# In the U.S. slave states, were any slaves owned by corporations? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 23, 2011, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306 "2011-02-23T02:07:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Frisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b19c9b/32.png) [@Frisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frisco)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2011, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/21 "2011-02-24T21:37:00Z")
On a related note, you might find it interesting that several Japanese companies used slave labor drawn from the POW population held by the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII. “Supervised” by company employees, the allied slaves were frequently beaten. Underfed. Denied medical care. Many died from this treatment. None of the companies are willing to even acknowledge these events still today or to meet with the few still-living men who they used as slave laborers. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 10:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/22 "2011-02-25T10:18:37Z")
Yeah a raw deal for the men involved. But then colonial powers in the region had been using local labor as slaves or near enough for decades or even centuries so a bit of turnaround is nothing special. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2011, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/23 "2011-02-25T22:47:04Z")
In New Amsterdam, the Dutch West India Company owned slaves, as did some of the Dutch colonists individually. This is obviously well before there was such a thing as a “slave state”, but it must have set a precedent. The history of slavery in the North is rather surprising in terms of how late it persisted, for instance until the 1820s in New York. ---
**Author:** ![Frisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b19c9b/32.png) [@Frisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frisco)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2011, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/24 "2011-02-26T00:44:51Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > Yeah a raw deal for the men involved. But then colonial powers in the region had been using local labor as slaves or near enough for decades or even centuries so a bit of turnaround is nothing special. I’m not familiar with Americans using Japanese citizens as slaves. But more to my point, there are people living in the US today who were slaves under the control of corporations. You don’t have to go back to the 19th century. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2011, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/25 "2011-02-26T02:09:18Z")
A lot of dockworkers and shipbuilders in NYC were slaves, though I don’t know if they were corporately owned or leased from individuals. They were apparently given wages of some kind as there were actually taverns that catered to (though obviously was not exclusively patronized by) their business. ([Cite](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Conspiracy_of_1741#Lower-class_conspiracy)- there are others.) ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2012, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/26 "2012-03-20T03:30:47Z")
> [@Sampiro](#): > > 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. Bumping the thread because I just noticed something interesting while reading the [1860 instructions to census enumerators](http://usa.ipums.org/usa/voliii/inst1860.shtml) for the white-skinned slaves thread: The instructions specifically recognize the possibility of corporate ownership. > [@](#): > > **Schedule No. 2 – Slave Inhabitants** > > 1. Owners of Slaves.-- Under heading No. I insert, in proper consecutive order, the names of all owners of slaves. When slaves are the property of a corporation, enter the name of the corporation. So if anyone wants to search four million census records, we can get an exact answer to this question. Happy reading! ---
**Author:** ![Uncertain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Uncertain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uncertain)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2012, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/27 "2012-03-21T04:50:02Z")
How about governments (in the U.S.) owning slaves? (No political wisecracks, please.) ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2012, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/28 "2012-03-21T05:32:13Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > 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. The latter is highly unlikely since teaching slaves to read was illegal in much of the South. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2012, 7:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/29 "2012-03-21T07:21:35Z")
My WAG is that while there were some institutional barriers to forming a corporation in the prebellum South, costs of monitoring and control drove the outcome. Corporations had good access to the capital markets - they could sell bonds - but hiring somebody to monitor and brutalize slaves 24/7, and monitoring the monitors as well seems difficult unless you are on site and highly motivated (i.e. you own the slaves yourself). In the 20th century, I could imagine franchise operations or financial intermediaries getting involved in chattel slavery though. The scope of the corporation has been of interest to economists. As a thought experiment, you can imagine a factory floor full of independent contractors who trade goods among one another. But to lower the costs of transaction, we typically have a single owner of the plant and equipment who coordinates the production of a single product. But such economies of scope are not boundless. Otherwise GM wouldn’t have any suppliers: everything would be done in house. I suspect that owning a slave isn’t an arms length sort of endeavor, so it’s ill suited for a corporate structure. Renting slaves would be another matter entirely though. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/30 "2012-03-22T05:13:01Z")
> [@Uncertain](#): > > How about governments (in the U.S.) owning slaves? (No political wisecracks, please.) Especially since the Bush recession, my city owns quite a few houses & buildings as tax-forfeited properties. I would presume that back in the pre-Civil War times, some plantations went bankrupt and got forfeited to the local government for non-payment of taxes. So that government would also own any slaves on that plantation. At least temporarily, until they auctioned off the property. ---
**Author:** ![kaltkalt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bb73d2/32.png) [@kaltkalt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaltkalt)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/31 "2012-03-22T11:44:29Z")
I remember reading that one of the reasons Thomas Jefferson couldn’t free his slaves was because he owed so much debt to so many creditors, it would be giving away collateral. I assume some of those creditors were banks, and as such I would fully expect that banks owned slaves, if only through foreclosure and taking secured collateral. As for the question posed above, I am almost certain that it would have cost less overall to hire a “free” black and pay him something akin to the minimum wage of the day (something far less than our minimum wage adjusted for inflation) than to pay several thousand dollars for a good slave - plus the cost of feeding/housing/caring for the slave and plus the losses due to the slave’s incentive to work as slow as possible. The reason they didn’t do this (i.e. move to the form of virtual slavery we have today with people living paycheck to paycheck, barely able to get by, and valuing their job as a positive thing they’d be horrified to lose) surely comes down to 90% pure racism and 10% lack of foresight. Plus nobody could do it if they wanted to. If one plantation owner decided to free his slaves and hire people to work his land picking cotton for 2 cents per day or even incentivized at 1 cent per 50 pounds picked (assume that’s about equal to what illegal migrant workers make doing similar work today), his neighbors would boycott him, call him n\*gger lover, capture and re-enslave the slaves he’d freed, etc. Either nobody did it or everyone did it - just like ending segregation. They may all want to keep blacks enslaved or prevent blacks from eating at their restaurants, but as long as one person is going to refuse to do it, then everyone else is at a commercial disadvantage. This is why we could get rid of the civil rights act today… no store is going to go back to refusing to serve black people - if they did they would not only go out of business but they’d make the national news and be the most hated business in america. And rightly so. ---
**Author:** ![robardin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/43a26b/32.png) [@robardin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robardin)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/32 "2012-03-22T20:32:18Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > 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. I recently read an article in the NY Times about exactly this - how a large number of Confederate slaves were held not by plantation owners but corporations and companies, including the railroads. [http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/been-workin-on-the-railroad/](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/been-workin-on-the-railroad/) > [@](#): > > Railroad companies and contractors hired slaves by the hundreds; they also purchased slaves directly, in lots of 50 or more. In fact, by the 1850s, the South’s railroad companies could be counted among the largest slaveholders in their regions. They even developed special accounting entries on their balance sheets to show the value of “the Negro Fund.” In the South Carolina Railroad’s 1857 annual report, for example, the company listed 57 slaves in its possession. In 1859, its holdings had almost doubled, to 90 slaves. Confederate railroads bought and hired slaves right up to the end of the war, even as slavery fell apart wherever the Union Army opened corridors of freedom: in 1863 the Virginia Central Railroad purchased 35 “negro men” for $83,484.60. ETA: “The Negro Fund”?!! I was trying to think of a tie-in joke between George Costanza’s “Human Fund” from _Seinfeld_ and the United Negro College Fund but it was just too depressing to joke about. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306/33 "2012-03-22T22:27:54Z")
> [@kaltkalt](#): > > I remember reading that one of the reasons Thomas Jefferson couldn’t free his slaves was because he owed so much debt to so many creditors, it would be giving away collateral. I assume some of those creditors were banks, and as such I would fully expect that banks owned slaves, if only through foreclosure and taking secured collateral. > > As for the question posed above, I am almost certain that it would have cost less overall to hire a “free” black and pay him something akin to the minimum wage of the day (something far less than our minimum wage adjusted for inflation) than to pay several thousand dollars for a good slave - plus the cost of feeding/housing/caring for the slave and plus the losses due to the slave’s incentive to work as slow as possible. The reason they didn’t do this (i.e. move to the form of virtual slavery we have today with people living paycheck to paycheck, barely able to get by, and valuing their job as a positive thing they’d be horrified to lose) surely comes down to 90% pure racism and 10% lack of foresight. Plus nobody could do it if they wanted to. If one plantation owner decided to free his slaves and hire people to work his land picking cotton for 2 cents per day or even incentivized at 1 cent per 50 pounds picked (assume that’s about equal to what illegal migrant workers make doing similar work today), his neighbors would boycott him, call him n\*gger lover, capture and re-enslave the slaves he’d freed, etc. Either nobody did it or everyone did it - just like ending segregation. They may all want to keep blacks enslaved or prevent blacks from eating at their restaurants, but as long as one person is going to refuse to do it, then everyone else is at a commercial disadvantage. > > This is why we could get rid of the civil rights act today… no store is going to go back to refusing to serve black people - if they did they would not only go out of business but they’d make the national news and be the most hated business in america. And rightly so. Just the opposite; people did not server blacks at the Woolworths counter even though it was legal; because social pressure held them back. Hate was such that anyone serving blacks would be boycotted by whites, would be firebombed, etc. The question is, if the laws were repealed, would the status quo hold or would some areas revert eventually the the way things were? After all, it’s not like you can shoot some unarmed black kid on the street for no reason, then claim self-defence and not get arrested… oh, wait a minute… The problem is cooperation - when the Nazis used slave labour in factories, there were plenty of stories of sabotage through poor performance (swapping chewed bread for explosive in shell triggers…). The more complex the job becomes, the more likely a slave is a bad choice to perform this work. They might shovel the coal in the boiler but I bet they didn’t pilot the ship. Having a policy where education and world knowledge is forbidden or discouraged probably adds to this problem. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-the-u-s-slave-states-were-any-slaves-owned-by-corporations/572306.md?page=1)