ABSTRACT
This chapter examines four examples from the exceptions to the Southern rule, the edges of Southern slavery: slaves in the towns and cities, slaves in industry, slaves hired out to employers other than their owner, and the free blacks living in slave states. Each of these four groups represented only a very small minority of the total black population of the South in the antebellum decades. To compare Southern slavery with other societies, the chapter discusses the multilateral comparative approach. The most ambitious and wide-ranging of modern attempts at the multilateral approach is Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death. According to Patterson, Southern slavery shared with all slaveholding societies certain imperatives of the interaction between slaveholder and slave. The common characteristics of that interaction in many different slave societies is what really interests Patterson and is also what he is most anxious to demonstrate.
