American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

U >> Ulrich Bonnell Phillips >> American Negro Slavery

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46

Some of the master craftsmen owned their staffs. Thus William Elfe, a
Charleston cabinet maker at the close of the colonial period, had title to
four sawyers, five joiners and a painter, and he managed to keep some of
their wives and children in his possession also by having a farm on the
further side of the harbor for their residence and employment.[5] William
Rouse, a Charleston leather worker who closed his business in 1825 when
the supply of tan bark ran short, had for sale four tanners, a currier and
seven shoemakers, with, however, no women or children;[6] and the seven
slaves of William Brockelbank, a plastering contractor of the same city,
sold after his death in 1850, comprised but one woman and no children.[7]
Likewise when the rope walk of Smith, Dorsey and Co. at New Orleans was
offered for sale in 1820, fourteen slave operatives were included without
mention of their families.[8]

[Footnote 5: MS. account book of William Elfe, in the Charleston Library.]

[Footnote 6: Charleston _City Gazette_, Jan. 5, 1826, advertisement.]

[Footnote 7: Charleston _Mercury_, quoted in the Augusta _Chronicle_, Dec.
5, 1850. This news item owed its publication to the "handsome prices"
realized. A plasterer 28 years old brought $2,135; another, 30, $1,805; a
third, 24, $1775; a fourth, 24, $1,100; and a fifth, 20, $730.]

[Footnote 8: _Louisiana Advertiser_ (New Orleans), May 13, 1820,
advertisement.]

Far more frequently such laborers were taken on hire. The following are
typical of a multitude of newspaper advertisements: Michael Grantland at
Richmond offered "good wages" for the year 1799 by piece or month for six
or eight negro coopers.[9] At the same time Edward Rumsey was calling for
strong negro men of good character at $100 per year at his iron works in
Botetourt County, Virginia, and inviting free laboring men also to take
employment with him.[10] In 1808 Daniel Weisinger and Company wanted three
or four negro men to work in their factory at Frankfort, Kentucky, saying
"they will be taught weaving, and liberal wages will be paid for their
services."[11] George W. Evans at Augusta in 1818 "Wanted to hire, eight or
ten white or black men for the purpose of cutting wood."[12] A citizen of
Charleston in 1821 called for eight good black carpenters on weekly or
monthly wages, and in 1825 a blacksmith and wheel-wright of the same city
offered to take black apprentices.[13] In many cases whites and blacks
worked together in the same employ, as in a boat-building yard on the Flint
River in 1836,[14] and in a cotton mill at Athens, Georgia, in 1839.[15]

[Footnote 9: _Virginia Gazette_ (Richmond), Nov. 20, 1798.]

[Footnote 10: Winchester, Va., _Gazette_, Jan. 30, 1799.]

[Footnote 11: The _Palladium_ (Frankfort, Ky.), Dec. 1, 1808.]

[Footnote 12: Augusta, Ga., _Chronicle_, Aug. 1, 1818.]

[Footnote 13: Charleston _City Gazette_, Feb. 22, 1825.]

[Footnote 14: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Mch. 18, 1836,
reprinted in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 356.]

[Footnote 15: J.S. Buckingham, _The Slave States of America_ (London,
[1842]), II, 112.]

In some cases the lessor of slaves procured an obligation of complete
insurance from the lessee. An instance of this was a contract between
James Murray of Wilmington in 1743, when he was departing for a sojourn in
Scotland, and his neighbor James Hazel. The latter was to take the three
negroes Glasgow, Kelso and Berwick for three years at an annual hire of L21
sterling for the lot. If death or flight among them should prevent Hazel
from returning any of the slaves at the end of the term he was to reimburse
Murray at full value scheduled in the lease, receiving in turn a bill of
sale for any runaway. Furthermore if any of the slaves were permanently
injured by willful abuse at the hands of Hazel's overseer, Murray was to be
paid for the damage.[16] Leases of this type, however, were exceptional.
As a rule the owners appear to have carried all risks except in regard to
willful injury, and the courts generally so adjudged it where the contracts
of hire had no stipulations in the premises.[17] When the Georgia supreme
court awarded the owner a full year's hire of a slave who had died in the
midst of his term the decision was complained of as an innovation "signally
oppressive to the poorer classes of our citizens--the large majority--who
are compelled to hire servants."[18]

[Footnote 16: Nina M. Tiffany ed., _Letters of James Murray, Loyalist_
(Boston, 1901), pp. 67-69.]

[Footnote 17: J.D. Wheeler, _The Law of Slavery_ (New York, 1837), pp.
152-155.]

[Footnote 18: Editorial in the _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec.
12, 1854.]

The main supply of slaves for hire was probably comprised of the husbands
and sons, and sometimes the daughters, of the cooks and housemaids of the
merchants, lawyers and the like whose need of servants was limited but who
in many cases made a point of owning their slaves in families. On the other
hand, many townsmen whose capital was scant or whose need was temporary
used hired slaves even for their kitchen work; and sometimes the filling of
the demand involved the transfer of a slave from one town to another. Thus
an innkeeper of Clarkesville, a summer resort in the Georgia mountains,
published in the distant newspapers of Athens and Augusta in 1838 his
offer of liberal wages for a first rate cook.[19] This hiring of domestics
brought periodic embarrassments to those who depended upon them. A Virginia
clergyman who found his wife and himself doing their own chores "in the
interval between the hegira of the old hirelings and the coming of the
new"[20] was not alone in his plight. At the same season, a Richmond editor
wrote: "The negro hiring days have come, the most woeful of the year! So
housekeepers think who do not own their own servants; and even this class
is but a little better off than the rest, for all darkeydom must have
holiday this week, and while their masters and mistresses are making fires
and cooking victuals or attending to other menial duties the negroes are
promenading the streets decked in their finest clothes."[21] Even the
tobacco factories, which were constantly among the largest employers of
hired slaves, were closed for lack of laborers from Christmas day until
well into January.[22]

[Footnote 19: _Southern Banner_ (Athens, Ga.), June 21, 1838, advertisement
ordering its own republication in the Augusta _Constitutionalist_.]

[Footnote 20: T.C. Johnson, _Life of Robert L. Dabney_ (Richmond, 1905), p.
120.]

[Footnote 21: Richmond _Whig_, quoted in the _Atlanta Intelligencer_, Jan.
5, 1859.]

[Footnote 22: Robert Russell, _North America_ (Edinburgh, 1857), p. 151.]

That the bargain of hire sometimes involved the consent of more than two
parties is suggested by a New Year's colloquy overheard by Robert Russell
on a Richmond street: "I was rather amused at the efforts of a market
gardener to hire a young woman as a domestic servant. The price her owner
put upon her services was not objected to by him, but they could not agree
about other terms. The grand obstacle was that she would not consent to
work in the garden, even when she had nothing else to do. After taking an
hour's walk in another part of town I again met the two at the old bargain.
Stepping towards them, I now learned that she was pleading for other
privileges--her friends and favourites must be allowed to visit her.[23]
At length she agreed to go and visit her proposed home and see how things
looked." That the scruples of proprietors occasionally prevented the
placing of slaves is indicated by a letter of a Georgia woman anent her
girl Betty and a free negro woman, Matilda: "I cannot agree for Betty to
be hired to Matilda--her character is too bad. I know her of old; she is a
drunkard, and is said to be bad in every respect. I would object her being
hired to any colored person no matter what their character was; and if she
cannot get into a respectable family I had rather she came home, and if she
can't work out put her to spinning and weaving. Her relations here beg she
may not be permitted to go to Matilda. She would not be worth a cent at the
end of the year."[24]

The cooerdination of demand and supply was facilitated in some towns by
brokers. Thus J. de Bellievre of Baton Rouge maintained throughout 1826 a
notice in the local _Weekly Messenger_ of "Servants to hire by the day or
month," including both artizans and domestics; and in the Nashville city
directory of 1860 Van B. Holman advertised his business as an agent for the
hiring of negroes as well as for the sale and rental of real estate.

[Footnote 23: _Ibid_.]

[Footnote 24: Letter of Mrs. S.R. Cobb, Cowpens, Ga., Jan. 9 1843, to
her daughter-in-law at Athens. MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin,
Athens, Ga.]

Slave wages, generally quoted for the year and most frequently for
unskilled able-bodied hands, ranged materially higher, of course, in the
cotton belt than in the upper South. Women usually brought about half
the wages of men, though they were sometimes let merely for the keep of
themselves and their children. In middle Georgia the wages of prime men
ranged about $100 in the first decade of the nineteenth century, dropped to
$60 or $75 during the war of 1812, and then rose to near $150 by 1818. The
panic of the next year sent them down again; and in the 'twenties they
commonly ranged between $100 and $125. Flush times then raised them in
such wise that the contractors digging a canal on the Georgia coast found
themselves obliged in 1838 to offer $18 per month together with the
customary weekly rations of three and a half pounds of bacon and ten quarts
of corn and also the services of a staff physician as a sort of substitute
for life and health insurance.[25] The beginning of the distressful
'forties eased the market so that the town of Milledgeville could get its
street gang on a scale of $125;[26] at the middle of the decade slaveowners
were willing to take almost any wages offered; and in its final year the
Georgia Railroad paid only $70 to $75 for section hands. In 1850, however,
this rate leaped to $100 and $110, and caused a partial substitution of
white laborers for the hired slaves;[27] but the brevity of any relief
procured by this recourse is suggested by a news item from Chattanooga in
1852 reporting that the commonest labor commanded a dollar a day, that
mechanics were all engaged far in advance, that much building was perforce
being postponed, and that all persons who might be seeking employment were
urged to answer the city's call.[28] By 1854 the continuing advance began
to discommode rural employers likewise. A Norfolk newspaper of the time
reported that the current wages of $150 for ordinary hands and $225 for
the best laborers, together with life insurance for the full value of
the slaves, were so high that prudent farmers were curtailing their
operations.[29] At the beginning of 1856 the wages in the Virginia tobacco
factories advanced some fifteen per cent. over the rates of the preceding
year;[30] and shortly afterward several of these establishments took refuge
in the employment of white women for their lighter processes.[31] In 1860
there was a culmination of this rise of slave wages throughout the South,
contemporaneous with that of their purchase prices. First-rate hands
were engaged by the Petersburg tobacco factories at $225;[32] and in
northwestern Louisiana the prime field hands in a parcel of slaves hired
for the year brought from $300 to $360 each, and a blacksmith $430.[33] The
general average then prevalent for prime unskilled slaves, however, was
probably not much above two hundred dollars. While the purchase price of
slaves was wellnigh quadrupled in the three score years of the nineteenth
century, slave wages were little more than doubled, for these were of
course controlled not by the fluctuating hopes and fears of what the
distant future might bring but by the sober prospect of the work at hand.

[Footnote 25: Advertisement in the Savannah newspapers, reprinted in J.S.
Buckingham, _Slave States_ (London, 1842), I, 137.]

[Footnote 26: MS. minutes of the board of aldermen, in the town hall at
Milledgeville, Ga. Item dated Feb. 23, 1841.]

[Footnote 27: Georgia Railroad Company _Report_ for 1850, p. 13.]

[Footnote 28: Chattanooga _Advertiser_, quoted in the Augusta _Chronicle_,
June 6, 1852.]

[Footnote 29: Norfolk _Argus_, quoted in _Southern Banner_ (Athens, Ga.),
Jan. 12, 1854.]

[Footnote 30: Richmond _Dispatch_, Jan., 1856, quoted in G.M. Weston, _Who
are and who may be Slaves in the U.S._ (caption).]

[Footnote 31: _Hunt's Merchants' Magazine_, XL, 522.]

[Footnote 32: Petersburg _Democrat_, quoted by the Atlanta _Intelligencer_,
Jan., 1860.]

[Footnote 33: _DeBow's Review_, XXIX, 374.]

The proprietors of slaves for hire appear to have been generally as much
concerned with questions of their moral and physical welfare as with the
wages to be received, for no wage would compensate for the debilitation of
the slave or his conversion into an inveterate runaway. The hirers in their
turn had the problem, growing more intense with the advance of costs, of
procuring full work without resorting to such rigor of discipline as
would disquiet the owners of their employees. The tobacco factories found
solution in piece work with bonus for excess over the required stint. At
Richmond in the middle 'fifties this was commonly yielding the slaves from
two to five dollars a month for their own uses; and these establishments,
along with all other slave employers, suspended work for more than a week
at the Christmas season.[34]

[Footnote 34: Robert Russell, _North America_, p. 152.]

The hiring of slaves from one citizen to another did not meet all the needs
of the town industry, for there were many occupations in which the regular
supervision of labor was impracticable. Hucksters must trudge the streets
alone; and market women sit solitary in their stalls. If slaves were to
follow such callings at all, and if other slaves were to utilize their
talents in keeping cobbler and blacksmith shops and the like for public
patronage,[35] they must be vested with fairly full control of their own
activities. To enable them to compete with whites and free negroes in the
trades requiring isolated and occasional work their masters early and
increasingly fell into the habit of hiring many slaves to the slaves
themselves, granting to each a large degree of industrial freedom in return
for a stipulated weekly wage. The rates of hire varied, of course, with the
slave's capabilities and the conditions of business in their trades. The
practice brought friction sometimes between slaves and owners when wages
were in default. An instance of this was published in a Charleston
advertisement of 1800 announcing the auction of a young carpenter and
saying as the reason of the sale that he had absconded because of a deficit
in his wages.[36] Whether the sale was merely by way of punishment or
was because the proprietor could not give personal supervision to the
carpenter's work the record fails to say. The practice also injured the
interests of white competitors in the same trades, who sometimes bitterly
complained;[37] it occasionally put pressure upon the slaves to fill
out their wages by theft; and it gave rise in some degree to a public
apprehension that the liberty of movement might be perverted to purposes of
conspiracy. The law came to frown upon it everywhere; but the device was
too great a public and private convenience to be suppressed.

[Footnote 35: _E. g_., "For sale: a strong, healthy Mulatto Man, about
24 years of age, by trade a blacksmith, and has had the management of a
blacksmith shop for upwards of two years" Advertisement in the Alexandria,
Va., _Times and Advertiser_, Sept. 26, 1797.]

[Footnote 36: Charleston _City Gazette_, May 12, 1800.]

[Footnote 37: _E. g., Plantation and Frontier_, II, 367.]

To procure the enforcement of such laws a vigilance committee was proposed
at Natchez in 1824;[38] but if it was created it had no lasting effect.
With the same purpose newspaper campaigns were waged from time to time.
Thus in the spring of 1859 the _Bulletin_ of Columbia, South Carolina, said
editorially: "Despite the laws of the land forbidding under penalty the
hiring of their time by slaves, it is much to be regretted that the
pernicious practice still exists," and it censured the citizens who were
consciously and constantly violating a law enacted in the public interest.
The nearby Darlington _Flag_ endorsed this and proposed in remedy that
the town police and the rural patrols consider void all tickets issued by
masters authorizing their slaves to pass and repass at large, that all
slaves found hiring their time be arrested and punished, and that their
owners be indicted as by law provided. The editor then ranged further.
"There is another evil of no less magnitude," said he, "and perhaps the
foundation of the one complained of. It is that of transferring slave labor
from its legitimate field, the cultivation of the soil, into that of the
mechanic arts.... Negro mechanics are an ebony aristocracy into which
slaves seek to enter by teasing their masters for permission to learn a
trade. Masters are too often seduced by the prospect of gain to yield their
assent, and when their slaves have acquired a trade are forced to the
violation of the law to realize their promised gain. We should therefore
have a law to prevent slave mechanics going off their masters' premises to
work. Let such a law be passed, and ... there will no longer be need of a
law to prohibit slaves hiring their own time," The _Southern Watchman_ of
Athens, Georgia, reprinted all of this in turn, along with a subscriber's
communication entitled "free slaves." There were more negroes enjoying
virtual freedom in the town of Athens, this writer said, than there were
_bona fide_ free negroes in any ten counties of the district. "Everyone who
is at all acquainted with the character of the slave race knows that they
have great ideas of liberty, and in order to get the enjoyment of it they
make large offers for their time. And everyone who knows anything of the
negro knows that he won't work unless he is obliged to.... The negro thus
set free, in nine cases out of ten, idles away half of his time or gambles
away what he does make, and then relies on his ingenuity in stealing to
meet the demands pay day inevitably brings forth; and this is the way our
towns are converted into dens of rogues and thieves."[39]

[Footnote 38: Natchez _Mississippian_, quoted in _Le Courrier de la
Louisiane_ (New Orleans), Aug. 25, 1854.]

[Footnote 39: _Southern Watchman_ (Athens, Ga.), Apr. 20, 1859.]

These arguments had been answered long before by a citizen of Charleston.
The clamor, said he, was intended not so much to guard the community
against theft and insurrection as to diminish the competition of slaves
with white mechanics. The strict enforcement of the law would almost
wholly deprive the public of the services of jobbing slaves, which were
indispensable under existing circumstances. Let the statute therefore be
left in the obscurity of the lawyers' bookshelves, he concluded, to be
brought forth only in case of an emergency.[40] And so such laws were left
to sleep, despite the plaints of self-styled reformers.

[Footnote 40: Letter to the editor in the Charleston _City Gazette_, Nov.
1, 1825. To similar effect was an editorial in the Augusta _Chronicle_,
Oct. 16, 1851.]

That self-hire may often have led to self-purchase is suggested by an
illuminating letter of Billy Procter, a slave at Americus, Georgia, in 1854
to Colonel John B. Lamar of whom something has been seen in a foregoing
chapter. The letter, presumably in the slave's own hand, runs as follows:
"As my owner, Mr. Chapman, has determined to dispose of all his Painters, I
would prefer to have you buy me to any other man. And I am anxious to get
you to do so if you will. You know me very well yourself, but as I wish
you to be fully satisfied I beg to refer you to Mr. Nathan C. Monroe, Dr.
Strohecker and Mr. Bogg. I am in distress at this time, and will be until I
hear from you what you will do. I can be bought for $1000--and I think that
you might get me for 50 Dolls less if you try, though that is Mr. Chapman's
price. Now Mas John, I want to be plain and honest with you. If you will
buy me I will pay you $600 per year untill this money is paid, or at any
rate will pay for myself in two years.... I am fearfull that if you do not
buy me, there is no telling where I may have to go, and Mr. C. wants me to
go where I would be satisfied,--I promise to serve you faithfully, and I
know that I am as sound and healthy as anyone you could find. You will
confer a great favour, sir, by Granting my request, and I would be
very glad to hear from you in regard to the matter at your earliest
convenience."[41]

[Footnote 41: MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.,
printed in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 41. The writer must have been
well advanced in years or else highly optimistic. Otherwise he could not
have expected to earn his purchase price within two years.]

The hiring of slaves by one citizen to another prevailed to some extent
in country as well as town, and the hiring of them to themselves was
particularly notable in the forest labors of gathering turpentine and
splitting shingles[42]; but slave hire in both its forms was predominantly
an urban resort. On the whole, whereas the plantation system cherished
slavery as a wellnigh fundamental condition, town industry could tolerate
it only by modifying its features to make labor more flexibly responsive to
the sharply distinctive urban needs.

[Footnote 42: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, pp. 153-155.]

As to routine control, urban proprietors were less complete masters even
of slaves in their own employ than were those in the country. For example,
Morgan Brown of Clarksville, Tennessee, had occasion to publish the
following notice: "Whereas my negroes have been much in the habit of
working at night for such persons as will employ them, to the great injury
of their health and morals, I therefore forbid all persons employing them
without my special permission in writing. I also forbid trading with them,
buying from or selling to them, without my written permit stating the
article they may buy or sell. The law will be strictly enforced against
transgressors, without respect to persons[43]."

[Footnote 43: _Town Gazette and Farmers' Register_ (Clarksville, Tenn.),
Aug. 9, 1819, reprinted in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 45, 46.]

When broils occurred in which slaves were involved, the masters were likely
to find themselves champions rather than judges. This may be illustrated by
two cases tried before the town commissioners of Milledgeville, Georgia,
in 1831. In the first of these Edward Gary was ordered to bring before the
board his slave Nathan to answer a charge of assault upon Richard Mayhorn,
a member of the town patrol, and show why punishment should not be
inflicted. On the day set Cary appeared without the negro and made a
counter charge supported by testimony that Mayhorn had exceeded his
authority under the patrol ordinance. The prosecution of the slave was
thereupon dropped, and the patrolman was dismissed from the town's employ.
The second case was upon a patrol charge against a negro named Hubbard,
whose master or whose master's attorney was one Wiggins, reciting an
assault upon Billy Woodliff, a slave apparently of Seaborn Jones. Billy
being sworn related that Hubbard had come to the door of his blacksmith
shop and "abused and bruised him with a rock." Other evidence revealed that
Hubbard's grievance lay in Billy's having taken his wife from him. "The
testimony having been concluded, Mr. Wiggins addressed the board in a
speech containing some lengthy, strengthy and depthy argument: whereupon
the board ordered that the negro man Hubbard receive from the marshall ten
lashes, moderately laid on, and be discharged."[44] Even in the maintenance
of household discipline masters were fain to apply chastisement vicariously
by having the town marshal whip their offending servants for a small fee.

[Footnote 44: MS. archives in the town hall at Milledgeville, Ga., selected
items from which are printed in the American Historical Association
_Report_ for 1903, I, 468, 469.]

The variety in complexion, status and attainment among town slaves led to a
somewhat elaborate gradation of colored society. One stratum comprised the
fairly numerous quadroons and mulattoes along with certain exceptional
blacks. The men among these had a pride of place as butlers and coachmen,
painters and carpenters; the women fitted themselves trimly with the
cast-off silks and muslins of their mistresses, walked with mincing tread,
and spoke in quiet tones with impressive nicety of grammar. This element
was a conscious aristocracy of its kind, but its members were more or less
irked by the knowledge that no matter how great their merits they could not
cross the boundary into white society. The bulk of the real negroes on the
other hand, with an occasional mulatto among them, went their own way, the
women frankly indulging a native predilection for gaudy colors, carrying
their burdens on their heads, arms akimbo, and laying as great store in
their kerchief turbans as their paler cousins did in their beflowered
bonnets. The men of this class wore their shreds and patches with an
easy swing, doffed their wool hats to white men as they passed, called
themselves niggers or darkies as a matter of course, took the joys and
sorrows of the day as they came, improvised words to the music of their
work, and customarily murdered the Queen's English, all with a true if
humble nonchalance and a freedom from carking care.