Slaves for Hire

The Allocation of Black Labor in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782 to 1810

Bibliographic Data

ID3452356
AuthorsSarah S Hughes (corresponding author)
Year1978
Volume35
Issue2
Pages260
Publication date1978-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1921835
OpenAlexW2316045539
LanguageEN
Citations received11

OR six years near the end of the eighteenth century Fanny Baines hired Jacob, an adult slave, to help her operate the 40-acre farm that she rented in Elizabeth City County, Virginia. In most of these years she paid at least twice as much for Jacob's services as she did for the land. She grew no tobacco, but the corn and beef raised on the farm were evidently profitable enough to allow her to continue to pay cash rent for both land and labor.' The experience of Fanny Baines and Jacob was not unusual, for such hiring was integral to the labor system and the institution of slavery in the county between I782 and i8io. Few of the county's slaves escaped being hired out. Before their childhood ended, most blacks spent at least a year working as hired servants outside their home household, and such uprootings continued periodically throughout their lives. This practice made slave labor available to nearly all of the free whites. Even tenants and owners of farms as small as 25 acres or less could employ slaves. Residents of the village of Hampton also hired domestic servants from among the women and children on the county's larger farms, while the local shipyards, artisans, and merchants rented the labor of more expensive skilled adult male slaves. Although large farms were a principal source of such labor, nearly anyone who owned one or two slaves might occasionally hire them out.2 Rather than being an incidental or peripheral aspect of the slave labor market, such arrangements were the key to the survival of slavery in the county. Hiring was a means of adjusting a labor system initiated when tobacco was the profitable staple crop to the needs of the smaller grain

Political science · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · Race, History, and American Society

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