"Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction": Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782-1865.

"Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction": Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782-1865. By Midori Takagi. Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Pp. xii, 187. $37.50, ISBN 0-8139-1834-0.)

Urban slavery was in decline in the mid-nineteenth century. While plantation slavery boomed, city slave populations were plummeting. Some scholars hold that the clash of slavery's authoritarian requirements with the city's disorderly, anonymous character caused the decline. However beguiling, that view has trouble accounting for Richmond's slave past. Alone among the South's ten largest cities, her slave community more than held its ground, nearly doubling between 1830 and 1860 (table, p. 78). Richmond's singular experience with slavery is the subject of Midori Takagi's fascinating study. Slavery was clearly flourishing there during the 1850s although urban industrial conditions, Takagi argues, threatened "the integrity of the system" by increasing "slave residents' ability to resist slave owner control" (p. 4).

Richmond's industrial economy set her apart from most cities in Dixie. Crucial to the antebellum history of black Richmond was the harnessing of slavery to profitable, expanding businesses like tobacco manufacture. The first of six chapters examines the role played by state-sponsored enterprises in the late-eighteenth century in demonstrating the utility of employing slaves in public works and war industries. Private employers subsequently experimented with different employee mixes and management styles. By 1840 slaves could be found in most workshops, clustering in transportation, flour milling, and iron making and dominating tobacco manufacture, Richmond's largest industry (pp. 11-14). Chapters two and four examine working and living conditions from 1800 to 1840 and from 1840 to 1860. Chapters three and five explore the social history of Richmond slaves for the same periods. Takagi's discussion of employer preference for slave workers and her sensitive reading of rich African church records are especially noteworthy.

Several practices involving the recruitment, management, and provisioning of slave workers became commonplace after 1840. These included self-hire, paying bonuses for overwork, and allowing slaves to find their own accommodations. Some citizens saw these practices as merely cost-effective policies necessary for the profitable adaptation of slavery to non-automated workshop and factory production, but others complained they were dangerous erosions of white power and authority that jeopardized the social order. Warned repeatedly that the owners and employers were "rearing wolves to our own destruction," local authorities launched campaigns to suppress those practices and make slaves thoroughly slavish and dependent. Most crackdowns failed because the practices were cheap and effective and, Takagi emphasizes, because slaves were not easily cowed. The final chapter notes that slaves lost the privileges and relative autonomy they had won incrementally over the previous decades in the war that delivered them from bondage.

Takagi believes that "Richmond's slave system was fraught with terrible problems and tensions that, had the Civil War not erupted, probably would have led to a slow, inexorable decline" (p. 4). The sense of an impending crisis lends drama to the narrative; but if the system's internal contradictions were becoming more intense, her evidence points to an eruption of tensions early in the 1850s followed by a period of relative calm for the remainder of the decade. If the crisis thesis rests on shaky ground, Takagi's careful history of industrial slavery and enslaved black Richmonders is nonetheless rock solid.

JOHN T. O'BRIEN Dalhousie University