In 1784 Jefferson, then a member of the Continental Congress, was appointed to chair a committee charged with drafting a plan for the organization of the newly opened lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, which were destined soon to fill with settlers. Apart from dividing this vast territory into a grid of sixteen new states with fantastical Grecian names like Metropotamia, Pelisipia, and Cheronesus, the measure would have prohibited slavery in all the western territories of the United States, south as well as north. Had Jefferson’s plan been adopted, slavery would never have been extended to the present states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, or presumably to those west of the Mississippi. Congress failed to approve the plan by a single vote. “Thus,” Jefferson wrote, “we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment.”
Three years later, representatives from every state gathered at Philadelphia to hammer out a plan for a national Constitution. Anxiety about slavery pervaded the convention, causing delegates, in the words of one Georgian, considerable “pain and difficulty.” The resulting compromise pleased no one completely, granting slave states representation for three-fifths of their slave population, even though slaves of course could not vote, and requiring every state to lend assistance in putting down insurrections, and prohibiting any legislation to limit the slave trade for the next twenty years. Even so, many antislavery delegates considered the compromise a victory, naively believing that a stronger federal government would soon be able to exert its power to bring about general emancipation. “Yet the lapse of a few years, and Congress will have power to exterminate slavery from within our borders,” exulted James Wilson of Pennsylvania. A like-minded delegate, William Dawes of Massachusetts, reported to his state’s ratifying convention, “We may say, that although slavery is not smitten by apoplexy, yet it has received a mortal wound, and will die of a consumption.” That same year, the Northwest Ordinance finally laid out a plan for the organization of the western territories, banning slavery north of the Ohio River after 1800, but permitting it in the states to the south. While the Ordinance represented another political compromise, it ensured that much of the West would be free territory forever and that the Ohio would in the dreams of countless slaves become the river Jordan, the threshold of Canaan, and the front line of battle in the moral conflict that would define America for the next three-quarters of a century.
Opposition to slavery among white Americans was, increasingly, not only philosophical but visceral. A Vermont judge named Theophilus Harrington declared in a written opinion that he would accept nothing less than “a bill of sale from God Almighty” as proof of one man’s ownership of another. Before the Revolution, such intensely personal reactions were rare. By the last decade of the century, societies advocating emancipation existed in almost every state, North and South, and they attracted the support of many eminent figures. The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery was led by Benjamin Franklin, who earlier in life had bought and sold slaves himself. The president of Yale University, Reverend Ezra Stiles, chaired the “Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom, and for the Relief of Persons Holden in Bondage,” which claimed to reflect the sentiments of a large majority of the state’s citizens. In New York, prominent men including Alexander Hamilton, Governor George Clinton, Mayor James Duane of New York City, future Chief Justice of the United States John Jay, and many Quakers, met at the Coffee House to organize the New York Manumission Society, naming Jay—who owned five slaves—its president. This was not unusual. In contrast to the abolitionists of a later day, such societies typically included slave owners and promoted only gradual emancipation, in the hopeful belief that masters could be persuaded to peacefully relinquish their human property.
Around the end of the century, a spate of state legislation made it appear that the momentum of history was on the side of emancipation. Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia all prohibited the importing of African slaves, a trend encouraged by those who believed that ending the transatlantic slave trade was virtually the same as terminating slavery itself. (South Carolina would reverse itself and import thirty-nine thousand more Africans before federal legislation finally put an end to the legal overseas slave trade, in 1808.) By the end of the century, most Northern states had enacted laws mandating gradual emancipation. State legislatures also revised their laws to make it easier for masters to free their slaves. Hundreds did so: between 1790 and 1810, Quaker and Methodist lobbying reduced Pennsylvania’s slave population by more than half, from 8,887 to 4,177. In Delaware, the number of free blacks would grow from 30 percent of the state’s black population to more than 75 percent between 1790 and 1810, and in Maryland from about 7 percent to more than 23 percent. Many who supported abolition in principle were less committed in actual practice, however. When one of George Washington’s slaves fled to New Hampshire, the president wrote to the local authorities asking for his return, gracefully explaining, “However well disposed I might be to gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of people (if the latter was in itself practicable) at this moment it would neither be politic nor just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference, and thereby discontent beforehand the minds of all her fellow serv’ts, who, by their steady attachment, are far more deserving than herself of favor.” Washington did, however, free his slaves upon his death, in his will, in 1799; Jefferson never did. But to Jefferson and others like him, the end of slavery seemed to be only a matter of time. “The spirit of the master is abating,” he confidently asserted, “that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.”
3
The handiwork of a Yankee tinkerer in the summer of 1792 changed everything. Eli Whitney was a genius of a type who would become familiar in the course of the next century, like Robert Fulton, John Deere, Cyrus McCormick, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Thomas Edison, who fused native mechanical aptitude with the entrepreneurial instincts of the dawning industrial age. It was said that as a boy in Massachusetts during the Revolution, Whitney had set up his own small forge and made nails to sell to his neighbors, and then converted them to hairpins after the war. After graduating from Yale, he went south to take a position as a tutor. As a guest in the home of the widow of General Nathaniel Greene, in Georgia, Whitney overheard several of her neighbors discussing the problems of cotton cultivation.
Planters were well aware that a potentially vast market for American cotton was developing in England, where textile manufacture had been revolutionized by the factory system; thanks to new machinery operated by steam or water-powered engines, Britain’s cotton imports had more than tripled, from nine million pounds to twenty-eight million pounds, between 1783 and 1790. American planters initially experimented with varieties of cotton imported from the Bahamas, which flourished on islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, but they grew almost nowhere else. This so-called upland or short-staple cotton provided a much greater per-acre yield, but the seeds clung hard to the fiber and had to be pulled out by hand, a labor-intensive job that took one worker a full day to clean a single pound of seeds.
Whitney later wrote, “There were a number of very respectable gentlemen at Mrs. Greene’s who all agreed that if a machine could be invented which would clean cotton with expedition, it would be a great thing both to the inventor and to the country. I involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan of a machine in my mind.” It was the cotton gin, which would ultimately transform American slavery, project it into its boom time, and transform it into a pillar of the nineteenth-century American economy. Within ten days, Whitney had made a model, and soon after that a full-size machine, “with which one man will clean ten times as much cotton as he can in any other way b
efore known,” Whitney exulted. “It makes the labor fifty times less, without throwing any class of People out of business.” The machine he created had an elegant simplicity. The cotton was picked up on a roller studded with metal teeth that carried it around to a metal grill; when the cotton was scraped off, the seeds dropped away. Simply by turning a hand crank, one slave could now do the work of a dozen. On large plantations, a water wheel could be used instead and the gin could do the work of hundreds. On June 20, 1793, Whitney addressed his letter of application, along with a fee of thirty dollars, to Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state, whose office was charged with issuing patents. “Mr. Jefferson,” Whitney wrote to his father, “agreed to send the patent as soon as it could be made out.” He established a factory in New Haven, and was soon shipping gins southward, where they would lead to a spectacular burgeoning of cotton cultivation, which would soon be matched by an exploding demand for slaves.
American cotton exports grew from almost nothing in the early 1790s to six million pounds in 1796, to twenty million pounds by 1801, and they would only continue to grow. Cotton was an ideal crop for the lands that were now being opened up in the Southeast, once the Indian inhabitants were removed, by either persuasion or force. It required only about two hundred frostless days, and twenty-four annual inches of rainfall, and was so simple to cultivate that even men and women fresh from Africa could quickly be taught the monotonous techniques of hoeing, planting, and picking. It was also a very efficient crop, in terms of the economics of slavery. Cotton kept slaves at work almost continuously, tilling fields, cleaning the crop, and preparing new land for the next year’s planting. Mississippi’s production alone would swell from 20,000 bales in 1821, to 962,006 in 1859, almost one-quarter of the nation’s total output. And in each of the four decades before 1840 the slave population of Mississippi more than doubled.
The phenomenal expansion of the cotton economy carried slavery with it across the coastal states, through the still half-settled Mississippi Territory, and beyond, until the “Cotton Kingdom” stretched from the Atlantic coast to Texas. By 1800, when slavery in New York was on the brink of extinction, Georgia would tally more than fifty-nine thousand slaves, and they would reach almost half a million by the eve of the Civil War. Slave traders made fortunes buying up “surplus” slaves, and long, grim lines of them chained together in awkward lockstep became a familiar sight on the roads leading westward from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas to the slave markets of the frontier Southeast. The new states wanted slaves, and more slaves. Lawyers, doctors, ministers, even the better class of “mechanics” dreamed of one day owning a plantation and slaves. “A plantation well stocked with hands, is the ne plus ultra of every man’s ambition who resides at the south,” one Northern traveler observed. “Young men who come to this country, ‘to make money,’ soon catch the mania, and nothing less than a broad plantation, waving with the snow white cotton bolls, can fill their mental vision.”
Although the movement for voluntary manumission lingered on, deluding those who supported it into thinking that they were having a serious impact on slavery as a whole, it was becoming clearer that slavery was not going to disappear. Even as states passed legislation limiting the transatlantic slave trade, the actual number of slaves in the United States continued to grow steadily. Voluntary manumissions freed thousands, but they were merely a drop in the demographic bucket as the total number of slaves swelled due to natural increase from just under 900,000 in 1800, to about 1.2 million in 1810, to slightly more than 2 million in 1830, more than doubling in just thirty years. Their number would double again by the outbreak of the Civil War.
4
On the morning of Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, there were already signs that the optimism of the Revolutionary era was a spent force. As idealism collided with economic imperatives, southerners began to insist that the right to own slaves was their most important liberty, and that to deprive them of it would be to subject them to “slavery.” The excesses of the French Revolution, followed soon afterward by the horrifying spectacle of successful slave insurrection against French rule on the island of Sante-Domingue (present-day Haiti), in 1791, raised slave owners’ anxiety to the level of near panic. In the course of the decade, thousands of refugees fled to the United States, bearing tales of slaughter and rapine that fueled Americans’ worst fears of what a slave rebellion might bring. George Washington’s government advanced seven hundred thousand dollars to aid the embattled white planters, while rumors of an impending French invasion that would arm the slaves swept through the South. Jefferson predicted that the “revolutionary storm” would sweep through the United States, bringing massacres in its wake. He warned that if American slaves were not freed and deported, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.” Southern suspicions of secret collaboration between abolitionists and slaves were further whetted by statements like those of a Presbyterian preacher named David Rice, who praised the rebels as “brave sons of Africa…sacrificing their lives on the altar of liberty,” and by the president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, who proclaimed that a “Negro war” in the United States would benefit the antislavery cause.
Southerners’ worst fears seemed about to be realized in the summer of 1800 when the plot for a supposed rebellion was uncovered in Virginia. The mastermind was a free blacksmith named Gabriel, who after his capture confessed that the rebels’ plan had been “to subdue the whole of the country where slavery was permitted.” All whites except Quakers, Methodists, and Frenchmen were to be massacred. The fury of rattled and vulnerable whites knew no bounds. “[W]here there is any reason to believe that any person is concerned, they ought immediately to be hanged, quartered, and hung upon trees on every road as a terror to the rest,” one planter declared. A hunt for the conspirators resulted in the arrest of hundreds of blacks, usually with little or no evidence. Twenty-six eventually were executed, even though no white person suffered actual harm. In the aftermath, free blacks were particularly singled out, and their very freedom treated as a subversive threat to those still enslaved. New laws prohibited voluntary manumissions without prior official approval, and compelled newly freed blacks to leave the state or face reenslavement. In North Carolina, the law barred the manumission of any slave “under any pretense whatsoever” except for meritorious service, and then only by license from the county court, along with the posting of a two hundred pound bond to guarantee each freedman’s “good behavior.” Free blacks who traveled without authorization could be arrested, fined, and even sold into slavery, like William Hyden, a New York-born mulatto who en route to Washington, D.C., was arrested as an alleged runaway, and put up for sale in Virginia, even though potential buyers complained that he was “too white.” They might also be reenslaved if they defaulted on a fine, or failed to pay their taxes, and they were barred from organizing schools, and from meeting together for almost any other activity that whites felt threatened by. White abolitionists, too, were increasingly treated as subversives. Members of abolition societies were prohibited from sitting on juries hearing suits brought by slaves, who claimed they had been manumitted by a will or other legal instrument, making it virtually impossible for a slave to win freedom in court, no matter how just his or her cause.
Meanwhile, free blacks now began to appear for the first time as a significant proportion of the population in Northern cities. Between 1765 and 1800, the number of free blacks in Philadelphia grew almost sixty-five times over, from 100 to 6,436, more than 9 percent of the city’s population. A similar though less dramatic pattern occurred in other cities. In New York, the number of free blacks tripled between 1790 and 1800 to 3,500, when more than half the city’s black residents were free. Some, of course, had been manumitted by local masters. Others had escaped to freedom in the chaos of the Revolutionary War, or won their independence by fighting in the ranks of the colonial forces. As Southern states made life more difficult for free blacks, expelling numbers of those who had been freed by
their masters, many of them turned their eyes northward as well. Still others, growing numbers of them, were fugitives; advertisements in Southern papers began to mention that a fugitive had last been seen “on the Pennsylvania road.”
For fugitive slaves, and eventually for the development of the Underground Railroad, the growth of Northern cities was crucial. There, fugitives could hope to disappear among friends, and former slaves learned the autonomy and self-reliance that were necessary to build lives in freedom. A free African American could even dare to defy a white, as an unnamed mulatto in New York did, in 1798, when confronted by a pursuing white man named Finch, who claimed that a black thief had fled into the mulatto’s cellar. The mulatto “stood at the Door with some kind of weapon in his hands and Declared he would knock the said Finch’s Brains out if Offered to come in.” In cities, blacks also came into contact, often for the first time, with white people who treated them as near equals, and for whom slavery was a spiritual abomination. As Jefferson, the country’s most graceful, if flawed, advocate of the Rights of Man ascended to its highest office on the steps of the Capitol, in the cobbled lanes of Philadelphia, fugitive slaves, free blacks, and white Quakers were discovering one another, and recognizing one another as allies in the struggle that was to come.
Bound for Canaan Page 6
