaves would have been great for doing the main things that happened 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.

GREGG KIMBALL: 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 the most fascinating pieces of its story that I can imagine talking. So thanks.

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ED: 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.

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