Slavery: The Economics and Social Impact
(what follows is an abridgement of Digital History/ Textbook/ the
Pre-Civil War South)
ASSIGNMENT
Read the text that follows to answer these questions on a
separate piece of paper:
1. Why, and in what ways, did slavery grow during the 1800s?
2. What role did slavery play in the regional and national
economy?
3. How did slavery affect southern whites?
4. Why was slavery so widely supported in the South—and in the
North?
5. In what ways did slavery hurt the southern economy?
The Development of Slavery
In the early 1790s, slavery appeared to be a dying institution.
Slave imports into the New World were declining and slave prices
were falling because the crops grown by slaves--tobacco, rice,
and indigo--did not generate enough income to pay for their
upkeep.
[Then Eli Whintey created the cotton gin, a machine which
separated the seeds from the cotton.] Whitney’s cotton engine
(gin for short) could separate fiber from seeds faster than 50
people working by hand.
Whitney’s invention revitalized slavery in the South by
stimulating demand for slaves to raise short-staple cotton. [The
price of slaves doubled, as did the number of slaves]
The Southern Social Structure
[T]he South was, in reality, a diverse and complex region.
Though Americans today often associate the old South with
cotton plantations, large parts of the South were unsuitable for
plantation life. In the mountainous regions of eastern Tennessee
and western Virginia, few plantations or slaves were to be found.
Nor did southern farms and plantations devote their efforts
exclusively to growing cotton or other cash crops, such as rice
and tobacco. Unlike the slave societies of the Caribbean, which
produced crops exclusively for export, the South devoted much
of its energy to raising food and livestock. . .
The white South’s social structure was much more complex than
the popular stereotype. . .
Large slaveholders were extremely rare. In 1860 only 11,000
Southerners, three-quarters of one percent of the white
population owned more than 50 slaves; a mere 2,358 owned as
many as 100 slaves. However, although large slaveholders were
few in number, they owned most of the South’s slaves. Over half
of all slaves lived on plantations with 20 or more slaves and a
quarter lived on plantations with more than 50 slaves.
Slave ownership was relatively widespread. In the first half of the
19th century, one-third of all southern white families owned
slaves, and a majority of white southern families either owned
slaves, had owned them, or expected to own them. These
slaveowners were a diverse lot. A few were African American,
mulatto, or Native American; one-tenth were women; and more
than one in ten worked as artisans, businesspeople, or
merchants rather than as farmers or planters. Few led lives of
leisure or refinement.
The average slaveowner lived in a log cabin rather than a
mansion and was a farmer rather than a planter. The average
holding varied between four and six slaves, and most
slaveholders possessed no more than five.
White women in the South, despite the image of the hoop-skirted
southern belle, suffered under heavier burdens than their
northern counterparts. They married earlier, bore more children,
and were more likely to die young. They lived in greater isolation,
had less access to the company of other women, and lacked the
satisfactions of voluntary associations and reform movements.
Their education was briefer and much less likely to result in
opportunities for independent careers.
Slavery and the Economy
The plantation legend was misleading in still other respects.
Slavery was neither dying nor unprofitable. In 1860 the South
was richer than any country in Europe except England, and it had
achieved a level of wealth unmatched by Italy or Spain until the
eve of World War II.
The southern economy generated enormous wealth and was
critical to the economic growth of the entire United States. Well
over half of the richest 1 percent of Americans in 1860 lived in
the South. Even more important, southern agriculture helped
finance early 19th century American economic growth. Before the
Civil War, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton,
provided over half of all U.S. export earnings, and furnished 70
percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry.
Cotton exports paid for a substantial share of the capital and
technology that laid the basis for America’s industrial revolution.
In addition, precisely because the South specialized in
agricultural production, the North developed a variety of
businesses that provided services for the southern states,
including textile and meat processing industries and financial and
commercial facilities.
Although slavery was highly profitable, it had a negative impact
on the southern economy. It impeded the development of
industry and cities and contributed to high debts, soil exhaustion,
and a lack of technological innovation. . .
The South, like other slave societies, did not develop urban
centers for commerce, finance, and industry on a scale equal to
those found in the North. . . Southern cities were small because
they failed to develop diversified economies. . . An overemphasis
on slave-based agriculture led Southerners to neglect industry
and transportation improvements. As a result, manufacturing and
transportation lagged far behind in comparison to the North.
Because of high rates of personal debt, Southern states kept
taxation and government spending at much lower levels than did
the states in the North. As a result, Southerners lagged far
behind Northerners in their support for public education. Illiteracy
was widespread. In 1850, 20 percent of all southern white adults
could not read or write, while the illiteracy rate in New England
was less than half of 1 percent.
Because large slaveholders owned most of the region’s slaves,
wealth was more stratified than in the North. In the Deep South,
the middle class held a relatively small proportion of the region’s
property, while wealthy planters owned a very significant portion
of the productive lands and slave labor. In 1850, 17 percent of
the farming population held two-thirds of all acres in the rich
cotton-growing regions of the South.
There are indications that during the last decade before the Civil
War slave ownership became increasingly concentrated in fewer
and fewer hands. . . . During the 1850s, the percentage of the
total white population owning slaves declined significantly. By
1860, the proportion of whites holding slaves had fallen from
about one-third to one-fourth. As slave and land ownership grew
more concentrated, a growing number of whites were forced by
economic pressure to leave the land and move to urban centers.