Cymraeg

The Welsh and American slavery

The Slave AMsters - How slave masters used their slaves

A multi-faceted system

Ex-slave

Slavery was a multi-faceted system which had several forms.

It is the large plantations which have tended to attract the attention of historians, but in the mid 19th century, half of the slave masters in the United States owned five slaves or less. Less than one per cent of slave masters owned a hundred or more slaves.

Slaves in the town and the country

There were slaves toiling in the country and slaves serving in the important households in the towns (see the evidence of Rosa Starke). Twenty per cent of the slaves in Virginia, for example, worked in towns rather than on plantations.

There were many slaves who were craftsmen and some were industrial workers; so much use was made of slaves in the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, for example, that the white workers went on strike.

White manager on his horse

However, most did work on plantations. In 1850, of the two and a half million that worked in the fields:

1,815,000 grew cotton
350,000 grew tobacco
150,000 grew sugar
125,000 grew rice
60,000 grew hemp

Hiring slaves

It was a flexible system which could adapt when faced with new conditions. In Virginia and Maryland as the agricultural situation worsened at the beginning of the 19th century, another option rather than to sell slaves to plantations in the West (see "The Second Middle Passage") was to hire them out. By the 1850s, 200,000 or 5% of the slave population worked in various industries.