Slaves in mid-nineteenth century America were employed in virtually every industry or trade present in the South.

Of course, the vast majority of slaves were involved in agricultural pursuits, particularly the cultivation of crops like cotton, rice, sugarcane, and indigo in the states of the lower South. A large number of slaves who were not "field hands" of this sort performed domestic work as servants, maids, nannies, and cooks on farms and plantations. But slaves were also carpenters, mineworkers, porters, factory-workers, boatmen, railwaymen, mechanics, and shop assistants. Slaves were rented ("hired out") to work at the blast furnaces of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia. While still a slave, Frederick Douglass labored as a shipwright in Baltimore for a time.

Most slaves working in these sorts of industrial pursuits lived in cities, where slavery looked a bit different from its rural incarnation. Urban slaveowners were not likely to posess very large numbers of slaves, and were more likely to rent those slaves out to corporations. Urban slaves were also more likely to be literate, and - unsurprisingly - more likely to regularly interact with strangers. They were also more likely to be able to keep a portion of the money that they earned. This led to what historian Peter J. Parish has described as a "relaxing affect," in which "the slaves' situation and daily working routine took them out and about, onto the streets and into the shops, into churches, and into drinking dens. They had frequent opportunities to mix with other blacks - slave, free, or runaways - and also with whites of various backgrounds. Urban slaves were more mobile and less restricted, and had higher levels of literacy and more opportunity for adventure and initiative than their rural counterparts. There were obvious implications for law and order, and for normal standards of slave discipline." Skilled slaves had a reputation for what historian Eugene Genovese described as "independence of spirit and greater knowledge of the world" - not a compliment, coming as it did from Southern whites.

According to Genovese, craftsmen like "the carpenter, the cooper and the stonemason, the miller and the shoemaker" were also present in large numbers on plantations during the eighteenth century. Colonial plantations functioned as "industrial villages" that achieved a degree of autarky. But, Genovese argues, this arrangement was disrupted by the first stirrings of industrial capitalism, as mass production in Europe, New England, and the urban South eventually made it more profitable for slaveowners to buy their finished goods elsewhere and divert more of their slave labor into agriculture. Skilled labor did not disappear among the enslaved, however. Genovese again: "On the eastern seaboard and the Mississippi River slaves continued to excel in making, manning, and piloting boats and ships, and the rice and sugar plantations could not have remained in business without the effort of some skilled trunk minders and machine operators. The general level of carpentry among the slaves probably remained low or even declined, but many individual slaves established formidable reputations. Genuinely first-rate carpenters brought two to three times as much as prime field hands on the auction block, and other did well for themselves and their masters when hired out on the countryside." Not just the out-buildings, but many of the "big houses" of the American South were slave-built and slave-decorated. Their craftsmanship at times was an art - no small feat, given the obstacles to education and skill-acquisition that they faced. The subtitle of Genovese's seminal study of the institution of slavery in America, The World the Slaves Made, can be meant literally: Southern whites inhabited a material world that had been, in large part, built by their own human property.