While enslavers thought of their work (the “business” of slavery) as being of the highest order, they argued that slave labor was inferior and even brutish. The work of enslavers was labor of the mind, suitable for white elites, while physical labor was ideally carried out by enslaved people. Dating back to the first European encounters with Africans, whites had believed that Black bodies were naturally meant for manual labor. Yet, as race-based slavery developed and intensified in the Americas, the perception grew and hardened.
By the end of the antebellum era, Joseph A. Turner—a Georgia enslaver and newspaper printer—proclaimed that the work of slaves was “menial service—for so far as real labor is concerned, I myself work harder than any negro on my plantation.” So anathema was physical labor for Southern white men and women that former First Lady Dolley Madison wrote that she was willing to let her enslaved housemaid Sukey “steal from me, to keep from labour myself.”
As much as Southern white men and women wanted to avoid manual labor, they also were wary of Black people engaging in a "higher" order of labor. Their fear was that doing even artisanal work—blacksmithing, coopering, carpentry—required both physical strength and mental acuity and therefore tapped into imagination and innovation. If workers could imagine a new design or process, could they also imagine a life outside of slavery?
It seemed no accident that Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner—who led or were alleged to have led slave revolts in 1800, 1822, and 1831—had all practiced carpentry. In the name of safety, by 1858, the city of Savannah, Ga., had barred free Black individuals from most skilled trades. This wouldn’t stop plantation owners from exploiting the labor of enslaved artisans, but defining work in more narrow terms could placate white fears of Black rebellion and freedom.
At the same time Savannah sought greater safety by legislating a racialized hierarchy of labor, the pro-slavery firebrand and South Carolina enslaver James Henry Hammond brought this southern belief to a national stage. In an 1858 speech to Congress, he argued that Black people were innately fit for the punishing work demanded by monocrop production. Hammond claimed that their work was essential — though only because it was important and valuable to those for whom they performed it. Black labor provided a stable base that enabled white people to do the work of the mind, of building governments and economies and societies: “Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.”