This panel addresses the role of enslaved people as skilled makers, creators, crafters, and manufacturers in the U.S.’ booming Market Revolution (1780s-1850s). The Market Revolution took hold after the American Revolution. It was a nationwide commercial movement driven by an influx of cash, immigration-driven abundance of laborers, and technological innovations that powered mills and quickened the transportation of goods for sale. American life became more commercialized: as people were increasingly able to buy cheaper and more accessible goods, a new middle class of purchase-minded aspirational whites emerged. But this textbook retelling of the Market Revolution often obscures the very workers who produced the goods that so many white Americans clamored after—enslaved African-Americans. Slavery drove the success of the Market Revolution, since the institution proved a permanent and hereditary labor force with little to no reprieve. Garrett examines how one female capitalist slave-owner, Kate McCall, took advantage of Richmond and Alexandria’s rapid growth in Virginia by hiring enslaved workers to hammer nails for sale at her ironworks (1805-1815). She shows how ironically, McCall competed with fellow businessperson Thomas Jefferson to sell nails to Virginia builders, only to be undersold by the state-owned Virginia State Penitentiary (which Jefferson himself had a hand in creating!). Mann analyzes the paradoxical nature of one of our nation’s most famous buildings: the White House. An apparent symbol of democracy, it was built by enslaved workers between 1792 and 1800, and again between 1818 and 1821 after it burned. She shows how enslaved people’s skills such as quarrying stone, cutting timber, producing bricks, and assembling its roof and walls were crucial to, ironically, projecting the White House as a symbol of freedom. Tracy Lynn Barnett takes the panel’s timeline up to the Civil War as she analyzes the market forces that drove northern manufacturers Amos and Samuel Colt to produce firearms for sale to southern slaveholders in the 1840s and 1850s. She shows how enslaved workers’ legal and cultural banishment from owning—no less creating—firearms did not stop them from dying at the hands of masters who used such mass produced goods against them. Kathryn De Silva Hyde, an expert in African-American women as producers in the southern textile industry, will chair and provide comment.
We believe our panel provides the diversity for which the Business History Conference strives in their presenters and scholarship, especially in terms of race, gender, institutional affiliation, and career level. Excitingly, this would be the first time all four members would present at the BHC (only Garrett has attended the BHC before, as a Doctoral Colloquium participant and organizer). Our panel would infuse new scholarship and scholars in the BHC community! Thank you for your consideration.