5.

Industrial and Urban Resistance

The labor of men and women in bondage did far more than bring in southern crops. In 1795, Irish visitor Isaac Weld found enslavers “have nearly everything they can want on their estates,” and that African Americans filled the skilled positions as “taylors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, turners, wheelwrights, weavers, tanners.”

Enslaved people built George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. They constructed the famous iron-grill balconies of New Orleans, built churches, jails, and the beautiful Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island.

Enslaved people were managers of plantations and rice mills, and a few were architects, civil engineers, and inventors. Their contribution stimulated a growing US economy. One enslaved man is credited with helping Eli Whitney invent the cotton gin, and another with helping Cyrus McCormick create the reaper. While enslaved, Benjamin Bradley created a steam-engine model out of a gun barrel, pewter, and round pieces of steel, sold it, and used the cash to build an engine large enough to propel a battleship. Bradley became an inventor for the US Naval Academy at Annapolis.

Enslaved laborers cleared wilderness land and built log cabins. They piloted steamboats, ferries, and early locomotives. Some dug gold in California and others roped and branded cattle from South Carolina to Texas. Their labor built bridges in Mississippi, hotels in Alabama, roads in Louisiana, and ships in Georgia and Maryland. The Norfolk ferryboat was run by an enslaved pilot, engineer, and crew, and ten thousand others ran Ohio and Mississippi River steamboats.

Enslaved laborers were lead miners in Virginia and Missouri, salt miners in Kentucky, Alabama, and Virginia, lumber workers from Texas to Virginia, ironworkers in Virginia and South Carolina, and turpentine producers in North Carolina and Alabama. They built southern canals, railroads, tunnels, ships, turnpikes, and worked for gas and light companies. They labored for US Army and federal government projects in the southern states.

Some became managers. Sandy Maybank, head carpenter at the Reverend C. C. Jones’s rice mill and plantation, was placed in charge when Jones was away. Horace, an enslaved architect and civil engineer, built bridges for Robert Jemison, Jr., a wealthy Alabama manufacturer. His enslaver and Jemison had the 1845 legislature emancipate Horace, and the three continued their business partnership and personal relationship.

The southern iron industry depended on ten thousand enslaved laborers. The Oxford Iron Works in Virginia enslaved 220 people, the Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina enslaved 120, and the giant Tredegar Iron Company of Virginia enslaved 450 laborers working alongside an equal number of whites. The Statue of Freedom for the Capitol dome in Washington was bolted together and finally lifted into place, reported the New York Tribune, by a “black master builder,” who had replaced the white who went on strike. Roads westward were often clogged with skilled whites unable to compete with enslaved workers.

Enslaved people were part of city life in Baltimore.

Half a million enslaved people lived and worked in southern cities by the 1850s. Black people made up half of Charleston’s population. Some seventy thousand lived in the region’s eight leading urban centers, and their numbers were expanding rapidly in Mobile, Savannah, Montgomery, and Richmond. Most were men, more likely than women to be taught urban and industrial skills, but women were represented in occupations such as cooks, maids, and servants.

Urban slavery was not the half-freedom some whites claimed. An urban escapee denied it was not hard and insisted, “Slavery is Slavery, wherever it is found.” Urban working hours sometimes exceeded twelve or even sixteen hours a day, and sugar refineries reached eighteen hours a day, “day and night, except during the winter months,” reported an overseer. One sugar mill did not grant enslaved workers the Christmas and New Year’s holidays for four out of five years in the 1850s. This also happened in other refineries.

In cities, enslaved laborers found dangerous work, poor living quarters, and inadequate clothing. The owner of the Oxford Iron Works said he “supplied what I consider absolutely necessary for his health & endurance.” Eating conditions at a rice mill were described by a white observer: “Chairs, tables, plates, knives, forks, they had none; they sat on the earth or doorsteps, and ate either out of their little cedar tubs or an iron pot, some few with broken iron spoons, more with pieces of wood, and all the children with their fingers.”

Enslaved people living in cities were not allowed to stroll through the streets when they wished, and some were locked in day and night. When outside, they had to wear badges or carry employer passes. The New Orleans Gas Company built fifteen-foot brick walls and iron gates between their fifty bondsmen and the sparkling nightlife of New Orleans. “The whole of our concern is surrounded with a brick wall ten feet high,” said an Alabama textile manager, and “no one is admitted after work hours except the watchman or one of the owners.”

Whites wished they could have sealed off the enslaved workers from the quarter of a million free people of color who lived in southern cities. Slavery was a society built for enslaver and enslaved, and a free Black person, complained white Charlestonians in 1822, “excites our slaves, who continually have before their eyes persons of the same color, many of whom they had known in slavery . . . freed from the control of masters, working where they please, going whither they please.” Seeing them, “the slave pants for freedom.” Though carefully watched lest they help fugitives and hounded by legal restrictions, some opened their homes to enslaved people seeking freedom—sisters, brothers, and perfect strangers.

In Baltimore, Frederick Douglass learned the animosity white workers felt toward Black people. Employed as a caulker in a shipyard, he was attacked by whites fearful that Blacks might take their jobs. Assaulted by a white who challenged his right to work, Douglass “threw him into the dock. Whenever any of them struck me, I struck back again, regardless of consequences.” But he was finally attacked by four at once who “came near killing me, in broad daylight.”

Frederick Douglass fled slavery in Baltimore to become a world-famous antislavery lecturer and author. Here he speaks before a British audience.

He reported the incident to the man who enslaved him, whose indignation, Douglass found, “resulted from the thought that his rights of property, in my person, had not been respected, more than from any sense of outrage committed on me as a man.” Enslaver and enslaved appeared before Judge Watson for an arrest warrant, but since no white witnesses testified for Douglass, none was issued.

Whites were deeply divided over employing enslaved workers in cities or industries. Enslavers spent time and money on skills training with the hope of renting workers out. But a group of Charlestonians declared their city’s enslaved people were “in every way . . . conducting themselves as if they were not slaves.” Another white warned city slaves “get strange notions in their heads and grow discontented.”

James Stirling toured urban and rural regions and wrote his Letters from the Slave States (1857). To him the South was “one of her own cotton-steamers,” filled from hold to top deck “with the most inflammable matter,” “everything heated to the burning point,” a stiff wind blowing from one end to the other, her “high pressure boiler . . . pressed to bursting.” “On such a volcano is based the institution of slavery,” wrote Stirling. The enslaver remedy was repression, but Stirling’s view was different: “Terrorism does not pacify a people. It only changes complaint to conspiracy.”

If the whites were divided over Black laborers in their cities, enslaved people were united in their preference for urban work over the dull plantation routines. In cities many could find ways to earn extra money to gain freedom and purchase loved ones. Emanuel Quivers, hired out to the Tredegar Iron Company, persuaded its owner to buy him. After four years of laboring for wages he purchased himself, his wife, and four children. The Quivers family settled in Gold Rush California, where the children gained an education and one became foreman in a Stockton factory.

Though they had escaped from plantation routines, enslaved workers still revolted against their urban enslavers and urban routines, excessive confinement, work hazards, and demanding overseers and bosses. Like rural laborers they slowed efforts to a crawl, feigned sickness, stole or sabotaged equipment and property, set fires, challenged bosses in many overt and covert ways, and conspired at insurrections or flights to freedom.

James’s overseer complained about his cobbler, “He will not do what is proper . . . he is capable of finishing six pairs of shoes a week and he seldom does more than three.” Jack in an Alabama coal mine refused to pump water and instead “lay there on a plank and went to sleep insisting that it was not necessary to haul anymore,” said the manager.

The enslaver of Jack Savage faced a clever, resistant young man. He found Savage “exceedingly lazy, quite smart . . . always giving trouble” and “capable of murdering me, or burning my dwelling at night.”

Some laborers refused to handle dangerous factory jobs and others failed to return after Christmas season. Complaining of beatings, lack of food, overwork, and having to wash their own clothes on Sunday, enslaved laborers for a railroad contractor stopped work. In many factories sickness was so common bosses could not tell when men were ill or faking.

Sabotage took some unusual turns among skilled industrial workers. Two Black railroad workers, seeing an oncoming, roaring locomotive, jumped off their handcar without telling the overseer riding with them. An overseer in a sugar mill so outraged one enslaved worker, he tried to push the white man into the boiling juice.

As hired workers, enslaved men and women resented sweating for someone else’s gain—a person who was not even their owner. Anthony, told to work on Sunday by a furnace manager, said Sunday was “his day and that he was not going to take it up going to your place,” and the two had a fight.

Jordan Hatcher, seventeen, scuffled with his Virginia boss. He finally fled after striking the man fatally with a poker. Captured, he was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted by Virginia’s governor.

Theft became a common way of expressing resentment, helping oneself, or halting production. Manufacturer William Weaver complained, “I’m afraid if I leave here they will steal the place. They come very near it while I am here.”

Jacob, a blacksmith, made himself a key to steal provisions from a smokehouse. Frank, a carpenter, stole $160 in gold and silver from his enslaver, also using a key he had made.

To insure production, some enslavers provided both attractive rewards and fearful punishments. Food and clothing allowances were increased for hard workers, held back from those who failed to meet quotas. In 1857, a gristmiller decided: “Don’t give John & Charles any summer shoes, because they killed a goat.” Time off at Christmas was either cut or extended for certain enslaved workers depending on the employer’s views of their efficiency and proper behavior.

Overtime pay, called “stimulant and reward money,” was commonly used to increase production in factories. For working on Sundays, a tobacco manufacturer paid enslaved laborers one to three dollars a week. One boss paid his men extra cash, calling it “nothing more nor less than presents for their good behavior while working.” The Savannah fire department welcomed and paid enslaved men extra cash for fighting fires, or being among the first to reach a blazing home or business.

A Lexington, Kentucky, rope factory employer argued for the system of stimulant and reward money: “This keeps them contented and makes them ambitious, and more labor is obtained . . . than could possibly be forced from them by severity.” But a Lexington visitor to a hemp factory found another hand behind the plan: “The stimulus of wages is applied behind the whip, of course the prime motor.”

Reporter Olmsted talked with an urban capitalist whose complaints sounded like those of rural planters. “We have tried reward and punishments, but it makes no difference. . . . We must always calculate that they will not labor at all except to avoid punishment, and they will never do more than just enough to save themselves from being punished, and no amount of punishment will prevent their working carelessly and indifferently.”

The use of arson as weapon by the oppressed leaped from farm to city. Useful because it was easily available and hard to pin on a fast-moving suspect, it gave employers one more worry. In 1845, Senator Henry Clay’s Lexington bagging factory burned down mysteriously. A Texas employer claimed his blacksmith burned down his shop and a court agreed. One enslaved worker stepped up and told the owner he would burn down his factory if the overseer was not fired.

The surprise and shock when “the most trusted,” “faithful,” and privileged enslaved people ran away had become a southern white tradition. This dismay thrived in urban as well as rural settings, among skilled and factory workers as well as field hands.

Most left their workbenches to stay with nearby relatives. They fled for a few days or a week and returned after visiting loved ones. A common cause for flight came when enslaved workers heard they were about to be punished, or sold away from family. Absenteeism also peaked in some factories during late summer and fall when production pressures soared.

Often enslaved people tried to handle the issue of visits to wives or loved ones by honest bargaining. Some even offered to make up lost time. But when turned down, some just disappeared to return later. In one instance, six men asked for a leave, were turned down, and argued for weeks with the overseer of a river improvement project. When he still refused, they picked up and left. The overseer, to head off a complete breakdown of his authority, hastily decided to let the rest visit their wives.

Enslaved people found new opportunities for flight from cities, especially ports or rail depots. A great advantage was the number of free Blacks and friendly whites who might write passes and provide cash, directions, or other help. One Black Louisiana carpenter sold forged passes for enslaved people seeking freedom. Although officials seized him, he escaped with one of his passes.

Manuel bought a certificate of freedom from a friend, reached Philadelphia under another name, and persuaded an abolitionist to purchase his children. Some enslaved people seeking freedom took jobs as sailors and then jumped ship at ports from Liverpool, England, to Boston and Detroit. Frederick Douglass left his caulker job in a Baltimore shipyard and fled to New York City with a pass forged by a Black seaman.

A southern city could not tolerate a peaceful protest by African Americans. On a hot July day in 1853, John Scott and twenty-two other enslaved people marched to the Richmond mayor’s office to demand the facts about a will they believed freed 118 people. Scott, speaking for the twenty-two men and women, almost half of whom had learned to read and write, said their intention was to return to “the home of our forefathers in Africa.” The delegation was arrested, but Scott again insisted “we cannot be still until we get home to Africa.”

Whites in southern cities, despite their many efforts at control over enslaved people, never felt completely secure. Urban men and women in bondage and free Black people played a leading role in the largest plots and rebellions of the nineteenth century, as we shall see in Chapter 9. In 1856, enslaved people working in industrial jobs—Louisiana sugar millers, Arkansas salt boilers, Missouri lead and iron miners, particularly along the Cumberland River—were found conspiring for freedom. Scores were arrested and twenty-nine were executed.

The next year, Dred Scott, an enslaved man in St. Louis, made history. Because his enslaver took him to the Wisconsin Territory where slavery was banned, Scott said he and his family were free. In St. Louis he hired attorneys and began a lawsuit that lasted more than a decade.

In 1857, the Supreme Court by a seven-to-two vote turned down the Scott family’s plea for liberty. The High Court decision made it legal for enslavers to bring those people they held in bondage to any state and territory in the United States and added that a Black person “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” It was not known at the time that president-elect James Buchanan, in violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers, had intervened by sending letters on his views to three Supreme Court justices.

However, by that time, the family had an owner who liberated them. The Scotts remained in St. Louis, where Dred worked as a porter at Barnum’s Hotel and also helped his wife, Harriet, run a laundry business. Tourists came to see the hotel porter whose case helped push the United States toward civil war.

Years of toil had ruined the Scotts’ health, and in 1858 Dred Scott died of tuberculosis. The next year Harriet Scott died. But the elderly couple, who fought so doggedly for liberty, died as free people.