Slavery in the United States

III

Distinctive Features of U.S. Slavery

By the mid-18th century, American slavery had acquired a number of distinctive features. More than 90 percent of American slaves lived in the South where conditions contrasted sharply with those to both the south and north. In Caribbean colonies, such as Jamaica and Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), blacks outnumbered whites by more than ten to one and slaves often lived on huge estates with hundreds of other slaves. In the Northern colonies, blacks were few and slaves were typically held in small groups of less than five. The South, by contrast, was neither overwhelmingly white nor overwhelmingly black: slaves formed a large minority of the population, and most slaves lived on small and medium-sized holdings containing between 5 and 50 slaves.

The second distinctive characteristic of slavery in the United States was in many ways the most important: in contrast to slaves in most other parts of the Americas, those in the United States experienced natural population growth. Elsewhere, in regions as diverse as Brazil, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and Cuba, slave mortality rates exceeded birth rates, and growth of the slave population depended on the importation of new slaves from Africa. As soon as that importation ended, the slave population began to decline. At first, deaths among slaves also exceeded births in the American colonies, but in the 18th century the birth rates rose in those colonies, mortality rates fell, and the slave population became self-reproducing. This transition, which occurred earlier in the upper than in the lower South, meant that even after slave imports were outlawed in 1808, the number of slaves continued to grow rapidly. During the next 50 years, the slave population of the United States more than tripled, from about 1.2 million to almost 4 million in 1860. The natural growth of the slave population meant that slavery could survive without new slave imports.

Natural population growth also hastened the transition from an African to an African American slave population. By the 1770s, only about 20 percent of slaves in the colonies were African-born, although the concentration of Africans remained higher in South Carolina and Georgia. After 1808 the proportion of African-born slaves became tiny. The emergence of a native-born slave population had numerous important consequences. For example, among African-born slaves, who were imported for their ability to perform physical labor, there were few children and men outnumbered women by about two to one. In contrast, American-born slaves began their slave careers as children and included approximately even numbers of males and females. Masters went through a similar process of Americanization. Those born in America usually felt at home on their holdings. Caribbean planters often sought to make their fortunes quickly and then retire to a life of leisure in England. American slaveholders, by contrast, were less often absentee owners. Instead, they typically took an active role in running their farms and plantations.

IV

Colonial Opposition to Slavery

Throughout most of the colonial period, opposition to slavery among white Americans was virtually nonexistent. Settlers in the 17th and early 18th centuries came from sharply stratified societies in which the wealthy savagely exploited members of the lower classes. Lacking a later generation’s belief in natural human equality, they saw little reason to question the enslavement of Africans. As they sought to mold a docile labor force, planters resorted to harsh, repressive measures that included liberal use of whipping and branding.

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Gradually, changes occurred in the way masters looked on both their slaves and themselves. Many second-generation masters, who unlike their parents had grown up with slaves, came to regard them as inferior members of their extended families. Such slaveowners looked upon themselves as kindly patriarchs who, like benevolent despots, ruled their people firmly but fairly and looked after their needs. Slavery remained harshly repressive: masters continued to rely heavily on the lash for discipline, and few if any slaves saw their owners as the kindly guardians that they proclaimed themselves to be. Still, many slaveowners accepted the idea that they should treat their slaves humanely.

Some slaveowners went further. The last third of the 18th century saw the first widespread questioning of slavery by white Americans. This questioning increased after the American Revolution (1775-1783), which sharply increased egalitarian thinking. The contradiction between the rhetoric of documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the reality of slavery was apparent. Many leaders of the new government, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, while slaveholders, were profoundly troubled by slavery. Although leery of rash actions, they undertook a series of cautious acts that they thought would lead to gradual abolition of slavery.

These acts included measures in all states north of Delaware to abolish slavery. A few states did away with slavery immediately. More typical were gradual emancipation acts, such as that passed by Pennsylvania in 1780, whereby all children born to slaves in the future would be freed when they became 28 years old. Two significant measures dated from 1787. First, the Northwest Ordinance barred slavery from the Northwest Territory, an area that included much of what is now the upper Midwest. Second, a compromise reached at the Constitutional Convention allowed the Congress of the United States to outlaw the importation of slaves in 1808. Meanwhile, a number of states passed acts making it easier for individuals to free their slaves. Hundreds of slaveowners, especially in the upper South, set some or all of their slaves free. In addition, tens of thousands of slaves acted on their own, taking advantage of wartime disruption to escape from their masters. As a result, the number of free blacks, which had been tiny before the Revolution, surged during the last quarter of the 18th century.

Nevertheless, the Revolutionary-era challenge to slavery was successful only in the North, where the investment in slaves was small. The antislavery movement never made much progress in Georgia and South Carolina, where planters imported tens of thousands of Africans to beat the cut-off of the slave trade in 1808. In the upper South, sentiment in favor of equality faded, along with revolutionary enthusiasm, in the 1790s and 1800s. The end of slave imports did not undermine slavery as it did elsewhere because the slave population in the United States was self-reproducing. The ultimate result of the first antislavery movement was to leave slavery a newly sectional institution, on the road to abolition throughout the North but largely intact in the South.

V

Growth of Slavery

Slavery expanded rapidly, along with the United States. Fueled by a surging world demand for cotton and the 1793 invention of the cotton gin, which efficiently separated the cotton seeds from the fiber, cotton cultivation spread rapidly westward. By the 1830s, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana formed the heart of a new cotton kingdom, producing more than half of the nation’s supply of the crop. The great bulk of this cotton was cultivated by slaves. Between 1790 and 1860, about one million slaves were moved west, almost twice the number of Africans shipped to the United States during the whole period of the transatlantic slave trade. Some slaves moved with their masters and others moved as part of a new domestic trade in which owners from the seaboard states sold slaves to planters in the cotton-growing states of the new Southwest.

As slavery grew, so too did its diversity. Slavery varied according to region, crops, and size of holdings. On farms and small plantations most slaves came in frequent contact with their owners, but on very large plantations, where slaveowners often employed overseers, slaves might rarely see their masters. Some owners left their holdings entirely in the care of subordinates, usually hired white overseers but sometimes slaves. A few slaveowners were even black themselves: a small percentage of free blacks owned slaves, in some cases as a ruse so that they could protect family members, but more often to profit from slave labor. Most slaves on large holdings worked in gangs, under the supervision of overseers and slave drivers. Some, however, especially in the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia, labored under the task system: they were assigned a certain amount of work to complete in a day, received less supervision, and were free to use their time as they wished once they had completed their daily assignments. In addition to performing field work, slaves served as house servants, nurses, midwives, carpenters, blacksmiths, drivers, preachers, gardeners, and handymen.

Despite such variations, there were a number of dominant trends. First, slavery was overwhelmingly rural: in 1860 only about 5 percent of all slaves lived in towns of 2500 people or more. Second, although some slaves lived on giant estates and others on small farms, the norm was in between: in 1860 about one-half of all slaves lived on holdings of 10 to 49 slaves. The remaining half of the slave population was evenly divided between larger and smaller establishments. Holdings tended to be bigger in the deep South than in the upper South. Third, most slaves lived with resident masters; owner absenteeism was most prevalent in the South Carolina and Georgia low country, but in the South as a whole it was less common than in the Caribbean. Fourth, most able-bodied adult slaves engaged in field work. Owners relied heavily on children, the elderly, and the infirm for “nonproductive” work such as house service; only the largest plantations could spare healthy adults for exclusive assignment to specialized occupations. The main business of Southern farms and plantations, and of the slaves who supported them, was to grow cotton, tobacco, rice, corn, wheat, hemp, and sugar.

A

Slave Treatment

Southern slaveholders took an active role in managing their property. Viewing themselves as the slaves’ guardians, they stressed the degree to which they cared for them. The character of such care varied, but in purely material terms such as food, clothing, housing, and medical attention, it was generally better in the pre-Civil War period than in the colonial period. Judging by measurable criteria such as slave height and life expectancy, material conditions also were better in the South than in the Caribbean or Brazil.

Although young children were often malnourished, most working slaves received a steady supply of pork and corn, which if lacking in nutritional balance (about which Americans of the era knew nothing) provided sufficient calories to fuel their labor. Slaves often supplemented their rations with produce that they raised on garden plots allotted to them. Clothing and housing were crude but functional: slaves typically received four coarse suits (pants and shirts for men, dresses for women, long shirts for children) and lived in small wooden cabins, one to a family. Wealthy slaveowners often sent for physicians to treat slaves who became ill; given the state of medical knowledge, however, such treatment—which could range from providing various concoctions to “bleeding” a patient—often did as much harm as good.

Masters intervened continually in the lives of their slaves, from directing their labor to approving or disapproving marriages. Some masters made elaborate written rules, and most engaged in constant meddling, directing, nagging, threatening, and punishing. Many took advantage of their position to exploit slave women sexually.

What slaves hated most about slavery was not the hard work to which they were subjected, but their lack of control over their lives, their lack of freedom. Masters may have prided themselves on the care they provided, but the slaves had a different idea of that care. They resented the constant interference in their lives and tried to achieve whatever autonomy they could. In the slave quarters, the collection of slave cabins that on large plantations resembled a miniature village, slaves developed their own way of life and struggled to increase their independence while their masters strove to limit it. The character and resolution of this struggle depended on a host of factors, from size of holdings and organization of production to residence and disposition of masters. Masters rarely were able, however, to shape the lives of their slaves as fully as they wanted.

B

Slave Life

Away from the view of owners and overseers, slaves lived their own lives. They made friends, fell in love, played and prayed, sang, told stories, and engaged in the necessary chores of day-to-day living, from cleaning house, cooking, and sewing to working on garden plots. Especially important as anchors of the slaves’ lives were their families and their religion.

Throughout the South, the family defined the actual living arrangements of slaves: most slaves lived together in nuclear families with a mother, father, and children. The security and stability of these families faced severe challenges: no state law recognized marriage among slaves, masters rather than parents had legal authority over slave children, and the possibility of forced separation, through sale, hung over every family. These separations were especially frequent in the slave-exporting states of the upper South. Still, despite their tenuous status, families served as the slaves’ most basic refuge, the center of private lives that owners could never fully control.

Religion served as a second refuge. In the colonial period, African slaves usually clung to their native religions, and many slaveowners were suspicious of others who sought to convert their slaves to Christianity, in part because they feared that converted slaves would have to be freed. During the decades following the American Revolution, however, Christianity was increasingly central to the slaves’ cultural life. Many slaves were converted during the religious revivals that swept the South in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Slaves typically belonged to the same denominations as white Southerners, the largest of which were the Baptists and Methodists. Some masters encouraged their slaves to come to the white church, where they usually sat in a special slave gallery and received advice about being obedient to their masters. In the quarters, however, there developed a parallel, so-called “invisible” church controlled by the slaves themselves, who listened to sermons delivered by their own preachers. Not all slaves had access to these preachers and not all accepted their message, but for many religion served as a great comfort in a hostile world.