Free Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond Virginia, 1782–1865 by Midori Takagi Page A

his slave Sally, who he insisted should "be attended by Doctors R & R Cabbles [and that] any other [will be] at the expense of the hirer." Such stipulations meant that employers most often summoned private physicians to examine their hired workers. Dr. Lewis Chamberlayne, a local physician, was one such practitioner frequently called to visit hired slaves, as his accounts indicate:
1835
Mr. George P. Crump,
May 11: To visit . . . Billy belonging to Frank Smith, $1.25.
July 14: ditto . . . $2.00
Mr. Edmund Brown
April 1: To advice . . . to Sam belonging to Dr. Richardson of James City, $1.00. 33
Slaves working on the canal and in the mines usually saw the company-employed physicians who visited the worksite several times a week or went to company-run hospitals. When Robert, a slave canal worker hired out for a year, fell ill, he was treated at the factory hospital for eleven days. Both free and enslaved canal workers who collapsed from heat exhaustion were placed in the small hospitals set up by the James River Company. 34
Slave patients also received treatment at the city hospitals. These facilities concentrated more on nursing and quarantining than curing persons with infectious diseases. In the early 1800s when cases of smallpox first appeared in Richmond, city officials established a public health facility to separate victims from other city residents. Another public hospital was opened during the early 1830s to treat cholera victims. 35 Slaves in need of treatment for non-life-threatening afflictions, however, could not depend on the hospitals because they were temporary facilities that closed once an epidemic passed. It was not until the late 1850s that permanent public health facilities were established to serve both free and enslaved patients with a variety of injuries and illnesses.
The preceding discussion of slaves' diet, clothing, medical care and housing suggests the wide range of material conditions under which city slaves lived. It also indicates the degree to which urbanization, industrialization, employers' budgets, and even the size of an owner's home affected working and living conditions, and how those circumstances prevented owners from using one common method of slave management. Given the diverse working conditions, a uniform slave system would have been impossible. What emerged, as owners and employers sought to shape urban slavery to meet their needs, was a set of control

 

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methods that varied as much as the working conditions themselves. Sometimes the controls of owners and employers proved redundant, sometimes they conflicted. But more often than not, the urban industrial milieu created a gap between the reach of owner and employer a space where neither proved able to control certain elements of slave life. It was in this space that slaves found opportunities to shape their own working and living conditions.
For some slaves this gap provided an opportunity to choose their own lodgings and their meals. For others, such as hired factory hands, it allowed them to accumulate small sums of cash from their wages and to spend these funds at their own discretion. The gap also gave slaves the chance to live with their families and friends and to create a separate, insulated space away from owners and employers. While these privileges may seem small, they significantly aided slave residents in their attempts to gain more "control" over their lives and to defy absolute owner control.
The Privilege of "Losing Time"
By law and custom every free person, particularly white residents, had power over slave workers. Owners held ultimate control and could discipline, hire out, or sell a bond laborer at any time. Under hiring contracts, hirers shared some of this authority and were able to discipline slave hands in their employment. Shopkeepers, manufacturers, and city watchmen all enjoyed privileges and power denied slaves (and many free blacks), such as the right to vote, own property, testify in court, and