Some set forth what became the diffusionist position—that spreading slavery throughout the Western territories would make elimination of the institution easier. In 1798 Virginia congressman John Nicholas contended that opening up the Western Country to slavery would be a service to the entire Union. It would, he said, “spread the blacks over a large space, so that in time it might be safe to carry into effect the plan which certain philanthropists have so much at heart, and to which he had no objection, if it could be effected, viz., the emancipation of this class of men.” Since the Constitution’s restriction on acting against the slave trade until 1808 applied only to slaves brought into the states, Congress in 1798 prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad into the Mississippi Territory but purposefully allowed the introduction of slaves into the Western territories from elsewhere in the United States. A similar policy was followed in the newly organized Orleans Territory in 1804 when Congress forbade the importation of foreign slaves but allowed owners of slaves settling in the territory from other parts of the United States to bring their slaves with them. The demand for slaves was so great in the Southwest that these restrictions were short-lived, and soon slaves were flowing into the Southwest not only from other parts of America but directly from Africa as well. But the diffusionist arguments voiced by slaveholders in the old states of the Upper South who had more slaves than they knew what to do with—self-serving as their arguments may have been—did suggest that many Southerners wanted to do away with slavery.38
Everywhere, even in South Carolina, slaveholders began to feel defensive about slavery and began to sense a public pressure against the institution that they had never felt before. Whites in Charleston expressed squeamishness about the evils of slavery, especially the public trading and punishment of slaves. Masters began toning down their fierce advertisements for runaway slaves and felt a need to justify their attempts to recover their slaves that they never had earlier. In the 1780s some of the Carolinian masters expressed a growing reluctance to break up families and even began manumitting their slaves, freeing more slaves in that decade than had been freed in the previous three decades.39
PERHAPS THE MAIN REASON many were persuaded that slavery was on its way to extinction was the widespread enthusiasm throughout America for ending the despicable slave trade. Everywhere in the New World slavery was dependent on the continued importations of slaves from Africa—except for much of the North American continent. But the fact that the Deep South and the rest of the New World needed slave importations to maintain the institution deluded many Americans into believing that slavery in the United States was also dependent on the slave trade and that ending the slave trade would eventually end slavery itself.
Those who held out that hope simply did not appreciate how demographically different North American slavery was from that in South America and the Caribbean. They were blind to the fact that in most areas the slaves were growing nearly as rapidly as whites, nearly doubling in number every twenty to twenty-five years. Living with illusions, white leaders concluded that if the slave trade could be cut off, slavery would wither and die.
All the initial eagerness to end the slave trade, especially among the planters of the Upper South, suggested to Northerners a deeper antagonism to slavery than was in fact the case. Perhaps some of the Virginia planters sincerely believed that ending the slave trade would doom the institution, but many others knew that they had a surplus of slaves. In 1799 Washington had 317 slaves, most of whom were either too young or too old and infirm to work efficiently. Even so, he had more slaves than he needed for farming wheat and foodstuffs, and he did not want to return to planting tobacco. Yet he had no desire to sell “the overplus . . . because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species.” Nor did he want to hire them out, because he had “an aversion” to breaking up families. “What then is to be done?” he asked.40
Certainly Washington, like many other Virginia farmers, did not need more slaves and thus could welcome an end to the international slave trade. But not all Chesapeake planters were as scrupulous as Washington about not wanting to sell slaves and break up families, and they made the domestic slave trade in the Chesapeake flourish as never before. By 1810 one in five Chesapeake slaves was being sent westward to Kentucky and Tennessee.
Northerners scarcely understood what was happening. They had little or no appreciation that slavery in the South was a healthy, vigorous, and expansive institution. As far as they were concerned, the Virginia and Maryland planters were enthusiastically supporting an end to the international slave trade as the first major step in eliminating the institution. This assault on the overseas slave trade appeared to align the Chesapeake planters with the anti-slave forces in the North and confused many Northerners about the real intentions of the Upper South.
The Constitution drafted in 1787 gave South Carolina and Georgia twenty years to import more slaves from abroad, but everyone clearly expected that in 1808 Congress would act to end the trade, which in turn would lead to the eradication of slavery itself. Actually all the states, including South Carolina, stopped importing slaves on their own during the 1790 s—actions that reinforced the conviction that slavery’s days were numbered.
YET THE EXPLOSIVE PRO-SLAVERY RESPONSE by representatives from the Deep South to two petitions from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to Congress in 1790 to end the slave trade and slavery itself should have indicated that the eradication of slavery was not going to be as predictable as many had thought. “Let me remind men who expect a general emancipation by law,” warned one outraged South Carolinian congressman, “that this would never be submitted to by the Southern States without civil war!” Despite such angry outbursts, however, confidence in the future remained strong, and James Madison and other congressmen from the Upper South were able to bury the petitions in 1790. Their desire to smother even talk about the problem of slavery rested on their deeply mistaken assumption that the Revolutionary ideals of “Humanity & freedom” were, as Madison put it, “secretly undermining the institution.”41 Raising noise about slavery, said Madison, could only slow down the inevitable march of progress. Besides, as President Washington pointed out, the petitions against slavery in 1790 were ill timed; they threatened to break apart the Union just as it was getting on its feet.
As early as 1786 Washington not only had vowed privately to purchase no more slaves but had expressed his deepest wish that the Virginia legislature might adopt some plan by which slavery could be “abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptible degrees.” In the early 1790s, like others, he seemed to rest his hopes on the ending of the slave trade in 1808, and in early 1794 he actually introduced into the Senate a petition from the New England Quakers urging an end to American participation in the international slave trade. Although the Constitution forbade Congress from preventing the importation of slaves until 1808, Congress decided in 1794 that it had the authority to prohibit American citizens from selling captured Africans to foreign traders and to prevent foreign ships involved in the slave trade from being outfitted in American ports.42
Madison and Washington were not the only leaders who had a naïve faith in the future. Vice-President John Adams thought that when the imports of slaves were cut off, white laborers would become sufficiently numerous that piecemeal private manumissions of the slaves could take place. Oliver Ellsworth, the third chief justice of the Supreme Court and a strict, hard-headed Connecticut Calvinist, agreed. He believed that “as population increases, poor labourers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country.”43
Besides the Deep South’s impassioned response to the 1790 Quaker petitions to end slavery, other signals suggested that slavery was not dying away. In 1803 South Carolina reopened its slave trade, a minor shock that should have prepared Americans for the big quake—the Missouri crisis of 1819—that lay ahead. Between 1803 and 1807 South Carolina brought in nearly forty thousand slaves, over twice as many in that
four-year period as in any similar period in its history.44
With slavery slowly disappearing in the North and yet persisting in the South, the nation was moving in two different directions. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Virginia was still the largest state in the Union, with 885,000 people, nearly equal to the population of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia combined. But its white population was expanding slowly, and tens of thousands of Virginians were pushing out of the Tidewater into the Piedmont and then even farther west and south into Kentucky and Tennessee in search of new land. At the same time, the black population in the Chesapeake was growing faster than the white population and was steadily being moved westward along with over two hundred thousand migrating white farmers. Although nearly one hundred thousand slaves were removed from Maryland and Virginia in the two decades after 1790, the black slave population of the Chesapeake still totaled well over five hundred thousand in 1810.
Each of the Chesapeake states of Maryland and Virginia responded differently to the rapidly growing slave populations. Although both states began manumitting slaves in the aftermath of the Revolution, Maryland freed many more than Virginia. Having no western piedmont to expand into, many of the Maryland planters were faced with either selling or freeing their slaves, and many chose to free them. By 1810 20 percent of Maryland blacks had gained their freedom, accelerating a process that continued up to the eve of the Civil War, when half the black population of the state had become free.
By contrast, only 7 percent of Virginia’s black population was free by 1810, and by the eve of the Civil War the percentage of free blacks never got beyond 10 percent. White planters either moved out of the state with their slaves or sold their excessive slaves to whites in other states or to their fellow Virginians. The result was that an ever larger proportion of white Virginians, especially in the Piedmont, became slaveholders in the decades between 1782 and 1810. Prior to the Revolution the majority of white Virginians had not owned slaves; by 1810 that had dramatically changed: the majority of white Virginians were now personally involved in the institution of slavery and the patriarchal politics that slavery promoted. With the spread of slavery to deeper levels of its population, Virginia became less and less the revolutionary leader of liberalism that it had been in 1776.45
MOST OF THE SOUTH became Jeffersonian Republican. As early as the Fourth Congress in 1795–1797, over 80 percent of the Southern congressmen voted in opposition to the Federalist administration. In the presidential election of 1796 the Federalist John Adams received only two Southern electoral votes in comparison to Jefferson’s forty-three.46
But not all the South was Republican, at least not at first. During the 1790s parts of South Carolina had been strongly Federalist, especially the Lowcountry and the city of Charleston.47 By 1800 Charleston had emerged as the most European and the least entrepreneurial-minded city of the large port cities of the United States. In the eighteenth century it had been one of the five largest colonial cities in North America with a flourishing commerce controlled by South Carolinian merchant-planters. But by the early nineteenth century merchants from the North and from Europe had taken over the city’s countinghouses, and the Carolinian nabobs who had once been merchants became increasingly disdainful of all those who were engaged in trade.48
The swampy land of the Carolina Lowcountry tended to breed mosquitoes and malaria, which encouraged white families to abandon the area in the summer months. Consequently, many of the Lowcountry planters became absentee owners of their plantations, with hired white overseers managing the many black slaves. The early nineteenth century was the golden age for these sea island Carolina planters, who by 1810 owned over two hundred plantations, each with a hundred slaves or more. Although the Lowcountry had only one-fifth of the state’s population, it contained three-fourths of its wealth. Its slaveholding planting class built huge mansions, bought elegant furniture, drank and ate the best of everything, dressed in the latest London fashions, intermarried with one another, voted for Federalists, and made believe they were English aristocrats.
In the coastal areas of the Lowcountry, where water was readily available, rice remained the principal staple, but planters in the lowlands also began turning to cotton, the long staple sort that was ideal for lace or fine linens. Although the long-staple cotton was lucrative, it was hard to grow and flourished only in the coastal areas. Many Carolinians would have liked to grow the short-staple cotton, which was appropriate for coarse fabrics and potentially very profitable, but they did not yet know how to process it easily. Separating the seeds from the cotton fibers by hand was so time-consuming and labor-intensive that results were measured in ounces rather than pounds.
Although sooner or later someone would have found a way to mechanize the process, it was left to a Massachusetts-born Yale graduate with an acute mechanical aptitude, Eli Whitney, to acquire the financial backing of Catherine Littlefield Greene, widow of General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, and come up with his invention of a cotton gin in 1793. His machine solved the perennial problem of removing seeds from the short-staple cotton; it, said Whitney, “required the labor of one man to turn it and with which one man will clean ten times as much cotton as he can in any other way before now, and also cleanse it much better than in the usual mode.” Planters pirated Whitney’s design and built large gins (short for engine) to process huge amounts of cotton. By 1805, in a little over a decade, cotton production in the South had multiplied thirty-fold, from two million pounds to sixty million pounds a year.49
The cotton gin turned the Carolina Upcountry into the greatest cotton producing area in the country. Prior to the 1790s the region had been dominated by yeoman farmers with few slaves raising tobacco for a little cash. By 1815 the interior of the state was full of small slaveholding cotton-producing planters, all eager to become aristocratic gentry like those of the Lowcountry. Cotton-production needed slaves, and the numbers multiplied dramatically. In 1790 five-sixths of all of the state’s slaves had belonged to Lowcountry plantations; by 1820 most of the state’s slaves were working in the Upcountry.50
From Carolina and Georgia, cotton and slavery soon moved to the new territories of the Southwest. Planters in the Natchez region quickly abandoned indigo and tobacco for the much more lucrative cotton. As early as 1800 a traveling minister in Mississippi noted that cotton was “now the staple commodity in the territory.” Merchants from New Orleans began furiously competing with one another to line up contracts with cotton-producing planters. Since everyone presumed that only slaves could work the cotton fields, any effort to limit slavery in the Southwest was met with fierce opposition. The planters declared that without slaves, “the farms in this District would be but little more value by 1810 to the present occupiers than an equal quantity of waste land.” In 1799 a Mississippi planter told his relatives back in Virginia to sell his property in Richmond and buy slaves. “I would take two Negros for it,” he said. “They would here sell for 1,000 or 1200 Dollars.” Everywhere in the Upper South increasing numbers of slaveholders either pulled up stakes and moved with their slaves to Mississippi or sold slaves at great profit to friends and relatives who were settling in the new territory. Between 1800 and 1810 the slave population of the Mississippi Territory increased from about thirty-five hundred to nearly seventeen thousand, with most of them producing cotton.51
In Orleans Territory sugar became the principal crop, especially following the slave rebellion and the collapse of the economy in Saint-Domingue. By 1802 seventy-five sugar plantations bordering the Mississippi River in lower Louisiana and staffed by slaves produced more than five million pounds of sugar annually; by 1810 sugar production had doubled. With rising sugar profits, the population of the area increased rapidly, with the number of slaves growing faster than the white population. In 1806 the Louisiana Gazette reminded slave-owners in the “middle and southern states” (identifying, as Washington had, the Upper South with the middle states) that the Orleans Territory offered
“an outlet for the superabundance of their black population, and an extravagant price for what will shortly be to them, an incumbrance instead of an advantage.” Slaves were flooded into Louisiana, turning New Orleans into one of the major slave markets in America. By 1810 New Orleans had become the largest city south of Baltimore and the fifth largest in the nation. By 1812 Louisiana had become a state.52
IN THE SOUTH AND SOUTHWEST there was democracy of a sort: some legislative elections, usually full white manhood suffrage, much talk of equal rights, and many rhetorical denunciations of “aristocrats.” Beneath these democratic and egalitarian trappings, however, the politics of these Southern and Southwestern areas continued to be remarkably traditional and hierarchical.
Virginia’s popular government, for example, bore little resemblance to the popular governments of New England. Not only was voting still confined to fifty-acre freeholders and done orally, but the wealthy Tidewater planters retained a disproportionate representation in the legislature. “The haughty and purse-proud landlords,” noted a Massachusetts visitor, “form an aristocracy over the dependent democracy.”53 While this was no doubt an exaggeration that only a frosty Yankee could make, it contained more than a grain of truth. Unlike in the Northern states, the only elected officials in Virginia were federal congressmen and state legislators; all the rest were either selected by the legislature or appointed by the governor or the county courts, which were self-perpetuating oligarchies that dominated local government. Thus popular democratic politics in Virginia and elsewhere in the South was severely limited, especially in contrast to the states of the North, where nearly all state and local offices had become elective and the turbulence of politics and the turnover of offices were much greater.
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