As the title says.
I’m not sure whether there were things that fit the bill for a “corporation” back then, though, so comments on that subject may be appropriate.
By a corporation I mean an entity which owns property not owned by any individual human being. That’s a rough definition, since you could come up with hypothetical examples fitting that definition which are not corporations (i.e. any sentient alien being would do) but it will work for a realistic question about a time in U.S. history.
Ah… should have googled first.
It looks like at JP Morgan–the company, not the person–took posession of slaves used as collateral.
I’m curious (perhaps inapprpriately morbidly) to know how the treatment of a corporately owned slave compared to the treatment of slaves by others. Of course, slave treatment was all quite variable, but I wonder if there were particular trends manifest in situations like those I’m talking about.
Wachovia, now Wells Fargo, took slaves as collateral, too.
Maybe they were immediately sold off?
I’ve also been wondering. I’m picturing a manufacturing plant with enslaved factory workers, or even an office where the guy at the next desk is a slave, and gets whipped instead of fired if he doesn’t meet performance goals.
We had a sign up in the office I used to work at that said;
“Arbiet macht frei”
I don’t know that the boss ever deciphered it . . . .
I’m sure there were some who did, but from my own research I’d speculate it was very rare- unless you count the companies that transported them from Africa and sold them on the wharves of course, but that was mostly before there was a U.S…
In my research whenever factories or businesses or cities or states needed slave labor they usually contracted with a slave owner. The usual lease rate for slaves was 1/10 of their value per year plus room/board/clothes {usually 2 changes per year}/medical care/etc… Robert E. Lee’s mother’s main income came from the lease of about 20 slaves she inherited from her father, while Wade Hampton and his brothers co-owned about 3,000 slaves at the time of the war and leased many of them to shipyards and railroads and government contracts (usually state government).
It’s worth remembering that there was not a lot of large scale manufacturing in the south- the north had more factories than the south had factory workers by the time of the Civil War. Plus, from a purely business decision slavery was probably not profitable to a corporation: there’s tremendous outlay or debtload to buy them and you could pay free labor for years and years for less than that expense, PLUS if your slave was maimed or killed on the job you were out a lot of money whereas free labor you could replace.
A friend of mine had a Father who worked for the old Southern Union Gas Company (now a part of Texas National Gas). His dad was transferred to Galveston to manage affairs there.
His dad found an old warehouse with masses of outdated paperwork from a previous gas company dating back to the 1850’s. The paperwork would be destroyed and the warehouse sold.
Anyway, according to him the records showed the purchase of slaves to lay gas pipe to light Galveston’s Strand Blvd. The slaves would go on the lay more gas pipe in the area.
Why would it be any less profitable for a corporation than anyone else? I don’t see why the points you raise would be any more or less of a problem either way.
I suspect that the real issue may well be that back then companies were a less frequent business structure altogether. Businesses were more commonly owned by individuals or partnerships. The use of companies as a commonplace business structure started I think mid 19th C when slavery was ending.
This is a surprisingly relevant inquiry in Chicago, where a city ordinance requires any companies doing business with the city to give an account on whether or not they profited from slaves. This always seems a little comical for my sole proprietorship founded in 1995.
Many slaves were inherited rather than purchased. Also, slaves are a long term investment- you’re expecting to use them and their “increase” (their descendants) throughout their natural life, but there’s also a social contract that you will provide for them when they become too old or too ill to work. This is offset partly by the fact that on a plantation or in a house there are still things that a 66 year old woman with arthritis or a man who’s lost his legs can do, even if it’s not but sitting on a stool shelling peas or working a churn dasher or rocking a cradle or shucking corn or whatever, while there’s really not a lot of good for older factory workers. Also, if a company owns slaves they’re going to have to pay an overseer who will live among them, which isn’t going to be necessary with free laborers making fifty cents a day. If a factory worker quits you fire him, if a slave runs away it’s a big deal of having to pay slave catchers to bring him back and then hoping they don’t injure him too much to work and then what do you do for the time you’re out?
Slavery was set up for people who intended to live in very close proximity to their slaves for a long period of time. Factories have never really worked that way.
You seem to be saying that slaves may be an investment that pay off only in the second owning generation ie that they only worthwhile if you inherited them such that you did not pay the initial outlay: I very much doubt this, I think they were highly profitable in the short term. I don’t think slaveowners were all so selfless that they bought slaves only in the hope that the slaves might turn a profit for the slaveowners sons.
What you are saying here seems to be a mix of “slave owning had costs” (which is equally true whether the slaveowner is an individual or a partnership or a company) and that slavery was more a rural thing than a manufacturing thing. The latter may be correct, but that isn’t an answer to the question of itself. Corporations can own rural businesses. It’s just that pre 19th C they didn’t as much as they do today.
As I said, I think the answer to this question lies more in the nature of pre-mid 19th C business structures than in anything inherent in slave owning.
Not if you spelled it that way. 
According to this article, railroads bought significant numbers of slaves.
http://railroads.unl.edu/blog/?p=32
Also, as mentioned by Sampiro above, they also hired slaves for track construction.
The south didn’t have many companies relative to the north and the north didn’t have as many companies when slavery was legal there. Buying slaves was a MAJOR capital outlay that would tie up all of a middle sized company’s operating capital OR multiply their debt load. (Very few slaves were bought cash on the barrel head, it was usually a promissory note because even rich planters could rarely afford the cash outlay.)
So suppose a day laborer earns $5 per week (which is a lot more than most earned in the antebellum era).
A company operating ca. 1850 can
1- Buy two healthy male slaves for $1,000 each, an outlay of $2000 or roughly $50,000 in 2011 USD and a bargain depending on time and place)
or
2- Take the same $2,000 and pay two free workers for almost 4 years
True, the slaves will still be yours in 4 years, BUT in that 4 years you will have to pay taxes on them as well as for their food, their clothing, all while they depreciate in value. Meanwhile if either should run away, die, be maimed, become ill or disabled, etc., you’re out a huge investment.
What’s your cash outlay for two free laborers? Nothing, unless you want to pay them a week in advance for whatever reason in which case, $10 (roughly $250 in today’s USD). A free laborer dies- it doesn’t cost you a penny, and that from that $5 per week they pay their needs and if they run away, hire another one. The interest on the $2000 paid for the two slaves would defray a significant part of the free wages, while if you borrowed $2000 to buy the slaves you’ll be paying interest (which further adds to their cost).
The massive immigration to the north began filtering down to the south and was making a dent in slavery. Slavery wouldn’t have been gone by the late 19th century probably but it would have changed. A major reason slavery ended in the northern states between the Revolution and the mid 19th century was that free labor was so much more practical, and in fact by the time of the Civil War many of the major slaveholders in the Carolinas and Virginia were already getting rid of many of their slaves by selling them to Texas and the Midwest in part because of the increasing availability of free labor.
More to the OP though: yes, some slaves were corporately owned, but they probably would not have accounted for 1% of the total population. The Census Slave Schedules were set up for individuals as owners and I don’t recall ever coming across the name of a business.
Now the OP was specific to the U.S… There were thousands upon thousands of company owned slaves in the Caribbean, but that’s another story. (I mentioned in another thread that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father alone owned an interest in hundreds if not thousands of slaves over the years through his shares in various companies that owned plantations in the Caribbean.) Here it was because many of the huge (and I mean HUGE) plantations were company owned by absentee investors in England and other parts of Europe.
So, this all raises an interesting question - say that I’m a Southernor looking to start a cotton plantation in 1850. Is there any reason that I would bother with slaves? It sounds like I’d be much better off exploiting free working men.
Is this just a statistical thing, or can you lose points on a bid or be barred from government contracts for having been involved in slavery when it was legal?
Where would you find them?
Plantations and railroads were utterly different working environments. Building a railroad was temporary. It might take a couple of years, but after that you didn’t need those workers. Plantations were forever. Cotton grew every year and in the same way. So did all the other crops. So did working in the Big House. It was extremely practical to buy slaves - who could breed other slaves - because you could amortize them over an entire lifetime.
And you had the social structure to consider. White workers wouldn’t do slave work. They certainly wouldn’t work alongside slaves. You couldn’t treat white workers in the same way and have the same expectations on plantations.
That’s why the Civil War was about slavery. The economic structure of the South was reflected in the big crops that were produced by plantations. It’s true that most farmers in the south didn’t own slaves but they didn’t control and direct the economy. Most workers in the north didn’t work for big industrial enterprises that soon came to control the Northern economy.
The slave structure of the South put the economy in a bind. The business class saw that they had to compete with the North for the new industries that were obviously hugely important and hugely profitable. But the North had millions of immigrants clamoring to come in and work. They avoided the South because the last thing the Southerners wanted was large numbers of outsiders demanding jobs and willing to work cheaply. That might give slaves ideas. The immigrants didn’t want to compete against slaves either, who could obviously underprice them in wages. At the time they also come predominantly from Northern Europe so they didn’t like the climate either. All those small farmers might be a draw to the factories, except that the South was seriously underpopulated. The Slave states in 1850 had only around 6 million people. But fully half of those were slaves. By contrast the North, from New England over to the western Great Lakes, had around 13 million people and was growing much faster.
The South was at a tremendous disadvantage because of the way the entire southern culture and economy had been set up. It would have had to dismantle it’s mind-set to compete, and even them the climate would have been a near-insurmountable issue. Staying with slaves for as long as possible - and long after - was why the economy was shaped the way it was, why the Civil War happened, and why the economy stayed flat for a 100 years after.
I think this would have been the Galveston Gas Company. They were unrelated to Southern Union since that wasn’t even formed until 1929 (1927 for a predessesor) and Clint Murchison, the founder, wasn’t even born until 1895.
I’ve got some WAG:
A plantation has plenty of land, so it’s relatively cheap to grow food and provide space for housing, making slaves relatively a better bargain.
The plantation is more-or-less permanent, so the investment in the next generation of slave offspring is more worthwhile.
As Sampiro pointed out, a plantation has a lot of tasks that children, older people, injured people, etc. can do, so you’re able to get payoff from slaves even when they’re not in peak laboring condition, wheras a factory generally needed a fairly narrow set of jobs done.
I also suspect that hired manual laborers were relatively expensive when there’s an open frontier just a state or two over, and you’re already far out in the boondocks. An immigrant who made it all the way to central Mississippi in 1840 probably had the capability and desire to keep going on to Texas and own his own land, rather than working for substinence wages. An immigrant who landed in Boston and made it 30 miles to Lowell might be easier to talk into working for low wages.