To answer Lyle's plaintive and very apt follow-up question --
industrialization and mechanization in the South were not retarding
slavery or pushing it to extinction. The opposite was the case --
slave owners adapted and modernized. They hired out their skilled and
unskilled slaves to mine owners, to factories, and to anyone who
needed a skilled artisan. Slavery was a very robust institution.
Sharon Murphy's fascinating study "Investing in Life: Insurance in
Antebellum America" shows how slave owners spread the the risk of
hiring slaves onto the burgeoning financial market by purchasing life
insurance policies on slaves they rented out for dangerous
occupations. Industrialization was the future, and slavery would have
a large role. She writes that just before the War, in Richmond and
Lynchburg between 1/2 and 2/3 of male slaves were hired out.

Henry Wiencek

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