James is making what I believe is a very significant point, and I  
very much appreciate his references, only some of which have crossed  
my ken.  I am doing research right now for a book I am writing about  
Benjamin Franklin.  In the course of which it has been impressed upon  
me, how much of the South's technical competence and craftsmanship  
resided in the brains and hands of Black men and women.  The craft  
communities of wheel makers, barrel makers, nail makers,  
glassworkers, ironworkers, saddle and harness makers, cabinetmakers,  
and such,  all included amongst their numbers a significant  
percentage of African-Americans, slave or freedmen, or slaves who  
were allowed to live on their own, and who basically paid rent on  
themselves back to their owners. (The ethical weirdness this presents  
in the 21st century was largely overlooked, if not entirely  
unremarked in the 18th and 19th).

-- Stephan


On 19 Jun 2007, at 17:04, James Brothers wrote:

> 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 Unpublished Masters Thesis, Department  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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