Institutional Slavery focuses on Anglican and Presbyterian churches, Free Schools, four colleges, and private industry. It seeks to complicate our understanding of both slave ownership and slave hiring by investigating institutions that owned slaves, and it argues that institutional slavery changed slavery in Virginia in three important ways. First, by visibly benefiting the three out of every four white Virginians who did not own slaves, it convinced them to support the slave regime (p. 9). Second, it argues that institutional slaves, by virtue of not being owned by an individual and frequently facing dislocation as a result of being rented out, experienced greater insecurity and hardship (p. 102). Finally, enslaved people owned by institutions, by virtue of lacking an appropriately “fatherly” master, challenged, and at times weakened, the paternalist defense of slavery (p. 9).

Oast defines an “institutional slave” as “[one] who was owned by a group of people united in a common purpose—nonprofit educational and religious organizations, the public… and for-profit companies” (p. 3). They “sometimes worked directly for the institutions” or “were owned by one and… hired out annually to raise funds” (p. 3). The category of institutional slave here represents a very broad and loosely defined one, coming to include even slaves rented to institutions.

Although the book challenges the reader to rethink slave owning and slave hiring in Virginia, it does not deliver consistently convincing results. Some of this may stem from the paucity of extant records. The chapter on Anglican churches cites vestry books or registries from ten different parishes and argues that from this “survey of all the extant Virginia vestry books… parish registers and acts of the General Assembly, it is clear that about half of the parishes owned slaves at some time during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries” (p. 20). Only two of those ten parish record sets actually include the nineteenth century (Cumberland and Antrim parish records go to 1816–17). As well, between 1613 and 1778, at least 160 different parishes were created in Virginia. The sample size is simply too small to draw powerful conclusions about Anglican slaveholding.

Oast argues that “most often, slaves owned by institutions faced insecurity compared with traditional slaves” (p. 28). They were “hired out to the highest bidder… they frequently changed homes, making it very difficult to form lasting relationships” (p. 102). This may be true, but the same could be said of enslaved people who were regularly hired out by their individual masters or who were hired out for years on end by estate administrators. At Briery Presbyterian, Oast notes that annual hiring of the church's enslaved women would have made it difficult “for them to maintain stable relationships with their spouses, yet these women managed to have children [emphasis added]” (p. 91). As well, the slave-owning Yeats Free School, which John Yeats originally gifted a handful of slaves (Bess, Dick, and Caesar) in 1731, owned eighty-six people by 1861, all of whom were “likely… the descendants of the slaves in John Yeats's original 1731 bequest” (p. 62). Oast later argues that at a university “this large concentration of African Americans must have led to opportunities for companionship and family formation, as well as unobtrusive entertainments among them” (p. 188). Perhaps, then, the insecurity problem was really one potentially faced by any enslaved person who was rented out. If institutional slavery hindered the ability of the enslaved to build and maintain families, surely these numbers would look different.

Anglican parishes, as well as churches in other denominations, served a geographically confined area. Despite claims to the contrary that institutional slaves’ lives were powerfully disrupted by hiring, when churches rented out the enslaved people they owned, they often did so to members of the church (pp. 40, 42, 111, 112). What might this landscape of institutional slavery have looked like? Could it reveal the many ways in which paternalist thought profoundly shaped the practices of enslavement, even at the institutional level?

Institutional Slavery is typically at its strongest in terms of evidence when examining William & Mary, the Free Schools, and Presbyterian churches. Oast's examination of Hampden-Sydney, the University of Virginia (UVA), and Hollins University, however, does not dig deep enough.

For instance, Oast argues that at UVA free black “[William] Spinner worked as the University's janitor for three years before the Board replaced him in 1828 with William Brockman, who was probably also a free African American” (p. 176). Actually, as the duties of the position evolved quickly in 1825, with the faculty seeking someone who could both surveil students and oversee nearly one hundred enslaved people living there, Spinner found his days numbered. By 1826, the university sought to replace him with two white men working as janitor and overseer. White man William Brockman was hired for one of those positions. The university would never again hire a free black as janitor. Spinner, possibly struggling with the evolution of his duties and “having, without authority, absented himself from the University for the space of a fortnight, be only paid up to the 15th of January [1826],” lasted less than one year as janitor.Footnote ¹ William Spinner and his father, Richard, would clean wells for the university in 1828, but never again as janitor.Footnote ²

Oast claims that UVA “owned and hired slaves” without specifying numbers (p. 174) and argues that the Board of Visitors in 1831 ordered the purchase of Lewis Commodore when it “decided it would be better for the University to purchase its own slave” (p. 177). Lewis had been hired out to UVA for several years and worked as the bell ringer and Rotunda attendant—he was already well-known to the professors. In 1831, Lewis, despite his “having proved a most valuable servant, neat, regular, sober and faithful” to his temporary masters at UVA, was exposed by his owner to public sale in Charlottesville. Two professors and the proctor, “believing that to lose his services would be a real misfortune to the University,” bought him.Footnote ³ Purchased by the faculty for clearly paternalistic reasons, Lewis was the only slave the university ever owned. The university, as well as hotelkeepers and faculty, did rent enslaved laborers as needed, tapping into a highly commodified regional rental network to do so, but that gets little coverage here.

Presbyterians, too, debated the feasibility of congregational ownership of slaves in deeply paternalist terms, as the minority report makes abundantly clear (pp. 97, 100, 102). Thus, the evidence here can be read as demonstrating that paternalism powerfully shaped decision-making and institutional slavery itself.

Finally, the book turns to the business world, arguing that “chances to earn money and other opportunities frequently afforded to slaves in industrial settings made their situation substantially different from that of [other institutional] slaves,” but does so without ever tackling internal improvements, resulting in a significant missed opportunity (p. 204). Fluvanna planter John Hartwell Cocke rented dozens of slaves to canal projects yearly—it's doubtful he was exceptional in that regard. Slaves, including those owned by Thomas Jefferson and others, were also paid for overwork. UVA's slaves were also routinely paid for overwork—the financial records are replete with payments to the enslaved. Oast argues that business practices led to “lenient policies toward skilled slaves that scandalized their paternalist neighbors” (p. 206). Joseph Reid Anderson of Tredegar Iron Works, however, suggested those policies were, in fact, deeply paternalist when he explained that he would not “purchase a hand except with his hearty preference” (p. 218). Paternalism may have profoundly shaped institutional slavery.

Institutional Slavery represents a thought-provoking intervention in the literature on the evolution of slavery and paternalism in Virginia, but one that raises many more questions than it successfully answers.