Chapter 12Chapter 12

• This chapter deals with two main themes: First, there was the rapid expansion of the plantation system from its traditional home in the Upper South to the Mississippi Valley and beyond.

Chapter 12Chapter 12

• American slavery began on the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake and the rice plantations of SC. It matured on the cotton plantations of the Deep South

• In 1790, most slaves lived and worked on the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake and in the rice and indigo areas of South Carolina. By 1830, hundreds of thousands of enslaved blacks were laboring on the cotton and sugar lands of the Lower Mississippi Valley and on cotton plantations in Georgia and Florida.

• Three decades later, the centers of slavery lay along the Mississippi River and in an arc of fertile cotton land—the “black belt”—sweeping from Mississippi through Georgia.

The Internal Slave TradeThe Internal Slave Trade• Congress had banned the international slave

trade in 1809. The Deep South turned to the Upper South for its slaves

• Figure 12.2 Estimated Movement of Slaves from the Upper South to the Lower South, 1790–1860  The cotton boom that began in the 1810s set in motion a great redistribution of the African American population. Between 1790 and 1860, white planters moved or sold more than a million slaves from the Upper to the Lower South, a process that broke up families and long-established black communities.

MigrationMigration• This movement of African Americans took two

forms: transfer and sale. Looking for new opportunities, thousands of Chesapeake and Carolina planters—men like James Lide—sold their plantations and moved to the Southwest with their slaves. Many other planters in the Old South signed over slaves to their sons and daughters, who migrated west. This transfer of entire or partial plantations accounted for about 40 percent of the African Americans migrants. The rest—about 60 percent of the total migration of more than 1 million slaves—were “sold south.” By 1860 a majority of African Americans lived and worked in the New South, the vast lands that stretched from Georgia to Texas.

Internal Slave TradeInternal Slave Trade• Some planters sold slaves South out of necessity

• Others speculated in slaves

• The domestic slave trade was crucial to the prosperity of the southern economy. Obviously, it provided tens of thousands of workers to carve new cotton plantations out of the forests of the Gulf states. But equally important, the trade bolstered the economy of the Upper South. By selling their surplus workers, tobacco, rice, and grain planters in the Chesapeake and Carolinas added about 20 percent to their income from the sale of agricultural goods. The domestic trade in slaves, remarked a Maryland newspaper, served as “an almost universal resource to raise money.”

Internal Slave TradeInternal Slave Trade• For African American families, the domestic

slave trade was a disaster that accentuated their status—and vulnerability—as property.

• The sheer size of the domestic trade meant that it touched thousands of families and destroyed about one in every four slave marriages

• Despite these sales, 80 percent of slave marriages remained unbroken, and the majority of children lived with one or both parents until puberty. Consequently, the sense of family among African Americans remained strong

Internal Slave TradeInternal Slave Trade• That a substantial majority

of African American marriages endured allowed slave owners to see themselves as benevolent masters, committed to the welfare of “my family, black and white.” – Superior status of some

slaves– Only “troublesome slaves”

sold South

• Whether or not they acknowledged the slaves' pain, few southern whites questioned the morality of the domestic trade in slaves

Impact on the Slave Impact on the Slave Owning EliteOwning Elite

• Westward movement had a profound impact on the small elite of extraordinarily wealthy planter families who stood at the top of southern society. These families—about three thousand in number—each owned more than one hundred slaves and huge tracts of the most fertile lands. Their ranks included many of the richest families in the entire United States. On the eve of the Civil War, nearly two-thirds of all American men with wealth of $100,000 or more were southern plantation owners.

• The plantation elite consisted of two distinct groups: the traditional aristocrats in the Old South, who had grown rich planting tobacco and rice and who lived in large and impressive mansions; and the market-driven entrepreneurs in the New South, whose wealth came from the booming cotton industry and who usually lived in relatively modest houses.

Aristocrats from the Aristocrats from the Upper SouthUpper South

• In the 1700s these leading planters in the Upper South acted like the English nobility

• Their aristocratic culture survived the republican revolution of 1776. In fact, these planters believed they embodied the true spirit of Republicanism

• Most of these planters criticized the increasingly democratic polity and egalitarian society, especially as they were developing in the Northeast and Midwest.

Aristocrats from the Aristocrats from the Upper SouthUpper South

• Although this genteel planter aristocracy flourished primarily around the periphery of the South—in Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana, its members took the lead in defending slavery as a benevolent social system. Ignoring the old Jeffersonian defense of slavery as a “necessary evil” (see Chapter 8), southern apologists now maintained that slavery was a “positive good” that allowed a civilized lifestyle for whites and provided tutelage for genetically inferior Africans.

Aristocrats from the Aristocrats from the Upper SouthUpper South

• Taking this ideology to heart, many planters intervened increasingly in the lives of their slaves. Some built cabins for their workers and insisted they be whitewashed regularly. Many others supervised the religious activities of their laborers. They welcomed evangelical preachers, built churches on their plantations, and often required their slaves to attend services. A few encouraged African Americans with spiritual “gifts” to serve as exhorters and deacons. The motives of the planters were mixed. Some acted from sincere Christian belief, while others wanted to counter abolitionist criticism or to use religious teachings to control their workers.

Entrepreneurs from the Entrepreneurs from the Cotton BeltCotton Belt

• Far less hypocrisy and far less elegance in the cotton states

• Cotton was a demanding crop because of its long growing season. Slaves plowed the land in March, dropped seeds into the ground in early April, and, once the plants began to grow, continually chopped away the surrounding grasses. In between these tasks, they planted the corn and peas that would provide food for them and the plantation's hogs and chickens. When the cotton bolls ripened in late August, the long four-month picking season began. Slaves in the Cotton South, concluded traveler Frederick Law Olmsted, worked “much harder and more unremittingly” than those in other regions. Moreover, their labor demanded fewer skills: No coopers were needed to make casks for tobacco or sugar; no engineers to build the irrigation systems for the rice fields.

• To increase the output of their enslaved workers, profit-conscious cotton planters began during the 1820s to use a rigorous gang-labor system. Previously, many planters had either supervised their workers sporadically, or assigned them random jobs and let them work at their own pace. Now masters with twenty or more slaves organized disciplined teams, or “gangs,” supervised by black drivers and white overseers. They instructed drivers and overseers to use the lash to work the gangs at a steady pace, clearing and plowing land or hoeing and picking cotton. A traveler in Mississippi described two gangs returning from work:

Entrepreneurs from the Entrepreneurs from the Cotton BeltCotton Belt

• Like all systems of forced labor, American racial slavery relied on physical coercion. Slave owners and overseers routinely whipped slaves who worked slowly or defied their orders. On occasion, they applied the whip with such ferocity that the slave died or was permanently injured. This photograph of a slave named Gordon stands as graphic testimony to the inherent brutality of the system.

Planters, Smallholding Planters, Smallholding Yeomen, and Tenants Yeomen, and Tenants

• Most Southern whites did NOT own slaves

• The absolute number of slave owners increased constantly between 1800 and 1860; however, the white population of the South rose even faster. Consequently, the percentage of white families who held blacks in bondage continually went down—from 36 percent in 1830, to 31 percent in 1850, to about 25 percent a decade later. There were significant variations among the regions in most states. In some cotton-rich counties, 40 percent or more of the white families owned slaves; in the hill country near the Appalachian Mountains, the proportion dropped to 10 percent.

• 20% of slave owners owned 20 or more (Upper)

• 20% owned 6-20 slaves (Middle Class)

• 60% smallholders who owned 1-5 slaves

Propertyless Whites Propertyless Whites • Many southern whites fled planter-dominated

counties and sought farms in the Appalachian hill country and beyond—in western Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and the southern regions of Illinois and Indiana.

• Thoughtful yeomen knew, and others sensed, that the cotton revolution of the nineteenth century had undercut the democratic potential of the Revolutionary era and sentenced independent family farmers of the South to a subordinate place in the social and political order. They could hope for a life of independence and dignity only by moving north or farther west, where labor was “free” and hard work was considered respectable.

The South in Context The South in Context • by the 1850s, wealthy legislators throughout the South began to

encourage economic development by subsidizing canals and railroads and increasing allocations for public education.

• Seen from one perspective, these measures were desperately needed. Even as the top 10 percent of the white population grew rich from the cotton, rice, tobacco, and sugar produced by their slaves, the economic well-being of ordinary southerners—white and black—did not improve significantly. In fact, the South's standard of living fell behind that of the North. Both in 1840 and in 1860, the per capita wealth of the South was only 80 percent of the national average, while that in the industrializing Northeast was 139 percent of the average.

• Yet this comparison with the Northeast is a bit misleading. If the South had been a separate nation, its economy would have been the fourth most prosperous in the world, with a per capita income higher than that of France and Germany. It ranked second in the world in the construction of railroads, sixth in cotton textiles, and eighth in the smelting of pig iron. As a contributor to a Georgia newspaper argued in the 1850s, it was beside the point to protest “tariffs, and merchants, and manufacturers” because “the most highly prosperous people now on earth, are to be found in these very [slave] States.”

The Southern Paradox The Southern Paradox • So, in one sense the South was lagging

behind…in another it was doing well

• But perceptive southerners recognized that their farm-based economy failed to raise the living standards of the entire population.

The Southern Paradox The Southern Paradox • Slavery discouraged economic diversification

• Wealthy southerners continued to invest in land and slaves, a strategy that brought substantial short-run profits but diverted capital resources and entrepreneurial energies from more-productive forms of economic activity.

• Slavery worked in yet another way to deter industrialization. Fearing competition from slave labor, poor European immigrants refused to settle in the South, depriving the region of the laborers needed to drain swamps, dig canals, smelt iron, and work on railroads. Nor were there enough enslaved African Americans to undertake these tasks because slave owners often refused to rent their slaves to entrepreneurs.

The Southern Paradox The Southern Paradox • Thus, despite the South's expansion in

territory and exports, in 1860, it remained an economic colony of Great Britain and the North, which bought its staple crops and provided its manufactures, financial services, and shipping facilities. Most southerners—some 84 percent—still worked in agriculture, more than double the percentage in the northern states; and southern factories turned out only 10 percent of the nation's manufactured goods.