Part 33 (1/2)
[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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 compet.i.tors 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” Advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.s and repa.s.s 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 a.s.sent, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 ent.i.tled ”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 compet.i.tion 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 s.h.i.+ngles[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.