Moral outrage and the U.S. Civil War

[giblets]

Why don't you respond to my actual posts and not to strawmen of your own devising?

It is difficult to make sense out of your posts. I have no idea why you thought your example of peasants with sickles is relevant if you acknowledge that slaves could have been reallocated to other occupations after it cotton production was mechanized.

[giblets]

If you're a McDonald's manager in Confederate Alabama- you could hire a free laborer to flip burgers for $6 an hour 40 hours a week, or you could buy a slave with a modern tracking device implanted in his abdomen and force him to flip burgers. Ultimately there isn't a big difference in the quality of burger flipping between the free laborer who just wants a paycheck and the slave who doesn't want to get savagely beaten. The free laborer might leave, so you have the risk of turnover, the slave is pretty much guaranteed to be there for life. The slave could be made to work 80 hours a week so his annual output is worth ~$24000. The cost of housing and feeding a slave might be ~$1000 and I'd say that's a high estimate. His net output is around $23000 a year. Assuming a prevailing interest rate of around 5%, the value of a modern slave would easily exceed $400,000. There is no way slavery would have died out without being outlawed- that's pure fantasy.

[grumbler]

It is difficult to make sense out of your posts. I have no idea why you thought your example of peasants with sickles is relevant if you acknowledge that slaves could have been reallocated to other occupations after it cotton production was mechanized.

If you have trouble with the words I use, just say so, and I will explain them.

The problem with slave labor is that the save has no motive to produce a quality product, nor to produce quantity beyond what you can force out of him or her by punishment and fear of punishment. Tasks whose quality can be easily monitored (resource extraction and mill operations) can be carried out, at considerable expense, by slaves, but more complex processes with more intricate machinery failed when done with slave labor. tredegar Iron Works tried to use slaves to make up for late-war manpower shortages, and couldn't maintain quality or quantity, even when they paid their "slaves" the same wages as their free workers. The Germans in WW2 were another group that believed that slave labor can be used to substitute for free labor in factories (munitions and weaponry, in many cases) and discovered that they couldn't, because equipment and ammo produced in those factories was unreliable and low volume. The Germans carried on because they had to, but no one could afford to make such ****ty products in peacetime.

Slaves simply cannot be used effectively in a great number of occupations, and the occupations they are suitable for are the ones most easily mechanized.

[grumbler]

If you're a McDonald's manager in Confederate Alabama- you could hire a free laborer to flip burgers for $6 an hour 40 hours a week, or you could buy a slave with a modern tracking device implanted in his abdomen and force him to flip burgers. Ultimately there isn't a big difference in the quality of burger flipping between the free laborer who just wants a paycheck and the slave who doesn't want to get savagely beaten. The free laborer might leave, so you have the risk of turnover, the slave is pretty much guaranteed to be there for life. The slave could be made to work 80 hours a week so his annual output is worth ~$24000. The cost of housing and feeding a slave might be ~$1000 and I'd say that's a high estimate. His net output is around $23000 a year. Assuming a prevailing interest rate of around 5%, the value of a modern slave would easily exceed $400,000. There is no way slavery would have died out without being outlawed- that's pure fantasy.

Got a basis for any of these assertions, or are you just plucking "facts" out of the air because you want some made-up numbers to justify your made-up argument?

[giblets]

If you have trouble with the words I use, just say so, and I will explain them.

The problem with slave labor is that the save has no motive to produce a quality product, nor to produce quantity beyond what you can force out of him or her by punishment and fear of punishment. Tasks whose quality can be easily monitored (resource extraction and mill operations) can be carried out, at considerable expense, by slaves, but more complex processes with more intricate machinery failed when done with slave labor. tredegar Iron Works tried to use slaves to make up for late-war manpower shortages, and couldn't maintain quality or quantity, even when they paid their "slaves" the same wages as their free workers. The Germans in WW2 were another group that believed that slave labor can be used to substitute for free labor in factories (munitions and weaponry, in many cases) and discovered that they couldn't, because equipment and ammo produced in those factories was unreliable and low volume. The Germans carried on because they had to, but no one could afford to make such ****ty products in peacetime.

Slaves simply cannot be used effectively in a great number of occupations, and the occupations they are suitable for are the ones most easily mechanized.

And how is fast food not one of those occupations?

You're making a stupid comparison- trying to train slaves to manufacture munitions during wartime when they have no relevant experience is nothing like peacetime slavery. During the colonial era before cotton got big it wasn't uncommon to make slaves learn a skilled trade.

[Proteus_MST]

You could also look at the roman empire. The slaves there often held important positions (especially the greek ones)... for example managers of the household, or teachers for the offspring of roman nobles.

[grumbler]

And how is fast food not one of those occupations?

You're making a stupid comparison- trying to train slaves to manufacture munitions during wartime when they have no relevant experience is nothing like peacetime slavery. During the colonial era before cotton got big it wasn't uncommon to make slaves learn a skilled trade.

I don't think you are going to find your arguments very persuasive if you simply call counter-arguments "stupid." In order to persuade, you need to provide substance (and not just numbers pulled out of your ass, either).

As far as fast food goes, a slave knows that, the ****tier the food and service he or she provides is, the fewer people that will come to the fast food place, and thus the easier the slave's job is. It is fairly easy for a fast food employee to sabotage the product. Paid workers don't want to see the business fail, because it will cost them their jobs. Slave workers want it to fail, because that means less work for them.

Similarly, of course, the slave worker wants to sabotage the equipment, so as to get out of work. No deep fat fryer, no deep fat frying.

The comparison to WW2 is entirely apt. It wasn't the lack of prior experience that made slaves sabotage the German war effort whenever they thought they could get away with it; Free German civilian workers were also drafted into the war effort, and their products showed no such signs of sabotage.

Before the cotton gin, slaves learned skilled trades that related to plantation work (blacksmithing, cooping, etc) or urban trades like assisting cobblers or carpenters. They didn't learn to be machinists or engineers, and it is arguable whether the time that skilled craftsmen had to devote to overseeing slave work was worth less than the savings achieved by using slave labor.

[grumbler]

You could also look at the roman empire. The slaves there often held important positions (especially the greek ones)... for example managers of the household, or teachers for the offspring of roman nobles.

Roman slavery was an entirely different concept than chattel slavery. Slaves in Rome (and most classical societies) were simply a lower social class than free persons. Manumission was frequent, as was pay for skilled work (and sometimes even for unskilled work). Most Roman slaves (except those owned by the state, who were the incorrigible ones and worked to death in short order) had at least the hope of eventual manumission and, if their owners were Roman citizens, became themselves citizens upon manumission. Chattel slaves were seldom freed.

[giblets]

A single paid worker working at a McDonald's most likely isn't thinking about how their individual actions will affect the entire business. Their primary motivation is to not get fired for not doing their job and most people in that position do the bare minimum necessary to not get fired. Comparing it to wartime conditions is absurd since prisoners of the Nazis had a moral motivation to sabotage the Nazi's war effort even if it meant they risked punishment if they got caught. Thank you for the lecture on how to be "persuasive" but there is no point in being "persuasive" if your claims aren't grounded in reality.

[Elok]

Roman slavery was an entirely different concept than chattel slavery. Slaves in Rome (and most classical societies) were simply a lower social class than free persons. Manumission was frequent, as was pay for skilled work (and sometimes even for unskilled work). Most Roman slaves (except those owned by the state, who were the incorrigible ones and worked to death in short order) had at least the hope of eventual manumission and, if their owners were Roman citizens, became themselves citizens upon manumission. Chattel slaves were seldom freed.

There were also strange hitches in the system like the vicarius--a slave bought by another slave to do his work while master sat on his arse (in emulation of his own master). Each vicarius could in theory save up enough money to buy his own vicarius, and so on a theoretically infinite number of times. The whole bizarre system only existed because endless Roman victories produced such a glut of slaves that even relatively humble citizens would own a slave or two as a status symbol, even if he had no work he wanted the slave to do, or that the slave was fit to do. You'd have slaves following master around to take his shoes off or hold his coat.

Downsides included inability to leave a bad job at will and master's legal right to rape you. And if you worked the mines or farming estates, well, then you were just plain ****ed. They really were about the same as plantation slaves, from what I've read. So I suppose it varied.

EDIT: I recall reading about a book by some patrician--Cato?--on how to manage a country estate. Supposedly the whole point of it was that Good Help is Hard to Find These Days. Everyone, from the lowest farmhand slave to the highest supervisor slave, was some combination of lazy, dishonest and incompetent. Or maybe Cato was just grumpy and impossible to please.

Whereas I think it was Petrarch who noted that slave-owners of his day lived in continual fear of assassination. Say what you like about modern-day wage-slaves, I don't think the McDonald's manager ever worried about them rising up, hacking him to pieces and deep-frying the chunks. So there's that.

[grumbler]

Classical slaves could, indeed, own property (even other slaves) while chattel slaves could not.

[grumbler]

A single paid worker working at a McDonald's most likely isn't thinking about how their individual actions will affect the entire business. Their primary motivation is to not get fired for not doing their job and most people in that position do the bare minimum necessary to not get fired. Comparing it to wartime conditions is absurd since prisoners of the Nazis had a moral motivation to sabotage the Nazi's war effort even if it meant they risked punishment if they got caught.

I don't see how your comparison of a paid worker at McDonalds to a Nazi slave adds anything to this conversation. Those are apples and oranges.

... there is no point in being "persuasive" if your claims aren't grounded in reality.

That's exactly what I have been trying to tell you! Bravo for finally getting it!

[giblets]

I don't see how your comparison of a paid worker at McDonalds to a Nazi slave adds anything to this conversation. Those are apples and oranges.



That's exactly what I have been trying to tell you! Bravo for finally getting it!

Your comparison with Nazi slavery was apples and oranges to begin with.

[giblets]

Urban Slavery in Columbia

In the early 1800s, South Carolina College was a significant institution in the growing city of Columbia. In order to understand slavery on campus, it is necessary to examine the role of slaves in Columbia during this era. Contrary to popular belief, not all slaves lived on plantations. In some ways, urban slaves, such as those in Columbia, inhabited a very different world than their rural counterparts.

One major difference between urban and rural slavery was the high concentration of slaves in cities. Whereas great distances often separated small communities of rural slaves, urban slaves typically lived and worked in close proximity with one another. In 1830, approximately 1,500 slaves lived and worked in Columbia; this population grew to 3,300 by 1860. Some members of this large enslaved population worked in their masters’ households. Masters also frequently hired out slaves to Columbia residents and institutions, including South Carolina College. Hired-out slaves sometimes returned to their owner’s home daily; others boarded with their temporary masters.

The movement of slaves throughout Columbia fostered ample opportunities for interaction among blacks in public and private spaces. These relationships permitted communication among slaves and the city’s small community of free blacks. Legislators developed state and local statutes to restrict the movement of urban slaves in hopes of preventing rebellion. Although various decrees established curfews and prohibited slaves from meeting and from learning to read and write, such rulings were difficult to enforce. Several prewar accounts note that many Columbia slaves were literate; some slaves even conducted classes to teach others to read and write. In spite of white efforts to prevent blacks from congregating, slaves and free blacks persevered to build a strong community of their own in Columbia.

Urban slaves also participated in white organizations throughout the city, though in limited roles. Many slaves attended services at local Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches, yet some struggled to obtain membership in these institutions. Jack, a college slave, applied for membership in the First Presbyterian Church in April 1820. Church leaders postponed this decision for nearly two years and consulted the college’s board of trustees regarding Jack’s character. Jack did not obtain membership before his death in 1822. Jack’s story reveals the close ties between campus slaves and their urban environment. It also provides evidence of whites’ utter disregard for the contributions of slaves throughout this period.

http://library.sc.edu/digital/slaveryscc/urban-slavery-in-columbia.html

Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum United States
Posted on September 17, 2014 by Christopher Rose

Host: Joan Neuberger, Editor, Not Even Past and Professor, Department of History
Guests: Daina Ramey Berry, Associate Professor, Department of History
Leslie Harris, Department of History, Emory University

When most people think about slavery in the United States, they think of large agricultural plantations and picture slaves working in the fields harvesting crops. But for a significant number of slaves, their experience involved working in houses, factories, and on the docks of the South’s booming cities. Urban slavery, as it has come to be known, is often overlooked in the annals of slave experience.

This week’s guests Daina Ramey Berry, from UT’s Department of History, and Leslie Harris, from Emory University, have spent the past year collaborating on a new study aimed at re-discovering this forgotten aspect of slave experience in the United States.

Download audio (right click to save)

Let’s just start by talking about what urban slavery was. I think when most people think about slavery in the US south, they imagine agricultural workers on big plantations. But apparently there were a lot of slaves in cities. Can you give us a general picture of what urban slavery was about?

LH: I think you’re absolutely right that our vision, particularly in the US, is about southern slavery, antebellum slavery as plantation slavery. But urban slavery was very important to the slave system as a whole. Slaves had to work at every part of the economy in the south. They were not just limited to plantations. In cities about ten percent of slaves in the antebellum south lived and worked in cities, and they did everything ranging from domestic labor to industrial work. They worked in the shipyards, loading and unloading goods onto ships. They traveled back and forth between rural and urban areas, transporting goods. Any kind of work you can imagine people doing, slaves did. They were woven throughout the economy; there were very few jobs, in fact, under slavery that enslaved people did not do in the antebellum south, and in other parts of the world. There have been urban slaves as long as there has been slavery. So it is not at all unusual to have slaves in cities.

What about the regime of slavery in cities? Was it very different from the regime on the plantation?

DRB: It was because they weren’t controlled by the agricultural calendar, which is what you see in the rural communities. They were controlled by a different rhythm of life. If they were working as domestics in the homes of their owners, they would just be doing domestic work like serving and cooking and doing tasks around the house. If they worked in the shipyard, they were doing work based on when ships came in when they needed to be loaded, when they needed to be sent out to go travel. So really the rhythm of work is much different and there’s a lot more geographic mobility among blacks in urban communities.

You mean they could move around the cities more freely? Or from city to city?

DRB: They could move around the city more freely. And I’m saying that hesitantly because they had to have passes. They had to have permission to go where they were going. But often times they lived even in separate quarters from their owners. Some cities had communities outside the edge of the city where all the black workers lived, some enslaved and some free. And so they lived there and there’s a different amount of mobility that you had on a large plantation, where they often could not even go to another plantation or there were a limited amount of people who had the ability to travel.

Can you give us a sense of how many urban slaves there were, or what the ratio was of urban to rural? Do we know?

DRB: We don’t have the exact figures—they change—because we have different census records that can tell us, but depending on what year you’re looking at, what city, how the census was enumerated that year, but for the most part we’re talking about ten to twenty percent of all slaves were in some type of urban community. In other cities like Charleston, they’re closer to twenty percent of those who were living in the city. So it really depends on the time period that you’re looking at.

LH: I would just add, if you look at individual cities, in some cities the black/white population is almost 60/40, or 50/50. Savannah was like that for some time, and New Orleans. And then the gender ratio in cities tends to be overwhelmingly female. And we think this is because women were involved in the upkeep of the fancy homes of the wealthy, but also even middling people would have a domestic servant or two to assist them with cooking and cleaning. So a lot of cities have a majority of women when you’re looking at the slave population.

The other thing I would point out is that the population of cities changes in the 1840s and 1850s in the south. You have an immigrant population moving in from Europe. The percentage of slaves in cities decreases, but so does the actual number of slaves in cities decrease. And we’re still not sure what that’s about. It could be that owners are moving slaves to rural areas because there’s a cotton boom at that time, just on the eve of the civil war. So the owners might be taking slaves out of the cities and moving them to plantations, and moving them West as places like Texas open up. So there is some change over the course of the antebellum period in terms of why the number of slaves in cities go down.

Leslie, you mentioned some of the occupations that black urban slaves performed. Can you talk a little bit more on the kinds of work that people did?

LH: Sure: household labor, as I mentioned; if you were a domestic in a home; if you were a cook, you might start your day by going to the market, bringing that back home, spending your day in the kitchen; laundresses, both in homes for individuals, but also laundry facilities around the city; women also cleaning houses and things like that, either you were owned by someone and did it for that owner in that house, if it’s a large house there might be a team of you, or you might be hired out to do that kind of labor. For men, men do a lot of skilled labor, so they work alongside whites. Things like blacksmithing, iron working, carpentry, all of those kinds of skilled jobs are the kinds of things that male slaves might do.

Some cities owned slaves. We just did a project in Savanah, and the municipal archives in Savanah recently put up a website about the city’s ownership of slaves, and those slaves would do all kinds of infrastructure work on the city, making sure the roads are smooth, doing repair to city buildings, and things like that, even possibly (we still have to investigate this) working in the jail, assisting with cleaning there, cleaning municipal buildings, that’s another option. Any kind of industry that’s happening in the city, it’s likely that there are slaves involved, either it’s a small number or, like Savanah we learned that the timber industry actually employed a large number of slaves. The brick industry actually employed a large number of slaves.

Daina, you mentioned that sometimes they lived separately from their owners, sometimes in communities. What were living conditions like for slaves?

DRB: For those who lived in these black communities, the quality of the housing was not as nice, obviously, as their owners. It was also different from what you would see in the rural plantations, when you would see slave cabins. So there were overcrowded living spaces. We have some images in the post-slavery period with the community that they lived in. And as I mentioned, both slaves and some free blacks lived in this community because they were often married to one another. But for those who lived in the outhouses or carriage houses of their owners—I don’t like to use comparative terms (I was about to say better, but I caught myself)—but their living conditions were different. The quality of the house was different than what you would find in a rural community. But these were small houses, the ones that were outside the city. One-room houses with a chimney and they could cook outside. In the chimney they would cook with large cast iron skillets in pans or pots or put sticks on a fire outside and cook outside. But it was very much communal living in this space.

And did some of the urban slaves live with their masters in their manor houses?

LH: Absolutely. The thing about city living, if the slave lived with the masters, was intimacy. And I don’t mean that in a necessarily positive way, but some owners liked to have the enslaved person sleeping at the foot of their bed or sleeping in the kitchen. They could ring a bell and bring the owner something in the night if they got thirsty or hungry. So for urban slaves there’s a lot of forced intimacy with owners, and separation, too, from slave communities. If on the rural plantations you have a hundred or fifty slaves in a kind of community, urban slaves could be more isolated depending on how tight the control of their owner was and how many people they knew in the city.

It sounds like there was a lot more mixing between free black, enslaved black, and free white peoples, especially in work places.

Both: Absolutely.

So, how did the presence of free blacks, for example, or whites affect enslaved life in urban communities?

DRB: I think it does a lot, actually. They’re working side by side, so enslaved people are hearing about things about the anti-slavery movement, they’re learning about the Nat Turner rebellion, they have people maybe near them who are literate who might read them pamphlets or things. They’re interacting with people that have traveled all over the world, some of them have come from different places, and they’re learning about things. And so we see this with a lot of the slaves that actually rebelled. In some of the large–scale rebellions in United States history, a lot of them were either free or working with free blacks and whites in very much urban spaces. We’ve seen that historically. So that does have that an influence on their attitude, and particularly those who have been transported back to a rural plantation, they’re bringing all of that knowledge with them.

Is urban slavery taught in the high school curriculum?

DRB: No, it’s not. Not yet. Slavery is hardly taught. They do teach the Civil War but it depends on what state you live in as well. I just came back from a workshop for eighth-grade teachers and they did Civil War. They did not have a sense of the differences between urban and rural, and they were very surprised to learn about, like, a brick-making factory, like Leslie was talking about or working by hauling timber and cotton to urban regions. They were not aware of that. They knew about domestic work inside homes, but they had not thought about the larger urban space as a setting for slavery.

And you’re both involved in doing research on urban slavery. What kinds of things are people studying now? And where is this field going?

DRB: There are a number of scholars right now who are doing work in comparative slavery. There’re people who are doing work in New Orleans and looking at Sierra Leone and Barbados. They’re doing multiple comparative research projects on urban settings and they’re tracing people who went from one city to another. There are people doing work on gender and sexuality, looking at women who were sex workers. I don’t really like that term, because they weren’t really getting paid for the labor that they were doing, but we can’t really call them prostitutes either. But there were a number of women who had power, there were brothel houses that women operated and owned in some of these urban communities. So that’s one area of looking at urban slavery in a comparative sense and not just in the United States.

LH: And I think we still need to know more about who owned slaves in urban areas. In colonial and early national New York for example, you have not only wealthy people owning slaves, but also artisans who owned slaves as helpers. And that sort of middling level of slave ownership, I don’t think we know enough about. And the same would be true in the antebellum south. What does it mean to own only one or two urban slaves because you’re an urban tradesperson and you’re in a city and you don’t have room for more than that—or money for more than that—but those slaves are intimately tied to your economic wellbeing. So I think we still can do some more asking of questions about what kinds of slave owners there are in cities and what does it mean to own a slave in the city if you only own one or two.

How has studying urban slavery changed the picture of US slavery all together?

DRB: It’s forced us to rethink this notion of large cotton plantations, where people are working in the fields from sunup to sundown. It’s moving us into other settings; not just homes and fields, but also industrial settings, shops, workshops, shipyards, and that’s changing the way we think about slavery, as Leslie was saying. We’re looking at cities that owned slaves, universities that owned slaves, medical schools and colleges that owned slaves. So we’re seeing all these different places where enslaved people show up.

So it’s a lot more ubiquitous than we originally thought, a lot more.

DRB: Absolutely, and it’s changing the way we think about it as a whole. And I think we’re at a moment now, historiographically, where we’re trying to understand the diversity of the institution and all of these places before we can really write these larger consensus narratives. And I think it’s ok to teach students that it’s a very diverse system, depending on where you live, what kind of work, and so forth.

LH: I think it’s also important that when we realize that enslaved people can work anywhere, it should make us think differently about African Americans as laborers as well. I think in American history, and even now today people are very dismissive of African American labor or imagine that African Americans can only occupy one place in the economy, and uncovering the variety of ways that enslaved people worked can give us a different picture of what African Americans as laborers have done in this country. I think that is a really important conversation to continue to have.

http://15minutehistory.org/2014/09/17/episode-54-urban-slavery-in-the-antebellum-united-states/

Urban Slaves a Little-Recognized Part of The Southern Economy

In my experiences teaching United States history, students have a misconception that American slavery was strictly an agricultural institution. The slave labor experience, in particular, is considered one that existed entirely on plantation fields, sowing, tending, or harvesting cash crops — tobacco, cotton, or rice. Not all rural slaves worked on plantations, though; many toiled on smaller farms with a workforce of five to 10 field hands.

Most slaves worked on farms in some capacity and in primarily in the fields, to be sure, but sweat fell from their brows in factories, in trade shops, in the sun while laying railroad tracks in-between towns, and even as fishermen in boats on the waters. (During a recent trip to Pensacola, Fla., I visited Fort Barrancas and marveled at the arched passageways inside the massive structure constructed primarily by slave engineers and laborers).

Slavery existed in urban areas, too. According to historians, 400,000 souls — about 10 percent of the South’s slave population — lived in urban areas. After the harvest season, some rural slaves, who possessed trade skills, were “hired out” and worked temporarily in towns and cities until they were needed back on the farm. It was not uncommon for there to be among the plantation slave population blacksmiths, carpenters, and mechanics, to name three jobs. In their spare time and with the master’s approval, according to historian Alan D. Watson, some bondsmen hired themselves out.

Most urban slaves possessed a skill. In cities and towns, one could find, among many occupations within the urban slave community, coopers, painters, cabinetmakers, cobblers, tailors, and carpenters.

It also was not uncommon to find urban slaves working in factories. During the Civil War, Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Va., for one, used skilled slave labor. During the war, Tredegar, along with its associated plants, employed approximately 1,200 slaves and free blacks. (By May 1863, 343 slaves comprised 59 percent of the work force among Tredegar’s affiliates in Georgia.) Even though their skills were in high demand, slaves of course did not have the opportunities to negotiate wages like their free black counterparts, who increased their compensation during the war. By the war’s end, writes one historian, Tredegar produced much of the South’s firepower — 1,600 cannons and 90 percent of shot and cannonballs.

In North Carolina, it was common to find slaves in towns such as Edenton, Fayetteville, New Bern, and Wilmington.

In coastal towns, according to Watson, urban North Carolina slaves served “as stevedores on the docks, pilots along the rivers, and cooks, stewards, and sailors on ships.” Watson writes further: “Women worked in towns as cooks, laundresses, and housekeepers. Wilmington slaves helped to fight fires, repair the streets, and build the town’s famed arches (later tunnels) for directing the flow of streams through the town.”

John Gilliard, for example, made a proposal to the town of Wilmington to “work the fire engines” and find four slaves for the same purpose. Once a month, the bondsmen made any necessary repairs on the fire engines and protected the town from incendiary threats. In 1778 Wilmington, slave owners commonly “hired out” slaves to help provide the town’s infrastructure. For instance, Priscilla Kennon was paid 10 pounds for a slave who worked on the arch — tunnels, Watson writes, that “direct[ed] the flow of streams through town.” In other places, such as Elizabeth City, tobacco factories such as Cameron & Towns employed slaves to manufacture an emerging and distinct Southern industry — plug tobacco.

Although primarily an agricultural institution, slavery took many forms. And one form was in bustling towns and cities.

http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/913/entry

[N35t0r]

Comparing it to wartime conditions is absurd since prisoners of the Nazis had a moral motivation to sabotage the Nazi's war effort even if it meant they risked punishment if they got caught.

And regular slaves do not?