Were all slaves in the United States owned as personal property by individuals? Or were any owned by a business or government entity?
Corporations were a rare type of business enterprise until the post-Civil War era. Most corporations existed to create enterprises of a scale that ordinary individual investors couldn’t achieve. Most early corporations were formed to do major infrastructure like canals, bridges, and railroads, or a few banks. Each had to be individually chartered by a vote of a state legislature in the beginning.
Some types of partnerships may have existed, as in law firms, but those were also limited in scope.
Plantations were individually owned, without any type of corporate structure. So were almost all factories, stores, merchants, shipping companies, and everything else.
So my assumption is that it was highly unlikely that any businesses owned slaves. The business model of the day didn’t provide for it.
I’m pretty sure that the same is true for governments. They certainly used slaves - the White House is the most famous example of a structure built with slave labor. But those slaves were the property of one of the people that the government contracted with.
There might be some small exceptions I’m not familiar with, and if so I’d like to hear about them. As a general rule, the answer is a definite no.
Was the Tredegar Iron Works incorporated before the Civil War, or did it stay a partnership, because it did own slaves. If your just looking for companies, regardless of their incorporated status, most of the southern manufacturing companies relied on slave labor, as did southern railroads. At first, they were hired, but starting in the 1850s, they were more likely to be owned by the companies outright.
Joseph Anderson is usually referred to as the “owner” of Tredegar, although he may have had partners. He certainly did after the war.
And he certainly used slaves regularly at the factory, along with mainly immigrant workers treated about as badly.
I’m just not sure how the actual ownership was recorded. Were the slaves his personal property or the Iron Works’ property or, if he was sole owner, was there any technical difference between the two?
Can you provide some background on this, or on state law at the time?
I would presume in some southern states there were probably slaves that were in service of the governor, and when a new governor came in the slaves stayed in the governor’s mansion rather than going with the now-ex-governor.
And that in some of those instances if they received a salary (or even just room and board etc.), those were covered by a modest state budget?
It’s my understanding that slaves usually belonged to one person–on a plantation, some would belong to the husband, some to the wife, etc. However, there were laws about ownership of slaves too. Most plantations ran on a cycle of debt and had mortgages, and the banks had an interest in the property, which included slaves. So freeing slaves was a long and complicated legal process, and often couldn’t be done at all (depending on where you were and the circumstances).
Railroads were among the earliest businesses to be incorporated, because of the huge capital demands, and the prewar Southern railroads did own slaves. They never owned huge numbers–most industrial enterprises preferred to hire rather than buy slave labor, as this was more flexible–but they did own some. So I’m pretty sure that at least some small number of slaves were owned by a corporation.
On the campus of Georgetown University there is a small antebellum brick house which (when I was there in the mid-'90s) is known as the Telecommunications Building. Prior to the Civil War it was housing for slaves. I have no idea if the slaves were the personal property of an individual who leased them to GU or what the arrangement was, however. But, since slaves were property like the buildings on campus, I wouldn’t be surprised if it could be shown that the university owned them.