Cities have a difference of industry than the rural antebellum. A city is where raw material and natural resources were sent to be refined and sold to mass market. Instead of cutlasses, sacks of cotton, and shackles, African slaves had to be entrusted with horses, deliveries, messages, and keys to businesses. However a rose by any other name is still a rose. A slave was still a slave, and African-Americans were just that. African-Americans were not comfortable in this role, their discomfort became the grounds for rebellion like in the case of the 1822 Denmark Vessey Slave Conspiracy. A metropolitan slave suffers and endures enough to still hate slavery and to pick up arms to fight his way out.

The Vexed Position of African-Americans in Early Urbanization