By Rick Beard
For nearly two centuries, the “peculiar institution” of slavery dominated Southern social and economic life in America, infecting the nation’s politics with an unresolvable moral conflict that led finally to civil war.
When George Thatcher, a Federalist congressman from New England, assailed slavery in 1791 as a “cancer of immense magnitude” that would destroy the young American nation, he was attacking a well-entrenched economic reality nearly 175 years old. The exchange of “20 and odd Negroes” by privateers aboard the English ship White Lion for food from colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, in late August 1619 was the first known sale of slaves in British North America. Six years later, the Dutch West India Company imported 11 enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam to work as farmers and laborers.
These first tentative steps toward creating chattel slavery were taken amid a century-long contest among the Dutch, Spanish, English, and French for naval supremacy in the Atlantic. England’s success would solidify its control of the increasingly lucrative slave trade by 1700. Financed by private investment groups such as the Dutch West India Company, transplanted Europeans settled islands throughout the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coasts of North and South America. Once there, planters bold enough to risk their time and capital in the frontier outposts often made their fortunes—frequently at the cost of the lives of hundreds of enslaved Africans treated as expendable sources of labor. As the century progressed, both France and England entered mercantile relationships that subordinated the emerging colonial economies to the prosperity of the mother country.
Slavery was fundamental to the new world economy. Whites did not initially envision the mass enslavement of people of African descent, but the growing scarcity of contractually indentured white servants, the escalating call for more labor, and the all too evident financial rewards combined to create a new reliance on enslaved Africans throughout the Western Hemisphere. West African merchants and military and political leaders nurtured the market in human beings, linking it to long-established trade in precious metals and wood. The emergence of global banking and insurance facilitated the slave trade by guaranteeing a steady flow of investors eager to underwrite a slave ship’s voyage. Slavery grew even more lucrative after 1660, when King Charles II granted the newly organized Royal African Company a monopoly on English trade with West Africa.
Slavery developed in North America incrementally. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first British colony to legalize the institution. Connecticut followed in 1650, Maryland in 1663, New York and New Jersey a year later, and Pennsylvania in 1700. In the eight decades following 1620, no more than 21,000 enslaved Africans arrived in North America, a modest total by later standards. By 1700, the slave population of the American colonies totaled 28,958, about 72 percent of whom lived in the Chesapeake region and the Upper South.
The fledgling borderland communities featured porous boundaries between slavery and freedom that created many opportunities for advancement. Atlantic Creoles—descendants of European fathers and African mothers—were especially adept at working the settlements’ racial and social interstices. Among the earliest nonwhite arrivals in North America, Creoles lived primarily along the Atlantic coast and in Florida and Louisiana. Generally more cosmopolitan than most African slaves (and many of the European settlers), the mixed race colonists played a particularly important role in Florida, where they allied themselves with Spanish officials eager to counter the expansion of English settlers in the Carolinas.
Plantation Culture Grows
Over the course of the 17th century, plantation agriculture came to dominate the colonial American economy. Tobacco, a crop introduced into the Chesapeake region in 1612, became a pathway to great riches. In 1628, Virginia planters exported 500,000 pounds to London; 11 years later, that number had risen to 1.5 million pounds; and by 1700 it exceeded 20 million pounds. Growing tobacco was grueling work, and planters quickly learned that reliance on enslaved Africans was essential to their success. Plantation agriculture also came to drive the economy of the northern colonies, whose traders supplied foodstuffs, naval stores, timber, and ships for slave-produced agricultural commodities.
The plantation model of agriculture dominated much of British North America before the American Revolution, beginning in the Chesapeake region and North Carolina and spreading to the South Carolina lowlands, where rice and indigo were staples, and finally to the lower Mississippi River Valley, where sugar and cotton were the primary crops.
Slave merchants in Great Britain and on the European continent responded enthusiastically to the Western Hemisphere’s appetite for slave labor. The vast majority of the 5.8 million Africans who arrived during the 18th century were not brought to British North America, but to the Caribbean and South America. Nevertheless, the numbers arriving in North America between 1700 and 1750, almost 146,000, accounted for a 750 percent increase in the slave population—from 28,958 to 246,648.
By 1750, the New England and Middle Atlantic colonies had 30,000 slaves, 12 percent of the North American total. A few agriculturalists had tried the plantation system in the lower Hudson River Valley and in South County, Rhode Island, but they met with limited success. While enslaved Africans in the northern colonies would remain an important source of skilled and unskilled labor throughout the 18th century, the dislocated Germans, Scots, and Scots-Irish who flooded to the backcountry of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina generally eschewed slave ownership and lived as independent yeoman farmers. Slavery in New England and the Middle Atlantic colonies remained marginal to the central economic process.
In the Chesapeake Bay region, the Carolina low country, and the lower Mississippi River Valley, an emergent class of southern planters created an alternative society in which slavery stood at the center of economic production and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations. Politically self-assured and cosmopolitan, the planter class observed a well-defined social hierarchy and easily resorted to physical violence to maintain control of a slave population that often constituted a numerical majority. By the late 17th century, new laws designated African slaves as commodities to be bought and sold. New laws outlawed any social interaction between the races and subjected slaves to brutal punishments, not excluding death in more extreme cases. Planters were immune from prosecution.
The fluidity and ambiguity that had defined life for many slaves a century earlier disappeared. Entire generations of enslaved Africans might spend their lives working on a single plantation with virtually no exposure to the outside world. Such self-contained universes maintained their own hierarchies in which house slaves lorded over field hands, just as established Creole populations dominated newly arrived Africans. The various means of social control exerted by the master class assured that few members of the new slave generation would ever own land or gain freedom. But the insulated quality of plantation life did allow many of the new arrivals to retain remnants of their African culture and establish multigenerational families.
Armed Revolts & Civil Upsets
The planters’ increasingly oppressive control did not go uncontested. Black people carved out small spheres of personal freedom, in rare cases earning cash with which to buy their freedom. In several instances, slaves mounted armed revolts. Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 pitted English colonists and Africans in a rare alliance against royal authorities in Virginia. The Natchez Rebellion of 1731 squelched French plans in the lower Mississippi Valley to institutionalize and expand slavery. Two of the most famous uprisings occurred within two years of one another. In 1739, enslaved Angolans in South Carolina launched the Stono Rebellion, murdering two dozen whites while attempting to reach Spanish-controlled St. Augustine, where a more tolerant regime allowed Africans freedom, independent production, and military service. Two years later, the failed Negro Plot in New York City led to the execution of 30 blacks and four whites, as well as the banishment of another 70 blacks and seven whites.
Less visible threats to the plantation system were found in new philosophical and religious currents that challenged the “inevitable and natural” expansion of slavery. Enlightened thinkers questioned both the humanity and efficiency of chattel slavery, while evangelical Christians stressed the equal relationship both whites and black enjoyed before God. Free trade advocates attacked the traditional mercantilist policies that bolstered the economic rationale for slavery, and declining tobacco prices combined with the growing consumption of manufactured goods flowing from industrialized England to create a level of indebtedness among the planter class that threatened to destabilize the entire plantation society.
The end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 ushered in significant changes in the geopolitical landscape of North American slavery. Great Britain’s decisive victory forced the French to forfeit control of Canada to England and cede control of New Orleans to the Spanish. At the same time, it solidified the British hold on the transatlantic slave trade. The second half of the 18th century witnessed the peak of that trade and a dramatic growth in the North American slave population.
Between 1750 and 1790, some 3.4 million enslaved Africans arrived in the Western Hemisphere. One third of these men, women, and children—1,175,703—disembarked at various ports in the British Caribbean. The number of slaves in the North American British colonies grew by a factor of almost three, from 246,648 in 1750 to 717,021 in 1790. The increase was greatest in the Chesapeake and the Upper South, which added nearly 350,000 human beings to its enslaved population. Between 1501 and 1866, a total of 12,521,336 Africans were put on slave ships. Of these, some 10,702,656 (85 percent) survived to reach a port in the Western Hemisphere. Almost 80 percent of the slave ships were bound for ports servicing the sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean islands. Fewer than four percent—388,747—entered ports in North America.
At the moment that slavery seemed to be tightening its hold on the British colonies, the American Revolution challenged the institution’s very foundations. Fueled by the powerful argument for human liberty implicit in the Declaration of Independence, the war represented an attack on hierarchy, inequality, and privilege that resonated as much for blacks as for whites. From the war’s outset, the Revolution’s language invited blacks throughout the colonies to press for their own freedom and equality. Ironically, the British would prove more receptive to black aspirations than the colonial rebels. Proclamations in 1775 and 1781 offered freedom for any slave who entered British lines. As many as 100,000 made the attempt, and hundreds fought effectively against the Americans. At the war’s conclusion, the British transported 3,000 former slaves from New York to Nova Scotia.
The American Revolution
The forces set in motion by the Revolutionary War continued to disrupt and transform slavery in the new nation, most dramatically in the northern states. Pennsylvania introduced gradual emancipation in 1780, and Massachusetts courts outlawed slavery three years later. By 1803, all the northern states had provided for the gradual abolition of slavery and had liberalized manumission laws. Slavery survived in New York and New Jersey, but its numbers gradually withered away, from 48,000 in 1770 to 27,000 in 1810 to 1,113 in 1840. Vibrant urban communities of free blacks emerged in the post-Revolutionary era. By 1800, there were 6,500 free blacks in Philadelphia, 6,300 in New York City, and 1,200 in Boston. These enclaves would nurture the growing anti-slavery movement and provide invaluable way stations for slaves fleeing their servitude.
Although the slave population in the Chesapeake and Upper South continued to grow, the institution underwent fundamental changes there as well. A shift from tobacco monoculture to more diversified farming combined with a growing demand for skilled artisans, many of whom were hired out for wages, to improve the lives of enslaved Virginians and Marylanders. Liberalized manumission laws also added significantly to the region’s free black population, which by 1810 numbered 110,000.
As new agricultural patterns supplanted tobacco growing, Chesapeake planters found they owned more slaves than they needed. They began engaging in the internal slave trade to profit from their surplus chattels. The so-called “Second Middle Passage” of forced relocation through sale would eventually send more than one million slaves to southern cotton, rice and sugar plantations. Such sales generally removed the younger, healthier, and stronger men and women from the Chesapeake plantations and in the process profoundly disrupted the region’s settled black family and community life. The threat of being “sold South” was an ever present terror for Chesapeake slaves.
Planters in the Carolina low country and eastern Florida provided a growing market for the internal slave trade. The exodus of slaves to British lines or Spanish Florida during the Revolutionary War had devastated coastal plantations, reducing the enslaved populations of Georgia and South Carolina by 70 and 25 percent respectively. Unlike their contemporaries in Chesapeake and the Upper South, low country planters had an unwavering commitment to sustaining slavery. They purchased thousands of slaves from the Upper South, and between 1803 and 1807 imported 90,000 Africans to South Carolina.
Life on the low country’s rice and indigo plantations was brutal, but the planters’ reliance on their slaves’ skills and labor enabled them to negotiate for less onerous working conditions and access to private garden plots. Many of the planters preferred to live in the coastal cities, in effect surrendering daily life on their plantations to the overwhelming black majorities who labored there. This absentee oversight allowed the formation of a unique black subculture and an interconnected network of family, kind, and black neighborhoods. Port cities such as Charleston and Savannah also became home to vibrant communities of free blacks, many of whom provided valued artisan services. By 1800, there were 10,000 free blacks in Charleston alone.
During the latter part of the 18th century, blacks living in the lower Mississippi Valley and western Florida still enjoyed considerable freedom and opportunity. But as planters flooded into the region between 1790 and 1810 and made new demands for slave labor, many of these freedoms began to disappear. The influx of 26,000 new slaves, 70 percent of whom came directly from Africa, had the effect of “re-Africanizing” the lower Mississippi Valley. The new arrivals had not been exposed to the revolutionary ideas about freedom that had animated the existing slave populations, and after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, American control of the region led to the passage of new laws severely restricting free blacks and manumissions.
By 1787, when the new nation’s leaders met in Philadelphia to draft a governing charter, the country’s different patterns of slaveholding demanded compromise. Northern delegates could take heart from the prospect of banning the importation of slaves after 1808, which some hoped would lead to the institution’s eventual demise. Delegates from the Chesapeake and Upper South also embraced the provision, hoping a ban on importation would enhance the market value for their region’s growing surplus of slaves. The fugitive slave clause pleased the slaveholding states by guaranteeing that free states were obligated to return escaped slaves. Despite the fact that the enslaved population had no legal rights as individuals, each African man, woman, and child represented three-fifths of a free person when determining congressional representation and direct taxation.
The Constitution failed to fulfill the implied promise of freedom and equality that had inspired both free and enslaved blacks during the Revolutionary War. American slavery now enjoyed greater legal protection than at any time in the nation’s history. Its favored status within the Constitution soon led to serious social, economic and political divisions. While the Constitution protected slavery, a simple invention patented in 1793 ended any hope that the institution would die a natural death. The cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney revolutionized cotton growing by increasing 50-fold the amount that could be processed in a single day. This increase drove profits higher than ever, thereby encouraging the expansion of cotton cultivation along a belt of southern states stretching from Georgia through Alabama and Mississippi to Louisiana and Texas. From 3,135 bales in 1790, cotton production grew exponentially, increasing from 177,000 bales in 1810 to 731,000 bales in 1830. By 1860, nearly four million bales were being produced annually.
Because a profitable cotton plantation required plenty of slave labor, the enslaved population in the lower South and the lower Mississippi River Valley expanded dramatically. Between 1790 and 1820, the number of slaves in the lower South nearly tripled to 408,129; the slave population in the newly settled lower Mississippi River Valley and Deep South increased eight-fold, from 18,700 to 145,394. Once the foreign slave trade closed in 1808, the internal slave trade fueled the region’s rapid growth. During the same period, natural increases and the activities of smugglers accounted for an increase from 717,023 to 1,538,147 at the national level.
By 1820, the growing population of slaves made it impossible to ignore the mounting tensions between the free and slave states. That year, Kentucky lawmaker Henry Clay led Congress in fashioning the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Maine and Missouri as free and slave states, respectively, to maintain the balance between pro- and anti-slavery factions. All of the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri’s southern boundary would exclude slavery, while all the territory south of that line would be open to its expansion. While Clay’s compromise delayed the conflict over the expansion of slavery for three decades, it did little to defuse the growing national debate over the moral ramifications of the institution.
In the face of abolitionist critics, slavery’s apologists defended the institution as a positive good, characterizing African Americans as childlike, biologically inferior, and sacrificial lambs on the altar of white progress. As it became more and more apparent that violence was essential to sustaining the plantation system, the likelihood of violent responses to the planters’ oppression also grew. The most violent of these responses occurred not in North America but in the French colony of Saint Domingue, whose bloody 13-year-long revolution would have a profound impact on African American aspirations while simultaneously terrifying white politicians and slaveholders.
Three slave conspiracies in America during the early 19th century seemed to justify white fears. In 1800, Virginia authorities uncovered a plot by slave Gabriel Prosser to recruit and arm hundreds of his fellow slaves, free blacks, poor whites, and Indians from tidewater Virginia to attack Richmond. After hasty trials, 26 slaves, including Prosser, were executed. In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a free black in Charleston, planned for a group of slaves and free blacks to seize and execute city leaders, temporarily liberate Charleston, and then sail to Haiti to escape retaliation. After word of the plot leaked, 35 free blacks and slaves, including Vesey, were hanged, and 30 others were shipped to West Indian plantations.
The most serious revolt took place in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831, when a charismatic slave named Nat Turner led a two-day uprising of slaves and free blacks that killed more than 60 whites. Authorities tried and executed 56 blacks, including Turner, whose body they flayed, beheaded, and quartered. In the rebellion’s aftermath, whites murdered nearly 200 blacks, most of whom had nothing to do with the bloody events. Turner’s rebellion gave the lie to pro-slavery arguments portraying slaves as happy, well cared for, and content. It also convinced southern leaders to resort to drastic measures to prevent a recurrence. State legislatures began to limit or deny the few rights enjoyed by free and enslaved blacks. The Virginia General Assembly made it unlawful to teach slaves, free blacks, or mulattoes to read or write. Nor could slaves hold religious meetings without the presence of a licensed white minister. North Carolina made it unlawful for free or enslaved blacks to preach, and Alabama joined Virginia in preventing slaves from gaining literacy. In 1835, Georgia required all enslaved and free African Americans to register with the state. And South Carolina, fearing the spread of revolutionary fever as well as abolitionists’ propaganda, forbade the introduction of printed anti-slavery materials into the state.
The fear of slave conspiracies did nothing to blunt the planters’ enthusiasm for maintaining and increasing the large enslaved work forces required to grow cotton, especially as tobacco and rice became less profitable. By 1815, slaves had replaced tobacco as the principal export of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. As many as one million blacks were “sold downriver” to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, where they entered a world far more brutal than any they had previously encountered. In the Chesapeake and Upper South, enslaved African Americans were often able to carve out time for planting a garden, practicing craft skills, raising livestock, or other activities that generated modest incomes. Conversely, the slaves on cotton plantations were organized into gangs and worked unrelentingly from sunrise to sunset.
Northerners and southerners alike had a stake in the cotton economy. Fueled by southern cotton, factories in New England and Great Britain created a worldwide demand for cheap cloth. Shipping magnates in northeastern ports reaped enormous profits carrying the products of slave labor to and from Europe and the Caribbean. As early as 1822, half the exports from New York City were tied to raw cotton or finished goods. In the three years before the Civil War, the United States produced 13,719,000 bales of cotton; the 1859 total of 5,387,000 bales represented a single year’s all-time high.
The economic importance of cotton raised the stakes in the ongoing political battle over the extension of slavery. While a “gag rule” in the House of Representatives prevented open debate on slavery between 1836 and 1844, the Mexican War once more brought the issue of slavery’s extension to the forefront. In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot proposed a ban on slavery in any territory acquired from the war. Although the Wilmot Proviso failed to pass, it reintroduced to the national stage an issue that many thought the Missouri Compromise had resolved.
This renewed debate gave rise in 1848 to the formation of the Free Soil Party by anti-slavery proponents opposed to slavery’s expansion. Declaring the institution morally bankrupt and economically inefficient, they argued that it would wither and die if it could be contained. Two years later Henry Clay, in partnership with Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, once more sought a solution to slavery’s vexations. The resulting series of bills, collectively known as the Compromise of 1850, brought California into the Union as a free state, organized Utah and New Mexico as territories in which a popular vote would determine the status of slavery, abolished the slave trade (but not slavery) in the District of Columbia, and formulated a new Fugitive Slave Act that pledged the federal government’s help for slaveholders in reclaiming escaped slaves.
The new compromise failed to defuse the issue. It mollified few southerners, while radicalizing many northerners who agreed with former slave turned abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass that slavery was “now an institution of the whole United States.” One unintended consequence was the inspiration it provided New England author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote one of the most influential novels in history. In 1852 alone, her anti-slavery screed Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the United States and more than a million copies in Great Britain.
Four years after the 1850 Compromise, the Stephen Douglas-led Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Intended to encourage western settlement and the construction of a transcontinental railroad, the act embraced popular sovereignty as the means of determining the status of slavery in the two states. The effect was to set in motion a series of bloody confrontations between pro-and anti-slavery partisans, one of which introduced an anti-slavery zealot named John Brown to the nation. The act also prompted the formation of the Republican Party and led a little-known former Whig congressman and Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln—a longtime personal and political enemy of Douglas—to reenter national politics.
Two events during the latter half of the 1850s reinforced each side’s view of the other in the debate over slavery. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling in 1857 rejected the right of the slave Dred Scott to sue for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived for several years in free territory, opining that blacks were, in the words of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, “so far inferior [to whites] that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The ruling put the Supreme Court’s imprimatur on slave owners’ increasingly paternalistic defense of slavery. Northerners saw it as evidence that yet another branch of the federal government had fallen under the sway of the slaveocracy. John Brown’s ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and his trial and execution two years later made him a martyr for many in the North. To southerners, however, the murderous Brown embodied their worst fears regarding the abolitionists’ violent intentions and the ever present threat of more slave insurrections.
The 1860 census recorded an enslaved population of 3,950,511, which represented 32 percent of the population in the 15 slaveholding states. In Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, enslaved people represented between 44 percent and 57 percent of the population. Nearly half the families in Mississippi owned at least one slave, while only one in eight Maryland families did. The enormous southern investment in slavery exceeded the nation’s combined investments in railroads, manufacturing, and banks. Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina asked the prescient question at the heart of American slavery. “Were ever any people, civilized or savage,” he mused, “persuaded by argument, human or divine, to surrender voluntarily two thousand million dollars [of property]?” With the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, the nation was about to find out the answer.
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