Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Industrialization of the Antebellum Chesapeake

Enslaved people in the antebellum Chesapeake found themselves at a crossroads of American commercial development.  This oldest reproducing slave society in the United States was undergoing commercial intensification and economic diversification.  Urban areas in the region were industrializing while slaveholders were selling off fit and fertile slaves at an alarming rate.  In the five decades before the Civil War, slaveholders sold off above twenty percent of the slave population into a trade that scattered enslaved people across the Cotton South. These slaveholders were subordinating their self-designated roles as moral masters to the opportunities of the market, favoring money over mastery.  Faced with eminent separations, enslaved people in the Chesapeake used what advantages an intensifying market economy held out to defend relatives from removal.  Seizing their own opportunities as the backbone of a new manufacturing economy, Chesapeake slaves did more than twist tobacco, mill flour, and forge iron, thereby underwriting the revitalization of a region once built on growing tobacco for export.  They actively broadened their families to include anyone who could help in an emergency.  Some recruited patrons or other allies in factories or in churches.  Some bought or rented their relatives with their accumulated savings.  Some even allied with slave traders.  In doing so, they often chose family over freedom.  This paper argues that the historiography on the political economy of slavery, including the slave trade, becomes more analytically compelling when put into conversation with the literature on enslaved families. Regional diversification and initial industrialization were more than abstract forces or processes that happened “to” enslaved people.  Not only were there concrete effects on the lives of the enslaved, but these same families recognized and maximized the new market-focused opportunities in order to keep their kin out of the slave market.