The debate is raging about whether or not enslaved people accrued some benefit from having learned skills during slavery. There’s little question that Black people did all kinds of work while enslaved. They were mechanics, carpenters, blacksmiths, domestic workers, and tailors, as well as doing agricultural work. The State of Florida points this out to us in their State Academic Standards, suggesting some benefitted from the training they received as slaves. It should be pointed out that African enslaved people brought some of their own expertise to America, especially in agriculture, music, and art.
Depending on where they were, formerly enslaved people could indeed utilize those skills, but it rarely worked out well for even the most skilled among them. Freedom came to one group of enslaved people in the nation’s capitol via the DC Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862. Three thousand one hundred slaves were freed and released, among them a mix of all the skills listed above. Their white owners were given reparations, and some freed people took the compensation offered if they agreed to be exported to Liberia. President Abraham Lincoln hoped to export almost all formerly enslaved people, but Frederick Douglass and others convinced him otherwise — only after he tried it and failed, however, on Cow Island off the coast of Haiti.
Almost thirty years earlier, in 1835, free entrepreneur Beverly Snow owned an Epicurean Eating House that had gotten too successful. Anti-abolition forces looted his restaurant and destroyed other Black businesses during the Snow Riot (it wasn’t a riot). Washington, DC, had been experiencing labor issues, including the 1835 Washington Navy Yard labor strike. In addition to discontent with hours worked and limited lunch privileges, white caulkers were upset about free Black caulkers, who they felt were taking jobs they were entitled to. There was a rumor that Snow made a comment about a white mechanic’s wife; the mechanics destroyed Snow’s restaurant, drinking all the liquor while they were there. Mobs of white men attacked the remaining Black-owned businesses, churches, and schools. Snow and other Black businessmen were forced to flee. Being a free skilled Black person was no advantage in Washington, DC.
Then came the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The Proclamation didn’t exactly free Black people. It said that anyone who escaped from the Confederacy and made their way to free territory would be free unless Union troops had already arrived where they were. Many enslaved people made their way to freedom; a high percentage of them headed for Washington, DC, which had nowhere to put them.
DC set up contraband (refugee) camps where freed enslaved people, skilled or not, were literally starving, with many succumbing to disease in unsanitary conditions. Formerly enslaved people not otherwise employed were put to work on abandoned farms, including Robert E. Lee’s estate, to raise money for the Union.
The Union had, in effect, returned free people to slave labor, having nothing else to do with them. This would be a precursor to what would happen at the war’s end.