URBAN INDUSTRY, BLACK RESISTANCE, AND RACIAL RESTRICTION IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH: A GENERAL MODEL AND A CASE STUDY IN URBAN VIRGINIA
Creators: name: Green, Rodney Dale
Publisher: name: American University
Year: 2023

description: During the late antebellum period, the restriction, repression, and surveillance of the South's black population intensified. Traditional historians have thought that these developments were responses by the southern elite to an increasingly militant and interventionist northern abolitionist movement. We look, instead, to economic developments within the South for the causes of these institutional changes. Specifically, we consider how urban industrialization destabilized southern life, and opened new and increasing opportunities for black resistance, provoking more severe controls over both free and slave blacks during the late antebellum period. To investigate this proposition, we developed historical materialist models of slave-labor capitalism and wage-labor capitalism. The effect of a presumed, developing spatial co-existence and interaction of these two modes of production in the southern cities led us to several hypotheses. (1) Urban industrialization greatly enhanced the ability of slaves in the city to resist the dominant classes of Virginia. (2) Significant groups of white workers emerged in the cities, whose major actions and statements reflected fears of job and wage competition with blacks. (3) Three class of whites supported increased black restriction, each for different reasons. All reasons were related to the effects of urban industrialization. Slave-labor capitalists (planters) wanted to limit the perceived encroachment of wage-labor capitalism on their domain. Wage-labor capitalists wanted to improve direct control over their labor-force. Finally, many white workers wanted to limit the encroachment of black labor in their crafts. Prior to testing these hypotheses in urban Virginia, we studied the changing economic base of the state's cities. We found substantial industrialization accompanied by transformations of economic institutions. Tobacco manufacturers used thousands of free black and slave laborers, while metal working entrepreneurs used thousands of native and immigrant white laborers. Slave hiring emerged, which diluted direct controls over slaves, and made their conditions of life similar to those of wage laborers. In studying these developments, we constructed a sample of over a thousand firms with data from population, slave, and manufacturing censuses and from tax records. With this prerequisite study completed, we tested the hypotheses against the historical record. We found substantial support for them. The urban industrialization process led to increased racial restrictions because it led to increased slave runaways and enhanced opportunities for shop floor resistance in factories. Northern abolitionists had little to do with either phenomena. By studying original legislative and judicial records, we found that both changes in black codes and trends in the enforcement of black restrictions were frequently direct responses by southern elites to the new conditions brought about by urban industrialization. Class stratification among whites brought about by urban industrialization affected the intensification of black restriction as well. Pro-planter elites vied with urban entrepreneurs over the proper means of intensifying black controls. White artisans fought to exclude black laborers from their crafts. White wage laborers who formed a small, ill-defined class, left little evidence of any role in the struggle over black controls. We concluded that much of the racial restriction of the late antebellum period in Virginia is properly attributable to the effects urban industrialization, rather than to intervention by northern abolitionists in the state. We also concluded that, in studying slavery, the historical materialist method is more fruitful than the neoclassical economic method.