The Richmond Slave Trade

The Economic Backbone of the Old Dominion

Jack Trammell

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781614233657
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This historical study examines the slave trade in Richmond, Virginia, and its impact on the city's economy, culture and politics. Richmond's 15th Street was known as Wall Street in antebellum times, and like its New York counterpart, it was a center of commerce. But the business done here was unspeakable and the scene heart wrenching. With over sixty-nine slave dealers and auction houses, the Wall Street area saw tens of millions of dollars and countless human lives change hands, fueling the southern economy. Local historian and author Jack Trammell traces the history of the city's slave trade, from the origins of African slavery in Virginia to its destruction at the end of the Civil War. Stories of seedy slave speculators and corrupt traders are placed alongside detailed accounts of the economic, political and cultural impact of a system representing the most immense, concentrated human suffering in our nation's history.

CHAPTER 1

Slavery and Virginia

The story of the slave trade in Richmond is in many ways the story of Virginia. Slavery is arguably the darkest shadow to pass over the bright light of almost five hundred years of modern Virginia history. When the first Africans disembarked at the Jamestown settlement in 1619, near the confluence of the James and Chickahominy Rivers, it wasn’t clear to any of the European colonists or even the Africans themselves exactly what their future status in the New World would be. There is some evidence that the twenty Africans—reportedly stolen from the Spanish and bartered by a Dutch pirate—arrived in the New World with a somewhat ambiguous status as indentured servants rather than in permanent bondage. According to Linwood Johnson and others, it is possible that they were not lifelong slaves, and the names of eleven of the first Africans are known, as is the fact that eleven of them were likely baptized as Christians.

Other black Africans apparently arrived in the early years as freemen. Some arrived in chains and died in the New World still in chains. The ambiguity of early black status in Virginia stemmed in part from the fact that Christianity and freedom seemed to be inseparable. Some of them also apparently received wages for their work, a situation inconsistent with outright bondage. This moral ambiguity was resolved in 1667 by the passage of a law that said that being a Christian would not necessarily alter the legal condition of slavery.

Regardless, by 1640, there were Africans on American soil reported as being slaves in the legal and fullest historical sense of the word. By 1640, their presence in what would become the United States of America was established historical fact. By the 1670s (and likely much earlier), there were African slaves housed and working at the site that would become the city of Richmond. By 1671, normal status as a slave upon arrival was established. There were at that time, according to Johnson, six thousand white indentured servants in Virginia and two thousand black slaves. The chattel system, with economics and a growing racism at its roots, spread rapidly westward from Jamestown to the new colonial capital of Virginia in Williamsburg, northward and then west into the wilderness settlements and plantations in what would become Henrico and Chesterfield Counties.

Eventually, nearly a full century later, the economic locus of slavery would become solidly centered on the small river village of Richmond, Virginia, situated on the fall line roughly fifty miles west of the Jamestown settlement. By 1860, nearly 250 years after the first African arrived at Jamestown, more than half a million African Americans had been bought and sold in Richmond’s notorious slave markets and auction houses, part of nearly one million slaves eventually sold and moved south or west from the region. Eventually, the activity along Wall Street and the surrounding blocks in Richmond that were home to dozens of slave dealers and auction houses would become so economically successful as to obscure the roots of the original story.

The arrival of Africans in 1619 and subsequently in the Virginia Colony was fueled by a variety of direct, as well as more subtle, factors. Although slavery as an institution had existed in diverse forms since ancient times, a modern and extensive European model of it only evolved in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries under the leadership of the Portuguese and, later, with competition from the Spanish. The system was directly tied to the need for a large and easily controlled labor force to farm sugar plantations in the Atlantic and Caribbean islands and then, a short while later, on the New World mainland as well. The English were relative latecomers to the colonization of slavery, with Queen Elizabeth encouraging “heroes” like Sir John Hawkins, whose coat of arms “was an African in Chains,” but they were always secondary in scale and importance in comparison to the efforts of the Portuguese and Spanish. Although the English were always playing catch-up with their colonial competitors at this stage of the game (1607), they would later help develop a slave system in Virginia and the American colonies that would make slavery notorious worldwide and a hot topic of controversy even in Western Europe, where it had its quiet beginnings commercially but was not overtly visible in daily life.

Slavery in Western Europe had never taken strong root as a social institution. This may, in part, have been due to some degree of social enlightenment, an attitude that permitted feudal systems and serfdom but also placed emphasis on political economy and some individual rights. In hindsight, it seems to have had equally as much to do with economics. Slavery simply wasn’t profitable or economically desirable in Europe, and it was only the advent of mercantilism and the subsequent exploitation of cheap foreign resources and agricultural goods (and the comfortable ocean barriers that hid the worst abuses from potentially sensitive consciences) that made slavery abroad profitable and feasible. Commodities like sugar had high demand and large markets in Europe and could be produced cheaply on large, slave-driven plantations in the Caribbean, far away from polite circles in Europe.

The new English colony at Jamestown did not lend itself at all to sugar production. Nor did it have the abundance of gold and native wealth like that the Spanish had discovered in some locales more to the south. In fact, it seemed at first that the Virginia colony would have very little at all to offer, economically or otherwise, and instead was hot, swampy, malarial-ridden and dangerous, with nothing tangible to offer in return for the risks.

Early engraving of the transatlantic slave trade. From Library of Congress.

Modern European-sponsored slavery was an economic entity, evidenced in part by the fact that African slaves did not go to the home countries in large numbers but, instead, went forcibly to where economic opportunity was the greatest and where there were no pre-established labor pools—in other words, to the colonies and to the New World. The concept of African slaves toiling in Irish potato fields seems so incongruous as to belie the real factors underlying an economics-based Western European slave trade and a subsequent North American system fully embraced by an independent American governmental policy. The American system of slavery began as a Western European colonial system but later transformed into a modern, industrialized, speculative slave system unique in world history.

Explorer John Smith of Pocahontas fame examined the terrain west of Jamestown along the James River, encountering the Chickahominy natives and other Algonquin tribes along the way, always looking for exploitable resources. He reached the rocks and falls where the future city of Richmond would be with Captain Christopher Newport in May 1607. Above the Shockoe Valley and on rising land to the west (later called Richmond Hill), he encountered another in a series of small Indian villages. He likely had no way of envisioning that a great city and the economic and intellectual capital of North American slavery would reside in an urban center located there.

Although Virginia had little to offer economically at first, the advent of tobacco farming rapidly changed the economic equation. In 1617, the Virginia Colony made its first return export of tobacco to England. Less than three years later, nearly thirty tons of tobacco were received in the home country from the colony. Tobacco production was labor intensive, and as a result, a variety of labor arrangements were attempted, including forcing Native Americans to work (a failure, as they were vulnerable to European diseases) and bringing poor workers from England to the colony as indentured servants (many perished under the harsh conditions, and their availability fluctuated according to the European economy). In 1619, the first permanent Africans (from modern Angola) arrived, traded by a Dutch ship for food. The legal status of these first African Virginians, as already mentioned, remains vague—they were very likely indentured and possibly later freed—but it is also important to remember that the first ten years of the Jamestown experiment had been far from easy. In fact, it is safe to say that even as late as 1619, many colonists welcomed any form of human assistance that would help them overcome the initial survival struggles. It also appears that at this stage there were no black and white in the modernist sense of such identities—only free and not free. There are even recorded cases of Africans owning land and their own servants and, in fact, developing large plantations where blacks owned other blacks in enterprises completely analogous to white-owned plantations. This distinction of free or not free is evidenced by events that occurred throughout the new colony. African slaves captured from a Spanish ship in 1620, for example, were freed after their seven-year indenture fulfilled its course and went on to other free ventures.

Permanent slavery as a form of organized labor took hold slowly at first. In 1649, for example, there were still only 300 or so enslaved Africans in the Virginia Colony. This would change before long, however. Just a little more than one century later, Virginia would have roughly 300,000 enslaved Africans. Tobacco changed everything in the Virginia equation, and first families like the Byrds fueled their tobacco production with imported African slave labor.

By 1700, the majority of African slaves were engaged in tobacco farming or peripheral jobs. During the antebellum period, there were fifty-two businesses or factories in Richmond producing tobacco plugs alone. The rapid growth of the tobacco industry meant that producers could no longer count on inconsistent indentured white laborers, who usually worked a maximum of four to seven years on contract (limited legally), and the availability of whom fluctuated wildly depending on the economy in Europe and current social conditions. Tobacco production demanded a stable, large, long-term labor pool, and African slaves were seen as the easiest solution. Because black slaves were forced to stay in the labor pool for long periods of time, there was also time to train them as stemmers, dippers and pressers, thus creating a highly specialized, very inexpensive and very dependable workforce.

As the Virginia soil was slowly exhausted and production moved west, trains, canals and wagons brought the tobacco back east to Richmond, which became and long remained the tobacco capital of the world. They also transported slaves to Richmond to be bought, sold or traded, and the city became the slave capital of the New World.

Even later, after cotton became king during the antebellum period, many slaves were hired out not only as skilled laborers in the tobacco factories and warehouses but also as engineers, blacksmiths and artisans, so that regardless of their status and immediate job, the value of their hired labor increased exponentially, ultimately becoming like stocks and futures to be bought and sold on speculation. In fact, hiring out slave labor and speculating on future labor and slave property values became more common in some locales than utilizing traditional field labor. Even during the colonial era, hiring transactions were common. By the eve of the Civil War, hiring transactions were five times more frequent than outright sales, according to historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman. Hiring rates were typically at 10 to 20 percent of the slave’s value, computed annually. An 1853 letter from Colonel T.J. Gregory to agents in Richmond serves as an interesting example:

Be pleased to write me on receipt of this what disposition you have made of my boy (James) that I left in your care last week. In the event of you hiring him out it will best I think to put him where he will be closely watched as he is a great runaway and in the event of your selling him will you not want power of attorney to make rights to him? You are aware thus my wish is to sell him as soon as I can something like a fair price for him say eight hundred dollars or upwards.

Cotton may have historically fueled the Civil War (Cotton Is King was the famous antebellum book by David Christy), but before that, tobacco fueled a profitable Virginia slave-driven economy that underpinned everything behind the southern colonial way of life. Later, the practice of hiring out slaves meant that slavery could flourish even in a technical, highly industrialized, urbanized environment like Richmond or similar cities in the deeper South. Although not nearly as heavily industrialized as the North, the South, in fact, was transformed by the Industrial Revolution, and slavery adapted side by side with urbanization and industrialization.

Long before the Industrial Revolution, however, an equally important transformation took place in Virginia that was far more subtle. It’s not perfectly clear in hindsight exactly when slavery became an entrenched legally protected entity, bound on one side by racism and on the other by an unapologetic profit motive. Although slavery was formally legalized in Virginia in 1660 (and Virginia was not the first colony to do so), important cultural shifts were clearly happening well before and after that date.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, something had changed besides the advent of the tobacco industry. It was not a shift that can easily be connected to a single event or to a single piece of legislation. Instead, it seemed to happen in incremental pieces, brought about by practical tensions and in response to events, and it occurred in different locations not always confined to Virginia.

One shift evident in the records is that Christian or non-Christian as a dominant identity dichotomy began to compete with white versus nonwhite as an organizing social principle. A 1640 Maryland case convicted a black runaway servant and sentenced him to servitude “for the time of his natural life,” while his two white companions were sentenced to only three additional years of servitude. According to Africans in America, no white person has ever been sentenced to a lifetime of slavery, although there are numerous court records of whites having to sue for release from their extended indenture. By the time “Grace” was sold to Robert Garnett in Madison County, Virginia, in 1847, “slave for life” was the common marker in the bill of sale and was accepted as a “natural state of affairs.”

In the rare antebellum cases where a slave served a term of labor before gaining freedom, he still remained at risk, as an 1837 anecdote illustrates: “Robey had got possession of a woman whose term of slavery was limited to six years. It was expected that she would be sold before the expiration period, and sent away to a distance, where assertion of her claim would subject her to ill-usage. Cases of this kind are very common.” In Maryland, a free black woman was sold back into slavery, even though she had papers of manumit. Finally, in court, she was freed again, but stories of such occurrences became notorious.

These practices were not as clear-cut during the colonial era in Virginia. While it would be an oversimplification to say that the rules were made up by people in positions of power as events moved along, it would be equally inaccurate to see the evolution of slavery and the slave trade in Virginia as a logical, linear progression.

In Virginia, the success of tobacco farming and the evaporation of indentured labor from European immigrants due to an improving home economy meant that African slavery filled a colonial labor vacuum. This was, as mentioned, formalized in 1660–61 when the colony officially recognized the legal status of slavery (Massachusetts having done so in 1641; slaves were also present throughout southern New York and some other areas of New England in that era; eventually, a large slave population was present in New York City and other northern cities). Within a short period, Virginia courts were further defining slavery by declaring that the children born of slaves were also slaves, by fiat, and later established the legality of killing slaves under certain circumstances.

It is difficult, historically or logically, to determine to what degree racism fueled the growth and acceptance of African slavery, or the practical need for cheap labor facilitated the acceptance of racism or both fed more or less equally off each other. There is evidence that the original settlers of Jamestown did not initially envision their fledgling entity evolving into a white-dominated and highly structured tobacco slavocracy. But there is also little evidence that they and their immediate successors took any serious steps to stop such a development from occurring. In fact, with no gold and no easily exploited natural wealth, the Virginia Colony was driven in large part by economic pressures at home in England that demanded something worthwhile come out of the Virginia experiment and, on the individual level, by settlers and adventurers who had an equal desire to succeed monetarily and socially. If either or both constituencies didn’t make money and increase their social standing, then the experiment was a failure.

What is clear is that the end of the seventeenth century in Virginia represented a crossroads in the pathways of human history. While slavery was present in countless other places in addition to Virginia (more than 70 percent of all global slaves ended up on sugar plantations outside of continental North America), it was in Virginia where the powerful tension between a rough but predictable status quo and the governmentality of a new slavocracy that would redefine black and white relations in ways that would connect to everything from the modern civil rights movement t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword, by Alphine W. Jefferson
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Slavery and Virginia
• 2. Growth and Slave Economy of Richmond
• 3. Perspectives of Observers
• 4. The Economics of Slavery
• 5. Wall Street Goes to War
• 6. Broken Economy, Broken Human Beings
• 7. Legacy of Wall Street
• Conclusion. The Opening of the National Slavery Museum
• References
• About the Author