Just as an aside, I found this quote of Smithwick's interesting.
Of course the essential principle of slavery was profiting off of captive labor, a description which would fit even tbe more prestigious slaveowners like Jeff Davis hisself.
But I at least tend to think of this on a plantation scale. Turns out slavery could also be a sort of slave owner welfare (which strictly speaking it was, even for the likes of a Jeff Davis).
Two incidences described by Smithwick where the wages of hired-out slaves were co-opted directly by the owners. Olmstead describes numerous cases of "hiring out" too but in the cases he describes the slave is permitted to keep most if not all of this "extra" income, once obligations to the master are met.
http://www.lsjunction.com/olbooks/smithwic/otd25.htm The savages got separated in the retreat, one party of them getting down into the cedar brakes below Burnet, where they made an attack on Joe Allen, the negro previously referred to. Joe had been spending Sunday with his wife at the Mormon mill, and started very early Monday morning for home.....
It would have been a distressing affair had old Joe Allen been killed, as he was the sole support of a poor widow with a large family, among them several grown-up sons. The injustice of the situation forced itself upon my recognition at the time, and I often wondered how it fared with Joe and his wife Mandy when they were free.
Two more honest, faithful people could not have been found in all the country. Joe was so entirely trustworthy that his mistress permitted him to hire himself to suit himself, himself collecting his wages, which were faithfully delivered to the mistress, while his own wife went barefooted and in rags, her hire and that of one of her children by a former husband supporting another white family.
I had both Joe and Mandy in my employ, and never had the least cause to find fault with either one.
At another time the widow's family had a narrow escape from losing their means of livelihood. Joe was wending his way to his work early in the morning, after having Sundayed with his wife, when he was bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake. He had a chunk of tobacco in his pocket, which he chewed up, hastily binding it on the wound with his handkerchief, and went on his way, not losing a day's work. Birdwatcher
