The most extensive industrial use of slave labor occurred in the Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond, Virginia. In 1842, Joseph Reid Anderson, the “commercial agent” (chief operating officer) of the company, began a program to train slaves for the most highly skilled work in the mill: “puddling.” Five years later, when he was about to turn over a new rolling mill to the now fully trained slave puddlers, the white workers went out on strike in protest, but to no avail. Anderson fired the strikers and replaced them with slaves, and within three years two-thirds of his labor force was owned by the
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