3/7/16
American Exceptionalism and our “Peculiar
Institution”: An Ethical and Statistical Problem With
American Historians Whitewashing the Illegal
Importation of African Slaves
Introduction
In his pious accolade reviewing two posthumous volumes of the late great George
Fredrickson (New York Review of Books, December 4, 2008), the preeminent American
academic historian of the Civil War, James MacPherson, of Princeton University,
summed up succinctly, with his customary flair, the hegemonic view concerning the
unexampled and implausible expansion of the African-American population in the U.S.
until 1860. He failed to mention any smuggling at all after 1808. This error in AfricanAmerican demography, arising from a consensus of neglectful studies based on tangible
evidence and easily available records, leaves out what should be an obvious and crucial
source for the incredibly rapid expansion of the slave population, namely the illegal and
mostly undocumented importation of slaves. Instead, the squirrel scholars and bean
counters have postulated a preposterous fertility and life expectancy of the slaves brought
in, mostly by Yankees, before 1808.
In fact, more slaves may have been imported after 1808 than before. The extent of
slave smuggling until the 8th U.S. Census of 1860, has been de-emphasized and virtually
denied since the 1920’s, because of deliberately forgotten culpability on the part of the
abolitionist North, their supposed altruistic motives stressed while denying Yankee
1
mercantile relationships with Southern planters, based on the advantage to both of
African slave labor. So close was the connection between New York City and Southern
cotton planters, that the city itself seriously considered seceding with the South.
Both Northerners and Southerners have obscured the link between the financiers
and merchants of northern cities and their plantation-owner counterparts in the South,
who flourished both before and after the War- at least after the corrupt bargain that ended
Reconstruction and occupation in 1876.
We cite three credible sources to support our theory: Senator Stephen Douglas,
W.E.B. Dubois, and William Alexander Percy I. Douglas, one of the most astute and
informed politicians of the time, opined that more slaves were imported in both 1859 and
in 1860 than in any previous year. The greatest and earliest professional scholar on the
subject, W.E.B. Dubois, the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard,
concurred with Douglas's judgment and further regretted towards the end of his life that
he himself hadn't spent more time documenting it. Undoubtedly, Dubois had personally
known a number of these illegal imports and knew many others within the black and
white community who were familiar with illegally imported freed people.
In 1891, Dubois calculated that 250,000 slaves were smuggled into the U.S. from
1808 to 1860. Because of the illegal nature of that slave trade, there is scant
documentation to refute the downplaying and minimization of it. But increasing evidence
is coming to light even while the old evidence continues to be disregarded. In 1839,
during the antebellum era, indeed when King Cotton was beginning to reign in the Deep
South, the abolitionist Theodore D. Weld published American Slavery As It Is, in which
2
he clearly details the methods by which the illegal slave trade into the U.S. was
conducted:
"The fact that thousands of slaves, generally in the prime of life, are
annually smuggled into the United States from Africa, Cuba, and
elsewhere, makes it manifest that all inferences drawn from the increase of
the slave population, which do not make large deductions, for constant
importations, must be fallacious…the African slave-trade adds ONE
HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND SLAVES TO EACH UNITED
STATES' CENSUS. These are in the prime of life, and their children
would swell the slave population many thousands annually--thus making a
great addition to each census.”
Weld’s figures, about 15,000 slaves annually, are much higher estimates than
postulated by Stephen Douglas in 1860, and later by W.E.B. Dubois. A mean average for
the period 1808 to 1860, however, can not be a reliable barometer of the illicit smuggling
of slaves, as many annually variable factors influenced the trade including the dramatic
rise of the cotton trade, European wars, and British Navy attempts to stop the trade.
In the spirit of mutual forgiveness, deciding to draw a curtain of oblivion on the
hatreds and tragedies of the Civil War, historians from the North and South began to
develop a new consensus after 1876. U.B. Phillips consolidated this consensus in his
classic work, American Negro Slavery (1918), the first major work to marginalize the
significance of the illegal slave trade,
“As to the dimensions of the illicit importations between
1808 and 1860, conjectures have placed the gross as high as 270,000.
3
Most of the documents in the premises, however, bear palpable marks of
unreliability. It may suffice to say that these importations were never great
enough to affect the labor supply in appreciable degree. So far as the
general economic regime was concerned, the foreign slave trade was
effectually closed in 1808…At that time, however, there were already in
the United States about one million slaves to serve as stock from which
other millions were to be born to replenish the plantations in the east and
to aid in peopling the west. These were ample to maintain a chronic racial
problem, and had no man invented a cotton gin their natural increase
might well have glutted the plantation labor market.”
Phillips’ trivialization of the illegal slave trade supports his theory that the slaves
were well cared for, thus their reproduction, facilitated with relative ease due to an
alleged atmosphere of congeniality, rose to the staggering number counted in 1860. His
explanation:
“It is clear that for a variety of reasons American slaves had
both higher birth rates and lower mortality rates than those elsewhere in
the Americas…This growth was entirely the result of natural increase, for
the small number of slaves smuggled into the United States was probably
exceeded by the number who escaped from slavery.”
(Slavery, 23, 94,147-148)
4
In 1950, Noel Deere had dared to suggest the possibility of over a million illegal
slave imports to the U.S., but Curtin "demolished" him. Not one of the leading historians
go above the figures carefully derived from the easily available documents cited by Philip
Curtin, 54,000 (The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, 1969), who "proved" U.B. Philips'
opinion. Few if any historians have been willing to question Phillips.
Influenced by the growing civil rights movement, Kenneth Stampp laid the
foundation for undermining the consensus in The Peculiar Institution (1956), but he
ultimately failed to make the connection between the exploding slave population and his
meticulous research on the low birth rates and high mortality rates of the slaves (in clear
contrast to Philip's presumptions of paternalistic care facilitating high birth rates and low
mortality rates). Since Stampp, this conundrum has been puzzled over by many scholars:
Fogel and Engerman, Genovese, Fredrickson, among others.
Obadele Starks, in Freebooters and Smugglers (2007), projecting what he thought
Dubois implied, states that over 700,000 slaves were smuggled in. David Eltis (Kent
State University) considered by many as the highest authority on the subject, countered
Starks and other revisionists, by stubbornly relying on the same sources used by Curtin.
Eltis minimizes the numbers even further, suggesting that even Curtin's estimates are too
high. Other "reputable" scholars such as Michael Tadman from the University of
Liverpool also concur with this old consensus. We believe between 400,000 and 500,000
African slaves were smuggled into the U.S. during the fifty-three year span of the illegal
trade. If we are right, about as many or more were illegally imported in to the U.S.
afterwards as before 1808.
5
In addition to Douglas and Dubois, we have a third unique source, a most reliable
oral tradition because it comes from a very literate Southern planter. My greatgrandfather William Alexander Percy (Princeton, 1853) was one of the largest and most
successful planters in the Mississippi Delta, and knew about the vast number of slaves
smuggled in. He told this to his oldest son Leroy Percy, U.S. Senator from Mississippi,
who in turn told his nephew and ward, my own father William Armstrong Percy II.
Daddy finally confided to me, at age 15 when I was at Middlesex, after I’d asked him
how late the Yankees had sold slaves to Southerners, to which he responded that vast
numbers of slaves were still being imported in the 1850's from Africa via Cuba, where
they were "broken in" before being smuggled into the States. This "breaking in" phase,
Daddy contended, included disciplining the slaves, teaching them to plow, and
familiarizing them with some words of English. I sincerely hope, but cannot prove that
my great-grandfather didn't buy any of these illegal imports.
Almost three score years ago when I was fourteen, I went from “deep in the heart
of Dixie”, Memphis, Tennessee, where your social rank depended on how many slaves
your ancestors had owned and what rank they had in the Confederate Army, to Middlesex
School in Concord, Massachusetts, the stronghold of Yankeedom, proud station on the
Underground Railroad, home of Thoreau, Emerson and the Alcotts, where what mattered
most socially was how many ancestors you had on the Mayflower and what books they
had written., The Yankee boys (I was the only southerner, recruited for diversity, in my
entering class of 1933) quickly taught me that the Negroes, as they called them, were just
as good as we. They confidently asserted that it was the Irish, their predominant servant
class, not the “negras” as I still called them, who were inferior. I, of course, was well
6
aware of how awful the rednecks were. After all they had tossed out my father’s Uncle
LeRoy as United States senator in 1912 -- the first direct election to the senate in
Mississippi. Theodore Bilbo had been the campaign manager for their candidate
Vardaman, and even my louche father recognized that his Uncle LeRoy’s greatest
achievement during the 1920’s had been keeping the Klan out of Washington county,
Mississippi, where the county seat Greenville was the center of the Delta. (See Revolt of
the Rednecks, 1964) All gentlefolk knew how horrid lynchings were and how stupid,
brutal, and corrupt the poor whites, on top since 1912, were. As my Uncle Will wrote in
Lanterns on the Levee (1941), from that time forward the bottom rail (the rednecks whom
he considered inferior to the blacks) was on top and was going to stay there. The upper
class Southerners which included all my family (except my paternal grandmother who
came from Scottish yeoman stock), didn’t protest segregation or the Democratic white
primary. Nor did I know how brutal and lethal slavery had been, nor even how unfair and
humiliating sharecropping was, until I came to study amongst the Damn Yankees in the
frozen North.
When I went home on vacations, I began investigations into these northern boys’
claims. "Perfessah" Falls, as everyone dutifully called him, ran the rural school for blacks
near my grandmother’s plantation. He told me that it was hard to keep the students in
school, even though classes were suspended for the most intensive periods of cotton
labor, planting and hoeing from spring until the fourth July and picking in fall. Their
parents, without education themselves, saw little need for their children to receive
schooling. Besides, children became useful on the farm at about age six when they could
gather eggs, water cattle, and most importantly, pick cotton. In such hard times, as in the
7
Depression, and even early, post-WW II South – especially on such poor soil as we had
near Memphis – every hand was needed. Many didn’t attend school, "Perfessah" Falls
claimed, to my astonishment, because they lacked clothes. That reminded me that during
the summers I had seen on many plantations, many children totally nude up to puberty, as
had also been common, as I later learned, in the days of slavery and reconstruction. But
that was in the late 30’s, towards the end of the depression and when rural electrification
was only beginning, courtesy of the T.V.A.
During these discussions my father, who saw nothing wrong with segregation
except that it was enforced by rednecks instead of Bourbons (as upper class Southerners
were called after The War), related how his uncle and guardian the Senator, who had died
in 1929, had told him that his father Col. Percy, (Princeton, 1853) had related how slaves
were being imported in great numbers up until the outbreak of the Civil War. Colonel
Percy, like General Robert E. Lee, and other reasonable Southerners, opposed secession
before most of them joined the Confederate ranks after the fact.
I thought that this claim about illegally importing slaves was dubious, but I never
forgot it. Over the years I have worked on demography in medieval Sicily, Renaissance
Europe, and more recently in ancient Greece and Rome. Such work and passing
acquaintance with comparative studies of slavery convinced me that the extraordinarily
rapid increase in the number of African slaves in the antebellum south, though doubtless
undercounted, could not possibly have come about by natural increase – even if all the
slaves had been treated as paternalistically and benevolently, as I had been taught to
believe before I set foot in Concord and began to learn otherwise, as Fitzhugh, the
greatest antebellum apologist asserted, who claimed most Southerners treated slaves
8
better than the Yankees did the Irish mill hands who could be replaced at no cost. This
dramatic increase could not even have been accounted for had all the slaveholders in the
Old Dominion and other lesser states with worn out land had concentrated exclusively on
breeding, which they rarely did. Fitzhugh stated that “[n]o man in the South, we are sure,
ever bred slaves for sale.” While this may be somewhat discredited as the dubious claims
of an ardent apologist, the existence of slave breeding between 1808 and 1860, infrequent
as it was, cannot explain the anomaly of the increase of the American slave population.
Never in all recorded history has a slave population grown so exponentially except, if one
accepts the standard account, in the antebellum U.S. South and in Bermuda, an island
with an idyllic climate, no harsh labor, and few germs or viruses.
American Slave Population Census Figures, 1790-1860
(from http://bessel.org/slavfree /slavfree.htm)
Year
Slave Population
1790
694,207
1800
887,612
1810
1,130,781
1820
1,529,012
1830
1,987,428
1840
2,482,546
1850
3,200,600
1860
3,950,546
In some West Indian islands, slaves were, in some periods, worked to death on
average in seven years. Because they were so cheap before 1808, they didn’t need to be
preserved much less bred, as was the case in late Republican Rome when Cato in De
Agricultura, copying Carthaginian manuals, recommended brutal exploitation and no
9
breeding for maximum profit. Slaves always had a longer life expectation in the U.S. and
on the rest of the non-tropical North American mainland than in the Caribbean, Brazil or
Late Republican Rome, but they weren’t superhuman breeders. Those who thought that
slaves were mistreated in the same manner we have just described, working them to death
with no special emphasis on breeding, are simply incorrect, if only because how
expensive slaves became, especially between 1808 and 1860. It was not feasible to spend
so much capital on slave labor and not protect in some considerable measure the health
and care of the slave. This observation lends some credence to the notion that slaveowners were more humane than has been allowed, especially since Stampp’s
denunciation (1956), but we do not exonerate those who did indeed treat their slaves
brutally.
During the five decades of illegal importation virtually as many slaves were
slipped to Cuba as to Brazil, in each of which harsh conditions occasioned low birth rates
and high mortality rates, but so many more survived in Brazil than in Cuba. Obviously, a
large portion of the slaves in Cuba were re-exported to the U.S. The tome by Hugh
Thomas, The Slave Trade (1997), has gathered more data about this trade than other
previous works but he hasn't digested it or related it properly to that re-exportation. Both
before and after the War for American Independence, and before the prohibition of slave
importation twenty years after the ratification of the Constitution, slave breeding was
usually encouraged in British North America, which already had a more normal ratio
between males and females than in Brazil or the Caribbean. Cultivating cotton, the main
crop after 1820, was less lethal than tobacco planting and tobacco less dangerous than
sugar cane or rice. The threat to ship recalcitrant slaves down the Mississippi River from
10
cotton to cane cultivation was often enough to get more cooperation from the victim, but
some were actually shipped “down the River”. Treatment by masters as well as type of
work and climate caused variations in life expectations and reproduction rates. For
various reasons the censuses doubtless undercounted slaves, likely due to lack of
diligence or the hiding of newly imported Blacks, but nothing legal can explain the
extraordinary increase recorded by the census takers.
“The policy of pretence that prevailed in connection with the [illegal] slave-trade
was infinitely disgraceful to the nation.” U.S. authorities didn’t want to admit that they
could not or would not stop the massive importation that may have peaked in 1859 and
1860, when no less than two slave ships was embarking from New York every month.
Among others both W.E. Du Bois, and Senator Stephen Douglas, both made this claim.
Du Bois claimed that between 1808 and 1860, approximately 250,000 illegal slaves were
imported. (Gray, p.649) In 1861, the largest cotton crop ever would support the theory of
Du Bois and Douglas that the illegal imports surged again along with their prices in 1859
and 1860.
(Spears, IX)
Du Bois and even Lewis Gray, who estimated that the number of illegal imports
slightly higher than Du Bois, at 270,000 in his History of Agriculture in Southern United
States to 1860 (1933, p.649), may have both underestimated rather considerably. Cotton
production increased at staggering rates throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century, more than quadrupling between 1838 and 1859, and increasing over fifty percent
in only five years between 1850 and 1855. A fifty percent increase in production would
have required nearly the same increase in the work force. Such estimates could easily
11
bring the number closer to 500,000. Even if the planters had had mechanical cotton
harvesters roaring across their field, as one historian recently claimed in Wolf-Shenk’s
generally well-received Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President
and Fueled His Greatness, natural increase and shipments from the Upper South together
could never have supplied nearly enough hands to plant and chop all that cotton, no
matter how good the weather or soil!
No published scholar has until now heard Colonel Percy’s tales. The Colonel was
one of the greatest planters in the Mississippi Delta – the flood plain between the bluffs
on which Memphis and Vicksburg were erected – 220 miles apart as the crow flies. It
12
was the richest cotton producing area in the world in 1860, still being cleared and in
desperate need of slave labor. Natchez, just south of Vicksburg, became the richest per
capita city in the country. Where there is such a demand, a supply will almost always
materialize. It is a law of economics. See how much liquor was consumed during
prohibition? How much dope today? How many illegal immigrants do we have today?
Much of the commodities and many of those people were smuggled in just as slaves were
up to 1860, into the bayou lagoons and swamps along our porous gulf coast, and also
across the Rio Grande into Texas.
Patrolling Africa, the American Navy proved ineffectual or disinterested in
squelching the illegal activity. Until 1839, navy ships were not on regular patrol off the
African coast, but rather drifted out sporadically with little result. Until 1842, other
foreign powers policing the seas were unable to search any ship flying the American flag.
In August of that year, America and Britain signed the Ashburton treaty to, “maintain in
service, on the coast of Africa, a sufficient and adequate squadron or naval force of
vessels, of suitable numbers and descriptions, to carry in all not less than eighty guns, to
enforce, separately and respectively, the laws, rights, and obligations of each of the two
countries for the suppression of the slave-trade.” (Article 8) The American Squadron was
thereupon assigned to regular patrols along the coast of Liberia, yet it took the U.S. eight
months from the signing of the treaty to get its first command in place. British ships were
still forbidden to search American ships, but the idea of “joint cruising”, a British and an
American ship patrolling together as a pair, had been strongly advocated in response. It
came to pass, however, that this suggestion was rarely heeded. Furthermore, Commodore
13
M.C. Perry, the first command officer for the Americans under the treaty, though he had
received information of at least two ships actively transporting slaves to and from the
coast, wrote in a letter six months after taking command, “I cannot hear of any American
vessels being engaged in the transportation of slaves; nor do I believe there has been one
so engaged for several years.” Worst of all, the Americans never managed to muster
anywhere near as many ships as the English, and certainly not enough to be called
“sufficient and adequate” to patrol the roughly 3,000 miles of coast to which they had
been assigned.
Year
1843
1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
1849
1850
1851
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
American Vessels
2
4
5
6
4
5
5
5
6
5
7
4
3
3
3
British Vessels
14
14
20
23
21
21
23
24
26
25
19
18
12
13
16
Anecdotal evidence abounds from the records of revolts on ships bringing slaves
directly from Africa (the Amistad) or indirectly from Cuba, where many were “broken
in” as Colonel Percy said, before being transported to the states. In Texas a law gave
“found slaves” to the finder if the true owner didn’t claim them. They were smuggled in
14
like today’s “undocumented aliens” from Mexico and “found” bound in the woods. So
lucrative was the trade that Georgia governor David B. Mitchell resigned his post to
engage in the illicit practice, operating a smuggling business while serving as United
States agent of the Creek Indians, an office more amenable to the trade, nestled in a
remote landscape awash with rarely traveled paths seemingly perfect for the clandestine
business. (Shively,Spears, 125)
There is no way that the vast increase in the slave population in Alabama,
Mississippi and those parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and Texas,
growing cotton could have come down the Natchez trail on foot or been shipped around
from Baltimore, Newport News, Charleston or Savannah to Mobile and New Orleans.
Nor could they have increased naturally so much on the cotton plantations of the Deep
South – expanding exponentially as the fields were to keep up with the demand from
textile factories in Great Britain, Europe and the North. Cotton was indeed king, and the
labor supply had to be secured, as is the agricultural proletariat today, by illegal aliens
coming in.
15
(Fogel & Engerman, I, p.90)
The price of slaves, especially in the Deep South, moved up much more than in the Upper
South because the Deep South grew cotton and the soil in the Upper South became
exhausted from overplanting tobacco.
Period
1830-1835
1836-1840
1841-1845
1846-1850
1851-1855
Hire
Price
$
62
106
83
99
141.5
Hire
$
521
957
529
709
935
Price
$
127
143
168
167
$
948
722
926
1,240
16
1856-1860
142
1,294
Upper South
196.5
1,658
Lower South
In his old age, “ [W.E.B.] Du Bois wrote that he wished he’d looked more closely
at the economics driving the slave trade rather than the laws governing it. Laws codify
morality; economics ignore both.” A recent book, The Last Victims, pointed out that the
importation of slaves accelerated in the last two or three years before the trade became
illegal in 1808. Of course it did, because already in that short time since Eli Whitney had
invented the cotton gin in 1794, one could see the need for more slaves, as they stole his
ideas and disregarded his patents.
True, prices sagged from 1815 to 1830, but the demand increased much more
after Andrew Jackson had more or less succeeded in emptying the South east of the
Mississippi of Native Americans by the late 1830’s. He and two other speculators
founded Memphis in 1819, which became rich from selling mules, slaves and cotton (it
only became a major emporium for hard-wood after the end of slavery). The demand for
cotton escalated most every year thereafter until 1860, and with it the demand for slaves.
There may have been a slight decline in demand for imported slaves from 1808, when the
importation became illegal, until the end of the war in 1815, in part because of the
increase in imports just before 1810 and because of the wars.
(Farrow, Lang, Frank, p.133)
17
With the Trail of Tears (1831), and other removals and massacres of Native
Americans, and with the rapid spread of the textile factories in Great Britain and from it
to France, Belgium and New England, the demand outstripped the supply of cotton,
accelerating with each improvement in textile manufacture, from spinning jennies and
flying shuttles, to power looms, etc., not to mention each improvement in financing,
marketing, shipping and distribution. In 1859 and 1860 the plantation economy reached
its fastest and most lucrative expansion and hence illegally imported more slaves than
ever before.
Another recent book Complicity, by three journalists from Hartford, Connecticut
is aware of Du Bois’ claim and regrets, but fails to investigate it properly. Fitzhugh’s
classic antebellum tract that southern masters treated their slaves better than Yankee
textile manufacturers treated their Irish immigrant workers, because slaves were valuable
chattels, while Irish immigrants could starve and be replaced by others at no cost to the
hard-hearted Yankees, was revived with extensive statistical “proof” by Fogel and
Engelman in the much criticized Time on the Cross (Little, Brown & co., 1974). That
work was upstaged and nuanced by Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll, which however didn’t
bother with statistics, saying that “400,000 grew to 4,500,000.” With or without
statistics, the thesis about the benevolence of the masters and the well being of the slaves
has its critics, but the most telling criticism is that illegal importation rather than natural
increase explains the extraordinary growth in the slave population from 1808, to 1860.
18
Chapter I
Commodities
Introduction
Under their Tudor and Stuart monarchs, the English had become the chief textile
manufacturers in Europe; fulling, spinning, and weaving at home the wool they had
formerly exported to the Low Countries and increasingly using efficient watermills to do
so, instead of putting out the raw materials to be worked by country folk in their idle
hours and seasons at the cottage. Likewise, in commerce of the 16th and 17th centuries,
the English had laid the basis of their overseas empire, replacing the Dutch, as the Dutch
themselves had earlier replaced the Spanish and Portuguese as the chief carriers of world
trade. Much of the capital that the English acquired was plowed back into intensive
agriculture at home, imitating earlier Dutch methods in making their agriculture very
profitable in both the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
Finally, in 1796, during the first true world war, the English allied with their
former rivals, the Dutch--against Le Grande Monarch, Louis XIV. They founded the
bank of England, which soon eclipsed its model, that of Amsterdam. So, at the conclusion
of the war of the Spanish Succession in 1713-1714, the Treaty of Utrecht gained two
thrones for the Bourbons but debilitated France in the bargain. Meanwhile, England had
become Great Britain, united with Scotland by the Act of 1707, and emerged as the
greatest manufacturer, commercial and financial power in the world, consolidating its
position after a long contest with France for empire and trade by 1763.
19
During the 18th century and the Napoleonic Wars that followed it, England
pioneered what we call the Industrial Revolution, a concatenation of inventions; the
spinning jenny, the flying shuttle, and the power loom—all three continually improved—
and transformed the textile industry. In time, factories replaced the cottages and small
water barrels with ever-upgraded coal-powered machines. Thus, endless demand for
cotton surged—cotton boll fiber being much better than wool for the new machines. It
wasn't until the 1820's that cotton replaced sugar as the leading commodity in world
trade. But Napoleon, when he queried indignantly, " does the destiny of the world turn on
a barrel of sugar" as his embargo of British goods faltered, blamed it on Russian taste for
sugar as he failed to grasp that the main new export from Britain was cloth. Even his own
quartermasters, desperate to save money, bought machine-made smuggled cloth from the
British for uniforms.
African slaves were essential both for sugar and cotton. During the war, the
British, having established a virtual monopoly of the slave trade, suddenly prohibited the
exportation of slaves from Africa just when cotton production was beginning to escalate
not only in British factories, but after 1820 in northern France and Belgium. There,
excess British capital could be invested with much higher rates of return than in Britain
itself, where factory sites, wages, government regulations, and taxation were driving up
costs.
Furthermore the application of steam power moved from the mines that had
supplied the megalopolis of London with coal for heating, because they had exhausted all
the wood. While it was first used in the 17th century to pump water out of the mines, as it
20
became more efficient it was applied to transport, especially river-boats and trains, and to
power the textile factories.
The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made that commodity cheaper than wool.
After Andrew Jackson removed the Indians west of the Mississippi, the Deep South along
the Gulf Coast saw the greatest agricultural boom in history, the Cotton Kingdom that fed
Europe's ever more voracious and efficient factories, which spread to Germany, Austria,
Northern Italy and Northern Spain, as well as to New England, by the 1840's; and all of
which employed the latest devices so that some mills outpaced those of England.
This chapter traces the unparalleled expansion of the Cotton Kingdom which
devoured slaves almost as voraciously as the far less salubrious and more demanding
sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil, which continued to expand as the
prosperous European bourgeoisie, and even some of the more well-placed factory
workers demanded sugar for their tea, coffee, and biscuits. The demand for slaves from
the plantations in the New World was met with an ever-increasing supply, eagerly
shipped to the African coast by kingdoms and tribes whose prosperity and even existence
depended upon it.
First, we document the expansion of cotton and sugar production in this chapter.
Then in the next, we discuss the slave labor force that worked them. About the
production, exports and prices of those commodities, there is not much doubt. About
slave demographics there is no consensus whatsoever, because that trade unlike the
others, was illegal and therefore lacks documentation. There are however, many detailed
price lists for slaves.
21
The iron and steel industries, like textiles, premiered in Great Britain and grew
apace with the steam engines for factories and the metal needed for railroads and
steamships, at first on rivers and canals, and later to supplement ocean-going vessels. It
wasn't until that iron and steel overtook textiles in value, production and world trade. The
expansion of iron, steel, and coal, increased demand for sugar and cotton because that
phase of the Industrial Revolution exploded before 1860. The Secessionists made their
worst mistake in thinking that England and France would be forced into supporting the
Confederacy to keep their factories from shutting down, not realizing that iron and coal
had supplanted cotton, just as cotton had supplanted sugar by 1820.
Chapter I
Slave Intensive Commodities of the American South
1808-1861
From the advent of Arkwright's factory system at Derbyshire in 1771, until well
into the 20th century, Great Britain produced most of the world's cotton cloth. After the
War of 1812, plantations of the Deep South became the premier suppliers of raw cotton
for the ever more efficient mills of Manchester, otherwise known as "Cottonopolis", until
interrupted by the American Civil War. Previously, no other cotton exporters, India,
Egypt, Brazil, or the West Indies, ever contended with the seemingly inexhaustible
supply of burlap covered cotton bales streaming out of southern ports. As bales of cotton,
becoming more standardized in weight from 400 to 500 pounds, crossed the ocean to
Liverpool from New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston, and Savannah, another commodity
22
essential to southern cotton culture was dispatched from West Africa to Cuba and then
onto the American mainland via the Gulf of Mexico; black slaves by the tens of
thousands were increasingly smuggled in every year (1808-1861) mostly from Spanish
Cuba to supply labor on cotton plantations spreading across the American South. While
cotton is foremost in any discussion about American slavery after 1820, other crops were
important too. The other four staples of the south, in order of importance were, tobacco,
sugar, rice, and hemp.
During the antebellum years, the cotton exchange between the United States and
Great Britain, as well as the traffic in African slaves, fostered the development of
transatlantic shipping on an unprecedented scale, setting the stage for the international
finance capitalism we recognize today. In his landmark scholarly work, Capitalism and
Slavery (1944), Eric Eustace Williams claimed that the enslavement of Africans provided
the impetus for Britain's imperial wealth during the Industrial Revolution. While this
situation was obvious in antebellum America, a similar claim can be made for the role
Northern interests played in illegally procuring slaves for the South after 1808, and the
enormous wealth that was created because of it in the five odd decades before the Civil
War.
Almost without exception, from 1814 until 1861, at least 2/3rds of the entire
American cotton crop was annually exported to Liverpool, billions of bales then traveling
by rail (after 1831) to the mills of Manchester. In fact, until 1843, more cotton was
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exported to mills in France, mainly in Lille, than was kept in the U.S. for production in
New England mills. 
By 1860, Britain could boast nearly 3,000 cotton factories while the U.S. had in
operation just over 900. From 1800 to 1860, British demand for cotton rose an astounding
1000%, the greater bulk of this supplied from the slave-worked plantations of the Deep
South. Thus, during the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century, the role of the
United States was mainly as a supplier of raw material, namely cotton, of which hundreds
of millions of bales of were shipped with increasing frequency to Liverpool until the
outbreak of war between the States in 1861. Liverpool, formerly Europe's focal point for
the Atlantic slave trade, became the epicenter of the exploding cotton industry, often reexporting raw American cotton to mills in Russia, Belgium, and Prussia, while Britain's
own mills in Lancashire County produced cotton goods for the majority of the world.
(Hammond, 252; Ellison, Cohn, 22)
From 1780 to 1820, as British factories utilized new spinning and weaving
technologies, raw cotton was primarily imported from the West Indies and Brazil. For
almost two centuries, from the inception of cotton cultivation at Jamestown in 1607,

The rampant Americanism associated with the historiography of the Industrial Revolution in the
antebellum U.S. is disconcerting. American cotton mills, primarily in New England, developed during the
first three decades of the 19th century but were of little importance in the overall international cotton
market. Though an auspicious development for the American economy, cotton goods from these mills
during the whole of the 19th century never even remotely rivaled the industrial output of Great Britain. The
dynamism of the American Industrial Revolution, pioneering as it was in many ways, registered a mere
hiccough in comparison with the roaring lungs of the British factory system. Stephen Yafa's interesting and
recent overview, Cotton: The Biography of A Revolutionary Fiber, greatly exaggerates the importance of
the U.S. textile industry in relation to the international cotton market. More puzzling is the bald declaration
of eminent agricultural historian Gavin Wright stating that U.S. cotton consumption somehow equaled or
outpaced that of the U.K. in the decades leading up to the Civil War. This was never true even in the
tremendous cotton boom of the 1850's. The U.S. never manufactured more than 15-20% of their total crop
and usually it was less than that.
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cotton exports from the North American colonies were insignificant, preempted by
Maryland and Virginia tobacco, and rice and indigo from Georgia and the Carolinas,
Southern commodities satisfactorily profitable for British merchants and investors.
The piddling few thousand bales of cotton exported from South Carolina and
Georgia to London and Liverpool before 1786, was of negligible quality, as separating
the seeds from rough short-staple variety of American "uplands" cotton fiber was too
labor intensive and costly. After "sea-island", or "long-staple" cotton with its longer,
finer, less enmeshed fibers, was introduced to coastal South Carolina in the late 1780's by
way of the West Indies. British merchants soon fastened onto this higher quality
American cotton and the American export market for cotton began to bloom. However,
cultivating Sea Island cotton necessitated technical skill few planters possessed and the
geographical limitations of this staple compounded its inadequacies in meeting the
demand for raw cotton as technology in the mills improved and manufacturing output
soared. The success of the coastal plantations and newly found profitability of Sea Island
cotton was not lost on farmers in the hills of Carolina and Georgia, who began to plant
short-staple, or "uplands" cotton, rightly predicting the volume of the cotton trade to
increase.
The young Yankee quick-study named Eli Whitney invented the saw-gin at the
Georgia home of General Nathaniel Green's widow--the lady herself suggesting a crucial
component for the machine--during the spring of 1793. Whitney's cotton gin effectively
removed the sticky seeds from the short-staple fiber, and operation of the new machine
performed by a single slave replicated the amount of work that fifty slaves by hand could
achieve in a day. Since the cultivation of long-staple Sea Island cotton was problematic,
25
production of that crop fell sharply thereafter, thus inaugurating short-staple uplands
cotton as the main crop destined to feed the mills. The U.S. exported less than a half
million pounds of raw cotton to Liverpool in 1793, even as word of Whitney's cotton gin
radiated excitedly outward from Georgia. A year later, the gin now patented and widely
imitated, over one and a half million pounds was shipped. By 1812, the adaptation of
southern cotton supplied a sharp rise in demand from the Lancashire mills. Many farmers
and planters, gentry and yeomen alike, abandoned their corn, wheat, or tobacco crops and
turned to uplands cotton. Cotton culture migrated west to the hills of South Carolina and
Georgia, spreading north to North Carolina and Virginia. By 1804, the Louisiana
Purchase had conclusively established the Mississippi River as the central artery for
American commerce, and settlements in the Deep South of the Louisiana, Mississippi,
and Alabama territories followed soon after.
Coincident with the transformation wrought by technology on the demand for
cotton, was the steady ruination of arable land in the South by the widespread practice of
tobacco farming without manuring or rotating fields. A"one-field" system, though
ruinous to the soil, was practiced almost without exception by 17th and 18th century
tobacco planters, rotation on plantations foregone in the interest of speedier profits, a
model type of outland cultivation with African slave labor integral to its application, as
the cotton planters of the 19th century were soon to imitate. Though the institution of
plantation slavery was widely perceived as a counterproductive anachronism by1800, the
appearance of Whitney's gin quickly convinced planters to decide otherwise. The same
soil-eroding methods of cultivation used by tobacco planters was carried on by cotton
planters, who, if successful, moved their plantation operations further south and west
26
when the deleterious effects of their planting methods depleted the soil. By the late
1840's, the one-field system practiced by cotton planters had exhausted much of the soil
in the coastal states of Virginia and Georgia. This tendency spurred a constant migration
of slaves for the plowing of virgin fields on new plantations. From 1830 to 1860,
Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and Georgia, each
exported annually an average of 25,000 slaves to the Deep South, including Texas and
Arkansas. Agriculture in the south moved and expanded, coinciding with a constant
demand for new slaves to meet the contingencies occasioned by the spread of new
plantations and the ever-present demand for cotton from Great Britain.
(Stampp, 238)
Beginning in the 1840's, overstock of American cotton in British warehouses led
to depreciation of prices, even while the prices for African slaves steadily rose in the
same period. Of course, the wealthiest within the southern planter caste could more
readily afford the rising price of slaves than yeoman farmers, and gentry. In the 1840's,
consolidation occurring within the plantation system became more noticeable, as smaller
farmers found it increasingly difficult to make profits for a few reasons: rising prices for
slaves, an inability to compete with the purchasing power of the planter elite in buying
land, the increasing efficiency of the larger plantations, and a reliance of the lower caste
or white yeoman farmer on the larger plantations for supplies and operational necessities.
Stampp succinctly states, " the yeoman labored in competition with the slaves." As a
result, many of the smaller cotton farms and their slaves, especially in the Deep South,
became extensions of vast cotton holdings under new ownership by a minority of
27
aristocratic planters. This tendency, reflective of the advantages held by the planter elite,
was nonetheless an anomaly. Most of the slave-holders in the antebellum south owned
fewer than ten slaves and theses planters held the majority of the slaves.
(Stampp, 238,428; Hammond)
Before 1793, most U.S. states had curtailed the importation of African
slaves, and many of the Northern states had abolished slavery altogether. However, the
expectations of profits from cotton, freed by Whitney's invention, created an instant and
uproarious demand for African slaves that didn't cease until the cannons boomed at Fort
Sumter in 1861. In 1807, a year before the U.S. officially ended participation in the
transatlantic slave trade, nearly 2/3rds of the American cotton crop, almost 95 million
pounds, was exported to England. 1808 was a dire year for maritime commerce,
especially for American merchants, north and south. Contemporary opinions expressed
incredulity at Jefferson's strangulation of the economic life-blood of the country,
forbidding trade with England and Napoleonic France while simultaneously abolishing
the slave trade to southern ports. After Jefferson's Embargo, less than 15% of American
raw cotton was squeezed through to Liverpool. The cotton merchants fought back in
1809, with much of the cotton smuggled overseas in disregard of the Embargo. Future
scrutiny into transatlantic smuggling on the part of American merchants in these years
(1807-1814), may unearth the beginnings of maritime and mercantile collaboration that
connect illicit smuggling of cotton (and other goods) to Britain, with the routine
trafficking of slaves into the U.S from Africa via Cuba.
28
The irresolute lifting of Jeffersonian embargoes saw sales of stockpiled surplus
cotton; 111% of the crop was exported in 1810. The New York market index for cotton
prices fell annually from 22.5¢ a pound in 1806 to 10.5¢ in 1811; conversely Liverpool
prices leaped from 14.5 shillings in 1807, to 22 shillings the next year, falling to 12.5
shillings by 1811. Sporadic sales of cotton to England in these years, notwithstanding the
official prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade, nonetheless inspired still more
American investment in the cultivation of cotton. By 1821, cotton had become the
leading U.S. export, winning out over both tobacco and wheat.
In 1815, Congress declared the importation of slaves into the U.S. an act of piracy
punishable by death. Regardless of the laws, illegal slaves continued to pour into the
country from the virtually un-policed waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Slaves were marched
overland in coffles, headed north from the shoals and bayous of the Gulf towards fenced
cotton fields on hundreds of majestic manorial estates and thousands of smaller farms.
These slaves were often assimilated into the legal interstate traffic in domestic slaves that
meandered southward from Virginia and Maryland, by land, or shipped by river or sea
around Florida.
Both circuits converged in the Deep South, the majority of slaves were installed in
the largest cotton operations there, while a smaller percentage were taken to work on
tobacco, sugar, rice, and hemp plantations. The greatest concentration of slaves worked
the largest cotton plantations that sat on the fertile alluvial soils of lush river valleys
coursing through Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
The slave traffic to the Deep South, legal or otherwise, was kept in perpetuity not only
because new plantations created the demand, but also to replace those slaves who had
29
perished from malaria and yellow fever in the humid mosquito-infested watersheds. The
cotton bonanzas of the 1850's made painfully apparent the widening gap between British,
European, and Yankee demand for cotton and the supply of African slaves to work the
cotton fields. Despite the constant influx of slaves, by legal or illegal means, the Southern
plantation system was beleaguered by labor shortages, a testament to the incredible
proliferation of cotton culture in the decade before the war.
(Stampp, 298)
Before the cotton trade began to boom in conjunction with mass cultivation of the
Mississippi Valley in the early 1830's, bales of cotton moved slowly along rivers, the
inland traffic terminating in the central coastal ports of Charleston, Savannah, Mobile,
and New Orleans. This wayward river traffic, mostly carried on flatboats, was sluggish
and expensive although a handful of steamships had begun service between inland ports
in South Carolina and Georgia by 1826. After 1830, cotton production in the western
states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, nearly equaled that of the Atlantic
coast states. Five years later, these states surpassed the production of Virginia, the
Carolinas, and Georgia, producing 6/11ths of the entire U.S. crop. By 1835, over a
hundred Lancashire mills housing nearly 100,000 power looms, processed at least 350
million pounds of American cotton, manufacturing about 83,000 pounds of yarn and
almost 2 million ft. of finished textile products from all of their imported cotton.
(Jeremy, 103;Hammond, 247; Clough, Cole, 407; Ellison, Table II)
30
President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal policy greatly affected the spread of
cotton culture in the Deep South. Choctaws vacated the upper valleys of the Pearl River
in 1830, the Chickasaws left the northern Mississippi Delta in 1832, Creeks left Alabama
the same year, and finally the Cherokee's sad exodus in 1835 opened a large portion of
the Tennessee River Valley for cotton cultivation. During the years of Indian Removal,
land speculation varied wildly as future deeds were contingent on the exit of the natives.
This situation was further exacerbated by fluctuating, unpredictable cotton harvests, an
annual cause of worry especially for British recipients. These developments,
accompanied by the continual progress of technological innovation in the textile industry,
resulted in growing popular demand for cotton manufactures as prices steadily fell,
factors that contributed in no small measure to the Panic of 1837, an economic meltdown
usually blamed on general market uncertainties caused by Jackson's war against Nicholas
Biddle and the 2nd Bank of the United States. Much of the uncertainty this episode
created can be traced directly to the unprecedented expanding infrastructure of the cotton
industry, and all of its peripheral industries.
(Yafa,107)
In the 1840's, cotton created definite prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic, even
as complications arose through the decade regarding supply and demand. British
merchants and industrialists chafed at their reliance on America as virtually their only
supplier of raw cotton. British investors were perennially risking their money blindly,
never knowing if whether the cotton crops across the pond would be blighted by
parasites, scorched by heat-waves, or washed out by downpours. The Panic of 1837 had
31
motivated British merchants to seek alternative sources for cotton imports but the raw
cotton Britain received from India was deemed inferior to American, and from 1840 to
1845, close to three billion pounds of southern-grown cotton crammed the Liverpool
harbors and Manchester warehouses. In fact, by 1845, the British bought up so much
cotton that their overstock equaled nearly nine months of extra consumption. The rate of
American cotton production was beginning to outpace British demand. As a result, cotton
prices dropped to their absolute historical nadir in 1845, 5.63 cents and 4 pence a pound
respectively. Another contributing factor to depreciating prices of cloth was the
expansion of cotton mills in continental Europe, due to the 1843 British Parliamentary
repeal of laws prohibiting mill machinery exportation.
(Hammond, 248-249)
From 1833 to 1842, about 19,000,000 acres of land were sold mostly to plantation
owners across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. In the same time decade
those states yielded nearly 10,000,000 bales of cotton, nearly 3/5ths of the total U.S. crop.
Cotton culture spread like wildfire, creating an insatiable demand for African slaves. In
1836 alone, over 250,000 shackled slaves were marched to their new owners overland
down from the Natchez Trace, and from Virginia and Maryland; many of these were
continuously parceled out from barracoons along the Gulf Coast in which the slaves were
corralled after being legally shipped to Cuba and illegally re-exported thereafter to
Florida or elsewhere along the Gulf Coast. Rising clamor for more African slaves to work
on new plantations in the Deep South dramatically increased the value of these slaves on
the auction blocks. Slavery in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and
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Tennessee, rose almost 90% between 1830 and 1840. The annexation of Texas in 1845
added to the swelling African population. By 1850, the average cotton plantation was
about 400 acres, while many covered an area well over 1,000, and a few over 10,000.
Between 1850 and 1860, the area of cotton cultivation in the foremost cotton producing
states increased 16.4%. The total cotton crop itself increased more than 100% in the same
decade. The reciprocal demand for slaves to meet this frenzied production caused slave
prices to skyrocket. Prices and demographics in regard to the slaves for the period 1808
to 1862 are analyzed in greater detail in Chapter II.
(Hammond, 50,60,72,84,102)
The Revolutionary War, and to a lesser extent the War of 1812 and the Seminole
Wars, caused Southern agriculture to decline, crippling rice, tobacco, and sugar, indigo
and flax. After Whitney's gin introduced the rapid spread of cotton culture, the production
of tobacco, sugar, and rice languished somewhat, bowing before King Cotton in 1821.
Nevertheless, though not as prosperous as it was before 1775, tobacco cultivation spread
from Virginia's coastal plains to North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and
even Georgia. Tobacco production spiked dramatically in the 1850's due to the discovery
of Bright yellow tobacco and tobacco output overall made a profitable comeback in the
last antebellum decade. Even so, tobacco export profits for the decade were about 5% of
cotton's. The 1850 U.S. census estimated that about 350,000 slaves were involved in
tobacco production on plantations and in factories. By 1860, tobacco plantations large
and small held a median average of 20 slaves compared to 37 slaves per cotton
plantation.
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(Goodman 194, 1960; Eliot, 254, 1860)
Cotton plantations shared the rich alluvial soil of the Mississippi River and its
bayou country with an increasing number of sugar operations that ranged along the river
over a hundred miles north of New Orleans. About 95% of antebellum sugar production
took place in Louisiana. Sugarcane culture advanced north into the watershed of the Red
River in the 1840's after King Cotton's prices tumbled with the Panic of 1837. Many
sugar planters of the time wrongly predicted that sugar would displace cotton in domestic
and export value, thus its cultivation spread despite the fact that cotton continued to
dominate the market. Nevertheless, the Red River demarcated the limit of sugar
production. Some of the more affluent cotton planters in the Deep South grew both
staples. Sugar production was much more labor intensive and unhealthy than cotton and
the unfortunate slaves engaged in sugar cane culture had higher mortality rates. Slaves
who expired from disease or heat exhaustion were often replaced by the circuit of
illegally smuggled slaves taken upriver from New Orleans, or further south from
Galveston, Texas. While slaves were imported into the sugar parishes, a significant
number of them were exported from them to cotton plantations as the value of slaves
continued to increase through the antebellum era. About 150,000 slaves were laboring in
the cane fields as reported by the U.S. census of 1850. Sugar attained its highest
productivity and profitability in the first half of the 1850's, when over 1.5 million
hogsheads, each with about 50 gallons of sugar, rolled off the docks of the Mississippi
into waiting steamboats. [Stampp, 46, 1956; Schmitz, 14-15, 1977]
In contrast with relatively profitable tobacco and sugar plantations was the
struggling rice industry in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia, which hosted
34
the lion's share of rice production for the nation. By 1850 about 125,000 slaves were
knee-deep in its cultivation. At about the same time, steam power encouraged rice culture
along the Mississippi river, but Louisiana's role as a rice producer declined rapidly after
1861. On the whole, rice farming was unprofitable until the very cusp of the Civil War.
Rice farmers rarely earned over 6% profits against their operating costs though this
percentage would increase upwards until a halt in 1861. Its mosquito-infested paddies
were as deadly as the sugar plantations.
(Swan, 322, 1973)
Along the Missouri River, in a region known as Little Dixie, an often overlooked
staple, hemp, was produced steadily throughout the antebellum period. Hemp was used
mainly for rope-making and for the burlap that covered bales of cotton. Its production
involved about 60,000 slaves by 1850, as compared to nearly 2 million slaves working in
the cotton fields.
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36