Did/Could US State Governments own slaves?

ben0628

Banned
I don't think they ever did IOTL, but that's an interesting question to ask.

I'm also curious. You'd think they'd have some to use as a free labor force to construct buildings, roads, etc but I've never actually read anywhere that state governments owned slaves. Was it illegal?
 
During the Civil War, the Confederate government "borrowed" slaves to do things like construct fortifications. This was not exactly popular with the slave-owners. The last ditch attempt to enroll slaves in the army was apparently sold as more of the same thing. However, this short description has stretched my knowledge of this probably past the point of accuracy.
 
I don't know if this happened in other states too, but after the import of slaves was outlawed in 1804, Louisiana had this rule that when a smuggler was seized the slaves aboard were seized as contraband and although the state did not keep the slaves, it would auction them off and keep the money.

Apparently Jean Lafitte found a trick to turn this to his advantage: Instead of trying to smuggle new slaves into the country he would dump them somewhere between New Orleans and Galveston and then have a middle man- often Jim Bowie - 'discover' the slaves, turn them over to the authorities and pocket the reward. Then with the money from that reward he would have another middle man buy back as many of the slaves as he could at the next auction. Like this he would eventually legally own them for less then it would cost to bribe his way through the system.
 
As I understand the logic, declaring slaves contraband, as the Union Army did during the Civil War, required them to maintain a legal fiction that, for however brief a moment, the US government took that property into its possession. So, ironically, its quite possible that the US government owed the largest number of slaves it ever did as part of freeing them.
 

ben0628

Banned
Okay so far from what I've heard, the government has "temporarily owned" slaves to either then free them, auction them off, or use them during times of war.

But what I really want to know is, if slavery was legal, why didn't Southern State Governments permanently own slaves and use them for public works projects or as civil servants (only certain positions), labor for government corporations, etc? Was there laws preventing them from doing so?
 
Okay so far from what I've heard, the government has "temporarily owned" slaves to either then free them, auction them off, or use them during times of war.

But what I really want to know is, if slavery was legal, why didn't Southern State Governments permanently own slaves and use them for public works projects or as civil servants (only certain positions), labor for government corporations, etc? Was there laws preventing them from doing so?
As far as I know, no there were no laws or prohibitions against governments owning slaves. If they existed, it would be on a state by state basis, and up to the laws and constitution of the state in question. But as I said, as far as I know no such prohibitions existed. The reason slaves were never purchased by the government for use as laborers is simple: cost. Slaves could be really, really expensive in the South. So while there's no reason states couldn't own slaves, it didn't really make much sense for them to. It would be cheaper to just hire labor on the market for whatever project needed doing, be it slave or free. And if there was some particular reason for the state to use slave labor for a given task, it could simple rent them from the owners for as long as they were necessary, or hire them on as day laborers, which was a fairly common practice with slaves. Either is a more efficient use of funds to achieve a given task than purchasing a stock of slaves to use as the state's own laborers. There's also the matter of the state really not doing too much in the way of big construction projects outside of war, especially in the South. That was the bastion of the old anti-whig opposition to internal improvements, and of government action in general (although both of those things can be and often are over exaggerated). So there weren't very many projects where the state would be looking for a large number of laborers and wouldn't simply contract the work out. As for using slaves as civil servants, what position exactly do you think they would be able and trusted to fill? Any position that required reading and writing was out as to my knowledge virtually every slave state prohibited teaching slaves to read and write- it still happened a good deal, but it was theoretically illegal. And even if they could read and write, what position could you fill with a slave? Something that didn't require too much actual authority so it would have to be menial, and ideally not one privy to sensitive information as the South was paranoid of slave rebellions since Turner's Rebellion and the Denmark Vessey's plot in Charleston. And it couldn't be a position that whites would want, since that would be taking away opportunitities for local politicians and grandees to distribute largess and patronage. I don't doubt you could find a few positions that satisfied these requirements, but you still run into the cost issue of before. Slaves are really expensive, so they need to be doing something that, in this case, would be substantially more expensive for the government to hire whites to do. Now, it's possible that there were still some positions that slaves could viably fill, and it might even have been done, but I think you can see at this point all of the things that prevented it ever becoming significant.
 
As I understand the logic, declaring slaves contraband, as the Union Army did during the Civil War, required them to maintain a legal fiction that, for however brief a moment, the US government took that property into its possession. So, ironically, its quite possible that the US government owed the largest number of slaves it ever did as part of freeing them.

Indeed. Historian Bruce Catton, in writing about the invention of the "contraband" doctrine by General Ben Butler, noted that as a result. the Federal government became the largest slaveowner in history, not excluding Pharaoh the Great.

Another question is: could slaves be owned by a corporation? One presumes that slaves and other property might be temporarily owned by a bank or other creditor as a result of bankruptcy, but I have never heard of a corporation owning slaves as a business practice.

One guesses that slaves might be owned by a partnership, in particular the backers of a slave trading voyage (before 1808). Were there ever slave traders operating as corporations?
 
Another question is: could slaves be owned by a corporation? One presumes that slaves and other property might be temporarily owned by a bank or other creditor as a result of bankruptcy, but I have never heard of a corporation owning slaves as a business practice.

You're correct that banks took possession of slaves that had been used as collateral. I believe these were auctioned off relatively quickly. JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo) both fell afoul of a Chicago regulation that forced companies to disclose whether they had ever profited from slavery.

One area where I know a small but appreciable number of slaves were owned by companies was southern railroads. Massive amounts of slave labor were used in their construction, and, while most of it was hired out from owners, Theodore Kornweibel has shown that it was not unheard-of for companies to purchase slaves outright.

Interestingly, one argument for why this happened at all was the higher fees, more restrictive contracts, and sometimes even life insurance policies that slave owners demanded before leasing out their slaves for dangerous railroad work. This seems to have changed the cost structure so that the railroad owning the slaves outright was occasionally viable.
 
Another question is: could slaves be owned by a corporation? One presumes that slaves and other property might be temporarily owned by a bank or other creditor as a result of bankruptcy, but I have never heard of a corporation owning slaves as a business practice.

One guesses that slaves might be owned by a partnership, in particular the backers of a slave trading voyage (before 1808). Were there ever slave traders operating as corporations?

Slaves absolutely could be owned by a corporation. As Fishmonger said above, southern railroads used slave labor and sometimes purchased the slave outright. Essentially the same pattern is seen in Southern industrial and manufacturing concerns. They certainly could and would employ slaves, but generally they would rent them from the owners rather than purchase them due to the cost, though as with the railroads that wasn't absolute. Interestingly, it wasn't unheard of for industrial entities to mix slave and free labor if they needed to to get the necessary labor. Tredegar Iron Works would be an example of the above trends.

As for slave trading corporations, I can't say if they ever existed as legal corporations, but there were absolutely partnerships, conglomerates, and companies that went into slave trading. It wasn't uncommon for a group of investors to get together and pool their capital to essentially commission a slave ship to go out and acquire a load of slaves. The backers would often pay upfront, at least in part, and get their share of the profit either as a certain number of the people brought in as slaves, or as a percentage of the profit of the slaves sale. Arrangements like that persisted and IIRC increased after the abolition of the slave trade since slave smuggling was a risky venture and gathering a group of investors spread the risk and ensured a group of people to take the slaves that had been smuggled in.

So ultimately, I'd say that corporations could and did own slaves if they wanted to, but most of the time the costs didn't work out for them to want to.
 
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