Enslavement in Richmond and the Region

The involvement of Richmond College and many of its early leaders in enslavement took place within a broader local and regional context in which enslavement dominated the economy and culture in Richmond, Virginia, and the South. During the nearly three decades of the institution’s early history:

• the population of enslaved people in the region grew to its historic height; 
• thousands of enslaved adults and children were trafficked through the Richmond slave market, injecting enormous wealth into the region and making Richmond the “largest slave trading center in the Upper South” in the 1840s;¹ 
• through the combination of direct enslavement and the human leasing system known as “slave hire,” the day-to-day life of nearly everyone who resided in the Richmond region was entwined with slavery; and 
• the labor of enslaved people was essential to the daily operations of many Virginia institutions of higher education. 

This page provides information about enslavement in the Richmond region during the early decades of the University of Richmond’s precursor institutions: Virginia Baptist Seminary and Richmond College. For additional information about Richmond and surrounding Henrico County during the enslavement era, two recommended sources are: American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond (Gregg D. Kimball, University of Georgia Press, 2000) and “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction”: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782-1865 (Midori Takagi, University of Virginia Press, 1999). Details about the role of enslavement and enslaved individuals at Virginia’s higher education institutions can be found in Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680–1860 (Jennifer Oast, Cambridge University Press, 2016). A brief overview of the history of Richmond’s enormous slave market created by the University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab can be found here. 

Richmond’s Location and the Domestic Slave Trade

Geography and the Slave Trade

As part of British colonial displacement of Virginia’s indigenous nations, Richmond was founded on the site of an established Powhatan town. The settlement is depicted and described on a 1633 colonial map as “Cabins of the Powite Indians” on “Shaccoe Creek formerly called the Chyinek.”² William Byrd (1674-1744), a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council and the London agent for the House of Burgesses, noted the clear advantages of the site for trade in 1733: “When we got home, we laid the foundation of two large Citys [sic]. One at Shacco’s to be called Richmond, and the other at the Point of Appamattuck River, to be nam’d Petersburgh.” Both were “naturally intended for Marts.”³ 

Richmond lay within the boundaries of Henrico County until 1871 when the Virginia Constitution detached the state’s cities from surrounding counties. The enslavement era city limits extended approximately 2.6 miles (roughly west to east) along the James River, and 1.3 miles (roughly north to south) from the turn of the Central Railroad as it approached the river to the mouth of Shockoe Creek.⁴ Henrico County consisted of 291 square miles,⁵ with Richmond at its narrowest point and large rural areas extending to the southeast and northwest. 

As Byrd anticipated, Richmond’s position on the James River fall line (and later, at the meeting point of a network of railroads) led to its 19^th-century role as a principal commercial, industrial, and slave trading center. Enslavers in outlying Henrico and distant counties transported enslaved people to the city by land and water (the Kanawha Canal facilitated movement around the rapids), and eventually by rail.⁶ Brought to Richmond, enslaved men, women, and children might be “hired out” to local homes and businesses or “sold south” in the city’s extensive slave market or through private sales, separating families and sending individuals to unknown and at times more dangerous locations, while producing enormous wealth for a range of white Richmonders.

The Richmond Slave Market

The domestic trafficking of adults and children grew to take the place of—and to dwarf in numbers and profits for traffickers—the transatlantic slave trade. Richmond’s geographical position and the willingness of many of its residents to meet the “demand for slaves in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana”⁷ led to its rise as the “largest slave trading center in the Upper South,” second only to New Orleans in the South overall with respect to the number of enslaved people sold and trafficked.⁹ At times, the two cities’ markets fueled one another, with Richmond dealers assembling large groups of enslaved people for mass sales to dealers in New Orleans. In 1860, a Richmond auction firm seeking “first rate negroes” advised that “several persons” were in Richmond “now making up lots for the New Orleans market and if you have any on hand now is the time to bring them in.”¹⁰ 

A western Virginia newspaper editor celebrated the wealth the state was deriving from the domestic slave trade in 1836, claiming that 40,000 enslaved people had been sold out of the state in the previous year, resulting in an influx of approximately $24 million.¹¹ The Richmond Slave Trail Commission has estimated that annual sales of enslaved people in the city ranged between 40,000 and 80,000 individuals.¹² The cumulative number of adults and children sold in the city has been estimated at 350,000.¹³ One Richmond company sold approximately 2,000 people per year between 1846 and 1849, “with the overwhelming majority going to slave traders.”¹⁴ By 1857, the company estimated its total sales of enslaved people had “reached the enormous sum of two million dollars,” the equivalent of $72 million today.¹⁵ 

Richmond became the site of numerous “slave jails” where individuals were held during the sale process. These were likely well-known to many Richmonders, with, for example, mentions of two “slave jails” appearing on the front page of the Richmond Enquirer on a single day in 1853,¹⁸ and the frequent publication of news and classified items featuring the activities of the city’s slave market alongside advertisements for land, luxury goods, and upcoming academic sessions at area institutions.¹⁹ The auction houses that made up Richmond’s slave market and the city’s public whipping post were just blocks away from both First Baptist Church, led by Virginia Baptist Seminary and Richmond College founding trustee Jeremiah Bell Jeter (1802-1882), and First African Baptist Church. One visiting anti-slavery minister later recalled the nearby “slave-pen,” the market where families were separated and “girls were sold for lust,” and the sound of the whip and the cries of the enslaved that “mingled with the songs of devotion and the voice of prayer” in the church.²⁰ Tobacconist and Richmond College trustee James Thomas, Jr. (1806-1886), sold enslaved people in the Richmond market through dealers Sidrum Grady, Silas Omohundro, and Robert Lumpkin.²¹ 

The Enslaved Population

According to Federal Census figures, in 1860 the proportion of the population constituted by enslaved individuals in Virginia’s counties ranged from 3.3% in Carroll County (more than 250 miles from Richmond on the North Carolina border) to 74% in Nottoway County (50 miles southwest of Richmond). Enslaved people made up 34.5% of the Henrico County population, which included the City of Richmond.²² 

Henrico County’s total population grew from under 30,000 in 1830 to more than 60,000 in 1860.²³ Enslaved adults and children constituted 42% of the county’s residents in 1830, 40% in 1840, 36% in 1850, and 32% in 1860. Within the city limits, the number of enslaved individuals rose from approximately 7,500 in 1840 to approximately 11,700 in 1860,²⁴ though the proportion of the overall population constituted by enslaved people declined from 37% in 1840 to 30.8% in 1860, due in part to the influx of white immigrants.²⁵ 

Enslavement in the Richmond Region

In many ways, Richmond and surrounding Henrico County typified “southern slave society,” in which “whites and blacks . . . grew up, were socialized by, married, reared children, worked, invested in, and conceived of the idea of property, and honed their most basic habits and values under the influence of a system that said it was just to own people as property.”²⁶ The area’s social customs and legal system meant that “every free person, particularly white residents, had power over slave workers.” Enslavers had “ultimate control and could discipline, hire out, or sell a bond laborer at any time.”²⁷ While some enslavers considered themselves “benevolent,” the system was dependent on actual or threatened violence and the perpetual risk of being separated from family or other connections. Enslavers and those who leased enslaved people could determine for themselves what level of “correction” they imposed on those they held: withholding food, whipping, or selling an individual into a more dangerous situation. Details of “Mayor’s Court” proceedings that appeared in the city’s papers reflected the frequent use of the public whipping post to punish Black men and women; in Virginia, white criminals were not whipped. The Mayor also encouraged enslavers and hirers to “correct” enslaved people themselves to save the city money.²⁸ Free Black people were also constrained by the slave system. If they were determined to have broken the law (crimes that included owing back taxes²⁹) or were unable to prove their free status,³⁰ they were whipped and, at times, sold into slavery. 

In Henrico County’s rural areas, enslaved adults and children labored in agricultural and milling operations, coal pits and granite mining, and in the homes (both large and modest) of their enslavers or hirers. When enslavers in outlying areas found themselves with an oversupply of labor due to seasonal lulls and shifts in crops, what had once been an ad hoc system of enslaved people being leant between farmers as needs arose³¹ shifted to a formal system of human trafficking and leasing, providing a massive enslaved labor force to the city’s small businesses, schools, homes, and the industries for which Richmond became nationally known. Some hirers, including Richmond College, subleased enslaved persons to yet another hirer, drawing profit themselves through commissions.³² 

Acts of Self-Determination

As leasing became an increasingly significant economic and social force in the city, “slave brokers” thrived and “played a prominent role in hiring negotiations.”³³ Some enslaved people, however, sent to Richmond for a prescribed period, handled negotiations themselves and paid their enslavers “a stipulated amount of money.” What they earned “above that amount was theirs to do as they wished.”³⁴ At times, enslaved individuals used these funds for donations to church collections or to purchase their freedom or that of a loved one. Some who were “hired out” to large businesses at times also “lived out,” residing “apart from both owner and employer.”³⁵ Other enslaved people leased to individual homeowners were housed on the same farm or, if in Richmond, on the same lot as their “hirers” and those they enslaved. 

Enslaved people exercised other measures of self-determination amidst the constraints and threats under which they lived—forming and sustaining family relationships and other personal connections despite the risk of separation; developing spiritual community, with its network of connections that at times facilitated escapes and the purchase of individuals’ freedom through pooled resources; and acts of resistance such as escapes and “losing time,” finding opportunities to gather in groups outside churches, in the city’s market, or in grocery stores, though they could be punished for being “out of track” or participating in an “unlawful assembly of negroes” (a restriction that also applied to free Black people). In one such example, in 1852, the Washington Hotel, which often housed visiting salesmen³⁶ and was located across from St. Paul’s Church on Grace and Ninth Streets, was the site of a large, secret “subscription ball” for enslaved and free Black people, held in its basement bar. A man later referred to as the hotel’s “head dining room servant” organized the event, and “80 to 100” young men and women gathered before the event was raided by a “posse of watchmen.” Participants were jailed, and a notice containing their names and those of their enslavers/hirers was published in the newspaper. Among those arrested were “R. Jacobs” and “C. Jacobs,” both held by James Thomas, Jr.³⁷

Civil War Impressment

During the Civil War, through “impressment,” thousands of enslaved individuals across the state were pressed into service by the Confederate government, with many transported to the Richmond area to construct fortifications around the city. Additionally, enslaved prisoners who had been sentenced to transportation and sale were forced instead to “labor on the public works for life.”³⁸ When ill or injured in the course of dangerous work, they were transported to the Engineer Bureau Hospital in Richmond for treatment. Conditions in the hospital were described as horrific. Amid the stories of gangrene and filth, there is a record of one escape—a 25-year-old man named Stephen.³⁹ Those still at the fortifications also risked their lives to attempt an escape. In 1862, close to 200 enslaved individuals held there were described as having “escaped to the enemy.”⁴⁰ Some who had been enslaved in the city attempted to escape, as well, despite the large numbers of Confederate soldiers in the area.⁴¹

Enslavement and Richmond’s Economy

Enslavement pervaded every dimension of Richmond’s economy. When a British visitor in the 1850s expressed his wish to see Richmond’s slave market, a local hotelier replied that there was no need to go to the market at all if he simply wished to see enslaved people because “all of the [Black people] in this hotel are slaves, and all the work in Richmond is done by slaves.”⁴² Charles Dickens described all the laborers at a Richmond tobacco factory as enslaved.⁴³ While free people (Black and white) made up a portion of the city’s labor force, large numbers of enslaved people labored in area homes, municipal projects, industries, small businesses, and educational institutions.

In large city homes, enslaved people were cooks, carriage drivers, wetnurses, and maids, living in the house with enslavers or in an outbuilding on the lot. For residents of more modest means, leased slave labor enabled them to live as, in effect, temporary enslavers. In some cases, a “hired” domestic worker was the only enslaved person in a household; in others, they augmented existing “servants,” sharing space with those a family already enslaved.

Because government-funded infrastructure projects often relied on enslaved laborers, even the poorest white resident was the beneficiary of the slave system. Richmond’s city government relied on enslaved labor for “essential city services, including street paving and cleaning, maintenance of the Capitol grounds, and trash removal—jobs that white workers frequently shunned.”⁴⁴

Industry

Despite four recessions between 1840 and 1860 that “wreaked financial havoc on Richmond industries,”⁴⁵ in the years before the Civil War, Richmond “reached a level of industrial development and growth few southern cities could match,”⁴⁶ making it the country’s “thirteenth most productive industrial center” by 1860.⁴⁷ Iron, wheat, and most significantly, tobacco processing and manufacturing operations dominated the city’s milling and manufacturing district, with factories “the size of city blocks” having “replaced the one room workshops that had predominated only a decade or two earlier.”⁴⁸ While flour milling and iron were critical to the city’s overall wealth, “tobacco production values—totaling more than $4 million—exceeded the combined products” of the other two industries.⁴⁹ Tobacco inspection laws (which mandated dockside inspection of all exports) and the warehousing of large quantities of tobacco in the city made Richmond the nexus for the “inspecting, negotiating, and selling the lucrative leaf.”⁵⁰ Richmond’s tobacco manufacturers, including Richmond College trustees and donors James Thomas, Jr. and Thomas C. Williams, Sr. (1831-1889), were dependent on the forced labor of large numbers of enslaved people. The enormity of the enslaved labor force gave rise to a subsidiary economy of its own by creating work for many professions and trades, including lawyers, medical practitioners, “auctioneers, commission merchants, and slave traders,”⁵¹ as well as overseers, hiring agents, and seamstresses who clothed laborers. Financial services were also deeply entwined with enslavement. In addition to holding assets individuals had amassed through enslavement, throughout the South, “banks regularly accepted enslaved people as mortgage collateral for the securitization of existing short-term loans.”⁵² The Richmond offices of several life insurance companies, including Baltimore Life Insurance, American Life Insurance and Trust Co., and National Safety Life Insurance Company, advertised the sale of “slave insurance” policies.⁵³ While there was some shift to exploiting the labor of white immigrants in industries that already relied on white workers, “substituting free laborers for slave workers was not a popular trend” among the city’s factory owners and manufacturers.⁵⁴ 

Other Commercial Enterprises

Advertisements by business owners record the range of work performed by enslaved labor in enterprises large and small. On a single day in 1850, proprietors of one shop sought “two Negro men to work in our store,” while others sought “an able bodied Negro man, of good character, to attend in our store.”⁵⁵ The “Wants” section in a December 30, 1859 issue included advertisements seeking large numbers of people (“Sixty Able Negro Men” for the Carbon Hill mines and “300 Negroes for the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad Company”), as well as items in which one or two enslaved people with particular skills, including experienced wagon drivers, blacksmiths, and cooks, were sought.⁵⁶ 

University of Richmond institutional history research similarly includes examples of the varied roles of enslaved labor in local businesses. The city’s principal hotels drew tourists and businessmen, including slave traders. Nearly all levels of their daily operations depended on the labor of enslaved people. Robert Davis (age 30), was enslaved by Richmond College trustee Jeremiah Bell Jeter and “hired out” to The American, a prominent hotel where he worked in the dining room before his escape in winter 1864-1865.⁵⁷ The owners of Glenn & Davis, which provided brickwork for the Richmond College campus, enslaved people through their business.⁵⁸ 

Educational Institutions 

Like other educational institutions in Virginia, Richmond College, prior to the closure of the Grace Street campus in 1861 at the start of the Civil War, depended on the labor of enslaved people in its daily operations, as discussed below. 

At Virginia’s colleges and universities, enslaved people were under the control of their enslavers, stewards who oversaw campus operations, and the faculty and students to whom they were assigned as servants. Enslaved laborers constructed campus buildings and cooked and served meals, polished students’ shoes, assisted professors in classrooms and laboratories, maintained campus grounds, tended gardens, washed clothes, removed waste, and at times, planted and harvested cash crops.⁵⁹ 

Several Virginia colleges and universities have documented the role of enslaved labor at their institutions. The College of William & Mary has documented that some enslaved individuals were held by the institution itself, having been purchased by the college or given to the institution; some were leased by the college; and others were brought to campus by students.⁶⁰ Thomas R. Dew (1802–1846), William & Mary’s president from 1836 to 1846, was a slavery advocate whose belief that Virginia’s wealth was contingent upon enslavement led him to oppose the idea of “gradual emancipation.”⁶¹ Research at the University of Virginia records individuals on the campus directly enslaved by the institution, enslaved by faculty, leased by students (despite an institutional policy that forbade it), and leased to the institution by their enslavers. In addition, an increasing number were enslaved or leased by “hotel keepers” who operated student boarding facilities.⁶² 

Washington & Lee University research documented that in 1834, the institution, then known as Washington College, enslaved 67 people, many bequeathed to it by a benefactor. That year, the college “hired out” 28 individuals, whose labor yielded $952.50 in income to the institution. In 1836, despite a stipulation that the enslaved people given to the college not be sold for 50 years, the institution sold 55 people to a Lynchburg resident who co-owned a Mississippi plantation to which he planned to send them. The sale of these and seven other individuals earned the college $22,515.41.⁶³ The Medical College of Virginia has also documented its reliance on leased and enslaved individuals.⁶⁴ In one case, an enslaved person was assigned to assist a faculty member in the Anatomical Department, with half of his hire cost to be paid by the faculty and half by the “Demonstrator of Anatomy.” To provide bodies for dissection, the college secured the services of a “resurrectionist,” who stole bodies from the nearby burying ground designated for enslaved and free Black people.⁶⁵ 

Richmond College and Precursor Institutions

Research to date suggests that Richmond College and its precursor institutions did not directly enslave individuals, but that it relied on the labor of individuals leased from their enslavers (including institutional figures and their families). In some cases, the institution’s steward determined the duties of enslaved laborers; in other cases, the duties were determined and overseen by the board of trustees. For example, trustees authorized the payment of an enslaved person to “attend” the classroom of Bennet Puryear (1826-1914) and “assist him in preparing for his Lectures.”⁶⁶ Faculty and students were also served by enslaved people overseen by the Boarding Department. Richmond College at times “hired out” enslaved persons leased from others, with the institution retaining the income. In one case, an enslaved man named Martin was leased to a neighboring property owner when there was not enough work for him on the campus. In another, a man named Thom, enslaved by Robert Ryland and hired out to the college, was leased to a neighboring property owner and later to the factory of trustee James Thomas, Jr.⁶⁷ 

Details about the role of enslaved labor at Richmond College and its precursors are provided in An Experiment at Dunlora, Enslavement in the Early Years, and “A Season of Discipline”: Enslavement, Education, and Faith in the Life of Robert Ryland (Shelby M. Driskill, 2021).⁶⁸

Escapes, Armed Resistance, Abolitionist Efforts & Union Support

While slavery pervaded daily life in the Richmond region, there were frequent instances of individual and small-group resistance by enslaved people and abolition pressure from the north, as well as rarer examples of larger-scale antislavery and abolitionist activities in the area. News of escapes of enslaved adults and children appeared in classified ads and articles in the city’s newspapers, with some linked to the work of the Underground Railroad. In 1835, newspapers featured editors’ outrage over northern abolitionists’ mailing of thousands of antislavery and abolitionist publications to enslavers. Effects of two revolts by enslaved and free Black individuals reverberated for decades: the thwarted 1800 uprising known as Gabriel’s Rebellion (also known as Gabriel’s Conspiracy), which was intended to spark a large-scale uprising in and around Richmond; and Nat Turner’s Revolt of 1832, during which more than 50 members of enslaving families were killed in nearby Southampton County. John Brown (1800-1859), a white abolitionist, sought to provoke a war against slavery through his raid on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, then part of Virginia.

An unknown but likely minuscule number of white people in the Richmond region believed in immediate (as opposed to gradual) abolition. The Richmond-based Virginia Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, founded by former enslaver Robert Pleasants (1723-1801) of Henrico County, operated from 1790 to 1804 and supported an incremental process of ending enslavement and educating freed Black people. Despite including notable Virginia elites, however, the organization’s numbers never exceeded 133, with many inactive.⁶⁹ Some in the area did directly aid enslaved individuals in escapes, or in the Civil War years, sought to destabilize the Confederacy by assisting the Union. Examples of city residents who helped transport individuals to freedom were Samuel A. Smith, a white shoemaker, and James Caesar Anthony Smith, a free Black man who operated a bakeshop and later stated that he had assisted in escapes since 1826.⁷⁰ Both men aided Henry “Box” Brown (c.1815-1897), who escaped Richmond in 1849 by having himself shipped to Philadelphia in a wooden box. During the Civil War, the abolitionist and pro-Union beliefs of wealthy Richmond resident Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900) resulted in her tending to federal prisoners held in Richmond, aiding some in their escape, and serving as a Union spy.⁷¹ Vital to Van Lew’s work was Mary Richards Bowser, also known as Mary J. Richards (c.1841-unknown), who was enslaved from childhood by the Van Lew family. In lectures Bowser gave after the Civil War, she described her participation in the espionage network operated by Van Lew: assisting in the escapes of Union prisoners, witnessing a secret session of the “Rebel Senate,” and briefly using a position in the Confederate White House—where she served the family of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (1808-1889)—as a means of gathering intelligence and weakening the southern fight to defend slavery during the final months of the war.⁷²

‍