Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 (6 page)

BOOK: Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865

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Page 18

brown leaves. But starting in 1800, Richmond's role in the tobacco economy expanded to include the processing of tobacco. High market demand for the processed leaf encouraged city entrepreneurs to combine shipping with tobacco manufacturing, which became one of Virginia's fastest-growing industries and dominated Richmond's economy throughout the early nineteenth century.

Crucial to the growth of tobacco manufacturing was slave labor (table 2). In hindsight, there is little reason to believe the industry would have succeeded without slave workers. Census materials indicate that slaves played an important role from the very start; in the early 1800s, when tobacco processing took hold in Richmond, the industry consisted of three rooms, a handful of benches, a few tools, and some twenty-two slave men. Even as the facilities, processing techniques, and tools changed over the years, slaves remained the main source of labor. Furthermore, it was the labor of slaves that helped build the industry from its modest beginnings to the most lucrative business in the city and state. Between 1800 and 1840 the industry grew from three workshops employing 22 laborers, to thirty or so manufactories with 981 workers, 73 percent (716) of whom were slaves.
⁴

Although tobacco factories engaged the highest number of slave workers, these businesses were not the only ones to seek slave labor. Increasingly slaves could be found in a variety of locales including flour mills, coal mines, river docks, cotton-weaving factories, and in private homes as domestic servants.

Predictably the increased use of slave labor in the various industries encouraged a rise in the number of city slave residents. Between 1800

Table 2. Tobacco and flour industries, Richmond and Henrico County, 1820 and 1840

No. of employees

1840

Product

1820

1840

Capital invested

Value of manufactured item

Tobacco

655

981

$429,250

$629,340

Flour

106

$467,200

$402,570

Source:
Richmond, Manufacturing Census, 1820;
Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States,
1840.

Note:
Statistics for 1840 reflect totals for Henrico County.

Page 19

and 1840 Richmond's slave population grew from 2,293 to 7,509 (table 3), a rate of increase that kept slaves at about one-third of the total population through those years. This growth is remarkable even in comparison to other nearby Virginian cities with rapidly growing slave populations. Petersburg's slave community, for instance, increased 250 percent, from 1,487 in 1800 to 3,637 in 1840. The slave population of Norfolk increased 130 percent between 1800 and 1840, from 2,724 to 3,709.
⁵

Industrial employment of bondmen also influenced the gender and age distribution patterns of Richmond slave residents by bringing a large influx of male slaves. As a result, between 1820 and 1840 there were nearly equal numbers of slave men and women, a pattern not seen in other southern urban centers where women typically were in the majority (tables 4 and 5). In Baltimore, for example, slave women outnumbered men in 1840 by a ratio of 100 to 57. This pattern also was evident in Charleston, Louisville, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., which suggests a high demand for female domestic servants in those cities. Although Richmond also had a significant demand for such servants, the growing need for industrial slaves during the early nineteenth century assured a more balanced sex ratio.

Table 3. Urban slave populations in Virginia, 18001840

Richmond

Norfolk

Petersburg

1800

2,293

2,724

1,487

1820

4,387

3,261

2,428