Blacksmith and German immigrant William H. Tappey arrived in Petersburg, Virginia, during the 1840s, established his own smith works, and settled well into a prosperous life as a skilled laborer in the antebellum South. Within a few years he partnered with Virginia-born pattern maker George L. Lumsden, and together they formed the Southern Foundry, which forged iron to manufacture machines and equipment for the growing industries in the Southside of Virginia, a region that stretched from the James River to the North Carolina line. Both Tappey and Lumsden, like many Petersburg businessmen, made investments in regional development and found slavery useful to their wide-ranging endeavors. The Southern Foundry employed many skilled artisans including molders, blacksmiths, pattern makers, and engineers, and by 1860 it had an annual production valued at $70,000. The foundry proved a model of Southern industrial development and provided employment opportunities for skilled workers in the South’s rapidly changing economy. But not all Southern Foundry workers were free and white; among the seventy workers employed in 1860 were a number of slaves who toiled side by side with their white counterparts.1
Updating the Debate on Southern Economics
Earlier models exploring the South’s economy, such as that of Eugene D. Genovese, have been unable to explain Southern industrial centers like Petersburg. Most, including Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss’s analysis, based their exploration on a wage-labor driven, Northern-derived understanding of industrialization that does not fully consider a mix of free and enslaved labor. The intricate connection between industrial development and labor illustrated in work relations at the Southern Foundry reflects the complicated path to modernity in the late-antebellum upper South, especially after 1840. Modernity brought economic and social mobility, increased specialization, and the division of labor to antebellum America. Across the nation, lives were altered by an increased movement of goods, capital, and ideas that brought more and more localities into connection with regional, national, and even transnational networks of commerce and social organization.2
The growth of the Southern Foundry demonstrates the progress of industrialization as Petersburg developed as a modern manufacturing city that produced goods for a regional market, including iron and tobacco. The foundry’s owners saw no inherent contradiction in using slave labor to make their industrial pursuit successful. Reexamining the Southern economy, it becomes readily apparent that the South was a region more complicated than the historical debate over its connection to markets and capitalism has allowed. Recent scholarship suggests the alternative consideration that the South was not set apart from the modern world, but that modernity took many paths. Scholars such as Edward Baptist, Anthony Kaye, and Walter Johnson are demonstrating that slavery and capitalism were not at odds, and that slavery actually reinforced industrial development. Southerners may have rejected the North’s application of economic theory and development, but they strongly supported liberal values and classical economic theory—along with race-based slavery. In fact, the South’s unique path to modernization was shaped exactly by the region’s commitment to slavery. As Baptist has argued, the commodification of slave labor was in itself a modern action, noting that “after turning humans into Cuffy, wool and ivory, and fancy maids . . ., perhaps additional commodifications,” such as credit, labor power, government services and information, were easy. The Southern Foundry’s owners employed such a mix, paying free white workers for their labor time and overseeing the work of slaves, a different but equally valuable commodity. Slavery offered Southern industrialists labor options. Although capital invested in slaves sometimes restricted cash flow, either through the slave market or through the hiring-out process, it was also convertible and could be used to start new businesses and make new profits. Slavery in the hinterland also benefited businesses such as the Southern Foundry, as plantations provided a regional market to consume manufactured goods.3
The South’s advancing modernity meant acknowledging and adapting to rapid economic change and accommodating traditional social structures, all the while becoming familiar with new social and class tensions. Among the hallmarks of economic change visible in the late antebellum era was the division of labor, the broadening of regional markets, and a link with the plantation economy. In the South, industrialization included both the manufacturing of standard goods such as iron and the processing of agricultural products, such as sugar and tobacco. Industrialization was not a “stage” in a process, as Marxist historians have claimed; rather, as Anthony Kaye has recently suggested, industrialization, as well as biological and mechanical innovation, went hand in hand with the agricultural economy and slavery. Petersburg’s development exemplifies this path to modernity. The growth of industry and transportation networks meant that work relations changed as the city’s market connections widened rapidly after 1840. Petersburg’s location within the Southside plantation belt, however, meant industry was often linked with the agricultural economy.4
Especially in states such as Virginia, where after 1840 agriculture became more diversified, industrialization represented a rational response for those seeking economic gain. The assumption that industrialization could only be conducted with free labor, long a central issue in the debate over capitalism, does not hold true.5 The flexibility and mobility of slave labor were key to the “second slavery” of the antebellum era. In places like Petersburg, agricultural diversification allowed some slaveholders to shift their workforce to new geographic areas and even to industrial work settings that free workers may not have chosen voluntarily. Accompanying Southern industry’s burgeoning use of slavery, there was a growing certainty that slavery was compatible with modern innovation.6 Southern free laborites, such as Tappey and Lumsden, though celebrating the superiority of free and independent labor, supported industrial growth, lobbied for railroads and worked in a climate that often found skilled white, free black, and enslaved labor toiling side-by-side. Indeed, slavery was the single most important distinguishing feature in the industrial world of the Old South.7 However, instead of setting the region apart from nineteenth-century capitalist development, slavery proved adaptable and was often employed by those reaching toward modernity. As Petersburg clearly demonstrates, it is now apparent that in parts of the upper South, the plantation economy actually bolstered industrial slavery and capitalist development.
As the fourth largest state in the United States, and also claiming the largest slave population until emancipation, Virginia is a particularly interesting setting in which to examine the compatibility of slavery, free labor, and industry. Daniel W. Crofts points out that despite holding the South’s largest slave population, antebellum Virginia was actually representative of national trends in economic and social development. He argues that Virginia’s agricultural production was not in decline as often stereotyped. Instead, farming shifted from tobacco monoculture to more diversified, less labor-intensive crops. In the late antebellum era, the commonwealth was among the leading states in production of grain, including corn and wheat. Movement toward industrial development also intensified as the annual output of manufactures grew from $30 million in 1840 to $50 million in 1850.8 Changes in agriculture and the growth of industry linked slavery to both segments of Virginia’s economy. David Goldfield was among the first to argue that slavery adapted well to both urbanization and industrial development. More recent scholarship clearly shows that as grain became the major crop on many Virginia plantations, slave owners often leased their surplus laborers to skilled artisans and industrial employers, thereby enhancing industrial development and employment. In contrast to recent statistics put forth by economic historian John Majewski, factories and businesses in Virginia benefited from the diversification of regional plantations. Instead of selling slaves south, many area planters earned a lucrative income leasing their slaves to factories and other industries in Virginia cities such as Richmond, Lynchburg, and Petersburg. Tobacco factories, the largest urban employers, depended almost exclusively on slave labor until the 1850s. Many tobacco manufacturers, or tobacconists, hired their workers from plantation owners in surrounding counties; other industrial employers, including Petersburg’s Southern Foundry, also came to rely on slave leasing, especially after slave prices rose in the 1850s.9
Adding to Croft’s argument, Edward L. Ayers and William A. Link expand the discussion of the connection between slavery and modern growth in late antebellum Virginia. Ayers demonstrates that Augusta County, in the Shenandoah Valley, easily found use for enslaved laborers as its main town of Staunton added a rail connection, macadamized roads, and built gas lighting.10 Link describes the way that the market economy broadened slaveholding into towns, cities, and industry. He argues that late antebellum “Virginians embraced national notions of business enterprise and public culture. Most were enthusiastic capitalists connected to the outside world and acutely aware of the market revolution.”11 Petersburg’s experience adds to this new trend in Southern studies, which collectively show the South as developing a modern capitalist economy compatible with slave labor.
The way slavery was viewed within the industrializing South also impacted the way that free workers viewed their role in the changing society. The free-labor ideology, which encouraged workers to strive for independence and to celebrate the superiority of free labor in contrast to slavery, was not absent from the South. Instead of being a contradiction, slavery stood as an important part of the Southern free-labor ideology: Seeking social mobility, workers believed in working hard, saving their pennies, and eventually purchasing property to demonstrate their independence. In the South reaching the ranks of property holding often mean property (owned or leased) in slave labor.12 While Michele Gillespie’s study of artisans in Georgia found that in the early years of the new republic skilled workers aspired to planter status, the changing nature of the Southern economy after 1820 made that type of mobility less likely. Many free workers, even some African Americans, however, continued to see slaveholding as the means toward upward mobility, a way to increase the profitability of their business establishments and a clear symbol of their success.13
The existence of slavery in the South has long been considered an indicator of the region’s backwardness, especially when contrasted with the free-labor economy of the North. However, on closer examination, it is possible to build a convincing case that property rights in slaves formed an important element of the South’s emerging modernity, representing a tangible and attainable investment for the emerging middle class of businessmen and industrialists. Because Southern political and social institutions protected slavery and tied it to the very fabric of society, it was a wise investment. The income produced from the safe investment in slavery worked to finance industrialization, transportation improvements, agricultural innovation, and government services. At the time of the Civil War, slave property was valued at nearly $3 billion, more than twice the value of all U.S. manufactures, providing a powerful economic motive for its defense.14
Slavery was as important to the South’s advancing industrialization as it was to the expansion of plantation agriculture. From the colonial era forward, slaves toiled in iron production, sugar manufacture, coal mining, and almost every industrial pursuit.15 In the 1850s at least 200,000 slaves worked in non-agricultural occupations. In many cases slaves represented direct competition with free labor, but they were crucial to the success of tobacco and iron production as well as coal mining and sugar processing. Robert Starobin was the first to argue convincingly for the compatibility of slavery and industry in the South, suggesting that rather than lessening the control of the slaveholder and weakening the institution, incentives such as pay for overwork were actually an effective means of control. Although other historians have viewed industrial slavery as a more complicated give and take that afforded enslaved workers some control over their work environment, Starobin was correct in asserting that industrial slavery helped to spread slave ownership to many who were not engaged in farming. Especially as slave prices rose in the 1850s, slave hiring extended the reach of the institution to small business owners and artisans.16 Although the rising value of slaves may have stopped some owners from leasing them into physically dangerous workplaces, the practice continued to thrive in less threatening industries, including tobacco manufacture and blacksmithing, especially once modern insurance policies helped to protect their investment.17 Many Southern industrialists considered property in slaves to be a reliable investment and necessary to the pursuit of manufacturing in the region.
The experiences of the Southern Foundry’s owners help to illustrate the incorporation of slaveholding in business strategies. Although many later immigrants to the antebellum South opposed slavery—especially German immigrants, influenced by the 1848 revolutions in Europe—those who arrived in the South earlier in nineteenth century adapted to the slave society. German-immigrant William H. Tappey had little trouble modifying his image of independence and upward mobility to include owning slaves. Tappey arrived in Petersburg in the 1840s after working in a Richmond foundry for about four years. He established an independent blacksmith’s shop and quickly adapted to life in his new homeland and to its peculiar institution. While records indicate that Tappey became a U.S. citizen in 1844, he was clearly a “citizen” of the slave South even earlier. When Tappey first appeared in city tax records in 1843, he already owned two slaves; one was a child, but the other was a man of prime working age. This is not altogether surprising as blacksmiths were among the skilled workers most likely to employ slave labor in their workshops because they required a physical assistant to act as a striker, swinging a sledge hammer on heavy forging operations. Tappey’s investment in slave labor yielded the immediate dividend of providing the extra labor needed in his workshop.
Tappey’s entrance into the ranks of the slaveholding class of the South marked him as a successful businessman. As James Huston argues, Tappey and other Southern proponents of free labor, “sanctioned private property in Africans.”18 Tappey maintained these two slaves in his household through the establishment of the Southern Foundry; in the 1850s, when slave prices rose exorbitantly, he switched to leasing slaves from plantations surrounding Petersburg. The Southern Foundry partners steadily increased their slaveholdings as their fortunes rose. They invested in slave labor in the same way that other businessmen invested in stocks and bonds, gaining an immediate return on their outlay of cash by employing the slaves’ labor. George L. Lumsden also acquired property in slaves, as did a third partner, William Lumsden, who was probably the elder Lumsden’s son.19
Slavery and Modernity in Context
If, as Edward Baptist and Anthony Kaye have suggested, property in slaves can be considered an indicator of the South’s unique path to modernity, it seems likely that other standards used to measure the region’s industrial growth also require rethinking. Picking up on statistics first presented by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman more than thirty years ago, scholars are now moving toward both comparative and transnational analyses. At a critical era in the evolution of the modern world, nineteenth-century citizens witnessed major changes in social, political, and especially economic structures. Viewing the South through a comparative lens that includes the countries of rapidly industrializing Europe, many of the hallmarks of modernity appear in the antebellum South.20 Its production of cotton textiles ranked sixth in the world, and Southern manufacturers made inroads into the production of pig iron. Although per capita wealth was well behind the North, if compared to the wider industrializing world, Southern incomes trailed only a small handful of countries and surpassed such nations as Canada, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and the German states.21 Comparing the South with manufacturing in other slave societies shows a similar superiority, as the South was ahead of Brazil in major industries such as textiles and iron forging.22 In railroad mileage per capita, the region bore comparison to the North. As William Thomas notes in his chapter in this volume, Southern railroad construction was more extensive and reached significantly more of the region’s population than previously believed.23 Southern railroads reached all of the region’s densely populated areas; in some states they actually connected a larger proportion of the population to markets than was true for the North.
Rising production rates and transportation connections served not only to increase profits, but also to foster rationalized government relations, to spur and manage development. State support for internal improvement played an important role in the development of industry, and the ways Southern states approached improvements affected the trajectory of industry.24 In Petersburg, which was crossed by five railroads, longer lines of communication and connections to wider markets, for example, made it possible for William Tappey and his partner to expand their blacksmith shop into a full-fledged foundry. This experience was likely repeated in numerous industrializing towns across the commonwealth.
As the most populous Southern state, Virginia’s approach to internal improvement and economic development influenced transportation and communication flow across the South. Adopting a mixed-enterprise plan for development, Virginians rejected a national program of internal improvements that, in its absence, left much responsibility with individual local capitalists. The creation of the Virginia Board of Public Works in 1820 provided some engineering supervision, but any incorporated transportation project could count on the state for only two-fifths of its funding. Although this was a higher percentage of the overall funding than states offered in other regions, it nevertheless meant that internal improvement projects required individual investment.25 Virginia businessmen and some state legislators worked diligently to create internal improvements, including railroads and canals, as well as banks that would influence development. In Petersburg, upwardly mobile artisans and industrialists invested in railroads, canal and river improvements and local banks and savings societies. In a common show of support for regional development, Tappey bought shares of the Southside Railroad, which, when completed in 1854, provided a link between Petersburg and Lynchburg.26
The South’s unique path to industrialization meant that commitment to slave labor was also reflected in urban development. Especially true of Virginia, this guided the commonwealth’s ability to attract and foster industrial and commercial development. Cities such as Richmond, Wheeling, and Petersburg bustled with commerce and industry, albeit on a smaller scale than Northern metropolises or cities along the South’s seaboard. As John Majewski shows in his comparison of Virginia and Pennsylvania, Virginia’s four rivers feeding to the Atlantic made the growth of four smaller cities the most feasible route for development.27 In 1860, although the second largest city in Virginia after Richmond, Petersburg’s population of 18,266 ranked it only forty-ninth in the nation. Despite the importance of ironworks such as the Southern Foundry, the city’s growth was most closely linked to the tobacco plantations that populated Virginia’s Southside and stretched into the Piedmont of North Carolina. Tobacco factories, which employed unskilled slave and free-black labor to manually prepare plug and chewing tobacco products, formed the most important part of the manufacturing base. Textile milling and iron forging were other important segments of the city’s industrial economy. In Petersburg, support for railroad development as well as other industrial concerns, came from municipal funds and from individual small investors such as Tappey who had a financial stake in their success. This investment in development reaped a reward for city industrialists.
As access to markets broadened in the 1840s, Petersburg expanded its industrial base to include eight cotton factories, three flour mills, a paper mill, and a woolen factory. Like the internal improvement projects, small investors drove the growth of these manufacturing concerns and also established two savings and loan corporations that further contributed to industrialization.28 They bought stock in corporations to ensure that railroads, banks, and manufactures came to their city, but they also bought and leased the labor of slaves. In keeping with the Southern model of industrialization, it was no contradiction to invest in manufactures and slavery simultaneously. Indeed, the path to modernity taken by these cities represents a unique strategy of economic development that incorporated both free and slave labor and saw little contradiction in placing free and unfree workers side by side.
Southern Labor Tensions
Tappey’s rise from a simple blacksmith to an employer and an investor in internal improvement projects suggests that social class and social structures within the Southern economy also need more attention. The region’s class structure cannot be described in terms of an exclusive agrarian-urban divide. Since studies now clearly show that the Southern economy was moving toward a fairly complicated modern mix of industry as well as staple crop–based agriculture, it stands to reason that two classes of capitalists also emerged. One represented the familiar pattern of wealth-holding in land and slaves, but the other set of capitalists gained their wealth from industrial pursuits and commerce.29 In a study of South Carolina, Tom Downey argues that although both groups shared a commitment to defending slavery as the significant Southern institution, conflict arose between those committed to agricultural versus commercial interests.30 Those divisions and disagreements were rooted in the tension between the social relations tied to a planter-dominated political economy and the emerging values of the commercial South. However, the argument that those divisions were tied to antimodernizing impulses may be overstated. In South Carolina, as in Virginia, the planter-centered political economy continued to dominate, but industrialization was gaining ground. Planters opposing measures that helped industry continued to dominate Virginia politics at the state level, but in localities such as Petersburg, the give and take between industrialists and planters was growing more fluid, and they often found cooperation to be of mutual benefit.
In the hinterland surrounding Petersburg, most planters embraced the modernizing impulses resulting in internal improvements and industrial growth because facilities such as the Southern Foundry provided much-needed services. The City Point Railroad, completed in 1838, provided a direct link between Petersburg and the nearby James River plantations. Once operating, planters such as Richard Eppes, who owned both Appomattox Manor and Bermuda Hundred, could reach Petersburg in an hour on the railroad. Eppes often sent trusted slaves via the railroad to conduct business and shipped much of his grain for sale in the city’s warehouses.31 Planters were as likely as business owners to subscribe to internal improvement projects that directly benefited their economic interests, and by the 1850s plantations and industrial pursuits enjoyed an interdependent relationship. Many Virginians grew impatient with the dichotomy between industrial pursuits and farming advocated by the older generation of agrarians.32 The railroads that brought planters into Petersburg also brought skilled workmen into the hinterland, where they transacted business on a regular basis. Workmen often traveled to regional plantations for on-site jobs. Planters such as Eppes engaged a variety of artisans in this way, but not the Southern Foundry. Instead, for his ironworking needs Eppes often patronized Tappey’s main competitor, Uriah Wells.33
In exploring the social changes heralded by modernity, it is useful to revisit the emergence of a Southern middle class, closely tied to both commerce and industry. This group included skilled artisans, industrialists, and the commercial men who constituted as much as 10 percent of the region’s white male population, while the bulk of the population remained tied to agriculture. It is now clear that the South had an entrepreneurial middle class that supported slavery along with planters, but this middle class also pursued their own distinct interests within the Southern economy. Industrialization and manufacturing both grew out of and served to reinforce the middle class environment.34 In Petersburg, the middle class was comprised of urban dwellers, but differences between merchants and industrialists were quite fluid. Although Tappey and Lumsden expanded their smith works into a foundry, many other small manufacturers and artisans chose to become merchants instead of expanding their industrial production. For example, gunsmith William Morgan converted his workshop into a mercantile establishment he called the Petersburg Gun and Sporting Store. Small-scale tobacconist John Rowlett took his marketing a step farther, becoming a full-scale commission merchant, eventually advertising in a regional business directory.35 Whether merchants or industrialists, middle-class Southerners also struggled to define their place in the changing economy. In Petersburg, these tensions were visible in relationships between the owners of the Southern Foundry and their workers.
As the Southern Foundry grew and prospered, Tappey and Lumsden moved into Petersburg’s emerging middle class. The iron-forging demands of local industry fostered the foundry’s growth; by the middle 1850s, increased operations allowed the completion of large-scale projects, such as building mail cars for the railroad and a steam-powered printing press for a local newspaper.36 As their business expanded, Tappey and Lumsden became “bosses” to a growing group of wage earners. The seventy molders, blacksmiths, pattern makers, and laborers they employed had little hope of achieving the independence that Tappey knew when he first opened his blacksmith shop in Petersburg. The annual production of $70,000 in iron goods clearly elevated the Southern Foundry’s proprietors above the social and economic level of their workforce.37
A hallmark of Tappey and Lumsden’s social status was their membership in a local fraternal organization, the Petersburg Benevolent Mechanic Association, which served as a collective of businessmen and enterprising master mechanics. Formed in 1825, as a benevolent aid society for artisans, the fraternity was one of the wealthiest organizations in the city and functioned both as a network linking prominent city men and as a source for small business loans to members. George Lumsden joined in 1838, with William Tappey following in 1856. By 1860 both partners held substantial amounts of real and personal property.38
Tappey and Lumsden represent one end of the spectrum in the modernizing South. They were characteristic of success in the expanding economy. Other laborers, including free whites and African Americans, did not fare as well. The economic changes that allowed men such as Tappey and Lumsden to move into the developing middle class also made upward mobility and economic independence measured by slave or property ownership increasingly unlikely for others. However, if success is measured by a means other than property ownership, many Southern workers adapted to opportunities in the changing economy. Although Majewski argues that sparse settlement inhibited industrialization and urban growth, the location of Petersburg in the midst of the Southside plantation district gave workers the opportunity to supplement their town earnings with work on area plantations. Many no longer lived with their employers; moreover, although finding their own housing added to their economic burden, it must also have given workers a sense of independence to be free from a master’s watchful eye.39 Workers at the Southern Foundry fit this economic pattern. Their housing arrangements and personal wealth declarations attest to the changing economic reality. More than half of the thirty-three Southern Foundry employees located in the 1850 or 1860 census lived in a boarding house or rented room. None owned any real property, and only one listed a personal estate valued at $100. Another six claimed an estate worth between $20 and $25. Even the Scottish-born foreman, Alexander Steel, lived in a rented room near the foundry.40 Their lives reflected a precarious balance between the autonomy of living outside their employer’s watchful eye and a meager financial situation that prevented ownership of a home or business of their own.
Similar to the advancing age of rural laborers in other areas of the South, the foundry employees’ average age was twenty-eight; two-thirds of those reporting their age to 1860 census enumerators were over the age of twenty-five.41 However, unlike the rural unskilled laborers Charles Bolton studied, the Southern Foundry employees practiced a skilled trade. They were listed as blacksmiths, machinists, molders, pattern makers, and carpenters; however, by 1860, such skills no longer guaranteed a path to owning an independent shop, though they did provide a means to earn a living.42 Because iron forging was one segment of industry that experienced expansion in the antebellum era, Southern Foundry employees were more likely than skilled workers in other trades to maintain steady employment. Although their position was not as sturdy as those in construction trades, iron forgers’ persistence rates (i.e., the number who chose to remain in Petersburg) suggest that they were able to make a living.43 Only the lucky few who found themselves at the intersection of a variety of special circumstances managed to advance into independence and the emerging Southern middle class. In stark contrast to their employees, foundry partners William Tappey and George Lumsden were quite wealthy by nineteenth-century standards, possibly a reflection of their efforts to suppress workplace racial equality. Although his fortunes was small when compared to wealthy planters, Tappey in 1860 owned real estate valued at $7,000 and claimed a total personal estate value of $15,000. Likewise, Lumsden’s real property was worth $4,000 and his total estate claimed a value of $10,000.44
Free African Americans and enslaved workers did not fare as well as skilled whites when cities such as Petersburg industrialized. Frank Towers has argued that in cities such as Baltimore and St. Louis politicians and economic elites helped to counteract any common bond that poor whites and blacks might have recognized in the changing economy. He demonstrates how they convinced whites in economic decline that slavery fostered white equality across class lines. This was bolstered by the argument that slavery exempted poor whites from engaging in the lowest form of manual labor.45 Indeed, census and city directory records do not indicate that the Southern Foundry employed any skilled free blacks. Although the foundry owners did lease slaves on annual contracts from the plantations surrounding Petersburg, it is highly unlikely that these men were skilled ironworkers or tradesmen. While they did not experience the virulent racism that developed in the North after 1830, African Americans in Petersburg struggled to gain equal footing with their white counterparts.46 Those few free African-American blacksmiths in the city worked independently and not for any of the growing factories or foundries. Whether white or African American, the employees of the Southern Foundry lived in a modern world where their lives were shaped by both the tensions and practices of capitalist development and racial slavery.
The path forged by William Tappey and George Lumsden in Petersburg in the late antebellum era represents one of several emerging modernities. Petersburg and other industrializing cities in the upper South developed on a path distinct from those blazed in other times and places, but it is not fair to count their experience as necessarily “exceptional,” as historians have been wont to do when considering the Old South. An immigrant from the German states, Tappey hardly typified the image of the average slaveholder, although he did fit James Oakes’s model of artisan-slaveholder who owned just a handful of bondsmen. Tappey’s arrival in Petersburg was influenced by the push and pull of global economic, political, and social changes, both in European and American societies. Emblematic of nineteenth-century citizens who believed the rapid change around them meant something special was happening, Tappey embraced change. Together with his partner, Lumsden, he built his blacksmith shop into an industrial complex that employed many men.47
Although having iron foundries, tobacco factories, and railroads did not on their own define Petersburg as a modern city, the way that men such as Tappey and Lumsden built their businesses, organized their lives, and related to their workers speaks to their connection with larger networks of commerce and social organization. Even though he came from a society where many opposed the institution of slavery, Tappey quickly adapted to using slave labor because it was a rational way to increase production. This ensured that the people within the walls of the Southern Foundry experienced modernity in diverse ways. While Tappey and Lumsden fashioned themselves as industrialists becoming comfortably situated within an emerging Southern middle class, their workers faced a different reality. For the skilled white workers in the foundry’s employ, modernity meant wage labor with little chance for advancement to independence. Most lived in rented houses or roomed in boarding houses, and many sought supplemental employment on the farms and plantations surrounding Petersburg. The enslaved men, whether permanently attached to Tappey and Lumsden or hired on annual contracts, could hardly have helped but resent the way that modernity adapted slavery to fit its new circumstances. As slavery proved easily adjustable to iron forging and other industries, these individuals must have held little hope that the institution that held them in bondage would become obsolete. The tensions that emanated from these different experiences with the nineteenth-century’s modern world belies the existence of a harmonious “Old South”; instead, it suggests the antebellum upper South was a complex society that requires more exploration. When viewed in a broader context allowing for changing nuances and global connections brought to the region, historians have much yet to learn about the Old South.
NOTES
1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Products of Industry during the Year Ending June 1, 1860,” 1860 census, schedule 5, Virginia Eastern Division, City of Petersburg, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (microfilm); Auction Sales Record Book, 1847–1854, Branch & Company Records, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond.
2. See Eugene D. Genovese, “The Significance of the Slave Plantation for Southern Economic Development,” Journal of Southern History 28 (November 1962): 422–437; and Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). For recent accounts of Southern industrialization, see Aaron W. Marrs, Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Barbara Hahn, “Making Tobacco Bright: Institutions, Information, and Industrialization in the Creation of an Agricultural Commodity, 1617–1937” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2006); Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005). On the South’s liberal values, see James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), esp. chap. 2; on race and modernity, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 71, 73, 81.
3. Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (2009); Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004): 299–303; Edward Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review 106 (December 2001): 1650 (quote).
4. Stanley L. Engerman, “Southern Industrialization, Myths and Realities,” in Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation, 14–19; Gloria Vollmers, “Industrial Slavery in the United States: The North Carolina Turpentine Industry 1849–61,” Accounting, Business & Financial History 13 (November 2003): 369–392; Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (2009): 634.
5. For the early capitalist/precapitalist debate, see James Oakes, The Ruling Race A History of American Slaveholders (1982; New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (1961; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1967); Elizabeth Fox Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Slavery in Black and White: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. chap. 6. The debate continues in John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2007); Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 3–17; John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 39–45; Mark M. Smith, Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Delfino and Gillespie, Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation.
6. Kaye, “The Second Slavery,” 640–641; Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 15.
7. On slavery’s adaptability to modernity, see William G. Thomas and Edward L. Ayers, “An Overview: The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” American Historical Review 108 (December 2003): 1299–1307; William G. Thomas and Edward L. Ayers, “The Differences Slavery Made,” http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR (accessed October 2010).
8. Daniel W. Crofts, “Late Antebellum Virginia Reconsidered,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107 (1999): 253–257.
9. David R. Goldfield, Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism: Virginia 1847–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xxvii, 137; James Irwin, “Exploring the Affinity of Wheat and Slavery in the Virginia Piedmont,” Explorations in Economic History 25 (1988): 302, 304–315; Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development, 113–116; Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy, 40–42.
10. Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York, W. W. Norton, 2003), 17–20.
11. William L. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 6–7.
12. James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 40–41; Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986), chap. 2.
13. See Michele Gillespie, Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), esp. 1–35; also Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984).
14. James L. Huston, “Property Rights in Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War,” Journal of Southern History 65 (1999): 253–255; Kaye, “The Second Slavery,” 633. See also Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development, 48–82. For the opposing interpretation, see Bateman and Weiss, Deplorable Scarcity; Douglas R. Egerton, “Markets without a Market Revolution: Southern Planters and Capitalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996): 207–221.
15. For early slave employment in iron forging, see John Bezís-Selfa, Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 70–90; for the sugar industry, see Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 124–127.
16. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union, 99–100; Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 134–135; Ronald L. Lewis, Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 112–114; Charles Dew, Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 29–31; Charles Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 9–12; Barbara Hahn, “Making Tobacco Bright: Institutions, Information, and Industrialization in the Creation of an Agricultural Commodity, 1617–1937,” Enterprise and Society 8 (December 2007): 790–798.
17. Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development, 73–75; Sharon Ann Murphy, “Securing Human Property: Slavery, Life Insurance, and Industrialization in the Upper South,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Winter 2005): 615–652.
18. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union, 40–41.
19. Personal Property Tax Ledger, 1843, Petersburg, Va., Library of Virginia, Richmond (microfilm); Auction Sales Record Book, 1847–1854, Branch & Company Records, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedules, Virginia Eastern Division, City of Petersburg, 1860, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (microfilm).
20. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 9–10; for the debate over comparative and transnational approaches, see Peter Kolchin, “The South and the World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (2009): 565–580.
21. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 254–255; David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 20–21; Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Viken Tchakerian, “Manufacturing Where Agriculture Predominates: Evidence from the South and Midwest in 1860,” Explorations in Economic History 34 (1997): 245–246.
22. Richard Graham, “Slavery and Economic Development: Brazil and the United States South in the Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (October 1981): 630–631.
23. See also Marrs, Railroads in the Old South, 5–7.
24. Sean Patrick Adams, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 6–8.
25. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 94–95; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 536–537. See also Milton Heath, “North American Railroads: Public Railroad Construction and the Development of Private Enterprise in the South before 1861,” Journal of Economic History 10, supplement (1950): 4253.
26. Southside Railroad Company, Stock Ledger, Norfolk and Western Railway Archives, Special Collections, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, 347.
27. Majewski, A House Dividing, 145–146.
28. James G. Scott and Edward A. Wyatt, Petersburg’s Story: A History (Petersburg, Va.: Titmus Optical, 1960), 75, 94–97; “An Act incorporating the Petersburg and Norfolk savings institutions,” Acts of the General Assembly (Richmond: Thomas Ritchie, 1836), 256–258.
29. For early interpretations of class in the South, see Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949); and more recently, Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., ed., Plain Folk of the South Revisited (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), ix–xix.
30. Tom Downey, Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 5–8.
31. Scott and Wyatt, Petersburg’s Story, 96; “Trip on the Railroad,” [Petersburg, Va.] American Constellation, May 25, 1838.
32. Bruce W. Eelman, Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry: Commercial Culture in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1845–1880 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 51–52; Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 39–45.
33. Account Book, 1851–1861, p.1, Richard Eppes Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond.
34. Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7–14; Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 8–12; John W. Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 21–22; Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 17–21.
35. Thomson’s Mercantile and Professional Directory (Baltimore: William Thomson, 1851), 213, 215.
36. Editorial, [Petersburg, Va.] Daily Southside Democrat, June 22, 1855; “The City as a Motive Power,” [Petersburg, Va.] Daily Express, May 2, 1859.
37. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Products of Industry during the Year Ending June 1, 1860,” 1860 census, schedule 5, Virginia Eastern Division, City of Petersburg, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (microfilm).
38. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 134–136; Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 14–15; L. Diane Barnes, Artisan Workers in the Upper South; Petersburg, Virginia, 1820–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 186–187; Membership List, Petersburg Benevolent Mechanic Association Papers, 1825–1921, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville.
39. A similar argument for the liberating qualities of independence is made for Southern single women in Christine Jacobson Carter, Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), esp. 1–12; Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy, 41–42.
40. W. Eugene Ferslew, comp., Second Annual Directory for the City of Petersburg (Petersburg: George E. Ford, 1860).; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedules, Virginia Eastern Division, City of Petersburg, 1860, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (microfilm).
41. See Charles C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).
42. Bolton, Poor Whites, 13–15; see also, Steven Elliott Tripp, Yankee Town, Southern City: Race and Class Relations in Civil War Lynchburg (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 30–31.
43. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedules, Virginia Eastern Division, City of Petersburg, 1860, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (microfilm). An examination of all metal forging workers in Petersburg demonstrates at least 12 percent persisted in the decade before the Civil War.
44. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedules, Virginia Eastern Division, City of Petersburg, 1860, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (microfilm).
45. Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 142–143.
46. For a discussion of the changing nature of race, see James Brewer Stewart, “Modernizing ‘Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776–1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (1999): 692–693; Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1:237.
47. Oakes, Ruling Race; Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 10–11.