Interior of Slave Pen in Alexandria, Virginia
The vast majority of male slaves worked as farmhands. Others worked as laborers, waiters,
blacksmiths, drivers and servants at inns.
Although the free labor of the slave was the most obvious economic
benefit to the owner, slaves were also a liquid asset. The selling or hiring out of excess slaves to
the labor hungry cotton plantations of the Deep South
was a source of revenue for many slaveholders in Virginia .
A slave woman was commonly esteemed less for her laboring qualities, and
most for those qualities which gave her value as a broodmare. In 1857, a Richmond newspaper price list quoted the
price of a “number one man…extra (fine)” at $1,450 - $1,550. “Good” at $1,200 - $1,250. Women sold for twenty percent less.
To appreciate the
hold that slavery had on the sense of economic well-being of both the slave
owning and the general populations, it is important to recognize the economic
pervasiveness of slavery in Virginia. In
1860 Virginia
had the largest number of slaves of any state in the Union .
One out of every three white families in what is modern day Virginia owned slaves, making it similar to
such Deep South states as Alabama , Louisiana and Georgia . A slave worth
$1,800 in 1860 would have a current value of some $49,000, the price of a new luxury
car. So, even a modest slave owner
would have a large economic stake in perpetuating the institution.
Even a cursory
examination of the writings of the time suggests that slavery led many slave
owners not to empathize with the humanity of slaves. The
Alexandria Gazette of January 2, 1850 , for
example, put reward notices for a runaway slave named Wallace aged twenty one
and a missing black horse aged seven years side by side, as though these
notices belonged in the same category.
Non-slave owners,
without the motive of economic self-interest blinding them, could recognize the
inherent problem of slavery in Virginia.
The Benevolent Society of Alexandria for
Ameliorating and Improving the Condition of the People of Color, for example,
published a statement stating,
“These enormous cruelties cannot be
practiced among us, without producing a sensible effect upon the morale of the
community: for the temptation to participate in so lucrative a traffic, though
stained with human blood, is too great to be withstood by all; and even many of
those who do not directly participate in it, become so accustomed to its
repulsive features, that they cease to discourage it in others.”
A quick look at women doctors and medicine in the
Civil War for the general reader. Technologically, the American Civil War was
the first “modern” war, but medically it still had its roots in the Middle
Ages. In both the North and the South, thousands of women served as nurses to
help wounded and suffering soldiers and civilians. A few women served as
doctors, a remarkable feat in an era when sex discrimination prevented women
from pursuing medical education, and those few who did were often obstructed by
their male colleagues at every turn.