Southern industry's most distinctive aspect was its wide and in- tensive use of slave labor. In the 1850's, for example, 160,000 to 200,000 - about 5 per cent of the total slave population - worked in industry. About four-fifths of these industrial slaves were directly owned by industrial entrepreneurs; the rest were rented by employers from their masters by the month or year. Most were men, but many were women and children. They lived in rural, small- town or plantation settings, where most southern industry was located, not in large cities, where only about 20 per cent of the urban slaves were industrially employed.
Many southern textile mills employed either slave labor or com- bined both bondsmen and free workers in the same mill, contradicting the myth that southern textile manufacturing was the sole domain of native poor whites. The manufacture of iron was also heavily dependent on slave labor, and southern tobacco factories employed slave labor almost exclusively. Slave labor was crucial to hemp manufacturing, and most secondary manufacturing - shoe factories, tanneries, bakeries, paper-makers, printing establishments, and brickmakers - used bondsmen extensively. Sugar refining, rice milling, and grist-milling together employed about 30,000 slaves. At ports and river towns, slaves operated mammoth cotton presses to recompress cotton bales for overseas shipment.
The southern coal and iron mining industry was greatly dependent upon slave labor, gold was mined throughout the Piedmont and Appalachian regions largely with slaves, and lead mining employed many bondsmen. Salt was produced with slave labor; slaves were used to log the pine, cypress, and live-oak in the swamps and forests from Texas to Virginia; and the turpentine extraction and distillation industry was entirely dependent upon slave labor. Southern internal improvements enterprises were so dependent upon slave labor that virtually all southern railroads, except for a few border-state lines, were built either by slave-employing contractors or by company-owned or hired bondsmen.