Slaves came with a variety of skills. There was an extensive market
in the leasing and purchase of skilled slaves in Virginia. Many
ironworks employed slaves both as laborers and in skilled positions.
Isaac Zane, owner/operator, of Marlboro IW (1770s-1795) often
complained about not being able to get the skilled slaves he needed.
This is covered in numerous works including:
Bezis-Selfa, John
1993 Planter Industrialists and Iron Oligarchs: A
Comparative Prosopography of Early Anglo-American Ironmasters .
BUSINESS AND ECONOMIC HISTORY, Volume Twenty-two, no. 1, Fall 1993,
pp. 62-70.
2004 Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers,
and the Industrious Revolution. Cornel University Press, Ithaca and
London.
Bining, Arthur Cecil
1979 [1938] Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the
Eighteenth Century. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission,
Harrisburg.
Bruce, Kathleen
1930 Virginia Iron Manufacture in the Slave Era.
The Century Co., New York and London.
Cooper, Karen G.
1991 Issac Zane's Marlboro Ironworks: A Colonial
Iron Plantation 1763-1795. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Department of
History, James Madison University.
Dew, Charles B
1999[1966] Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson
and the Tredegar Iron Works. The Library of Virginia, Richmond.
1974 David Ross and the Oxford Iron Works: A Study
of Industrial slavery in the Early Nineteenth-Century South. William
& Mary Quarterly, Vol. 31(2):189-224. Williamsburg.
1994 Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo
Forge. W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
1997 Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North:
African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey 1665-1865. Madison
House, Wisconsin.
Lewis, Ronald Loran
1974 Slavery in the Chesapeake Iron Industry,
1716-1865. Dissertation. University of Akron, Akron.
1974 Slavery on Chesapeake Iron Plantations Before
the American Revolution. Journal of Negro History 59:242-254.
1978 Slave Families at Early Chesapeake Ironworks.
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86:169-180.
Pierce, Arthur D.
1957 Iron in the Pines: The Story of New Jersey's
Ghost Towns and Bog Iron. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick,
New Jersey.
And these are just the sources I ran across while doing the research
for my MA. My topic was technical and did not deal much with the
workers. So there are sure to be lots more.
Ironmasters started out with predominantly White skilled labor. But
as time permitted they had their White workers train slave
replacements. Because iron working skills were in short supply, the
free work force was highly mobile. Ironmasters were constantly
poaching workers from each other. Alexander Spotswood is known to
have trained skilled slaves to replace his White workers for his
Tubal IW (1718-63 or so).
The crew at Tredegar (19C) was both slave and White. Jobs had nothing
to do with race or free or slave. To my knowledge the only position
that was exclusively White was that of founder (the man who ran a
blast furnace). There is no reason why a slave could not have done
this job, I just have never run across any reference to it happening.
James Brothers, RPA
[log in to unmask]
On Jun 19, 2007, at 14:07, Anita Wills wrote:
> To those of us interested in the discussion on whether George
> Washington owned interest in Iron Works, here is a link to his
> fathers' Will. If you read down, you will notice that he left his
> son Lawrence the interest to his mine works. When Lawrence died, he
> left that interest to his brother George Washington. Lawrence
> Washingoton had one daughter who died in childhood (so he died
> without Issue), and his estate went to George Washington, including
> the iron works. If any whites worked in mines it was to supervise
> slaves. I doubt that anyone cared whether slaves worked in
> dangerous conditions. Slaves were by definition there to do manual
> labor, and work that was not considered suitable for a white man.
>
> Anita
>
> This information is kept by the Kenmore Foundation.
>
> http://www.kenmore.org/WashingtonFamilyInfo/augustine_wash_will.html
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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