Chapter 16
The South and the
Slavery Controversy,
1793–1860
I. “Cotton Is King!”
• Cotton Kingdom:
– Developed into a huge agricultural factory:
• In an economic spiral the planters bought more slaves
and land
• Northern shippers reaped large profits from the
cotton trade
• The prosperity of the North, South, and England
rested on the bent backs of enslaved bondsmen
– So too did the nation’s growing wealth:
• Cotton accounted for half the value of American
export
I. “Cotton is King!”
• Cotton export earnings provided the capital for the
Republic’s economic growth
• The South produced more than half of the entire
world’s supply of cotton
• About 75% came from the acres of the South
• Southern leaders knew that Britain was tied to them
by cotton threads
• Thus this dependence gave them power
• In their eyes “Cotton was King”
• Cotton was a powerful monarch indeed
II. The Planter “Aristocracy”
• The South was a planter aristocracy:
– In 1850 only 1,733 families owned more than
100 slaves:
• This select group provided the political and social
leadership
• They enjoyed a lion’s share of southern wealth
• They could educate their children in the finest schools
• Money provided the leisure for study, reflection, and
statecraft:
– Notable: John C. Calhoun (Yale), Jefferson Davis (West Point)
II. The Planter “Aristocracy”
• They felt a keen sense of obligation to serve.
– Dominance by a favored aristocracy was
basically undemocratic:
• It widened the gap between rich and poor
• It hampered tax-supported public education
– The plantation system shaped the lives of
southern women:
• The mistress commanded a sizable household staff
• Relationships between mistress and slaves ranged
from affectionate to atrocious
II. The Planter “Aristocracy”
(cont.)
• Some mistresses showed tender regard for their
bondwomen
• Some slave women took pride in their status as
“members” of the household
• But slavery strained the bonds of womanhood
• Virtually no slaveholding women believed in
abolition.
p339
III. Slaves of the Slave System
• Plantation life:
• Plantation agriculture was worrisome, distasteful, and
sordid because it despoiled the good earth
• Quick profit led to excessive cultivation or “land
butchery”
• Which caused a heavy leakage of population to the
West and Northwest.
– The economic structure of the South became
increasingly monopolistic:
• The big got bigger and the small smaller.
III. Slaves of the Slave System
(cont.)
– The financial instability of the plantation system
• There was overspeculation in land and slaves
• The slaves represented a heavy investment of capital
• An entire slave quarter might be wiped out by disease
– Dominance by King Cotton led to a dangerous
dependence on a one-crop economy
• Prices were at the mercy of world conditions
• The whole system discouraged healthy diversification
– Southern planters resented the North growing
fat at their expense.
III. Slaves of the Slave System
(cont.)
– The Cotton King repelled large-scale European
immigration:
• Immigrants added richly to the manpower and wealth
of the North
• 1860 only 4.4 % of the southern population was
foreign-born as compared to 18.7% for the North
• German and Irish immigration to the South was
discouraged by the competition of slave labor, by the
high cost of fertile land and by European ignorance of
cotton growing
IV. The White Majority
• Southern life:
– Only a handful of southern whites lived in
Grecian-pillared mansions
• Only 1,733 families owned a hundred or more slaves
(see Figure 16.1)
• Most owned less than ten slaves
• ¼ of white southerners owned slaves or belonged to a
slaveowning family.
– The smaller slaveowners did not own a majority
of the slaves, but were the majority of masters.
IV. The White Majority
(cont.)
• These lesser masters were typically small farmers
• Beneath the slaveowners was a great body of whites
who owned no slaves at all (see Maps 16.1 and 16.2)
• The least prosperous nonslaveholding whites were
scorned even by slaves as “poor white trash”
• All the whites without slaves had no direct economic
stake in preserving slavery, yet they were among the
stoutest defenders of the slave system
• They was always the hope of buying slaves
– In accord with the “American dream of upper mobility
• Some poorer whites were no better off than the
slaves
IV. The White Majority
(cont.)
• In a special category of white southerners were the
mountain whites:
– Living in the valleys of the Appalachian range
– Independent small farmers
– These mountain whites had little in common with the
whites of the flatlands
– When the war came, the tough-fibered mountain whites
constituted a vitally important peninsula of Unionism
– They played a significant role in crippling the Confederacy
– They were the only concentrated Republican strength in the
solid South
Figure 16-1 p341
Map 16-1 p342
Map 16-2 p343
V. Free Blacks: Slaves Without
Masters
• South’s free blacks:
– They numbered about 250,000 by 1860:
• Free black population trace their emancipation to the
idealism of Revolutionary days
• Many were mulattoes
• Some purchased their freedom
• Many owned property
• They were a kind of “third race” with restrictions
• They were unpopular in the North
V. Free Blacks: Slaves Without
Masters (cont.)
– Northern climate for free blacks:
•
•
•
•
Several states forbade their entrance
Most denied them the right to vote
Some barred them from public schools
Northern blacks were particularly hated by the Irish
immigrants with whom they competed for jobs
• Antiblack feelings were stronger in the North than in
the South:
– Southerners liked the blacks as individuals, but despised the
race: white northerners often professed to like the race but
disliked individual blacks
VI. Plantation Slavery
• In the south of 1860 there were nearly 4
million black human chattels
– Legal importation of African slaves into America
ended in 1808, outlawed by Congress
– Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807
• The Royal Navy’s West African Squadron seized
hundreds of slave ships and freed thousands of
grateful captives
• Yet 3 million enslaved Africans were shipped to Brazil
and the West Indies after 1807
VI. Plantation Slavery
(cont.)
• Slavery:
• In the United States, the price of “black ivory” was so
high before the Civil War that countless thousands of
black were smuggled into the South
• Ironically, the suppression of the international slave
trade fostered the growth of a vigorous internal slave
trade
• Most of the increase in the slave population came
from natural reproduction:
– It distinguished North American slavery from slavery in
more southerly New World societies.
VI. Plantation Slavery
(cont.)
• The planters regarded their slaves as
investments:
– Of some $2 billion of their capital by 1860
– Slaves were the primary form of wealth in the
South:
• They were cared for as any asset is cared for by a
prudent capitalist
• Sometimes spared from dangerous work
• Slavery was profitable, even though it hobbled the
economic development of the region as a whole.
VI. Plantation Slavery
(cont.)
• Breeding slaves was not openly encouraged
– Women who bore thirteen or fourteen babies were prized
as “rattlin’ good breeders”
– White masters would force their attentions on female slaves
fathering a sizable mulatto population, most of which
remained enchained.
• Slave auctions were brutal sights
–
–
–
–
–
The most revolting aspects of slavery
Families were separated with distressing frequency
This was slavery’s greatest psychological horror
Abolitionists decried the practice
Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 novel: Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
VII. Life Under the Lash
• How did the slaves actually live?
– Conditions varied greatly:
• Slavery meant hard work, ignorance, and oppression
• They had no political rights and minimal protection
• Laws were difficult to enforce since slaves were
forbidden to testify in court or to have their
marriages legally recognized
• Floggings were common
• Strong-willed slaves were sometimes sent to
breakers—the lavish laying on of the lash.
VII. Life Under the Lash
(cont.)
• Savage beatings made sullen laborers
• Lash marks hurt resale values
• The typical planter had too much of his own property
riding on the backs of his slaves to beat them bloody
on a regular basis.
– Black concentration in the black belt of the Deep
South:
• Stretched from South Carolina to Georgia into the
new southwest: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana
• Life was often rough and raw, for the slaves it was
harder.
VII. Life Under the Lash
(cont.)
• Black living:
• Most lived on large plantations of twenty or more
slaves
• In some counties blacks accounted for 75%
• Family life was relatively stable, and a distinctive
African American slave culture developed
• Forced separations was more common on smaller
plantations
• Blacks managed to sustain family life in slavery; most
slaves were raised in stable two-parent households.
VII. Life Under the Lash
(cont.)
• Continuity of family identity across generations was
evidenced
• African American displayed their African cultural
roots when they avoided marriage between first
cousins, in contrast to the frequent intermarriage of
close relatives among the ingrown planter aristocracy
• African roots were visible in the slaves’ religion:
– Many Christianized during the Second Great Awakening
– Yet they molded their own distinctive religious forms from a
mixture of Christian and African elements
– African practice of responsorial style of preaching—the
give and take between caller and dancers.
VIII. The Burdens of Bondage
• Slavery was intolerably degrading to the
victims:
• They were deprived of the dignity and sense of
responsibility that come from independence and the
right to make choices
• They were denied an education
• Victims of the “peculiar institution” devised ways to
show protest:
– They slowed the pace of their labor to the barest minimum
– They filched food from the “big house”
– They pilfered other goods
VII. The Burdens of Bondage
(cont.)
– They sabotaged expensive equipment
– They even poisoned their masters’ food.
• The slaves universally pined for freedom:
– Many took to their heels as runaways
– Others rebelled, though never successfully
– 1800 armed insurrection led by a slave named Gabriel in
Richmond, Virginia-foiled by informers and leaders hanged
– 1822 Denmark Vesey, a free black, led an ill-fated rebellion
in Charleston, South Carolina foiled by informers; Vesey and
30 followers were publicly strung from the gallows
– 1813 the semiliterate Nat Turner , a visionary black
preacher, led an uprising that slaughtered 60 Virginians—
Nat Turner’s rebellion was soon extinguished.
VII. The Burdens of Bondage
(cont.)
– Enslaved Africans rebelled aboard the Spanish
slave ship Amistad in 1839
– The dark taint of slavery left its mark on whites:
• It fostered the brutality of the whip, the bloodhound,
and the branding iron
• White southerners increasingly lived in a state of
imagined siege, surrounded by potentially rebellious
blacks inflamed by abolitionist propaganda from the
North
• Their fears bolstered a theory of biological racial
superiority
p349
IX. Early Abolitionism
• The inhumanity of the “peculiar institution”
caused antislavery societies:
– Abolitionist sentiment first stirred at the time of
the Revolution, especially among Quakers
– The American Colonization Society (1817):
• Purpose to transport blacks bodily back to Africa
• In 1822 the Republic of Liberia, on West African
coast, was established for former slaves
IX. Early Abolitionism (cont.)
• Its capital, Monrovia, was named after President
Monroe
• Some 15,000 freed slaves were transported over four
decades
• Most blacks had no wish to be transported into a
strange civilization after having become partially
Americanized
• By 1860 most southern slaves were native-born
African-Americans, with their own distinctive history
and culture
– Yet colonization appealed to some antislaverites, including
Abraham Lincoln, before the Civil War.
IX. Early Abolitionism (cont.)
• William Wilberforce:
• A member of the British Parliament, an evangelical
Christian reformer whose family had been touched by
the preaching of George Whitefield (see Chapter 5):
– Unchained the slaves in the West Indies (see pp. 354-355)
– Wilberforce University in Ohio, an African American college
that later sent many missionaries to Africa.
– Theodore Dwight Weld:
• Appealed with special power and directness to his
rural audiences of untutored farmers
IX. Early Abolitionism (cont.)
– Weld (cont.):
• He was materially aided by two wealthy and devout
New York merchants—brothers Arthur and Lewis
Tappan
• They paid his way to Lane Theological Seminary in
Cincinnati, Ohio
• Expelled with several other students in 1834 for
organizing an 18 day debate on slavery
• Weld and his fellow “Lane Rebels” fanned out across
the Old Northwest preaching antislavery gospel.
IX. Early Abolitionism (cont.)
– Weld (cont.):
• He assembled a potent propaganda pamphlet,
American Slavery as It Is (1839)
• Its compelling arguments made it among the most
effective abolitionist tracts and greatly influenced
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Map 16-3 p350
p350
X. Radical Abolitionism
• William Lloyd Garrison:
– The Liberator—his militantly antislavery
newspaper:
• That under no circumstances would he tolerate the
poisonous weed of slavery, but would stamp it out,
root and branch.
• American Anti-Slavery Society (1833):
– Founders: Garrison, Wendell Phillips
X. Radical Abolitionism
(cont.)
• Black abolitionists:
– David Walker—Appeal to the Colored Citizens of
World (1829):
• Advocated a bloody end to white supremacy
– Sojourner Truth—fought tirelessly for black
emancipation and women’s rights
– Martin Delany
• one of the few black leaders who took seriously the
notion of mass recolonization of Africa
X. Radical Abolitionism
(cont.)
– Delany (cont.)
• In 1859 he visited West Africa’s Niger Valley seeking a
suitable site for relocation
– Frederick Douglass—the greatest black
abolitionist:
• Escaped bondage in 1838 at age 21
• He was “discovered” by the abolitionists in 1841 after
giving an impromptu speech at an antislavery
meeting in Massachusetts
• Thereafter continued to lecture, despite punishment
X. Radical Abolitionism
(cont.)
– Douglass (cont.):
• Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass (1845)
published his classic autobiography
– It depicted his remarkable origins and his struggle to learn
to read and write, and his eventual escape to the North.
• Comparison of Garrison and Douglass:
– Garrison:
• Was stubbornly principled
• More interested in his own righteousness than in the
substance of the slavery evil itself
X. Radical Abolitionism
(cont.)
• Repeatedly demand that the “virtuous” North secede
from the “wicked” South
• Never explained how the creation of an independent
slave republic would bring an end to the “damning
crime” of slavery
• Renouncing politics, on the Fourth of July, 1854, he
publicly burned a copy of the Constitution as “a
covenant with death and an agreement with hell”
• Critics and former supporters charged that he was
cruelly probing the moral wound in America’s
underbelly, but offered no acceptable balm…
X. Radical Abolitionism
(cont.)
– Douglas:
• Was flexibly practical
• He and other abolitionists Increasingly looked to
politics to end the blight of slavery
• They backed the Liberty party in 1840; the Free Soil
party in 1848; the Republican party in the 1850s
• Most abolitionists, including Garrison, followed the
logic of their beliefs and supported war as the price of
emancipation.
p352
p352
XI. The South Lashes Back
– Antislavery sentiment was known in the South
and antislavery societies were more numerous
south of the Mason-Dixon line than north of it
• After 1830 the voice of white southern abolitionism
was silenced
• The Virginia legislature debated and defeated various
emancipation proposals in 1831-1832:
– That debate marked a turning point
– Slave states tightened their slave codes
– Moved to prohibit emancipation of any kind, voluntary or
compensated
XI. The South Lashes Back
(cont.)
– Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831:
• Sent waves of hysteria
• Planters slept with pistols
• Garrison was bitterly condemned as a terrorist and
inciter of murder
• The State of Georgia offered $5,000 for his arrest and
conviction
– The nullification of 1832:
• Further implanted haunting fears in white southern
minds
XI. The South Lashes Back
(cont.)
• Jailings, whippings, and lynching now greeted rational
efforts to discuss the slavery problem in the South
– Proslavery whites responded by launching a
massive defense of slavery as a positive good
• White apologists claimed that master-slave
relationships resembled those of a family
• They were quick to contrast the “happy” lot of their
“servants” with that of the overworked northern
wage slaves
• These proslavery arguments widened the chasm
between the South and the North
XI. The South Lashes Back
(cont.)
• The controversy over free people endangered free
speech in the entire country:
– Gag Resolution:
• Pushed through Congress by sensitive southerners
• It required all such antislavery appeals to be tabled
without debate.
– Southern whites resented the flooding of their
mails with incendiary abolition literature:
• Congress (1835) ordered southern postmasters to
destroy abolitionist material and arrest those who did
not comply.
p354
Table 16-1 p355
XII. The Abolitionist Impact in the
North
– Abolitionists, especially the extreme
Garrisonians, were unpopular in the North:
• Northerners revered the Constitution and the clauses
on slavery as a lasting bargain
• The ideal of Union grated harshly on northern ears
• They had a heavy economic stake in Dixieland
• Southern planters owned northern bankers and
creditors about $300 million—that would be lost if
the Union was dissolved
• A disrupted labor system might cut off vital supply
and bring unemployment
XII. The Abolitionist Impact in the
North (cont.)
• The abolitionist outcry (1850s) had made a
dent in the northern mind:
– Many citizens had come to see the South as the
land of the unfree and the home of the hateful
institution
– “Free-soilers” were prepared to abolish slavery
outright, but some, including Lincoln, opposed
extending it to the western territories.
p35