Artisan Workers in the Upper South: Petersburg, Virginia, 1820-1865

Abstract

Perhaps because slavery looms so large in antebellum southern historiography, free southern workers, as L. Diane Barnes notes, have received less attention than their northern counterparts. Barnes's study of artisans in Petersburg, Virginia, joins a small but growing group of studies seeking to remedy that deficiency. In successive chapters, the author traces the economic history of Petersburg; the activities of the Petersburg Benevolent Mechanic Association (organized by master craftsmen in the 1820s); the experiences of white wage earners caught between employers—slave-owning masters—and slaves; the paradox of freedom for free black artisans; the work lives of slave factory workers; and finally the “culture of southern antebellum artisans.” Petersburg artisans greeted the effects of the market revolution with an ambivalence similar to their northern counterparts, and they similarly couched their public statements in the language of republicanism. However, Barnes argues that because they lived and worked in a slave society, Petersburg artisans responded to capitalism and to republicanism differently from northern workers. They expressed more systematic antagonism to competition from black labor than to exploitation by bosses, and they conceived of republicanism less as an egalitarian ideology than as a racialized caste discourse harmonizing the interests of wage earners and slave owners.