Psychosomatic medicine is an interdisciplinary medical field exploring the relationships among social, psychological, behavioral factors on bodily processes and quality of life in humans and animals.
Some physical diseases are believed to have a mental component derived from stresses and strains of everyday living. Some researchers have suggested, for example, that lower back pain and high blood pressure may be related to stresses in everyday life. The psychosomatic framework additionally sees mental and emotional
states as capable of significantly influencing the course of any
physical illness. Psychiatry traditionally distinguishes between
psychosomatic disorders, disorders in which mental factors play a
significant role in the development, expression, or resolution of a
physical illness, and somatoform disorders, disorders in which mental factors are the sole cause of a physical illness.
It is difficult to establish for certain whether an illness has a
psychosomatic component. A psychosomatic component is often inferred
when there are some aspects of the patient's presentation that are
unaccounted for by biological factors, or some cases where there is no
biological explanation at all. For instance, Helicobacter pylori causes 80% of peptic ulcers. However, most people living with Helicobacter pylori do not develop ulcers, and 20% of patients with ulcers have no H. pylori infection. Therefore, in these cases, psychological factors could still play some role. Similarly, in irritable bowel syndrome
(IBS), there are abnormalities in the behavior of the gut. However,
there are no actual structural changes in the gut, so stress and
emotions might still play a role.
The strongest perspective on psychosomatic disorders is that
attempting to distinguish between purely physical and mixed
psychosomatic disorders is obsolete as almost all physical illness have
mental factors that determine their onset, presentation, maintenance,
susceptibility to treatment, and resolution.According to this view, even the course of serious illnesses, such as
cancer, can potentially be influenced by a person's thoughts, feelings
and general state of mental health.
Addressing such factors is the remit of the applied field of behavioral medicine. In modern society, psychosomatic aspects of illness are often attributed to stress making the remediation of stress one important factor in the development, treatment, and prevention of psychosomatic illness.
Connotations of the term "psychosomatic illness"
The term psychosomatic disease
was most likely first used by Paul D. MacLean in his 1949 seminal paper
‘Psychosomatic disease and the “visceral brain”; recent developments
bearing on the Papez theory of emotions.’ In the field of psychosomatic medicine, the phrase "psychosomatic
illness" is used more narrowly than it is within the general population.
For example, in lay language, the term often encompasses illnesses with
no physical basis at all, and even illnesses that are faked (malingering).
In contrast, in contemporary psychosomatic medicine, the term is
normally restricted to those illnesses that do have a clear physical
basis, but where it is believed that psychological and mental factors
also play a role. Some researchers within the field believe that this
overly broad interpretation of the term may have caused the discipline
to fall into disrepute clinically. For this reason, among others, the field of behavioral medicine has
taken over much of the remit of psychosomatic medicine in practice and
there exist large areas of overlap in the scientific research.
Criticism
Studies
have yielded mixed evidence regarding the impact of psychosomatic
factors in illnesses. Early evidence suggested that patients with
advanced-stage cancer may be able to survive longer if provided with
psychotherapy to improve their social support and outlook. However, a major review published in 2007, which evaluated the evidence
for these benefits, concluded that no studies meeting the minimum
quality standards required in this field have demonstrated such a
benefit. The review further argues that unsubstantiated claims that "positive
outlook" or "fighting spirit" can help slow cancer may be harmful to the
patients themselves if they come to believe that their poor progress
results from "not having the right attitude".
Treatment
While
in the U.S., psychosomatic medicine is considered a subspecialty of the
fields of psychiatry and neurology, in Germany and other European
countries it is considered a subspecialty of internal medicine. Thure von Uexküll
and contemporary physicians following his thoughts regard the
psychosomatic approach as a core attitude of medical doctors, thereby
declaring it not as a subspecialty, but rather an integrated part of
every specialty. Medical treatments and psychotherapy are used to treat illnesses believed to have a psychosomatic component.
Contrary to Hippocrates and Galen, Ahmed ibn Sahl al-Balkhi
did not believe that mere regulation and modulation of the body tempers
and medication would remedy mental disorders because words play a vital
and necessary role in emotional regulation.
To change such behaviors, he used techniques, such as belief altering,
regular musing, rehearsals of experiences, and imagination.
In the beginnings of the 20th century, there was a renewed interest in psychosomatic concepts. Psychoanalyst Franz Alexander had a deep interest in understanding the dynamic interrelation between mind and body. Sigmund Freud pursued a deep interest in psychosomatic illnesses following his correspondence with Georg Groddeck who was, at the time, researching the possibility of treating physical disorders through psychological processes. Hélène Michel-Wolfromm applied psychosomatic medicine to the field of gynecology and sexual problems experienced by women.
In the 1970s, Thure von Uexküll and his colleagues in Germany and elsewhere proposed a biosemiotic theory (the umwelt concept) that was widely influential as a theoretical framework for conceptualizing mind-body relations. This model shows that life is a meaning or functional system. Farzad Goli further explains in Biosemiotic Medicine (2016), how signs in the form of matter (e.g., atoms, molecules, cells), energy
(e.g., electrical signals in nervous system), symbols (e.g., words,
images, machine codes), and reflections (e.g., mindful moments,
metacognition) can be interpreted and translated into each other.
Henri Laborit,
one of the founders of modern neuropsychopharmacology, carried out
experiments in the 1970s that showed that illness quickly occurred when
there was inhibition of action in rats. Rats in exactly the same
stressful situations but whom were not inhibited in their behavior
(those who could flee or fight—even if fighting is completely
ineffective) had no negative health consequences. He proposed that psychosomatic illnesses in humans largely have their
source in the constraints that society puts on individuals in order to
maintain hierarchical structures of dominance. The film My American Uncle, directed by Alain Resnais and influenced by Laborit, explores the relationship between self and society and the effects of the inhibition of action.
In February 2005, the Boston Syndromic Surveillance System detected an increase in young men seeking medical treatment for stroke. Most of them did not actually experience a stroke, but the largest number presented a day after Tedy Bruschi,
a local sports figure, was hospitalized for a stroke. Presumably they
began misinterpreting their own harmless symptoms, a group phenomenon
now known as Tedy Bruschi syndrome.
Robert Adler is credited with coining the term
Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) to categorize a new field of study also
known as mind-body medicine. The principles of mind-body medicine
suggest that our mind and the emotional thoughts we produce have an
incredible impact on our physiology, either positive or negative.
PNI integrates the mental/psychological, nervous, and immune
system, and these systems are further linked together by ligands, which
are hormones, neurotransmitters and peptides. PNI studies how every
single cell in our body is in constant communication—how they are
literally having a conversation and are responsible for 98% of all data
transferred between the body and the brain.
Dr. Candace Pert, a professor and neuroscientist who discovered
the opiate receptor, called this communication between our cells the
‘Molecules of Emotion' because they produce the feelings of bliss,
hunger, anger, relaxation, or satiety. Dr. Pert maintains that our body
is our subconscious mind, so what is going on in the subconscious mind
is being played out by our body.
By the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the status of enslaved people had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. During and immediately following the Revolution, abolitionist laws were passed in most Northern states and a movement developed to abolish slavery. The role of slavery under the United States Constitution (1789) was the most contentious issue during its drafting. The Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution gave slave states disproportionate political power, while the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3)
provided that, if a slave escaped to another state, the other state
could not prevent the return of the slave to the person claiming to be
his or her owner. All Northern states had abolished slavery to some
degree by 1805, sometimes with completion at a future date, and
sometimes with an intermediary status of unpaid indentured servitude.
Abolition was in many cases a gradual process. Some slaveowners, primarily in the Upper South, freed their slaves, and charitable groups bought and freed others. The Atlantic slave trade began to be outlawed by individual states during the American Revolution and was banned by Congress in 1808. Nevertheless, smuggling was common thereafter, and the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (Coast Guard) began to enforce the ban on the high seas. It has been estimated that before 1820 a majority of serving congressmen owned slaves, and that about 30 percent of congressmen who were born before 1840 (the last of which, Rebecca Latimer Felton, served in the 1920s) owned slaves at some time in their lives.
The rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased demand for slave labor, and the Southern states continued as slave societies. The U.S., divided into slave and free states, became ever more polarized over the issue of slavery. Driven by labor demands from new cotton plantations in the Deep South,
the Upper South sold more than a million slaves who were taken to the
Deep South. The total slave population in the South eventually reached
four million. As the U.S. expanded, the Southern states attempted to extend slavery into the new Western territories to allow proslavery forces to maintain power in Congress. The new territories acquired by the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession were the subject of major political crises and compromises. Slavery was defended in the South as a "positive good", and the largest religious denominations split over the slavery issue into regional organizations of the North and South.
Image marketing 18th-century tobacco produced by enslaved laborers in the Colony of Virginia (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North
typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers, and craftsmen,
with the greater number in cities. Many men worked on the docks and in
shipping. In 1703, more than 42 percent of New York City households held
enslaved people in bondage, the second-highest proportion of any city
in the colonies, behind only Charleston, South Carolina. Enslaved people were also used as agricultural workers in farm communities, especially in the South, but also in upstate New York and Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
By 1770, there were 397,924 black people out of a population of
2.17 million in what would soon become the United States. The slaves of
the colonial era were unevenly distributed: 14,867 lived in New England, where they were three percent of the population; 34,679 lived in the mid-Atlantic colonies, where they were six percent of the population; and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31 percent of the population.
The South developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops.
Its planters rapidly acquired a significantly higher number and
proportion of enslaved people in the population overall, as its
commodity crops were labor-intensive. Early on, enslaved people in the South worked primarily on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice and tobacco (cotton did not become a major crop until after the 1790s). In 1720, about 65 percent of South Carolina's population was enslaved. Planters (defined by historians in the Upper South as those who held 20
or more slaves) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops.
They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in
many Southern port cities. The later wave of settlers in the 18th
century who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry were backwoods subsistence farmers, and they seldom held enslaved people.
Detail
of the brickwork of a colonial-era church in Maryland; the brickmakers
of Baltimore were predominantly black and often enslaved
Beginning in the second half of the 18th century, a debate emerged
over the continued importation of African slaves to the American
colonies. Many in the colonies, including the Southern slavocracy, opposed further importation of slaves due to fears that it would destabilize colonies and lead to further slave rebellions. In 1772, prominent Virginians submitted a petition to the Crown, requesting that the slave trade to Virginia be abolished; it was rejected. Rhode Island forbade the importation of slaves in 1774. The influential revolutionary Fairfax Resolves called for an end to the "wicked, cruel and unnatural" Atlantic slave trade. All of the colonies banned slave importations during the Revolutionary War.
Slavery in the American Revolution and early republic
Slavery had existed for thousands of years, all around the world. In
the United States and many parts of the world it was a legal practise
and had become entrenched socially and economically in many societies.
The ideals and principles promoted in the Enlightenment and the American Revolution helped to put slavery and the desire for its abolition on the political agenda. As historian Christopher L. Brown put it, slavery "had never been on the agenda in a serious way before", but the American Revolution "forced it to be a public question from there forward".
After the new country's independence was secure, slavery was a topic of contention at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Many of Founding Fathers of the United States
were plantation owners who owned large numbers of enslaved laborers;
the original Constitution preserved their right to own slaves, and they
further gained a political advantage in owning slaves. Although the
enslaved of the early Republic were considered sentient property, were
not permitted to vote, and had no rights to speak of, they were to be
enumerated in population censuses and counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation in the national legislature, the U.S. Congress.
Slaves and free blacks who supported the Continental Army
This postage stamp, which was created at the time of the Bicentennial, honors Salem Poor,
who was an enslaved African-American man who purchased his freedom,
became a soldier, and rose to fame as a war hero during the Battle of Bunker Hill.
The rebels began to offer freedom as an incentive to motivate slaves
to fight on their side. Washington authorized slaves to be freed who
fought with the American Continental Army.
Rhode Island started enlisting slaves in 1778, and promised
compensation to owners whose slaves enlisted and survived to gain
freedom. During the course of the war, about one-fifth of the Northern army was black. In 1781, Baron Closen, a German officer in the French Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment at the Battle of Yorktown, estimated the American army to be about one-quarter black. These men included both former slaves and free-born blacks. Thousands
of free blacks in the Northern states fought in the state militias and
Continental Army. In the South, both sides offered freedom to slaves who
would perform military service. Roughly 20,000 slaves fought in the
American Revolution.
After the Revolutionary War broke out, the British realized they
lacked the manpower necessary to prosecute the war. In response, British
commanders began issuing proclamations to Patriot-owned slaves,
offering freedom if they fled to British lines and assisted the British
war effort. Such proclamations were repeatedly issued over the course of the
conflict, which resulted in up to 100,000 American slaves fleeing to
British lines. Self-emancipated slaves who reached British lines were organized into a
variety of military units, which served in all theaters of the war.
Formerly enslaved women and children, in lieu of military service,
worked instead as laborers and domestic servants. At the end of the war,
freed slaves in British lines either evacuated to other British
colonies or to Britain itself, were re-enslaved by the victorious
Americans, or fled into the countryside.
In early 1775, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth of his intention to free slaves owned by American Patriots in case they staged a rebellion. On November 7, 1775, Dunmore issued Dunmore's Proclamation, which promised freedom to any slaves of American patriots who would leave their masters and join the British forces. Historians agree that the proclamation was chiefly designed for
practical rather than moral reasons, and slaves owned by American
Loyalists were unaffected by the proclamation. About 1,500 slaves owned
by patriots escaped and joined Dunmore's forces. A total of 18 slaves
fled George Washington's plantation, one of whom, Harry, served in Dunmore's all-black loyalist regiment called "the Black Pioneers". Escapees who joined Dunmore had "Liberty to Slaves" stitched on to their jackets. Most died of disease before they could do any fighting, but three hundred of these freed slaves made it to freedom in Britain. Historian Jill Lepore writes that "between eighty and a hundred
thousand (nearly one in five black slaves) left their homes ... betting
on British victory", but Cassandra Pybus states that between 20,000 and
30,000 is a more realistic number of slaves who defected to the British
side during the war.
Many slaves took advantage of the disruption of war to escape
from their plantations to British lines or to fade into the general
population. Upon their first sight of British vessels, thousands of
slaves in Maryland and Virginia fled from their owners. Throughout the South, losses of slaves were high, with many due to escapes. Slaves also escaped throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic, with many joining the British who had occupied New York. In the closing months of the war, the British evacuated freedmen and also removed slaves owned by loyalists. Around 15,000 black loyalists left with the British, most of them ending up as free people in England or its colonies. Washington hired a slave catcher during the war, and at its end he pressed the British to return the slaves to their masters. With the British certificates of freedom in their belongings, the black
loyalists, including Washington's slave Harry, sailed with their white
counterparts out of New York harbor to Nova Scotia. More than 3,000 were resettled in Nova Scotia, where they were eventually granted land and formed the community of the black Nova Scotians.
In the first two decades after the American Revolution, state
legislatures and individuals took actions to free slaves. Northern
states passed new constitutions that contained language about equal
rights or specifically abolished slavery; some states, such as New York
and New Jersey, where slavery was more widespread, passed laws by the
end of the 18th century to abolish slavery incrementally. By 1804, all
the Northern states had passed laws outlawing slavery, either
immediately or over time. In New York, the last slaves were freed in
1827 (celebrated with a big July5 parade).
No Southern state abolished slavery, but some individual owners,
more than a handful, freed their slaves by personal decision, often
providing for manumission
in wills but sometimes filing deeds or court papers to free
individuals. Numerous slaveholders who freed their slaves cited
revolutionary ideals in their documents; others freed slaves as a
promised reward for service. From 1790 to 1810, the proportion of blacks free in the United States increased from 8 to 13.5 percent, and in the Upper South from less than one to nearly ten percent as a result of these actions.
Starting in 1777, the states outlawed the importation of slaves
one by one. They all acted to end the international trade, but, after
the war, it was reopened in North Carolina (opened until 1794) and
Georgia (opened until 1798) and South Carolina (opened until 1787, and
then reopened again in 1803.) In 1807, the United States Congress acted on President Thomas Jefferson's advice and, without controversy, made importing slaves from abroad a federal crime, effective the first day that the United States Constitution permitted this prohibition: January 1, 1808.
In 1787, the Northwest Territory
was established by the Continental Congress, and it excluded slavery.
It became the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and
Wisconsin, as well as part of Minnesota. It doubled the size of the
United States. As each new state wrote its constitution, slavery was
prohibited, although Illinois allowed the presence of slaves temporarily
brought in by their owners.
Slavery was a contentious issue in the writing and approval of the Constitution of the United States. The words "slave" and "slavery" did not appear in the Constitution as
originally adopted, although several provisions clearly referred to
slaves and slavery. Until the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the Constitution did not prohibit slavery.
Section 9 of Article I
forbade the federal government from prohibiting the importation of
slaves, described as "such Persons as any of the States now existing
shall think proper to admit", for twenty years after the Constitution's
ratification (until January 1, 1808). The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson
(who had called for its enactment in his 1806 State of the Union
address), went into effect on January 1, 1808, the earliest date on
which the importation of slaves could be prohibited under the
Constitution.
The delegates approved the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution (Article IV, section 2, clause 3),
which prohibited states from freeing those "held to Service or Labour"
(meaning slaves, indentures, and apprentices) who fled to them from
another state and required that they be returned to their owners. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave effect to the Fugitive Slave Clause. Salmon P. Chase
considered the Fugitive Slave Acts unconstitutional because "The
Fugitive Slave Clause was a compact among the states, not a grant of
power to the federal government".
In a section negotiated by James Madison of Virginia, Section2 of ArticleI designated "other persons" (slaves) to be added to the total of the state's free population, at the rate of three-fifths
of their total number, to establish the state's official population for
the purposes of apportionment of congressional representation and
federal taxation. The "Three-Fifths Compromise" was reached after a debate in which
delegates from Southern (slaveholding) states argued that slaves should
be counted in the census just as all other persons were while delegates
from Northern (free) states countered that slaves should not be counted
at all. The compromise strengthened the political power of Southern
states, as three-fifths of the (non-voting) slave population was counted
for congressional apportionment and in the Electoral College,
although it did not strengthen Southern states as much as it would have
had the Constitution provided for counting all persons, whether slave
or free, equally.
In addition, many parts of the country were tied to the Southern
economy. As the historian James Oliver Horton noted, prominent
slaveholder politicians and the commodity crops of the South had a
strong influence on United States politics and economy. Horton said,
in the 72 years between the election of George Washington and the election of Abraham Lincoln, 50 of those years [had] a slaveholder as president of the United States, and, for that whole period of time, there was never a person elected to a second term who was not a slaveholder.
The power of Southern states in Congress lasted until the Civil War, affecting national policies, legislation, and appointments. One result was that most of the justices appointed to the Supreme Court
were slave owners. The planter elite dominated the Southern
congressional delegations and the United States presidency for nearly
fifty years.
For
sale: 51 head of slaves, 12 yoke of draught oxen, 32 horses or mules; 5
head of slaves, 2 yoke of draught oxen; 11 head of slaves, 4 yoke of
oxen—in early America, slaves were treated legally and socially as if
they were farm animals (Louisiana State Gazette, New Orleans, November 1, 1819)
According to demographic calculations by J. David Hacker of the
University of Minnesota, approximately four out of five of all of the
slaves who ever lived in the United States or the territory that became
the United States (beginning in 1619 and including all colonies that
were eventually acquired or conquered by the United States) were born in
or imported to the United States in the 19th century. Slaves were the labor force of the South, but slave ownership (and the
dispossession and expulsion of Native Americans from their lands) was
also the foundation upon which American white supremacy was constructed. Historian Walter Johnson
argues that "one of the many miraculous things a slave could do was
make a household white...", meaning that the value of whiteness in
America was in some ways measured by the ability to purchase and
maintain black slaves.
Slavery in the United States was a variable thing, in "constant flux, driven by the violent pursuit of ever-larger profits." The enslaved labor force of the United States, while stereotypically
drawn as field labor for the production of cash crops like sugar and
cotton, performed nearly every type of skilled labor sought by the
economy. An examination of 1200 runaway slave ads published in Tennessee
found 25 blacksmiths, 18 carpenters, and 13 shoemakers, as well as
barbers, boat builders, bricklayers, a "conjurer or fortune teller,"
cooks, coopers, cotton mill engineers, dressmakers (often called mantuamakers),
hack drivers, iron furnace engineers, milliners, millwrights,
ministers, musicians (most commonly of the fiddle/violin), a racehorse
trainer, ostlers, plasterers, painters, seamstresses, stonemasons,
tanners, a "turner and tin-plate workman," wagoners, waiters, and
weavers. Complex as it was, historians do know, however, that slavery in the
United States was not a "deferred-compensation trade school
opportunity." Harriet Beecher Stowe summarized slavery in the United States in 1853:
What, then, is American slavery, as
we have seen it exhibited by law, and by the decision of Courts? Let us
begin by stating what it is not:
1. It is not apprenticeship.
2. It is not guardianship.
3. It is in no sense a system for the education of a weaker race by a stronger.
4. The happiness of the governed is in no sense its object.
5. The temporal improvement or the eternal well-being of the governed is in no sense its object.
The object of it has been distinctly stated in one sentence by Judge Ruffin,— "The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public safety."
Slavery, then, is absolute despotism, of the most unmitigated form.
One of the many defenses of American slavery was that the imagined "benevolent paternalism" of planters was beneficial or necessary (Detail, Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1840)
American slavery as "a necessary evil"
In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the
institution as a "necessary evil". At that time, it was feared that
emancipation of black slaves would have more harmful social and economic
consequences than the continuation of slavery. On April 22, 1820, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, wrote in a letter to John Holmes, that with slavery,
We have the wolf by the ear, and we
can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale,
and self-preservation in the other.
The French writer and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, in his influential Democracy in America
(1835), expressed opposition to slavery while observing its effects on
American society. He felt that a multiracial society without slavery was
untenable, as he believed that prejudice against blacks increased as
they were granted more rights (for example, in Northern states). He
believed that the attitudes of white Southerners, and the concentration
of the black population in the South, were bringing the white and black
populations to a state of equilibrium, and were a danger to both races.
Because of the racial differences between master and slave, he believed
that the latter could not be emancipated.
In a letter to his wife dated December 27, 1856, in reaction to a message from President Franklin Pierce, Robert E. Lee wrote,
There are few, I believe, in this
enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution
is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its
disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the
colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the
latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks
are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically,
and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary
for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope,
for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known
and ordered by a merciful Providence.
Confederate
$100 bill, 1862–63, showing slaves farming; there were over 125
carefully wrought etchings of laboring slaves made for currency issued
by 19th-century Southern banks and the Confederate States, images that provided reassurance that slavery "was protected both by law and by tradition." In 1860, Southern slaveholders held slaves as personal property collectively valued at more than $3 billion (about $97 billion in 2022) (National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History)Slave shackle found while digging in a property on Baronne Street in New Orleans; donated to the Kid Ory Historic House museum
However, as the abolitionist movement's agitation increased and the
area developed for plantations expanded, apologies for slavery became
more faint in the South. Leaders then described slavery as a beneficial
scheme of labor management. John C. Calhoun, in a famous speech in the Senate
in 1837, declared that slavery was "instead of an evil, a good – a
positive good". Calhoun supported his view with the following reasoning:
in every civilized society one portion of the community must live on
the labor of another; learning, science, and the arts are built upon
leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his master and mistress
and looked after in his old age, is better off than the free laborers of
Europe; and under the slave system conflicts between capital and labor
are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this respect, he concluded,
"will become more and more manifest, if left undisturbed by interference
from without, as the country advances in wealth and numbers".
Newspaper listings for New Orleans slave depots at Barrone and Gravier Street, and at 54, 58, 68, and 78 Barrone represented but a slim fraction of the trade in the city (New Orleans Crescent, January 10, 1861)
South Carolina army officer, planter, and railroad executive James Gadsden called slavery "a social blessing" and abolitionists "the greatest curse of the nation". Gadsden was in favor of South Carolina's secession in 1850, and was a leader in efforts to split California into two states, one slave and one free.
Other Southern writers who also began to portray slavery as a positive good were James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh. They presented several arguments to defend the practice of slavery in the South. Hammond, like Calhoun, believed that slavery was needed to build the
rest of society. In a speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858, Hammond
developed his "Mudsill Theory", defending his view on slavery by
stating: "Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other
class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes
the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might
as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one
or the other, except on this mud-sill." Hammond believed that in every
class one group must accomplish all the menial duties, because without
them the leaders in society could not progress. He argued that the hired laborers of the North were slaves too: "The difference...
is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is
no starvation, no begging, no want of employment," while those in the
North had to search for employment.
George Fitzhugh used assumptions about white superiority to
justify slavery, writing that, "the Negro is but a grown up child, and
must be governed as a child." In The Universal Law of Slavery,
Fitzhugh argues that slavery provides everything necessary for life and
that the slave is unable to survive in a free world because he is lazy,
and cannot compete with the intelligent European white race. He states
that "The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense,
the freest people in the world." Without the South, "He (slave) would become an insufferable burden to
society" and "Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so
by subjecting him to domestic slavery."[84]
The new [Confederate] Constitution
has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our
peculiar institutions – African slavery as it exists among us – the
proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the
immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson,
in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old
Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a
realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon
which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas
entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the
formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the
African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in
principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew
not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that
day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the
institution would be evanescent and pass away...
Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the
assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy
foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it – when the "storm
came and the wind blew, it fell".
Our new [Confederate]
Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations
are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is
not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior
race, is his natural and moral condition.
This view of the "Negro race" was backed by pseudoscience. The leading researcher was Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a Southerner and the inventor of the mental illnesses of drapetomania (the desire of a slave to run away) and dysaesthesia aethiopica
("rascality"), both cured, according to him, by whipping. The Medical
Association of Louisiana set up a committee, of which he was chair, to
investigate "the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race".
Their report, first delivered to the Medical Association in an address,
was published in their journal in 1851, and then reprinted in part in the widely circulated DeBow's Review.
American Slavery as a Cornerstone of World Economics
Many American Southerners justified the institution of slavery as a
fundamental part of the world's economic system. Central to this belief
was the King Cotton
ideology — the idea that global industrial economies, particularly in
Britain and France, were heavily dependent on the South’s cotton
exports, which were only affordable due to enslaved labor. As a result,
Southern leaders like Senator John A. Winston
asserted in 1857 that “the suspension of involuntary servitude for a
single year only, would cause convulsions in all the governments of the
civilised world, the disastrous results of which, it would be beyond
human ken to foresee.”
Southerners often pointed to the economic disruptions faced by
Britain, France, and Denmark following emancipation as proof of
slavery’s importance. Some even believed these nations might reverse
abolition due to market pressures. The British repeal of protectionist tariffs against slave-grown sugar
in 1846, alongside Europe’s broader turn toward free trade in the 1850s,
was interpreted by many Southerners as tacit recognition that
slave-based commodities remained essential to the global economy.
Southern Attempts to Expand Slavery
Throughout the 19th century, many white Southern Americans sought to
expand the institution of slavery into new territories. The most
successful example was Texas. Anglo-American settlers in Texas declared independence from Mexico in March 1836 and defeated the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto.
One of the primary motivations for independence was to preserve
slavery, which had been abolished by the Mexican government. After a
decade of political debate in the United States, Texas was annexed in 1845.
However, most attempts to expand slavery ultimately failed. Efforts to extend slavery into territories acquired during the Mexican Cession met resistance, culminating in the Compromise of 1850. Several high-profile expansionist initiatives, such as the Ostend Manifesto (a plan to annex Cuba as a slave state) and Narciso López’s
filibustering expeditions to Cuba, were unsuccessful. There were also
ambitions to expand slavery into Mexico, Nicaragua (see Walker Affair and Filibuster War), and other parts of Latin America within the proposed "Golden Circle."
Dark green indicates the reach of the Golden Circle, an aspirational empire for American slave owners
Wanted to reintroduce slavery in the Northern states, through federal action or Constitutional amendment making slavery legal nationwide, thus overriding state anti-slavery laws. (See Crittenden Compromise.) This was described as "well underway" by 1858.
Said openly that slavery should by no means be limited to black
people, since in their view it was beneficial. Northern white workers,
who were allegedly "wage slaves" already, would allegedly have better lives if they were enslaved.
None of these ideas got very far, but they alarmed Northerners and contributed to the growing polarization of the country.
Slavery is a volcano, the fires of
which cannot be quenched, nor its ravishes controlled. We already feel
its convulsions, and if we sit idly gazing upon its flames, as they rise
higher and higher, our happy republic will be buried in ruin, beneath
its overwhelming energies.
Beginning during the Revolution and in the first two decades of the
postwar era, every state in the North abolished slavery. These were the
first abolitionist laws in the Atlantic World. However, the abolition of slavery did not necessarily mean that
existing slaves became free. In some states they were forced to remain
with their former owners as indentured servants:
free in name only, although they could not be sold and thus families
could not be split, and their children were born free. The end of
slavery did not come in New York until July 4, 1827, when it was
celebrated (on July 5) with a big parade. However, in the 1830 census, the only state with no slaves was Vermont. In the 1840 census,
there were still slaves in New Hampshire (1), Rhode Island (5),
Connecticut (17), New York (4), Pennsylvania (64), Ohio (3), Indiana
(3), Illinois (331), Iowa (16), and Wisconsin (11). There were none in
these states in the 1850 census.
Most Northern states passed legislation for gradual abolition,
first freeing children born to slave mothers (and requiring them to
serve lengthy indentures to their mother's owners, often into their 20s
as young adults). In 1845, the Supreme Court of New Jersey received lengthy arguments towards "the deliverance of four thousand persons from bondage". Pennsylvania's last slaves were freed in 1847, Connecticut's in 1848,
and while neither New Hampshire nor New Jersey had any slaves in the 1850 Census, and New Jersey only one and New Hampshire none in the 1860 Census, slavery was never prohibited in either state until ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865 (and New Jersey was one of the last states to ratify it).
None of the Southern states abolished slavery before 1865, but it
was not unusual for individual slaveholders in the South to free
numerous slaves, often citing revolutionary ideals, in their wills. Methodist, Quaker, and Baptist preachers traveled in the South, appealing to slaveholders to manumit
their slaves, and there were "manumission societies" in some Southern
states. By 1810, the number and proportion of free blacks in the
population of the United States had risen dramatically. Most free blacks
lived in the North, but even in the Upper South, the proportion of free
blacks went from less than one percent of all blacks to more than ten
percent, even as the total number of slaves was increasing through
imports.
African slaves arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, and slavery was legally sanctioned by the Puritans in 1641. Massachusetts residents participated in the slave trade, and laws were
passed regulating the movement and marriage among slaves. In 1700, Samuel Sewall, Puritan abolitionist and associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, wrote The Selling of Joseph, within which he condemned slavery and the slave trade and refuted many of the era's typical justifications for slavery. The Puritan influence on slavery was still strong at the time of the American Revolution and up until the Civil War. Of America's first seven presidents, the two who did not own slaves, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams,
came from Puritan New England. They were wealthy enough to own slaves,
but they chose not to because they believed that it was morally wrong to
do so. In 1765, colonial leader Samuel Adams and his wife were given a slave girl as a gift. They immediately freed her.
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the abolitionists, such as Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass, repeatedly used the Puritan heritage of the country to bolster their cause. The most radical anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator,
invoked the Puritans and Puritan values over a thousand times. Parker,
in urging New England Congressmen to support the abolition of slavery,
wrote that "The son of the Puritan... is sent to Congress to stand up for Truth and Right..."
Northerners predominated in the westward movement into the Midwestern
territory after the American Revolution; as the states were organized,
they voted to prohibit slavery in their constitutions when they achieved
statehood: Ohio in 1803, Indiana in 1816, and Illinois in 1818. What
developed was a Northern block of free states united into one contiguous
geographic area that generally shared an anti-slavery culture. The
exceptions were the areas along the Ohio River settled by Southerners:
the southern portions of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Residents of those
areas generally shared in Southern culture and attitudes. In addition,
these areas were devoted to agriculture longer than the industrializing
northern parts of these states, and some farmers used slave labor. In
Illinois, for example, while the trade in slaves was prohibited, it was
legal to bring slaves from Kentucky
into Illinois and use them there, as long as the slaves left Illinois
one day per year (they were "visiting"). The emancipation of slaves in
the North led to the growth in the population of Northern free blacks,
from several hundred in the 1770s to nearly 50,000 by 1810.
Simon Legree and Uncle Tom: a scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), an influential abolitionist novel
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, abolitionism, a
movement to end slavery, grew in strength; most abolitionist societies
and supporters were in the North. They worked to raise awareness about
the evils of slavery, and to build support for abolition. After 1830,
abolitionist and newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison
promoted emancipation, characterizing slaveholding as a personal sin.
He demanded that slaveowners repent and start the process of
emancipation. His position increased defensiveness on the part of some
Southerners, who noted the long history of slavery among many cultures. A
few abolitionists, such as John Brown, favored the use of armed force to foment uprisings among the slaves, as he attempted to do at Harper's Ferry.
Most abolitionists tried to raise public support to change laws and to
challenge slave laws. Abolitionists were active on the lecture circuit
in the North, and often featured escaped slaves in their presentations.
Writer and orator Frederick Douglass became an important abolitionist leader after escaping from slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was an international bestseller, and along with the non-fiction companion A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, aroused popular sentiment against slavery. It also provoked the publication of numerous anti-Tom novels by Southerners in the years before the American Civil War.
This struggle took place amid strong support for slavery among white
Southerners, who profited greatly from the system of enslaved labor. But
slavery was entwined with the national economy; for instance, the
banking, shipping, insurance, and manufacturing industries of New York
City all had strong economic interests in slavery, as did similar
industries in other major port cities in the North. The Northern textile
mills in New York and New England processed Southern cotton and
manufactured clothes to outfit slaves. By 1822, half of New York City's
exports were related to cotton.
Slaveholders began to refer to slavery as the "peculiar institution" to differentiate it from other examples of forced labor. They justified it as less cruel than the free labor of the North.
The principal organized bodies to advocate abolition and anti-slavery reforms in the north were the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the New York Manumission Society. Before the 1830s the antislavery groups called for gradual emancipation. By the late 1820s, under the impulse of religious evangelicals such as Beriah Green,
the sense emerged that owning slaves was a sin and the owner had to
immediately free himself from this grave sin by immediate emancipation.
The shipping news in Charleston in December 1805 included 900 newly imported enslaved Africans from the Gold Coast, Windward Coast, and Bonny, plus cotton shipping out for Liverpool, and a delivery of salampore cloth, which was traded for "prime negroes" in regions of Africa where Islamic dietary laws made American rum undesirable
Under the Constitution, Congress could not prohibit the import slave
trade that was allowed in South Carolina until 1808. However, the third
Congress regulated against it in the Slave Trade Act of 1794, which prohibited American shipbuilding and outfitting for the trade. Subsequent acts in 1800
and 1803 sought to discourage the trade by banning American investment
in the trade, and American employment on ships in the trade, as well as
prohibiting importation into states that had abolished slavery, which
all states except South Carolina had by 1807. The final Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was adopted in 1807 and went into effect in 1808. However, illegal importation of African slaves (smuggling) was common. The Cuban slave trade between 1796 and 1807 was dominated by American
slave ships. Despite the 1794 Act, Rhode Island slave ship owners found
ways to continue supplying the slave-owning states. The overall U.S.
slave-ship fleet in 1806 was estimated to be almost 75% the size of that
of the British.
After Great Britain and the United States outlawed the
international slave trade in 1807, British slave trade suppression
activities began in 1808 through diplomatic efforts and the formation of
the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron
in 1809. The United States denied the Royal Navy the right to stop and
search U.S. ships suspected as slave ships, so not only were American
ships unhindered by British patrols, but slavers from other countries
would fly the American flag to try to avoid being stopped. Co-operation
between the United States and Britain was not possible during the War of 1812 or the period of poor relations in the following years. In 1820, the United States Navy sent USS Cyane under the command of Captain Edward Trenchard to patrol the slave coasts of West Africa. Cyane
seized four American slave ships in her first year on station.
Trenchard developed a good level of co-operation with the Royal Navy.
Four additional U.S. warships were sent to the African coast in 1820 and
1821. A total of 11 American slave ships were taken by the U.S. Navy
over this period. Then American enforcement activity reduced. There was
still no agreement between the United States and Britain on a mutual
right to board suspected slave traders sailing under each other's flag.
Attempts to reach such an agreement stalled in 1821 and 1824 in the United States Senate.
A U.S. Navy presence, however sporadic, did result in American slavers
sailing under the Spanish flag, but still as an extensive trade. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty
of 1842 set a guaranteed minimum level of patrol activity by the U.S.
Navy and the Royal Navy, and formalized the level of co-operation that
had existed in 1820. Its effects, however, were minimal while opportunities for greater co-operation were not taken. The U.S.
transatlantic slave trade was not effectively suppressed until 1861,
during Lincoln's presidency, when a treaty with Britain was signed whose
provisions included allowing the Royal Navy to board, search and arrest
slavers operating under the American flag.
Andrew Jackson and the slave trade in the United States:
Jackson, soon to be the "Hero of New Orleans," explains how much it
should cost to take a shipment of slaves to Natchez for sale ( The Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, 1926)
During the War of 1812, British Royal Navy
commanders of the blockading fleet were instructed to offer freedom to
defecting American slaves, as the Crown had during the Revolutionary
War. Thousands of escaped slaves went over to the Crown with their families. Men were recruited into the Corps of Colonial Marines on occupied Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay. Many freed American slaves were recruited directly into existing West Indian regiments, or newly created British Army
units. The British later resettled a few thousand freed slaves to Nova
Scotia. Their descendants, together with descendants of the black people
resettled there after the Revolution, have established the Black
Loyalist Heritage Museum.
Slaveholders, primarily in the South, had considerable "loss of
property" as thousands of slaves escaped to the British lines or ships
for freedom, despite the difficulties. The planters' complacency about slave "contentment" was shocked by seeing that slaves would risk so much to be free. Afterward, when some freed slaves had been settled at Bermuda, slaveholders such as Major Pierce Butler of South Carolina tried to persuade them to return to the United States, to no avail.
The Americans protested that Britain's failure to return all slaves violated the Treaty of Ghent. After arbitration by the Tsar of Russia, the British paid $1,204,960 in damages (about $33.5 million in today's money) to Washington, which reimbursed the slaveowners.
According to Herbert Aptheker,
"there were few phases of ante-bellum Southern life and history that
were not in some way influenced by the fear of, or the actual outbreak
of, militant concerted slave action."
Historians in the 20th century identified 250 to 311 slave uprisings in U.S. and colonial history. Those after 1776 include:
In 1831, Nat Turner, a literate slave who claimed to have spiritual visions, organized a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia;
it was sometimes called the Southampton Insurrection. Turner and his
followers killed nearly sixty white inhabitants, mostly women and
children. Many of the men in the area were attending a religious event
in North Carolina. Eventually Turner was captured with 17 other rebels, who were subdued by the militia. Turner and his followers were hanged, and Turner's body was flayed.
In a frenzy of fear and retaliation, the militia killed more than 100
slaves who had not been involved in the rebellion. Planters whipped
hundreds of innocent slaves to ensure resistance was quelled.
This rebellion prompted Virginia and other slave states to pass
more restrictions on slaves and free people of color, controlling their
movement and requiring more white supervision of gatherings. In 1835,
North Carolina withdrew the franchise for free people of color, and they
lost their vote.
There are four known mutinies on vessels involved in the coastwise slave trade: Decatur (1826), Governor Strong (1826), Lafayette (1829), and the Creole (1841).
Post-revolution Southern manumissions
Manumission papers of Phillis Murray, a black woman about 25 years old, signed by William Glasgow, December 31, 1833 (Missouri History Museum)
Although Virginia, Maryland and Delaware
were slave states, the latter two already had a high proportion of free
blacks by the outbreak of war. Following the Revolution, the three
legislatures made manumission
easier, allowing it by deed or will. Quaker and Methodist ministers in
particular urged slaveholders to free their slaves. The number and
proportion of freed slaves in these states rose dramatically until 1810.
More than half of the number of free blacks in the United States were
concentrated in the Upper South. The proportion of free blacks among the
black population in the Upper South rose from less than 1 percent in
1792 to more than 10 percent by 1810. In Delaware, nearly 75 percent of black people were free by 1810.
In the United States as a whole, the number of free blacks reached 186,446, or 13.5 percent of all black people by 1810. After that period, few slaves were freed, as the development of cotton plantations
featuring short-staple cotton in the Deep South drove up the internal
demand for slaves in the domestic slave trade and high prices being paid
for them.
South Carolina made manumission more difficult, requiring legislative approval of every manumission. Alabama banned free black people from the state beginning in 1834; free
people of color who crossed the state line were subject to enslavement. Free black people in Arkansas after 1843 had to buy a $500
good-behavior bond, and no unenslaved black person was legally allowed
to move into the state.
Female slave owners
The slave trade made kidnapping children of color a profitable criminal business—the Patty Cannon
gang was at work in Northwest Fork Hundred, Delaware until 1829, when
four bodies were found buried on property they had owned ("Kidnapping
250 Dollars Reward" Constitutional Whig, April 27, 1827)
Despite coverture
laws that gave the property of married women to their husbands, married
women exercised their right to own and control human property without
their husbands' interference or permission, and they were active
participants in the slave trade. For example, in South Carolina 40% of bills of sale for slaves from the 1700s to the present included a female buyer or seller. Women also governed their slaves in a manner similar to men, engaging
in the same levels of physical disciplining. Like men, they brought
lawsuits against those who jeopardized their ownership to their slaves.
Despite the longstanding color line in the United States, some
African Americans were slave owners themselves, some in cities and
others as plantation owners in the country. Slave ownership signified both wealth and increased social status. Black slave owners were uncommon, however, as "of the two and a half
million African Americans living in the United States in 1850, the vast
majority [were] enslaved."
After 1800, some of the Cherokee and the other four civilized tribes of the Southeast started buying and using black slaves as labor. They continued this practice after removal to Indian Territory in the 1830s, when as many as 15,000 enslaved blacks were taken with them.
The nature of slavery in Cherokee society
often mirrored that of white slave-owning society. The law barred
intermarriage of Cherokees and enslaved African Americans, but Cherokee
men had unions with enslaved women, resulting in mixed-race children.Cherokee who aided slaves were punished with one hundred lashes on the
back. In Cherokee society, persons of African descent were barred from
holding office even if they were also racially and culturally Cherokee.
They were also barred from bearing arms and owning property. The
Cherokee prohibited the teaching of African Americans to read and write.
By contrast, the Seminole welcomed into their nation African Americans who had escaped slavery (Black Seminoles).
Historically, the Black Seminoles lived mostly in distinct bands near
the Native American Seminole. Some were held as slaves of particular
Seminole leaders. Seminole practice in Florida had acknowledged slavery,
though not the chattel slavery model common elsewhere. It was, in fact,
more like feudal dependency and taxation. The relationship between Seminole blacks and natives changed following
their relocation in the 1830s to territory controlled by the Creek
who had a system of chattel slavery. Pro slavery pressure from Creek
and pro-Creek Seminole and slave raiding led to many Black Seminoles
escaping to Mexico.
The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, prevented Congress from completely banning the importation of slaves until 1808, although Congress regulated against the trade in the Slave Trade Act of 1794, and in subsequent Acts in 1800 and 1803. During and after the Revolution, the states
individually passed laws against importing slaves. By contrast, the
states of Georgia and South Carolina reopened their trade due to demand
by their upland planters, who were developing new cotton plantations:
Georgia from 1800 until December 31, 1807, and South Carolina from 1804.
In that period, Charleston traders imported about 75,000 slaves, more
than were brought to South Carolina in the 75 years before the
Revolution. Approximately 30,000 were imported to Georgia.
By January 1, 1808, when Congress banned further imports,
South Carolina was the only state that still allowed importation of
enslaved people. The domestic trade became extremely profitable as
demand rose with the expansion of cultivation in the Deep South for
cotton and sugar cane crops. Slavery in the United States became, more
or less, self-sustaining by natural increase among the current slaves
and their descendants. Maryland and Virginia viewed themselves as slave
producers, seeing "producing slaves" as resembling animal husbandry.
Workers, including many children, were relocated by force from the upper
to the lower South.
Despite the ban, slave imports continued through smugglers bringing in slaves past the U.S. Navy's African Slave Trade Patrol to South Carolina, and overland from Texas and Florida, both under Spanish control. Congress increased the punishment associated with importing slaves,
classifying it in 1820 as an act of piracy, with smugglers subject to
harsh penalties, including death if caught. After that, "it is unlikely
that more than 10,000 [slaves] were successfully landed in the United
States." But, some smuggling of slaves into the United States continued until just before the start of the Civil War.
The 1839 Mitchell map of Liberia shows colonial settlements including New Georgia, Pennsylvania Colony, Mississippi Colony, Louisiana Colony, and Maryland Colony"Only think of it!—There is actually a scheme on foot for transporting to the shores of Africa a large portion of the yeomanry of this country!
And why? Because it is said they can never attain to respectability or
happiness here—among their own countrymen!!—Hail, Columbia! happy land!"
(The Liberator, December 1, 1832)
In the early part of the 19th century, other organizations were
founded to take action on the future of black Americans. Some advocated
removing free black people from the United States to places where they
would enjoy greater freedom; some endorsed colonization in Africa, while others advocated emigration, usually to Haiti. During the 1820s and 1830s, the American Colonization Society (ACS) was the primary organization to implement the "return" of black Americans to Africa. The ACS was made up mostly of Quakers
and slaveholders, and they found uneasy common ground in support of
what was incorrectly called "repatriation". By this time, however, most
black Americans were native-born and did not want to emigrate, saying
they were no more African than white Americans were British. Rather,
they wanted full rights in the United States, where their families had
lived and worked for generations.
In 1822, the ACS and affiliated state societies established what would become the colony of Liberia, in West Africa. The ACS assisted thousands of freedmen and free blacks (with legislated
limits) to emigrate there from the United States. Many white people
considered this preferable to emancipation in the United States. Henry Clay, one of the founders and a prominent slaveholder politician from Kentucky, said that blacks faced:
...unconquerable prejudice
resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free
whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected
them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them
off.
Deportation would also be a way to prevent reprisals against former
slaveholders and white people in general, as had occurred in the 1804 Haiti massacre, which had contributed to a consuming fear amongst whites of retributive black violence, a phobia dubbed Haitianism.
The U.S. Constitution
barred the federal government from prohibiting the importation of
slaves for twenty years. Various states passed bans on the international
slave trade during that period; by 1808, the only state still allowing
the importation of African slaves was South Carolina. After 1808, legal
importation of slaves ceased, although there was smuggling via Spanish Florida and the disputed Gulf Coast to the west. This route all but ended after Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821 (but see slave shipsWanderer and Clotilda).
The replacement for the importation of slaves from abroad was
increased domestic production. Virginia and Maryland had little new
agricultural development, and their need for slaves was mostly for
replacements for decedents. Normal reproduction more than supplied
these: Virginia and Maryland had surpluses of slaves. Their tobacco
farms were "worn out" and the climate was not suitable for cotton or sugar cane. The surplus was even greater because slaves were encouraged to reproduce (though they could not marry). The pro-slavery Virginian Thomas Roderick Dew wrote in 1832 that Virginia was a "negro-raising state"; i.e. Virginia "produced" slaves. According to him, in 1832 Virginia exported "upwards of 6,000 slaves" per year, "a source of wealth to Virginia". A newspaper from 1836 gives the figure as 40,000, earning for Virginia an estimated $24,000,000 per year.
Demand for slaves was the strongest in what was then the southwest of
the country: Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and, later, Texas,
Arkansas, and Missouri. Here there was abundant land suitable for
plantation agriculture, which young men with some capital established. This was expansion of the white, monied population: younger men seeking their fortune.
The most valuable crop that could be grown on a plantation in
that climate was cotton. That crop was labor-intensive, and the
least-costly laborers were slaves. Demand for slaves exceeded the supply
in the southwest; therefore slaves, never cheap if they were
productive, went for a higher price. As portrayed in Uncle Tom's Cabin (the "original" cabin was in Maryland), "selling South" was greatly feared. A recently (2018) publicized example of the practice of "selling South" is the 1838 sale by Jesuits of 272 slaves from Maryland, to plantations in Louisiana, to benefit Georgetown University, which has been described as "ow[ing] its existence" to this transaction. The growing international demand for cotton led many plantation
owners further west in search of suitable land. In addition, the
invention of the cotton gin
in 1793 enabled profitable processing of short-staple cotton, which
could readily be grown in the uplands. The invention revolutionized the
cotton industry by increasing fifty-fold the quantity of cotton that
could be processed in a day. At the end of the War of 1812,
fewer than 300,000 bales of cotton were produced nationally. By 1820,
the amount of cotton produced had increased to 600,000 bales, and by
1850 it had reached 4,000,000. There was an explosive growth of cotton
cultivation throughout the Deep South and greatly increased demand for
slave labor to support it. As a result, manumissions decreased dramatically in the South.
Most of the slaves sold from the Upper South were from Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas,
where changes in agriculture decreased the need for their labor and the
demand for slaves. Before 1810, primary destinations for the slaves who
were sold were Kentucky and Tennessee, but, after 1810, the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas received the most slaves. This is where cotton became "king". Meanwhile, the Upper South states of Kentucky and Tennessee joined the slave-exporting states.
By 1815, the domestic slave trade had become a major economic activity in the United States; it lasted until the 1860s. Between 1830 and 1840, nearly 250,000 slaves were taken across state lines. In the 1850s, more than 193,000 enslaved persons were transported, and
historians estimate nearly one million in total took part in the forced
migration of this new "Middle Passage". By 1860, the slave population in
the United States had reached four million. Of the 1,515,605 free families in the fifteen slave states in 1860, nearly 400,000 held slaves (roughly one in four, or 25%), amounting to 8% of all American families.
Ashley's Sack
is a cloth that recounts a slave sale separating a mother and her
daughter. The sack belonged to a nine-year-old girl Ashley and was a
parting gift from her mother, Rose, after Ashley had been sold. Rose
filled the sack with a dress, braid of her hair, pecans, and "my love
always". (Middleton Place Foundation, South Carolina)
The historian Ira Berlin called this forced migration of slaves the "Second Middle Passage" because it reproduced many of the same horrors as the Middle Passage
(the name given to the transportation of slaves from Africa to North
America). These sales of slaves broke up many families and caused much
hardship. Characterizing it as the "central event" in the life of a
slave between the American Revolution
and the Civil War, Berlin wrote that, whether slaves were directly
uprooted or lived in fear that they or their families would be
involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people,
both slave and free". Individuals lost their connection to families and clans. Added to the
earlier colonists combining slaves from different tribes, many ethnic
Africans lost their knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa. Most
were descended from families that had been in the United States for many
generations.
The firm of Franklin and Armfield
was a leader in this trade. In the 1840s, almost 300,000 slaves were
transported, with Alabama and Mississippi receiving 100,000 each. During
each decade between 1810 and 1860, at least 100,000 slaves were moved
from their state of origin. In the final decade before the Civil War,
250,000 were transported. Michael Tadman wrote in Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South
(1989) that 60–70% of inter-regional migrations were the result of the
sale of slaves. In 1820, a slave child in the Upper South had a 30
percent chance of being sold South by 1860. The death rate for the slaves on their way to their new destination
across the American South was less than that suffered by captives
shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, but mortality nevertheless was higher
than the normal death rate.
Slave traders transported two-thirds of the slaves who moved West. Only a minority moved with their families and existing master. Slave
traders had little interest in purchasing or transporting intact slave
families; in the early years, planters demanded only the young male
slaves needed for heavy labor. Later, in the interest of creating a
"self-reproducing labor force", planters purchased nearly equal numbers
of men and women. Berlin wrote:
The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in
the South outside the plantation itself, and probably the most advanced
in its employment of modern transportation, finance, and publicity. The
slave trade industry developed its own unique language, with terms such as "prime hands, bucks, breeding wenches, and "fancy girls" coming into common use.
"Northern Industry" and "Southern Industry" prior to the American Civil War (Scribner's Popular History of the United States, 1896)
The expansion of the interstate slave trade contributed to the
"economic revival of once depressed seaboard states" as demand
accelerated the value of slaves who were subject to sale. Some traders moved their "chattels" by sea, with Norfolk to New Orleans being the most common route, but most slaves were forced to walk overland. Others were shipped downriver from such markets as Louisville on the Ohio River, and Natchez
on the Mississippi. Traders created regular migration routes served by a
network of slave pens, yards and warehouses needed as temporary housing
for the slaves. In addition, other vendors provided clothes, food and
supplies for slaves. As the trek advanced, some slaves were sold and new
ones purchased. Berlin concluded, "In all, the slave trade, with its
hubs and regional centers, its spurs and circuits, reached into every
cranny of southern society. Few southerners, black or white, were
untouched."
Once the trip ended, slaves faced a life on the frontier
significantly different from most labor in the Upper South. Clearing
trees and starting crops on virgin fields was harsh and backbreaking
work. A combination of inadequate nutrition, bad water and exhaustion
from both the journey and the work weakened the newly arrived slaves and
produced casualties. New plantations were located at rivers' edges for
ease of transportation and travel. Mosquitoes
and other environmental challenges spread disease, which took the lives
of many slaves. They had acquired only limited immunities to lowland
diseases in their previous homes. The death rate was so high that, in
the first few years of hewing a plantation out of the wilderness, some
planters preferred whenever possible to use rented slaves rather than
their own.
The harsh conditions on the frontier increased slave resistance
and led owners and overseers to rely on violence for control. Many of
the slaves were new to cotton fields and unaccustomed to the
"sunrise-to-sunset gang labor" required by their new life. Slaves were
driven much harder than when they had been in growing tobacco or wheat back East. Slaves had less time and opportunity to improve the quality of their lives by raising their own livestock or tending vegetable gardens, for either their own consumption or trade, as they could in the East.
In Louisiana, French colonists had established sugar cane plantations and exported sugar as the chief commodity crop. After the Louisiana Purchase
in 1803, Americans entered the state and joined the sugar cultivation.
Between 1810 and 1830, planters bought slaves from the North and the
number of slaves increased from fewer than 10,000 to more than 42,000.
Planters preferred young males, who represented two-thirds of the slave
purchases. Dealing with sugar cane was even more physically demanding
than growing cotton. The largely young, unmarried male slave force made
the reliance on violence by the owners "especially savage".
New Orleans became nationally important as a slave market and port, as slaves were shipped from there upriver by steamboat
to plantations on the Mississippi River; it also sold slaves who had
been shipped downriver from markets such as Louisville. By 1840, the New Orleans slave market
was the largest in North America. It became the wealthiest and the
fourth-largest city in the nation, based chiefly on the slave trade and
associated businesses. The trading season was from September to May, after the harvest.
The notion that slave traders were social outcasts of low
reputation, even in the South, was initially promulgated by defensive
southerners and later by figures like historian Ulrich B. Phillips. Historian Frederic Bancroft, author of Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931) found — to the contrary of Phillips's position — that many traders were esteemed members of their communities. Contemporary researcher Steven Deyle
argues that the "trader's position in society was not unproblematic and
owners who dealt with the trader felt the need to satisfy themselves
that they acted honorably," while Michael Tadman
contends that "'trader as outcast' operated at the level of propaganda"
whereas white slave owners almost universally professed a belief that
slaves were not human like them, and thus dismissed the consequences of
slave trading as beneath consideration. Similarly, historian Charles Dew
read hundreds of letters to slave traders and found virtually zero
narrative evidence for guilt, shame, or contrition about the slave
trade: "If you begin with the absolute belief in white
supremacy—unquestioned white superiority/unquestioned black
inferiority—everything falls neatly into place: the African is inferior
racial 'stock,' living in sin and ignorance and barbarism and heathenism
on the 'Dark Continent' until enslaved...Slavery thus miraculously
becomes a form of 'uplift' for this supposedly benighted and brutish
race of people. And once notions of white supremacy and black
inferiority are in place in the American South, they are passed on from
one generation to the next with all the certainty and inevitability of a
genetic trait."
The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending
on conditions, time, and place, but in general it was brutal, especially
on plantations. Whippings and rape were routine. The power
relationships of slavery corrupted many whites that had authority over
slaves, with children showing their own cruelty. Masters and overseers
resorted to physical punishments to impose their wills. Slaves were
punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation,
branding and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted out in
response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse
was carried out to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer of
the slave. Treatment was usually harsher on large plantations, which were often
managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders, conditions
permitting abuses.
William Wells Brown,
who escaped to freedom, reported that on one plantation, slave men were
required to pick eighty pounds of cotton per day, while women were
required to pick seventy pounds per day; if any slave failed in his or
her quota, they were subject to one lash of the whip for each pound that
they were short. The whipping post stood next to the cotton scales. A New York man who attended a slave auction in the mid-19th century
reported that at least three-quarters of the male slaves he saw at sale
had scars on their backs from whipping. By contrast, small slave-owning families had closer relationships
between the owners and slaves; this sometimes resulted in a more humane
environment but was not a given.
Historian Lawrence M. Friedman wrote: "Ten Southern codes made it a crime to mistreat a slave.... Under the Louisiana Civil Code
of 1825 (art. 192), if a master was "convicted of cruel treatment", the
judge could order the sale of the mistreated slave, presumably to a
better master. Masters and overseers were seldom prosecuted under these laws. No slave could give testimony in the courts.
Wilson Chinn, a branded slave from Louisiana—also exhibiting instruments of torture used to punish slaves (carte de visite by Charles Paxson, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2019.521)
According to Adalberto Aguirre's research, 1,161 slaves were executed in the United States between the 1790s and 1850s. Quick executions of innocent slaves as well as suspects typically
followed any attempted slave rebellions, as white militias overreacted
with widespread killings that expressed their fears of rebellions, or
suspected rebellions.
Although most slaves had lives that were very restricted in terms
of their movements and agency, exceptions existed to virtually every
generalization; for instance, there were also slaves who had
considerable freedom in their daily lives: slaves allowed to rent out
their labor and who might live independently of their master in cities,
slaves who employed white workers, and slave doctors who treated
upper-class white patients. After 1820, in response to the inability to import new slaves from
Africa and in part to abolitionist criticism, some slaveholders improved
the living conditions of their slaves, to encourage them to be
productive and to try to prevent escapes. It was part of a paternalistic approach in the antebellum era
that was encouraged by ministers trying to use Christianity to improve
the treatment of slaves. Slaveholders published articles in Southern
agricultural journals to share best practices in treatment and
management of slaves; they intended to show that their system was better
than the living conditions of Northern industrial workers.
Medical care for slaves was limited in terms of the medical
knowledge available to anyone. It was generally provided by other slaves
or by slaveholders' family members, although sometimes "plantation
physicians", like J. Marion Sims,
were called by the owners to protect their investment by treating sick
slaves. Many slaves possessed medical skills needed to tend to each
other, and used folk remedies brought from Africa. They also developed
new remedies based on American plants and herbs.
An estimated nine percent of slaves were disabled
due to a physical, sensory, psychological, neurological, or
developmental condition. However, slaves were often described as
disabled if they were unable to work or bear a child, and were often
subjected to harsh treatment as a result.
According to Andrew Fede, an owner could be held criminally
liable for killing a slave only if the slave he killed was "completely
submissive and under the master's absolute control". For example, in 1791 the North Carolina General Assembly defined the willful killing of a slave as criminal murder, unless done in resisting or under moderate correction (that is, corporal punishment).
While slaves' living conditions were poor by modern standards, Robert Fogel argued that all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the 19th century were subject to hardship. Unlike free individuals, however, enslaved people were far more likely
to be underfed, physically punished, sexually abused, or killed, with no
recourse, legal or otherwise, against those who perpetrated these
crimes against them.
Commodification of human tissue
In a very grim fashion, the commodification of the human body was
legal in the case of African slaves as they were not legally seen as
fully human. The most popular means of commodifying slave tissues was
through medical experimentation. Slaves were routinely used as medical
specimens forced to take part in experimental surgeries, amputations,
disease research, and developing medical techniques. Many slaves in these routine experiments were not given pain relief or
analgesics, resulting in death by shock on the table. The bodies of such
slaves were grouped with other medical cadavers, or sold with the
bodies of other slaves sold, stolen, or grave robbed for medical
experimentation. In many cases, slave cadavers were used in demonstrations and dissection tables, oftentimes resulting in their tissues being sold for profit.
For the reason of slave punishment, decoration, or
self-expression, the skin of slaves was in many instances allowed to be
made into leather for furniture, accessories, and clothing, a common instance of which being that of wealthy clientele sending
cadaver skin to tanners and shoemakers under the guise of animal
leather. Slave hair could be shaved and used for stuffing in pillows and
furniture. In some instances, the inner body tissue of slaves (fat,
bones, etc.) could be made into soap, medicinal grease, trophies, and
other commodities.
Some enslaved persons recounted actual instances of cannibalism by white enslavers, who butchered and consumed some enslaved black people.
Sexual abuse, reproductive exploitation, and breeding farms
"The negroes to be sold" including America and Obedience, The Port Gibson Herald, March 1, 1850
Because of the power relationships at work, slave women in the United States were at high risk for rape and sexual abuse. Their children were repeatedly taken away from them and sold as
chattel; usually they never saw each other again. Many slaves fought
back against sexual attacks, and some died resisting. Others carried
psychological and physical scars from the attacks. Sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern culture that treated black women as property or chattel. Southern culture strongly policed against sexual relations between
white women and black men on the purported grounds of racial purity but,
by the late 18th century, the many mixed-race slaves and slave children showed that white men had often taken advantage of slave women. Wealthy planter widowers, notably such as John Wayles and his son-in-law Thomas Jefferson, took slave women as concubines; each had six children with his partner: Elizabeth Hemings and her daughter Sally Hemings (the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife), respectively. Both Mary Chesnut and Fanny Kemble,
wives of planters, wrote about this issue in the antebellum South in
the decades before the Civil War. Sometimes planters used mixed-race
slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their
children or other relatives. While publicly opposed to race mixing, in his Notes on the State of Virginia
published in 1785, Jefferson wrote: "The improvement of the blacks in
body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites,
has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not
the effect merely of their condition of life". Historians estimate that 58% of enslaved women in the U.S. aged 15–30
years were sexually assaulted by their slave owners and other white men. As a result of centuries of slavery and such relationships, DNA studies
have shown that the vast majority of African Americans also have
historic European ancestry, generally through paternal lines. The average Black American genome is roughly 20-25% European, and it is estimated that as much as one third of their Y chromosomes are of European origin.
Portrayals of black men as hypersexual and savage, along with
ideals of protecting white women, were predominant during this time and masked the experiences of sexual violence faced by black male
slaves, especially by white women. Subject not only to rape and sexual
exploitation, slaves faced sexual violence in many forms. A black man
could be forced by his slaveowner to rape another slave or even a free
black woman. Forced pairings with other slaves, including forced breeding, which neither slave might desire, were common. Despite explicit bans on homosexuality and sodomy, it was not uncommon
for male slaves and children to be sexually harassed and assaulted by
their masters in secret. Through sexual and reproductive abuse slaveowners could further enforce their control over their slaves.
The prohibition on the importation of slaves
into the United States after 1808 limited the supply of slaves in the
United States. This came at a time when the invention of the cotton gin
enabled the expansion of cultivation in the uplands of short-staple
cotton, leading to clearing lands cultivating cotton through large areas
of the Deep South, especially the Black Belt.
The demand for labor in the area increased sharply and led to an
expansion of the internal slave market. At the same time, the Upper South
had an excess number of slaves because of a shift to mixed-crops
agriculture, which was less labor-intensive than tobacco. To add to the
supply of slaves, slaveholders looked at the fertility of slave women as
part of their productivity, and intermittently forced the women to have
large numbers of children. During this time period, the terms
"breeders", "breeding slaves", "child bearing women", "breeding period",
and "too old to breed" became familiar.
The Quadroon Girl (1878) oil painting by Henry Mosler;
scholars of slavery have described the image of the "quadroon bride"
and the Southern "fixation on interracial sex and violence" as a form of
folk pornography (Cincinnati Art Museum 1976.25)
As it became popular on many plantations to breed slaves for
strength, fertility, or extra labor, there grew many documented
instances of "breeding farms"
in the United States. Slaves were forced to conceive and birth as many
new slaves as possible. The largest farms were located in Virginia and
Maryland. Because the industry of slave breeding came from a desire for larger
than natural population growth of slaves, slaveowners often turned
towards systematic practices for creating more slaves. Female slaves
"were subjected to repeated rape or forced sex and became pregnant again
and again", even by incest.
In horrific accounts of former slaves, some stated that hoods or bags
were placed over their heads to prevent them from knowing who they were
forced to have sex with. Journalist William Spivey wrote, "It could be
someone they know, perhaps a niece, aunt, sister, or their own mother.
The breeders only wanted a child that could be sold."
In the United States in the early 19th century, owners of female slaves could freely and legally use them as sexual objects. This follows free use of female slaves on slaving vessels by the crews.
The slaveholder has it in his power, to violate the
chastity of his slaves. And not a few are beastly enough to exercise
such power. Hence it happens that, in some families, it is difficult to
distinguish the free children from the slaves. It is sometimes the case,
that the largest part of the master's own children are born, not of his
wife, but of the wives and daughters of his slaves, whom he has basely
prostituted as well as enslaved.
"This vice, this bane of society, has already become so common, that it is scarcely esteemed a disgrace."
Andreas Byrenheidt, a 70-year-old physician, placed an unusually long and detailed runaway slave ad
in two Alabama newspapers in hopes of recovering a 20-year-old enslaved
woman, whom he had purchased four years earlier, and her four-year-old
daughter, who sometimes called herself Lolo ("$100 Reward" Cahawba Democrat, Cahaba, Alabama, June 16, 1838)
"Fancy" was a code word that indicated that the girl or young woman was suitable for or trained for sexual use. In some cases, children were also abused in this manner. The sale of a 13-year-old "nearly a fancy" is documented. Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., bought his wife when she was 13.
Furthermore, enslaved women who were old enough to bear children
were encouraged to procreate, which raised their value as slaves, since
their children would eventually provide labor or be sold, enriching the
owners. Enslaved women were sometimes medically treated to enable or
encourage their fertility. The variations in skin color found in the United States make it obvious how often black women were impregnated by whites. For example, in the 1850 Census, 75.4% of "free negros" in Florida were described as mulattos, of mixed race. Nevertheless, it is only very recently, with DNA
studies, that any sort of reliable number can be provided, and the
research has only begun. Light-skinned girls, who contrasted with the
darker field workers, were preferred.
The sexual use of black slaves by either slave owners or by those
who could purchase the temporary services of a slave took various
forms. A slaveowner, or his teenage son, could go to the slave quarters area of the plantation and do what he wanted, with minimal privacy if any. It was common for a "house" female (housekeeper, maid, cook, laundress, or nanny) to be raped by one or more members of the household. Houses of prostitution
throughout the slave states were largely staffed by female slaves
providing sexual services, to their owners' profit. There were a small
number of free black females engaged in prostitution, or concubinage,
especially in New Orleans.
Slave owners who engaged in sexual activity with female slaves
"were often the elite of the community. They had little need to worry
about public scorn." These relationships "appear to have been tolerated
and in some cases even quietly accepted". "Southern women... do not trouble themselves about it". Franklin and Armfield, who were definitely the elite of the community,
joked frequently in their letters about the black women and girls that
they were raping. It never occurred to them that there was anything
wrong in what they were doing.
Light-skinned young girls were sold openly for sexual use; their price was much higher than that of a field hand. Special markets for the fancy girl trade existed in New Orleans and Lexington, Kentucky. Historian Philip Shaw describes an occasion when Abraham Lincoln and Allen Gentry witnessed such sales in New Orleans in 1828:
Gentry vividly remembered a day in
New Orleans when he and the nineteen-year-old Lincoln came upon a slave
market. Pausing to watch, Gentry recalled looking down at Lincoln's
hands and seeing that he "doubled his fists tightly; his knuckles went
white". Men wearing black coats and white hats buy field hands, "black
and ugly", for $500 to 800. And then the real horror begins: "When the
sale of "fancy girls" began, Lincoln, "unable to stand it any longer",
muttered to Gentry "Allen that's a disgrace. If I ever get a lick at
that thing I'll hit it hard."
Those girls who were "considered educated and refined, were purchased
by the wealthiest clients, usually plantation owners, to become
personal sexual companions". "There was a great demand in New Orleans
for 'fancy girls'."
The issue that did come up frequently was the threat of sexual
intercourse between black males and white females. Just as the black
women were perceived as having "a trace of Africa, that supposedly
incited passion and sexual wantonness", the men were perceived as savages, unable to control their lust, given an opportunity.
Another approach to the question was offered by Quaker and Florida planter Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr.
He advocated, and personally practiced, deliberate racial mixing
through marriage, as part of his proposed solution to the slavery issue:
racial integration, called "amalgamation" at the time. In an 1829 Treatise,
he stated that mixed-race people were healthier and often more
beautiful, that interracial sex was hygienic, and slavery made it
convenient. Because of these views, tolerated in Spanish Florida, he found it impossible to remain long in Territorial Florida, and moved with his slaves and multiple wives to a plantation, Mayorasgo de Koka, in Haiti (now in the Dominican Republic). There were many others who less flagrantly practiced interracial, common-law marriages with slaves (see Partus sequitur ventrem).
The inscription on the back of the case reads: This Daguerreotype was taken by Southworth Aug. 1845 it is a copy of Captain Jonathan Walker's hand as branded by the U.S. Marshall of the Dist. of Florida
for having helped 7 men to obtain 'Life Liberty, and Happiness.' SS
Slave Saviour Northern Dist. SS Slave Stealer Southern Dist. (image by Southworth & Hawes, Massachusetts Historical Society 1.373)Tags
to be used for identifying and tracking enslaved people of Charleston,
South Carolina (National Museum of American History 1993.0503)
To help regulate the relationship between slave and owner, including
legal support for keeping the slave as property, states established slave codes,
most based on laws existing since the colonial era. The code for the
District of Columbia defined a slave as "a human being, who is by law
deprived of his or her liberty for life, and is the property of
another".
While each state had its own slave code, many concepts were shared throughout the slave states. According to the slave codes, some of which were passed in reaction to
slave rebellions, teaching a slave to read or write was illegal. This
prohibition was unique to American slavery, believed to reduce slaves
forming aspirations that could lead to escape or rebellion. Informal education occurred when white children taught slave companions
what they were learning; in other cases, adult slaves learned from free
artisan workers, especially if located in cities, where there was more
freedom of movement.
In Alabama, slaves were not allowed to leave their master's
premises without written consent or passes. This was a common
requirement in other states as well, and locally run patrols (known to
slaves as pater rollers) often checked the passes of slaves who
appeared to be away from their plantations. In Alabama slaves were
prohibited from trading goods among themselves. In Virginia, a slave was
not permitted to drink in public within one mile of his master or
during public gatherings. Slaves were not permitted to carry firearms in
any of the slave states.
Slaves were generally prohibited by law from associating in groups, with the exception of worship services (a reason why the Black Church is such a notable institution in black communities today). Following Nat Turner's rebellion
in 1831, which raised white fears throughout the South, some states
also prohibited or restricted religious gatherings of slaves, or
required that they be officiated by white men. Planters feared that
group meetings would facilitate communication among slaves that could
lead to rebellion. Slaves held private, secret "brush meetings" in the woods.
In Ohio, an emancipated slave was prohibited from returning to
the state in which he or she had been enslaved. Other Northern states
discouraged the settling of free blacks within their boundaries. Fearing
the influence of free blacks, Virginia and other Southern states passed
laws to require blacks who had been freed to leave the state within a
year (or sometimes less time) unless granted a stay by an act of the
legislature.
Africans brought their religions with them from Africa, including Islam, Catholicism, and traditional religions.
Prior to the American Revolution, masters and revivalists spread Christianity to slave communities, including Catholicism in Spanish Florida and California, and in French and Spanish Louisiana, and Protestantism in English colonies, supported by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In the First Great Awakening of the mid-18th century, Baptists and Methodists
from New England preached a message against slavery, encouraged masters
to free their slaves, converted both slaves and free blacks, and gave
them active roles in new congregations. The first independent black congregations were started in the South
before the Revolution, in South Carolina and Georgia. Believing that,
"slavery was contrary to the ethics of Jesus", Christian congregations
and church clergy, especially in the North, played a role in the Underground Railroad, especially Wesleyan Methodists, Quakers and Congregationalists.
Southern slaves generally attended their masters' white churches,
where they often outnumbered the white congregants. They were usually
permitted to sit only in the back or in the balcony. They listened to
white preachers, who emphasized the obligation of slaves to keep in
their place, and acknowledged the slave's identity as both person and
property. Preachers taught the master's responsibility and the concept of
appropriate paternal treatment, using Christianity to improve conditions
for slaves, and to treat them "justly and fairly" (Col. 4:1). This
included masters having self-control, not disciplining under anger, not
threatening, and ultimately fostering Christianity among their slaves by
example.
Slaves also created their own religious observances, meeting
alone without the supervision of their white masters or ministers. The
larger plantations with groups of slaves numbering 20, or more, tended
to be centers of nighttime meetings of one or several plantation slave
populations. These congregations revolved around a singular preacher, often
illiterate with limited knowledge of theology, who was marked by his
personal piety and ability to foster a spiritual environment. African
Americans developed a theology related to Biblical stories having the
most meaning for them, including the hope for deliverance from slavery
by their own Exodus. One lasting influence of these secret congregations is the African American spiritual.
Miscellaneous enslavers: Henry Clay
had several children with his wife Lucretia Hart and two children with
Phoebe Moore, a 16-year-old enslaved girl he bought from U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton; Maine-born lawyer S.S. Boyd co-owned between 10 and 16 Mississippi River plantations with former slave trader Rice C. Ballard; Meredith Calhoun married into 1,000 slaves and 7,000 acres of plantation land in Louisiana; William G. Ponder's family owned the family of the first Black graduate of West Point, Henry Ossian Flipper; Robert Ruffin Barrow funded Confederate ironclads with the wealth he owned in hundreds of slaves and at least six plantations in Louisiana; James Jackson of Alabama owned fine racehorses and some of the ancestors of writer Alex Haley
In a feature unique to American slavery, legislatures across the
South enacted new laws to curtail the already limited rights of African
Americans. For example, Virginia prohibited blacks, free or slave, from
practicing preaching, prohibited them from owning firearms, and forbade
anyone to teach slaves or free blacks how to read. It specified heavy penalties for both student and teacher if slaves were taught, including whippings or jail.
[E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of
instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose,
shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any
office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such
assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other
justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes.
Slave owners saw literacy
as a threat to the institution of slavery and their financial
investment in it; as a North Carolina statute passed in 1830-1831
stated, "Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite
dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and
rebellion." Literacy enabled the enslaved to read the writings of abolitionists, which discussed the abolition of slavery and described the slave revolution in Haiti of 1791–1804 and the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. It also allowed slaves to learn that thousands of enslaved individuals had escaped, often with the assistance of the Underground Railroad.
Literacy also was believed to make the enslaved unhappy at best,
insolent and sullen at worst. As put by prominent Washington lawyer Elias B. Caldwell in 1822:
The more you improve the condition
of these people, the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable
you make them, in their present state. You give them a higher relish for
those privilegies which they can never attain, and turn what we intend
for a blessing [slavery] into a curse. No, if they must remain in their
present situation, keep them in the lowest state of degradation and
ignorance. The nearer you bring them to the condition of brutes, the
better chance do you give them of possessing their apathy.
Unlike in the South, slave owners in Utah were required to send their slaves to school. Black slaves did not have to spend as much time in school as Indian slaves.
With the development of slave and free states after the American
Revolution, and far-flung commercial and military activities, new
situations arose in which slaves might be taken by masters into free
states. Most free states not only prohibited slavery, but ruled that
slaves brought and kept there illegally could be freed. Such cases were
sometimes known as transit cases. Dred Scott and his wife Harriet Scott each sued for freedom in St. Louis after the death of their master, based on their having been held in a free territory (the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase from which slavery was excluded under the terms of the Missouri Compromise).
(Later the two cases were combined under Dred Scott's name.) Scott
filed suit for freedom in 1846 and went through two state trials, the
first denying and the second granting freedom to the couple (and, by
extension, their two daughters, who had also been held illegally in free
territories). For 28 years, Missouri state precedent had generally
respected laws of neighboring free states and territories, ruling for
freedom in such transit cases where slaves had been held illegally in
free territory. But in the Dred Scott case, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against the slaves.
After Scott and his team appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, in a sweeping decision, denied Scott his freedom. The 1857 decision,
decided 7–2, held that a slave did not become free when taken into a
free state; Congress could not bar slavery from a territory; and people
of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves,
or their descendants, could never be citizens and thus had no status to
bring suit in a U.S. court. A state could not bar slaveowners from
bringing slaves into that state. Many Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, considered the decision unjust and evidence that the Slave Power
had seized control of the Supreme Court. Anti-slavery groups were
enraged and slave owners encouraged, escalating the tensions that led to
civil war.
In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, as part of the Compromise of 1850,
which required law enforcement and citizens of free states to cooperate
in the capture and return of slaves. This met with considerable overt
and covert resistance in free states and cities such as Philadelphia,
New York, and Boston. Refugees from slavery continued to flee the South
across the Ohio River and other parts of the Mason–Dixon line dividing North from South, to the North and Canada via the Underground Railroad. Some white Northerners helped hide former slaves from their former owners or helped them reach freedom in Canada.
The abolitionists, realizing that the total elimination of
slavery was unrealistic as an immediate goal, worked to prevent the
expansion of slavery into the western territories that eventually would
become new states. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Bleeding Kansas
period dealt with whether new states would be slave or free, or how
that was to be decided. Both sides were anxious about effects of these
decisions on the balance of power in the Senate.
After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, border fighting broke out in the Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a slave or free state was left to the inhabitants. Migrants from both free and slave states moved into the territory to prepare for the vote on slavery. Abolitionist John Brown,
the most famous of the anti-slavery immigrants, was active in the
fighting in "Bleeding Kansas", but so too were many white Southerners
(many from adjacent Missouri) who opposed abolition.
Abraham Lincoln's and the Republicans' political platform in 1860 was to stop slavery's expansion. Historian James M. McPherson says that in his famous "House Divided" speech in 1858, Lincoln said American republicanism
can be purified by restricting the further expansion of slavery as the
first step to putting it on the road to 'ultimate extinction.'
Southerners took Lincoln at his word. When he won the presidency, they
left the Union to escape the 'ultimate extinction' of slavery."
The divisions became fully exposed with the 1860 presidential election. The electorate split four ways. The Southern Democrats endorsed slavery, while the Republican Party denounced it. The Northern Democrats said democracy required the people to decide on slavery locally, state by state and territory by territory. The Constitutional Union Party said the survival of the Union was at stake and everything else should be compromised.
Lincoln, the Republican, won with a plurality of popular votes and a majority of electoral votes.
Lincoln, however, did not appear on the ballots of ten southern slave
states. Many slave owners in the South feared that the real intent of
the Republicans was the abolition of slavery in states where it already
existed, and that the sudden emancipation of four million slaves would
be disastrous for the slave owners and for the economy that drew its
greatest profits from the labor of people who were not paid. The slave
owners feared that ending the balance could lead to the domination of
the federal government by the northern free states. This led seven southern states to secede from the Union. When the Confederate Armyattacked a U.S. Army installation at Fort Sumter, the American Civil War
began and four additional slave states seceded. Northern leaders had
viewed the slavery interests as a threat politically, but with
secession, they viewed the prospect of a new Southern nation, the Confederate States of America, with control over the Mississippi River and parts of the West, as politically unacceptable. Most of all, they could not accept this repudiation of American nationalism.
The American Civil War,
beginning in 1861, led to the end of chattel slavery in America. Not
long after the war broke out, through a legal maneuver by Union General Benjamin F. Butler, a lawyer by profession, slaves who fled to Union lines were considered "contraband of war".
General Butler ruled that they were not subject to return to
Confederate owners as they had been before the war. "Lincoln and his
Cabinet discussed the issue on May 30 and decided to support Butler's
stance". Soon word spread, and many slaves sought refuge in Union territory,
desiring to be declared "contraband". Many of the "contrabands" joined
the Union Army as workers or troops, forming entire regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops. Others went to refugee camps such as the Grand Contraband Camp near Fort Monroe or fled to northern cities. General Butler's interpretation was reinforced when Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which declared that any property used by the Confederate military, including slaves, could be confiscated by Union forces.
Ambrotype
of African-American woman with a flag, "believed to be a washerwoman
for Union troops quartered outside Richmond, Virginia" (National Museum
of American History 2005.0002)
At the beginning of the war, some Union commanders thought they were
supposed to return escaped slaves to their masters. By 1862, when it
became clear that this would be a long war, the question of what to do
about slavery became more general. The Southern economy and military
effort depended on slave labor. It began to seem unreasonable to protect
slavery while blockading Southern commerce and destroying Southern
production. As Congressman George W. Julian
of Indiana put it in an 1862 speech in Congress, the slaves "cannot be
neutral. As laborers, if not as soldiers, they will be allies of the
rebels, or of the Union." Julian and his fellow Radical Republicans
put pressure on Lincoln to rapidly emancipate the slaves, whereas
moderate Republicans favored gradual, compensated emancipation and
voluntary colonization. The border states, Peace Democrats (Copperheads), and War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the border states and War Democrats eventually accepted it as part of the total war needed to save the Union.
The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln
on January 1, 1863. In a single stroke it changed the legal status of
three million slaves in designated areas of the Confederacy from "slave"
to "free". It had the practical effect that as soon as a slave escaped
the control of his or her owner, by running away or through advances of
federal troops, the slave's proclaimed freedom became actual. Plantation
owners, realizing that emancipation would destroy their economic
system, sometimes moved their slaves as far as possible out of reach of
the Union army. By June 1865, the Union Army controlled all of the Confederacy and had liberated all of the designated slaves.
In 1861, Lincoln expressed the fear that premature attempts at
emancipation would mean the loss of the border states. He believed that
"to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game." At first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Generals John C. Frémont (in Missouri) and David Hunter (in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida) to keep the loyalty of the border states and the War Democrats.
On July 22, 1862, Lincoln told his cabinet of his plan to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Secretary of State William H. Seward
advised Lincoln to wait for a victory before issuing the proclamation,
as to do otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat". On September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam provided this opportunity, and on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,
which provided that enslaved people in the states in rebellion against
the United States on January 1, 1863, "shall be then, thenceforward, and
forever free". On September 24 and 25, the War Governors' Conference added support for the proclamation. Lincoln issued his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.
In his letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln explained his belief that
If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong...
And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me
an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling... I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation declared freedom for slaves in
the Confederate states and authorized the enlistment of African
Americans in the Union Army. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free
slaves in the border states,
which were the slaveholding states that remained in the Union. As a
practical matter, the proclamation freed only those slaves who escaped
to Union lines. But the proclamation made the abolition of slavery an
official war goal and was implemented as the Union took territory from
the Confederacy. According to the Census of 1860, this policy would free nearly four million slaves, or over 12 percent of the total population of the United States.
Because the Emancipation Proclamation was issued under the
president's war powers, it might not have continued in force after the
war ended. Therefore, Lincoln played a leading role in getting the
constitutionally required two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress
to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, which made emancipation universal and permanent, "except as a punishment for crime".
Enslaved African Americans had not waited for Lincoln before escaping
and seeking freedom behind Union lines. From the early years of the
war, hundreds of thousands of African Americans escaped to Union lines,
especially in Union-controlled areas such as Norfolk and the Hampton Roads region in 1862 Virginia, Tennessee from 1862 on, and the line of Sherman's march to the sea.
So many African Americans fled to Union lines that commanders created
camps and schools for them, where both adults and children learned to
read and write. The American Missionary Association
entered the war effort by sending teachers south to such contraband
camps, for instance, establishing schools in Norfolk and on nearby
plantations.
In addition, nearly 200,000 African American men served with
distinction in the Union forces as soldiers and sailors; most were
escaped slaves. The Confederacy was outraged by armed black soldiers and
refused to treat them as prisoners of war. They murdered many, as at the Fort Pillow massacre, and re-enslaved others.
On February 24, 1863, the Arizona Organic Act abolished slavery in the newly formed Arizona Territory. Tennessee
and all of the border states (except Kentucky and Delaware) abolished
slavery by early 1865. Thousands of slaves were freed by the operation
of the Emancipation Proclamation as Union armies marched across the
South. Emancipation came to the remaining Southern slaves after the
surrender of all the Confederate troops in spring 1865.
In spite of the South's shortage of manpower, until 1865, most
Southern leaders opposed arming slaves as soldiers. However, a few
Confederates discussed arming slaves. Finally, in early 1865, General Robert E. Lee
said that black soldiers were essential, and legislation was passed.
The first black units were in training when the war ended in April.
As the great day drew nearer, there
was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had
more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the
plantation songs had some reference to freedom....
Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I
presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper – the
Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that
we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who
was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while
tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant,
that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but
fearing that she would never live to see.
Abolition of slavery in the various states of the United States over time:
Abolition of slavery during or shortly after the American Revolution
The Northwest Ordinance, 1787
Gradual emancipation in New York (starting 1799) and New Jersey (starting 1804)
The Missouri Compromise, 1821
Effective abolition of slavery by Mexican or joint US/British authority
Abolition of slavery by Congressional action, 1861
Abolition of slavery by Congressional action, 1862
Emancipation Proclamation as originally issued, 1 Jan 1863
Subsequent operation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863
Abolition of slavery by state action during the Civil War
Operation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1864
Operation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865
Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution, 18 Dec 1865
Territory incorporated into the U.S. after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment
The war ended on June 22, 1865, and following that surrender, the Emancipation Proclamation
was enforced throughout remaining regions of the South that had not yet
freed the slaves. Slavery officially continued for a couple of months
in other locations. Federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to enforce the emancipation. The commemoration of that event, Juneteenth National Independence Day, was declared a national holiday in 2021.
The Thirteenth Amendment,
abolishing slavery except as punishment for a crime, had been passed by
the Senate in April 1864, and by the House of Representatives in
January 1865.
The amendment did not take effect until it was ratified by
three-fourths of the states, which occurred on December 6, 1865, when
Georgia ratified it. On that date, the last 40,000–45,000 enslaved
Americans in the remaining two slave states of Kentucky and Delaware,
as well as the 200 or so perpetual apprentices in New Jersey left from
the very gradual emancipation process begun in 1804, were freed. The last Americans known to have been born into legal slavery died in the 1970s.
Against brutal (often physically brutal) opposition from the whites of the late rebel states, Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, and black representatives elected by newly enfranchised former slaves, including Hiram Revels, who took Jeff Davis's old Senate seat, worked to realize the lofty goals of the abolitionists through Congressional legislation
Journalist Douglas A. Blackmon reported in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Slavery By Another Name that many black persons were virtually enslaved under convict leasing
programs, which started after the Civil War. Most Southern states had
no prisons; they leased convicts to businesses and farms for their
labor, and the lessee paid for food and board. Incentives for abuse were
present.
The continued involuntary servitude took various forms, but the primary forms included convict leasing, peonage and sharecropping, with the latter eventually encompassing poor whites as well. By the 1930s, whites constituted most of the sharecroppers in the South. Mechanization of agriculture had reduced the need for farm labor, and many black people left the South in the Great Migration.
Jurisdictions and states created fines and sentences for a wide variety
of minor crimes and used these as an excuse to arrest and sentence
black people. Under convict-leasing programs, African-American men,
often guilty of petty crimes or even no crime at all, were arrested,
compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced
to do the bidding of the leaseholder. Sharecropping, as it was practiced
during this period, often involved severe restrictions on the freedom
of movement of sharecroppers, who could be whipped for leaving the
plantation. Both sharecropping and convict leasing were legal and
tolerated by both the North and South. However, peonage was an illicit
form of forced labor. Its existence was ignored by authorities while
thousands of African Americans and poor white Americans were subjugated
and held in bondage until the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. With the
exception of cases of peonage, beyond the period of Reconstruction, the federal government took almost no action to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment until December 1941, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt summoned his attorney general. Five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, at the request of the President, Attorney General Francis Biddle issued Circular No. 3591 to all federal prosecutors,
instructing them to investigate actively and try any case of
involuntary servitude or slavery. Several months later, convict leasing
was officially abolished. But aspects have persisted in other forms.
Historians argue that other systems of penal labor were all created in
1865, and convict leasing was simply the most oppressive form. Over
time, a large civil rights movement arose to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans.
Nathan Bedford Forrest transitioned effortlessly from being a slave trader before the war to using convict labor on his farm on President's Island near Memphis after the war (glass copy negative, Library of Congress LC-BH821-3061)Prisoners pick cotton c. 1900 at Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana, which was built on land that had formerly been plantations owned by hugely successful interstate slave trader Isaac Franklin
With emancipation a legal reality, white Southerners were concerned
with both controlling the newly freed slaves and keeping them in the
labor force at the lowest level. The system of convict leasing
began during Reconstruction and was fully implemented in the 1880s,
officially ending in the last state, Alabama, in 1928. It persisted in
various forms until it was abolished in 1942 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, several months after the attack on Pearl Harbor
involved the U.S. in the conflict. This system allowed private
contractors to purchase the services of convicts from the state or local
governments for a specific time period. African Americans, due to
"vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory
sentencing", made up the vast majority of the convicts leased. Writer Douglas A. Blackmon writes of the system:
It was a form of bondage distinctly
different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and
the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime
and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it
was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free men, guilty
of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor
without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced
to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of
extraordinary physical coercion.
Historian Mark Summers Wahlgren notes that the estimated literacy rate
among formerly enslaved southern blacks at the time of emancipation was
five to 10 percent, but had reached a baseline of 40 to 50 percent (and
higher in cities) by the turn of the century, representing a "great
advance". As W. E. B. Du Bois
noted, the black colleges were not perfect, but "in a single generation
they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South" and "wiped out
the illiteracy of the majority of black people in the land".
Northern philanthropists continued to support black education in the
20th century, for example of a major donor to Hampton Institute and
Tuskegee was George Eastman, who also helped fund health programs at colleges and in communities.
A 2016 study, published in The Journal of Politics,
finds that "[w]hites who currently live in Southern counties that had
high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a
Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and
colder feelings toward blacks." The study contends that "contemporary
differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South
in part trace their origins to slavery's prevalence more than 150 years
ago. " The authors argue that their findings are consistent with the theory
that "following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and
economic incentives to reinforce existing racist norms and institutions
to maintain control over the newly freed African American population.
This amplified local differences in racially conservative political
attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across
generations."
Original caption: "Negro going in colored entrance of movie house on Saturday afternoon, Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi" (Marion Post Wolcott 35mm nitrate negative, Farm Security Administration, October 1939)
A 2017 study in the British Journal of Political Science
argued that the British American colonies without slavery adopted
better democratic institutions to attract migrant workers to their
colonies.
An article published in the Journal of Economic History
in 2022 finds that former slave owners remained politically dominant
long after the abolition of slavery. Using data from Texas, the authors
find that "[i]n 1900, still around 50 percent of all state legislators
came from a slave-owning background."
Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in their 1974 book Time on the Cross, argued that the rate of return
of slavery at the market price was close to ten percent, a number close
to investment in other assets. The transition from indentured servants
to slaves is cited to show that slaves offered greater profits to their
owners. A qualified consensus among economic historians and economists
is that "Slave agriculture was efficient compared with free agriculture.
Economies of scale, effective management, and intensive utilization of
labor and capital made southern slave agriculture considerably more
efficient than nonslave southern farming", and it is the near-universal consensus among economic historians and
economists that slavery was not "a system irrationally kept in existence
by plantation owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to
their best economic interests".
The relative price of slaves and indentured servants in the
antebellum period did decrease. Indentured servants became more costly
with the increase in the demand of skilled labor in England. At the same time, slaves were mostly supplied from within the United
States and thus language was not a barrier, and the cost of transporting
slaves from one state to another was relatively low. However, as in Brazil and Europe, slavery at its end in the United States tended to be concentrated in the poorest regions of the United States, with a qualified consensus among economists and economic historians
concluding that the "modern period of the South's economic convergence
to the level of the North only began in earnest when the institutional
foundations of the southern regional labor market were undermined,
largely by federal farm and labor legislation dating from the 1930s."
In the decades preceding the Civil War, the black population of the United States experienced a rapid natural increase. Unlike the trans-Saharan slave trade with Africa, the slave population transported by the Atlantic slave trade to the United States was sex-balanced. The slave population multiplied nearly fourfold between 1810 and 1860, despite the passage of the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves signed into law by PresidentThomas Jefferson in 1807 banning the international slave trade. Thus, it is also the universal consensus among modern economic
historians and economists that slavery in the United States was not
"economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War". In the 2010s, several historians and sociologists, among them Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Walter Johnson, Calvin Schermerhorn, and Matthew Desmond have posited that slavery was integral in the development of American capitalism.Johnson wrote in River of Dark Dreams
(2013): "The cords of credit and debt—of advance and obligation—that
cinched the Atlantic economy together were anchored with the mutually
defining values of land and slaves: without land and slaves, there was
no credit, and without slaves, land itself was valueless. Promises made
in the Mississippi Valley were backed by the value of slaves and
fulfilled in their labor." Other economic historians have rejected that thesis.A 2023 study estimates that prior to the onset of the US Civil War, the
enslaved population produced 12.6% of US national product.
Plantations featuring the forced labor of large numbers of black slaves, such as Monticello owned by Thomas Jefferson, produced wealth for the white elite, the planter class.
Slavery had a long-lasting impact on wealth and racial inequality in the United States.
Black families whose ancestors were freed before the start of the Civil
War have had better socio-economic outcomes than families who were
freed in the Civil War. The end of slavery has seen marginal change in the racial wealth gap.
In 1863, two years prior to emancipation, black people owned 0.5 percent
of the national wealth, while in 2019 it is just over 1.5 percent.
Those who economically gained the most from slavery were the planter class,
owners of large-scale agricultural estates, plantations, where large
numbers of enslaved Africans were held captive and forced to produce
crops to create wealth for a white elite. Having a prominent role in politics with eight of the 15 presidents
prior to Lincoln owning slaves while in office, upon the end of the
Civil War the planter class kept control of their land and remained
politically influential, with the London School of Economics
stating, "this persistence in "de facto power" in turn allowed them to
block economic reforms, disenfranchise black voters, and restrict the
mobility of workers."
Efficiency of slaves
"Weighing cotton after the day's picking" c. 1908
in Monticello, Florida, with a black man in a sack used as the
counterweight; when a New York reporter visited a cotton gin in South
Carolina in 1851, the managers reported that it cost an average of $75 a
year to staff the gin with black slaves, whereas it would have cost
$116 to use free whites
Scholars disagree on how to quantify the efficiency of slavery. In Time on the Cross Fogel and Engerman equate efficiency to total factor productivity
(TFP), the output per average unit of input on a farm. Using this
measurement, Southern farms that enslaved black people using the gang system
were 35% more efficient than Northern farms, which used free labor.
Under the gang system, groups of slaves perform synchronized tasks under
the constant vigilance of an overseer. Each group was like a part of a
machine. If perceived to be working below his capacity, a slave could be
punished. Fogel argues that this kind of negative enforcement was not
frequent and that slaves and free laborers had a similar quality of
life; however, there is controversy on this last point. A critique of Fogel and Engerman's view was published by Paul A. David in 1976.
In 1995, a random survey of 178 members of the Economic History Association
sought to study the views of economists and economic historians on the
debate. The study found that 72 percent of economists and 65 percent of
economic historians would generally agree that "Slave agriculture was
efficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of scale, effective
management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern
slave agriculture considerably more efficient than nonslave southern
farming." 48 percent of the economists agreed without provisos, while 24
percent agreed when provisos were included in the statement. On the
other hand, 58 percent of economic historians and 42 percent of
economists disagreed with Fogel and Engerman's "proposition that the
material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared
favorably with those of free industrial workers in the decades before
the Civil War".
Prices of slaves
The U.S. has a capitalist economy so the price of slaves was determined by the law of supply and demand. For example, following bans on the import of slaves after the UK's Slave Trade Act 1807 and the American 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves,
the prices for slaves increased. The markets for the products produced
by slaves also affected the price of slaves (e.g. the price of slaves
fell when the price of cotton fell in 1840). Anticipation of slavery's
abolition also influenced prices. During the Civil War the price for
slave men in New Orleans dropped from $1,381 in 1861 to $1,116 by 1862
(the city was captured by U.S. forces in the Spring of 1862).
Survivors of the Wanderer: Ward Lee, Tucker Henderson, and Romeo—born Cilucängy, Pucka Gaeta, and Tahro in the Congo River basin—were purchased at a Portuguese-run African slave market in 1858 for an estimated US$50
(equivalent to $1,817 in 2024) each, and resold in the United States
where the fair-market price for a healthy young enslaved male was easily
US$1,000 (equivalent to $36,342 in 2024) (Charles J. Montgomery, American Anthropologist, 1908)
Controlling for inflation, prices of slaves rose dramatically in the
six decades prior to the Civil War, reflecting demand due to commodity
cotton, as well as use of slaves in shipping and manufacturing. Although
the prices of slaves relative to indentured servants declined, both got
more expensive. Cotton production was rising and relied on the use of
slaves to yield high profits. Fogel and Engeman initially argued that if
the Civil War had not happened, the slave prices would have increased
even more, an average of more than fifty percent by 1890.
Prices reflected the characteristics of the slave; such factors
as sex, age, nature, and height were all taken into account to determine
the price of a slave. Over the life-cycle, the price of enslaved women
was higher than their male counterparts up to puberty age, as they would
likely bear children who their masters could sell as slaves and could
be used as slave laborers. Men around the age of 25 were the most
valued, as they were at the highest level of productivity and still had a
considerable life-span. If slaves had a history of fights or escapes, their price was lowered
reflecting what planters believed was risk of repeating such behavior.
Slave traders and buyers would examine a slave's back for whipping
scars; a large number of injuries would be seen as evidence of laziness
or rebelliousness, rather than the previous master's brutality, and
would lower the slave's price. Taller male slaves were priced at a higher level, as height was viewed as a proxy for fitness and productivity.
Effects on Southern economic development
Five-dollar banknote showing a plantation scene with enslaved people in South Carolina. Issued by the Planters Bank, Winnsboro, 1853. On display at the British Museum in London.
While slavery brought profits in the short run, discussion continues
on the economic benefits of slavery in the long run. In 1995, a random
anonymous survey of 178 members of the Economic History Association found that out of the forty propositions about American economic history
that were surveyed, the group of propositions most disputed by economic
historians and economists were those about the postbellum economy of
the American South (along with the Great Depression). The only exception was the proposition initially put forward by historian Gavin Wright
that the "modern period of the South's economic convergence to the
level of the North only began in earnest when the institutional
foundations of the southern regional labor market were undermined,
largely by federal farm and labor legislation dating from the 1930s."
62 percent of economists (24 percent with and 38 percent without
provisos) and 73 percent of historians (23 percent with and 50 percent
without provisos) agreed with this statement. Wright has also argued that the private investment of monetary
resources in the cotton industry, among others, delayed development in
the South of commercial and industrial institutions. There was little
public investment in railroads or other infrastructure. Wright argues
that agricultural technology was far more developed in the South,
representing an economic advantage of the South over the North of the
United States.
Soils of the cotton-growing regions of the United States
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
noted that "the colonies in which there were no slaves became more
populous and more rich than those in which slavery flourished". In 1857, in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, Hinton Rowan Helper made the same point. Economists Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson,
in a pair of articles published in 2012 and 2013, found that, despite
the American South initially having per capita income roughly double
that of the North in 1774, incomes in the South had declined 27% by 1800
and continued to decline over the next four decades, while the
economies in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states vastly expanded. By
1840, per capita income in the South was well behind the Northeast and
the national average (Note: this is also true in the early 21st century).
Lindert and Williamson argue that this antebellum period is an example of what economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson call "a reversal of fortune". In his essay "The Real History of Slavery", economist Thomas Sowell reiterated and augmented the observation made by de Tocqueville by comparing slavery in the United States to slavery in Brazil.
He notes that slave societies reflected similar economic trends in
those and other parts of the world, suggesting that the trend Lindert
and Williamson identify may have continued until the American Civil War:
Both in Brazil
and in the United States – the countries with the two largest slave
populations in the Western Hemisphere – the end of slavery found the
regions in which slaves had been concentrated poorer than other regions
of these same countries. For the United States, a case could be made
that this was due to the Civil War, which did so much damage to the
South, but no such explanation would apply to Brazil, which fought no
Civil War over this issue. Moreover, even in the United States, the
South lagged behind the North in many ways even before the Civil War.
Although slavery in Europe died out before it was abolished in the
Western Hemisphere, as late as 1776 slavery had not yet died out all
across the continent when Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations
that it still existed in some eastern regions. But, even then, Eastern
Europe was much poorer than Western Europe. The slavery of North Africa
and the Middle East, over the centuries, took more slaves from
sub-Saharan Africa than the Western Hemisphere did... But these remained largely poor countries until the discovery and extraction of their vast oil deposits.
Market
update, published on the eve of the American Civil War: Here the
sell-side (Virginia) prepares the buy-side (Mississippi) for expected
prices in the 1860–61 slave-trading season (The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, August 11, 1860).
Sowell also notes in Ethnic America: A History, citing historians Clement Eaton and Eugene Genovese, that three-quarters of Southern white families owned no slaves at all. Most slaveholders lived on farms rather than plantations, and few plantations were as large as the fictional ones depicted in Gone with the Wind. In "The Real History of Slavery", Sowell also notes in comparison to slavery in the Arab world and the Middle East (where slaves were seldom used for productive purposes) and China
(where the slaves consumed the entire output they created), Sowell
observes that many commercial slaveowners in the antebellum South tended
to be spendthrift and many lost their plantations due to creditor foreclosures, and in Britain, profits by British slave traders only amounted to two percent of British domestic investment at the height of the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century. Sowell draws the following conclusion regarding the macroeconomic value of slavery:
In short, even though some individual slaveowners grew
rich and some family fortunes were founded on the exploitation of
slaves, that is very different from saying that the whole society, or
even its non-slave population as a whole, was more economically advanced
than it would have been in the absence of slavery. What this means is
that, whether employed as domestic servants or producing crops or other
goods, millions suffered exploitation and dehumanization for no higher
purpose than the... aggrandizement of slaveowners.
Eric Hilt noted that, while some historians have suggested slavery was necessary for the Industrial Revolution
(on the grounds that American slave plantations produced most of the
raw cotton for the British textiles market and the British textiles
market was the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution), it is not clear
if this is actually true; there is no evidence that cotton could not
have been mass-produced by yeoman farmers rather than slave plantations if the latter had not existed (as their existence tended to force yeoman farmers into subsistence farming) and there is some evidence that they certainly could have. The soil and climate of the American South
were excellent for growing cotton, so it is not unreasonable to
postulate that farms without slaves could have produced substantial
amounts of cotton; even if they did not produce as much as the
plantations did, it could still have been enough to serve the demand of
British producers. Similar arguments have been made by other historians.
Scholar Adrienne Davis articulates how the economics of slavery also
can be defined as a sexual economy, specifically focusing on how black women
were expected to perform physical, sexual and reproductive labor to
provide a consistent enslaved workforce and increase the profits of
white slavers. Davis writes that black women were needed for their
"sexual and reproductive labor to satisfy the economic, political, and
personal interest of white men of the elite class" articulating that black women's reproductive capacity was important in
the maintenance of the system of slavery due to its ability to
perpetuate an enslaved workforce. She is also drawing attention to black
women's labor being needed to maintain the aristocracy of a white
ruling class, due to the intimate nature of reproduction and its
potential for producing more enslaved peoples.
Due to the institution of partus sequitur ventrem, black women's wombs became the site where slavery was developed and transferred, meaning that black women were not only used for their physical labor, but for their sexual and reproductive labor as well.
"The rule that the children's status follows their
mothers' was a foundational one for our economy. It converted enslaved
women's reproductive capacity into market capital"
Divided-back era postcard: "The Old Slave Block in the Old St. Louis Hotel, New Orleans, La. The colored woman standing on the block was sold for $1500.00 on this same block when a little girl."
This articulation by Davis illustrates how black women's reproductive
capacity was commodified under slavery, and that an analysis of the
economic structures of slavery requires an acknowledgment of how pivotal
black women's sexuality was in maintaining slavery's economic power.
Davis writes how black women performed labor under slavery, writing:
"[black women were] male when convenient and horrifically female when
needed". The fluctuating expectations of black women's gendered labor under
slavery disrupted the white normative roles that were assigned to white
men and white women. This ungendering black women received under slavery
contributed to the systemic dehumanization experienced by enslaved
black women, as they were unable to receive the expectations or
experiences of either gender within the white binary.
Davis's arguments address the fact that, under slavery, black
women's sexuality became linked to the economic and public sphere,
making their intimate lives into public institutions. Black women's
physical labor was gendered as masculine under slavery when they were
needed to yield more profit, but their reproductive capacities and
sexual labor were equally as important in maintaining white power over
black communities and perpetuating an enslaved workforce.
Geography and demography
"Fugitive Negroes, fording Rappahannock river following Pope's retreat, Aug. 1862" (New York Public Library)
Slave importation
About 600,000 slaves were transported to the United States, or five
percent of the 12 million slaves taken from Africa. About 310,000 of
these persons were imported into the Thirteen Colonies before 1776: 40
percent directly, and the rest from the Caribbean.
Slaves trafficked to the British colonies and United States:
The great majority of enslaved Africans were transported to sugar plantations in the Caribbean and to Portuguese Brazil.
As life expectancy was short, their numbers had to be continually
replenished. Life expectancy was much higher in the United States, and
the enslaved population was successful in reproduction, which was called
"natural increase" by enslavers. The population of enslaved people in
the United States grew to 4 million by the 1860 census.
Historian J. David Hacker conducted research that estimated that the
cumulative number of slaves in colonial America and the United States
(1619–1865) was 10 million.
Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States (1861) created by Edwin Hergesheimer of the United States Coast Survey; Lincoln kept a copy of this map in the White House and studied it often, using it to track Union troop movements
Evolution of the enslaved population of the United States as a percentage of the population of each state, 1790–1860
Total Slave Population in U.S., 1790–1860, by State and Territory
Census Year
1790
1800
1810
1820
1830
1840
1850
1860
All States
694,207
893,308
1,191,338
1,531,490
2,009,079
2,487,392
3,204,215
3,953,820
Alabama
–
494
2,565
41,879
117,549
253,532
342,844
435,080
Arkansas
–
–
136
1,617
4,576
19,935
47,100
111,115
California
–
–
–
–
–
–
0
0
Connecticut
2,648
951
310
97
25
54
0
0
Delaware
8,887
6,153
4,177
4,509
3,292
2,605
2,290
1,798
District of Columbia
–
2,072
3,554
4,520
4,505
3,320
3,687
3,185
Florida
–
–
–
–
15,501
25,717
39,310
61,745
Georgia
29,264
59,699
105,218
149,656
217,531
280,944
381,682
462,198
Illinois
–
107
168
917
747
331
0
0
Indiana
–
28
237
190
3
3
0
0
Iowa
–
–
–
–
–
16
0
0
Kansas
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
2
Kentucky
12,430
40,343
80,561
126,732
165,213
182,258
210,981
225,483
Louisiana
–
–
34,660
69,064
109,588
168,452
244,809
331,726
Maine
–
–
–
–
2
0
0
0
Maryland
103,036
105,635
111,502
107,398
102,994
89,737
90,368
87,189
Massachusetts
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
Michigan
–
–
24
0
1
0
0
0
Minnesota
–
–
–
–
–
–
0
0
Mississippi
–
2,995
14,523
32,814
65,659
195,211
309,878
436,631
Missouri
–
–
–
10,222
25,096
58,240
87,422
114,931
Nebraska
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
15
Nevada
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
0
New Hampshire
157
8
0
0
3
1
0
0
New Jersey
11,423
12,422
10,851
7,557
2,254
674
236
18
New York
21,193
20,613
15,017
10,088
75
4
0
0
North Carolina
100,783
133,296
168,824
205,017
245,601
245,817
288,548
331,059
Ohio
–
0
0
0
6
3
0
0
Oregon
–
–
–
–
–
–
0
0
Pennsylvania
3,707
1,706
795
211
403
64
0
0
Rhode Island
958
380
108
48
17
5
0
0
South Carolina
107,094
146,151
196,365
251,783
315,401
327,038
384,984
402,406
Tennessee
3,417
13,584
44,535
80,107
141,603
183,059
239,459
275,719
Texas
–
–
–
–
–
–
58,161
182,566
Utah
–
–
–
–
–
–
26
29
Vermont
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Virginia
287,959
339,499
383,521
411,886
453,698
431,873
452,028
472,494
West Virginia
4,668
7,172
10,836
15,178
17,673
18,488
20,428
18,371
Wisconsin
–
–
–
–
–
11
4
0
For various reasons, the census did not always include all of the slaves, especially in the West, and also black slaves owned by Native-American in the Southeast. New Mexico Territory
never reported any slaves on the census, yet sued the government for
compensation for 600 slaves that were freed when Congress outlawed
slavery in the territory. Utah was actively trying to hide its slave population from Congress and did not report slaves in several communities.
California was admitted as a free state and reported no slaves.
However, there were many slaves that were brought to work in the mines
during the California Gold Rush. Some Californian communities openly tolerated slavery, such as San Bernardino, which was mostly made up of transplants from the neighboring slave territory of Utah. Additionally, the census did not traditionally include Native
Americans, and hence did not include Native American slaves. The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians introduced a system of custodianship for indigenous children and established convict leasing as a form of slavery or forced labor in California. White settlers took 10,000 to 27,000 Native Americans as forced laborers in California, including 4,000 to 7,000 children.There were other Native American slaves in Utah and New Mexico that were never recorded in the census.
Distribution of slaveholders
Sketches of enslaved Americans in Richmond and Charleston, made by British artist Eyre Crowe, March 1853
As of the 1860 census, one may compute the following statistics on slaveholding:
Enumerating slave schedules by county, 393,975 named persons
held 3,950,546 unnamed slaves, for an average of about ten slaves per
holder. As some large holders held slaves in multiple counties and are
thus multiply counted, this slightly overestimates the number of
slaveholders.
Excluding slaves, the 1860 U.S. population was 27,167,529;
therefore, approximately 1.45% of free persons (roughly one in 69) was a
named slaveholder (393,975 named slaveholders among 27,167,529 free
persons). By counting only named slaveholders, this approach does not
acknowledge people who benefited from slavery by being in a slaveowning
household, e.g., the wife and children of an owner; in 1850, there was
an average of 5.55 people per household, so on average, around 8.05% of free persons lived in a slave-owning
household. In the South, 33% of families owned at least one slave. According to historian Joseph Glatthaar, the number of soldiers of the
Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia who either owned slaves or came
from slave owning households is "almost one of every two 1861 recruits".
In addition he notes that, "Untold numbers of enlistees rented land
from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. In the final
tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct
connection to slavery."
It is estimated by the transcriber Tom Blake, that holders of 200 or
more slaves, constituting less than 1% of all U.S. slaveholders (fewer
than 4,000 persons, one in 7,000 free persons, or 0.015% of the
population) held an estimated 20–30% of all slaves (800,000 to 1,200,000
slaves). Nineteen holders of 500 or more slaves have been identified. The largest slaveholder was Joshua John Ward, of Georgetown, South Carolina, who in 1850 held 1,092 slaves, and whose heirs in 1860 held 1,130 or 1,131 slaves – he was dubbed "the king of the rice planters", and one of his plantations is now part of Brookgreen Gardens.
The percentage of families that owned slaves in 1860 in various groupings of states was as follows:
Group of States
States in Group
Slave-Owning Families
15 states where slavery was legal
Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia,
Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia
26%
11 states that seceded
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia
31%
7 states that seceded before Lincoln's inauguration
Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas
The historian Peter Kolchin,
writing in 1993, noted that until the latter decades of the 20th
century, historians of slavery had primarily concerned themselves with
the culture, practices and economics of the slaveholders, not with the
slaves. This was in part due to the circumstance that most slaveholders
were literate and left behind written records, whereas slaves were
largely illiterate and not in a position to leave written records.
Scholars differed as to whether slavery should be considered a benign or
a "harshly exploitive" institution.
Much of the history written prior to the 1950s had a distinctive racist slant to it. By the 1970s and 1980s, historians were using archaeological records, black folklore
and statistical data to develop a much more detailed and nuanced
picture of slave life. Individuals were shown to have been resilient and
somewhat autonomous in many of their activities, within the limits of
their situation and despite its precariousness. Historians who wrote in
this era include John Blassingame (Slave Community), Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll), Leslie Howard Owens (This Species of Property), and Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom).
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