Slavery in pre-civil war America

Slavery in the United States in the nineteenth century was a complicated and thorny social system, one whose tangled historical roots and unexpected growth affected every American. Most importantly, it was the source of great suffering for the nation’s black population, including those African Americans living “free” in the northern states. But it involved white America as well. It deeply implicated the entire white population in economies either directly or indirectly invested in slave labour; it spurred social and cultural re-organization in the southern states especially; and it increasingly polarized the economies and politics of the American North and South, resulting in a devastating civil war.

Everyone Involved Slavery affected even the Indigenous populations with whom white settlers and black slaves came into contact. In previous centuries, European settlers had at times attempted to enslave Indigenous peoples, but their numbers dwindled due to a combination of the spread of European diseases, violent conflict with the white settlers, and the Indigenous populations’ retreat into the west. Some white people had also served as early slaves on the continent, brought over from Europe as indentured labourers serving a term of forced labour in order to earn their eventual freedom or pay off their fare of passage. It was only when, after 1680 especially, these sources of labour dried up (Kolchin), that the American colonies began to purchase African men and women as slaves. Throughout the following century, they bought into a vigorous cross-Atlantic slave trade dominated increasingly by British shipping companies. When, “by the middle of the eighteenth century, slavery existed in all thirteen [American] colonies” (Kolchin), there was a sufficient population of black people living in the colonies that African American and Indigenous peoples had begun to intermarry. One historian writes that “many of the people who came to be known [in America] as slaves, free people of colour, Africans, or Indians were most often the product of integrating cultures” (Becker).

Hypocrisy and Conflicting Feelings As early as the late 1700s, some Americans began to feel anxious about participating in the African slave trade and using slave labour in agriculture and in their homes. In 1776 America had declared independence of Britain, and formed a republic supposedly founded on principles of life and liberty. “Freedom” had been a rallying cry in their opposition to British rule, and many citizens of the new United States were clear-sighted enough to recognize the double-standard they were setting by championing freedom while employing slaves. While some slave-owners voluntarily freed their slaves, others sought to justify their ownership by arguing that the enslavement of black people consequently freed and “united all whites on the basis of race” (Woodman). Many white people felt caught in a double-bind between their financial and cultural investment in slave labour and their growing sense that it was morally wrong; but many others remained unaware of (or unconcerned by) the slaves’ suffering or of their own indirect involvement in the slave economy.

Whatever the private feelings of each American, the United States’ first collective move was to oppose the African slave trade, making it illegal to import slaves. Note however that this did not at all outlaw the enslavement of people of African descent in America; it simply disallowed American participation in international slave trading. This political move was intended to soothe white Americans’ post-Revolution sense of hypocrisy, by shifting the blame for cruelty onto the shoulders of the slave-shipping companies – useful scapegoats, since these were for the most part made up of their own former colonial masters, the British. But this anti-slave trade legislation was slow coming, in part because of resistance from the southern states. Slave labour was more important there: during the last decades of the eighteenth century, “despite widespread questioning of its morality […] in the Upper South […] bondage actually expanded in the Southern states” (Kolchin). Indeed, the majority of African slaves ever imported to America were purchased during this period. One historian calculates that “only about one third of the total arrived before 1760, more than one half in the next half-century, and a large influx,” amounting to over one-sixth of the total number of African slaves imported to America, arrived in the decade before the U.S. finally abolished importation in 1808 (Rawley).

Economic and Cultural Entrenchment Slavery in the U.S. actually continued to expand after 1808, both in terms of increasing numbers of slaves and as an expanding domestic (inter-state) trade economy. The black slave population in the U.S. reproduced itself, and expanded, through childbirth, unlike other colonies’ slave populations which depended for their renewal on the constant importation of new slaves. Certain states within the U.S. found they had more slaves than they needed, and began to export them to other states. Markets were set up to sell slaves between owners and across state boundaries, a practice that gradually increased throughout the first half of the nineteenth century until families of slaves were being torn apart and scattered. And the economy based on their labour grew rapidly as well. In 1793, a machine called the “cotton gin” was invented (“gin” refers to “engine,” not the drink) to help planters process raw cotton. It “quickly and easily separat[ed] the cotton fibers from the seedpods and the sometimes sticky seeds” (Wikipedia). With this tool to boost the speed of cotton production, planters in the southern states expanded their operations, employing more slaves, spreading their fields deeper into the southern and western frontiers, and exporting more and more cotton to the textile factories of the northern U.S. and Europe. In the years leading up to the Civil War (1860-65), “cotton rapidly became far and away the nation’s most valuable commercial crop,” with “cotton exports alone constituting 50-60% of the nation’s total exports” (Woodman).

All this expansion was motivation enough for many Americans to support continued slavery, even when in 1834 Britain recovered a moral high tone by abolishing slavery in the British empire. The southern states gambled that their cotton industry would continue to boom, and that their investment in this economy would continue to pay off. They were deeply invested in both the culture that they had developed out of white mastery and black enslavement, and dependent upon plantation agriculture itself: a southern delegate to the legislature argued against emancipation by declaring that “our slaves constitute the largest portion of our wealth, and by their value, regulate the price of nearly all the property we possess” (Deyle 40).

Both the southern plantations and the northern textile industry relied on the slave labour that planted and harvested cotton. But as these two economies expanded, they began increasingly to polarize in their attitudes towards this labour. The northern states, which abolished slavery early in the century, began increasingly to argue for emancipation when it began to benefit them economically to do so. The second-wave industrial revolution opened up new markets, “in the North and abroad,” for the goods produced by northern factories; this meant that they no longer depended so heavily on the southern states to buy their goods (Woodman, Deyle). Meanwhile, during the cotton boom they felt threatened by the idea that the south would expand its system, cutting into the “free labour” system on which their factories depended. This system included the rights of black men and women to hold jobs, but black people still faced discrimination in the North, and low-income working conditions could be exploitative and brutal even outside of the slave states. Nevetheless, the northerners embraced “a radically different way of life” when they enforced free-labour capitalism, and the increasing “social and ideological conflict between the North and the South eventually forced the majority of southern states to leave the Union, an action that ultimately led to a devastating [civil] war and a legal end to slavery” (Deyle 42).

Suffering This essay has attempted to indicate some of the reasons why slavery lasted in America as long as it did, and to point out the ways that everyone in America was involved in the institution. But it leaves the most important parts of the story untold: it does not describe either the slaves’ suffering – when they were taken from their homelands; when they were forced to work and live in bondage within a racist institution; when they lost family members to trading; when they suffered cruel punishment, whippings, lynching, and rape, at the hands of their masters – or their efforts at resistance – their rebellions; their brave daily acts of resistance; the rich culture they developed as African Americans. These would all be important topics for further research.
Works Cited

Anon. “Cotton Gin.” Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia. Nov. 30, 2005. Nov. 30, 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

Becker, Eddie. “Chronology on the History of Slavery and Racism.”

Deyle, Stephen. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

Kolchin, Peter. “Slavery: The Institution of Slavery.” The Reader’s Companion to American History. Houghton Mifflin – College Division.

Rawley, James A. “Slavery III: Slave Trade.” The Reader’s Companion to American History. Houghton Mifflin – College Division.

Woodman, Harold D. “Slavery II: Economic Aspects.” The Reader’s Companion to American History. Houghton Mifflin – College Division.

Works Consulted

Anon. “History of Slavery in the U.S.” Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia. Nov. 25, 2005. Nov. 27, 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Slavery_in_the_United_States

Foner, Eric. “Slavery IV: Slave Rebellions.” The Reader’s Companion to American History. Houghton Mifflin – College Division.

Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991).