According to demographic calculations by J. David Hacker of the University of Minnesota, approximately four out of five of all of the slaves who ever lived in the United States or the territory that became the United States (beginning in 1619 and including all colonies that were eventually acquired or conquered by the United States) were born in or imported to the United States in the 19th century. Slaves were the labor force of the South, but slave ownership (and the dispossession and expulsion of Native Americans from their lands) was also the foundation upon which American
white supremacy was constructed. Historian
Walter Johnson argues that "one of the many miraculous things a slave could do was make a household white...", meaning that the value of whiteness in America was in some ways measured by the ability to purchase and maintain black slaves. The enslaved labor force of the United States, while stereotypically drawn as field labor for the production of cash crops like sugar and cotton, performed nearly every type of skilled labor sought by the economy. An examination of 1200 runaway slave ads published in Tennessee found 25 blacksmiths, 18 carpenters, and 13 shoemakers, as well as barbers, boat builders, bricklayers, a "conjurer or fortune teller," cooks, coopers, cotton mill engineers, dressmakers (often called
mantuamakers), hack drivers, iron furnace engineers, milliners, millwrights, ministers, musicians (most commonly of the fiddle/violin), a racehorse trainer, ostlers, plasterers, painters, seamstresses, stonemasons, tanners, a "turner and tin-plate workman," wagoners, waiters, and weavers. Complex as it was, historians do know, however, that slavery in the United States was not a "deferred-compensation trade school opportunity."
Harriet Beecher Stowe summarized slavery in the United States in 1853:
Justifications in the South " of planters was beneficial or necessary (Detail,
Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1840)
American slavery as "a necessary evil" In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a "necessary evil". At that time, it was feared that emancipation of black slaves would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. On April 22, 1820,
Thomas Jefferson, one of the
Founding Fathers of the United States, wrote in a letter to
John Holmes, that with slavery, In his influential
Democracy in America (1835), the French writer and traveler
Alexis de Tocqueville expressed opposition to slavery while observing its effects on American society. He felt that a multiracial society without slavery was untenable, as he believed that prejudice against blacks increased as they were granted more rights (for example, in Northern states). He believed that white Southerners' attitudes, and the concentration of the black population in the South, were bringing the white and black populations to a state of equilibrium and were a danger to both races. Because of the racial differences between master and slave, he believed the latter could not be emancipated. In a letter to his wife dated December 27, 1856, in reaction to a message from President
Franklin Pierce,
Robert E. Lee wrote,
American slavery as "a positive good" ,
National Museum of American History) in New Orleans; donated to the
Kid Ory Historic House museum As the abolitionist movement's agitation increased and the area developed for plantations expanded, apologies for slavery became fainter in the South. Leaders then described slavery as a beneficial scheme of labor management. In a famous 1837
Senate speech,
John C. Calhoun declared that slavery was "instead of an evil, a good—a positive good". Calhoun supported his view with the following reasoning: in every civilized society one portion of the community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his master and mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this respect, he concluded, "will become more and more manifest, if left undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in wealth and numbers". at Barrone and
Gravier Street, and at 54, 58, 68, and 78 Barrone represented but a slim fraction of the trade in the city (
New Orleans Crescent, January 10, 1861) South Carolina army officer,
planter, and railroad executive
James Gadsden called slavery "a social blessing" and abolitionists "the greatest curse of the nation". Gadsden supported South Carolina's
secession in 1850 and led efforts to split California into two states,
one slave and one free. Southern writers
James Henry Hammond and
George Fitzhugh also began to portray slavery as a positive good. They presented several arguments to defend the practice. Like Calhoun, Hammond argued that slavery was needed to build the rest of society. In a speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858, Hammond developed his "Mudsill Theory", saying: "Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill." Hammond said that, in every class, one group must accomplish all the menial duties, because without them society's leaders could not progress. Without the South, "He [a slave] would become an insufferable burden to society" and "Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery." This view of the "Negro race" was backed by
pseudoscience. The leading researcher was
Samuel A. Cartwright, a Southerner and the inventor of the mental illnesses of
drapetomania (the desire of a slave to run away) and
dysaesthesia aethiopica ("rascality"), both cured, according to him, by whipping. The Medical Association of Louisiana set up a committee, which he chaired, to investigate "the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race". Their report, first delivered to the Medical Association in an address, was published in their journal in 1851, and then reprinted in part in the widely circulated ''
DeBow's Review''.
American slavery as a cornerstone of world economics Many American Southerners justified slavery as a fundamental part of the world's economic system. Central to this belief was the
King Cotton ideology—the idea that global industrial economies, particularly in Britain and France, heavily depended on the South's cotton exports, which were affordable only due to enslaved labor. Alabama Governor
John A. Winston said, "the suspension of involuntary servitude for a single year only, would cause convulsions in all the governments of the civilised world, the disastrous results of which, it would be beyond human ken to foresee." Southerners often pointed to the economic disruptions faced by Britain, France, and Denmark following emancipation as proof of slavery's importance. Some even believed these nations might reverse abolition due to market pressures. Many Southerners interpreted the British repeal of protectionist tariffs against slave-grown sugar in 1846, alongside Europe's broader turn toward free trade in the 1850s, as tacit recognition that slave-based commodities remained essential to the global economy. • Funded
illegal slave shipments from the Caribbean and Africa, such as the
Wanderer slave shipment to Georgia in 1858 • Wanted to reintroduce slavery in the Northern states, through federal action or
Constitutional amendment making slavery legal nationwide, thus overriding state anti-slavery laws. (See
Crittenden Compromise.) This was described as "well underway" by 1858. • Said openly that slavery should by no means be limited to black people, since in their view it was beneficial. Northern white workers, who were allegedly "
wage slaves" already, would allegedly have better lives if they were enslaved. None of these ideas got very far, but they alarmed Northerners and contributed to the country's growing polarization.
Abolitionism in the North and
William Lloyd Garrison (with British abolitionist
George Thompson),
William Wells Brown,
Frederick Douglass, 1851 meeting of the
Pennsylvania Abolition Society (including
Oliver Johnson,
Mary Grew,
Robert Purvis, and
Lucretia Mott),
John Brown, and
Harriet Tubman Beginning during the Revolution and in the first two decades of the postwar era, every state in the North abolished slavery. These were the first abolitionist laws in the
Atlantic World. However, the abolition of slavery did not necessarily mean that existing slaves became free. In some states they were forced to remain with their former owners as
indentured servants: free in name only, although they could not be sold and thus families could not be split, and their children were born free. The end of slavery did not come in New York until July 4, 1827, when it was celebrated (on July 5) with a big parade. However, in the
1830 census, the only state with no slaves was Vermont. In the
1840 census, there were still slaves in New Hampshire (1), Rhode Island (5), Connecticut (17), New York (4), Pennsylvania (64), Ohio (3), Indiana (3), Illinois (331), Iowa (16), and Wisconsin (11). There were none in these states in the
1850 census. Most Northern states passed legislation for gradual abolition, first freeing children born to slave mothers (and requiring them to serve lengthy indentures to their mother's owners, often into their 20s as young adults). In 1845, the
Supreme Court of New Jersey received lengthy arguments towards "the deliverance of four thousand persons from bondage". Pennsylvania's last slaves were freed in 1847, Connecticut's in 1848, and while neither New Hampshire nor New Jersey had any slaves in the
1850 Census, and New Jersey only one and New Hampshire none in the
1860 Census, slavery was never prohibited in either state until ratification of the
13th Amendment in 1865 (and New Jersey was one of the last states to ratify it). None of the Southern states abolished slavery before 1865, but it was not unusual for individual slaveholders in the South to free numerous slaves, often citing revolutionary ideals, in their wills.
Methodist,
Quaker, and
Baptist preachers traveled in the South, appealing to slaveholders to
manumit their slaves, and there were "manumission societies" in some Southern states. By 1810, the number and proportion of free blacks in the population of the United States had risen dramatically. Most free blacks lived in the North, but even in the Upper South, the proportion of free blacks went from less than 1% of all blacks to more than 10%, even as the total number of slaves was increasing through imports. was chief justice of the
Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, the highest court in Massachusetts. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts) African slaves arrived in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, and slavery was legally sanctioned by the Puritans in 1641. In 1700,
Samuel Sewall, Puritan abolitionist and associate justice of the
Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, wrote
The Selling of Joseph, within which he condemned slavery and the slave trade and refuted many of the era's typical justifications for slavery. The Puritan influence on slavery was still strong at the time of the
American Revolution and up until the Civil War. Of America's first seven presidents, the two who did not own slaves,
John Adams and his son
John Quincy Adams, came from Puritan New England. They were wealthy enough to own slaves, but they chose not to because they believed that it was morally wrong to do so. In 1765, colonial leader
Samuel Adams and his wife were given a slave girl as a gift. They immediately freed her. was
censured in the
U.S. House of Representatives in 1842 for introducing anti-slavery resolution deemed to be incendiary, and in violation of the House's
gag rule prohibiting discussion of slavery. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the abolitionists, such as
Theodore Parker,
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau and
Frederick Douglass, repeatedly used the Puritan heritage of the country to bolster their cause. The most radical anti-slavery newspaper,
The Liberator, invoked the Puritans and Puritan values over a thousand times. Parker, in urging New England Congressmen to support the abolition of slavery, wrote that "The son of the Puritan... is sent to Congress to stand up for Truth and Right..." Northerners predominated in the westward movement into the
Midwestern territory after the American Revolution; as the states were organized, they voted to prohibit slavery in their constitutions when they achieved statehood: Ohio in 1803, Indiana in 1816, and Illinois in 1818. What developed was a Northern block of free states united into one contiguous geographic area that generally shared an anti-slavery culture. The exceptions were the areas along the Ohio River settled by Southerners: the southern portions of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Residents of those areas generally shared in Southern culture and attitudes. In addition, these areas were devoted to agriculture longer than the industrializing northern parts of these states, and some farmers used slave labor. In Illinois, for example, while the trade in slaves was prohibited, it was legal to bring slaves from
Kentucky into Illinois and use them there, as long as the slaves left Illinois one day per year (they were "visiting"). The emancipation of slaves in the North led to the growth in the population of Northern free blacks, from several hundred in the 1770s to nearly 50,000 by 1810. '' (1852), an influential abolitionist novel Throughout the first half of the 19th century, abolitionism, a movement to end slavery, grew in strength; most abolitionist societies and supporters were in the North. They worked to raise awareness about the evils of slavery, and to build support for abolition. After 1830, abolitionist and newspaper publisher
William Lloyd Garrison promoted emancipation, characterizing slaveholding as a personal sin. He demanded that slaveowners repent and start the process of emancipation. His position increased defensiveness on the part of some Southerners, who noted the long history of slavery among many cultures. A few abolitionists, such as
John Brown, favored the use of armed force to foment uprisings among the slaves, as he attempted to do at
Harper's Ferry. Most abolitionists tried to raise public support to change laws and to challenge slave laws. Abolitionists were active on the lecture circuit in the North, and often featured escaped slaves in their presentations. Writer and orator
Frederick Douglass became an important abolitionist leader after escaping from slavery.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel ''
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was an international bestseller, and along with the non-fiction companion A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' aroused popular sentiment against slavery. It also provoked the publication of numerous
anti-Tom novels by Southerners in the years before the American Civil War. routes, as mapped by a historian of 1898 This struggle took place amid strong support for slavery among white Southerners, who profited greatly from the system of enslaved labor. But slavery was entwined with the national economy; for instance, the banking, shipping, insurance, and manufacturing industries of New York City all had strong economic interests in slavery, as did similar industries in other major port cities in the North. The Northern textile mills in New York and New England processed Southern cotton and manufactured clothes to outfit slaves. By 1822, half of New York City's exports were related to cotton. Slaveholders began to refer to slavery as the "peculiar institution" to differentiate it from other examples of
forced labor. They justified it as less cruel than the free labor of the North. '' (1846–1849) The principal organized bodies to advocate abolition and anti-slavery reforms in the north were the
Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the
New York Manumission Society. Before the 1830s the antislavery groups called for gradual emancipation. By the late 1820s, under the impulse of religious evangelicals such as
Beriah Green, the sense emerged that owning slaves was a sin and the owner had to immediately free himself from this grave sin by immediate emancipation.
Prohibiting the international trade ,
Windward Coast, and
Bonny, plus cotton shipping out for
Liverpool, and a delivery of
salampore cloth, which was traded for "prime negroes" in regions of Africa where
Islamic dietary laws made American
rum undesirable Under the Constitution, Congress could not prohibit the import slave trade that was allowed in South Carolina until 1808. However, the third Congress regulated against it in the
Slave Trade Act of 1794, which prohibited American shipbuilding and outfitting for the trade. Subsequent acts
in 1800 and 1803 sought to discourage the trade by banning American investment in the trade, and American employment on ships in the trade, as well as prohibiting importation into states that had abolished slavery, which all states except South Carolina had by 1807. The final
Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was adopted in 1807 and went into effect in 1808. However, illegal importation of African slaves (smuggling) was common. After Great Britain and the United States outlawed the international slave trade in 1807, British slave trade suppression activities began in 1808 through diplomatic efforts and the formation of the
Royal Navy's
West Africa Squadron in 1809. The United States denied the Royal Navy the right to stop and search U.S. ships suspected as slave ships, so not only were American ships unhindered by British patrols, but slavers from other countries would fly the American flag to try to avoid being stopped. Co-operation between the United States and Britain was not possible during the
War of 1812 or the period of poor relations in the following years. In 1820, the
United States Navy sent under the command of Captain
Edward Trenchard to patrol the slave coasts of West Africa.
Cyane seized four American slave ships in her first year on station. Trenchard developed a good level of co-operation with the Royal Navy. Four additional U.S. warships were sent to the African coast in 1820 and 1821. A total of 11 American slave ships were taken by the U.S. Navy over this period. Then American enforcement activity reduced. There was still no agreement between the United States and Britain on a mutual right to board suspected slave traders sailing under each other's flag. Attempts to reach such an agreement stalled in 1821 and 1824 in the
United States Senate. A U.S. Navy presence, however sporadic, did result in American slavers sailing under the Spanish flag, but still as an extensive trade. The
Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 set a guaranteed minimum level of patrol activity by the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy, and formalized the level of co-operation that had existed in 1820. Its effects, however, were minimal while opportunities for greater co-operation were not taken. The U.S. transatlantic slave trade was not effectively suppressed until 1861, during Lincoln's presidency, when a treaty with Britain was signed whose provisions included allowing the Royal Navy to board, search and arrest slavers operating under the American flag.
War of 1812 : Jackson, soon to be the "Hero of New Orleans", explains how much it should cost to take a shipment of slaves to Natchez for sale (
The Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, 1926) During the
War of 1812, British
Royal Navy commanders of the blockading fleet were instructed to offer freedom to defecting American slaves, as the Crown had during the Revolutionary War. Thousands of
escaped slaves went over to the Crown with their families. Men were recruited into the
Corps of Colonial Marines on occupied
Tangier Island, in the
Chesapeake Bay. Many freed American slaves were recruited directly into existing West Indian regiments, or newly created
British Army units. The British later resettled a few thousand freed slaves to Nova Scotia. Their descendants, together with descendants of the black people resettled there after the Revolution, have established the Black Loyalist Heritage Museum. Afterward, when some freed slaves had been settled at
Bermuda, slaveholders such as Major
Pierce Butler of
South Carolina tried to persuade them to return to the United States, to no avail. The Americans protested that Britain's failure to return all slaves violated the
Treaty of Ghent. After arbitration by the
Tsar of Russia, the British paid $1,204,960 in damages (about $ million in today's money) to Washington, which reimbursed the slaveowners.
Slave rebellions File:Nat Turner captured.jpg|thumb|
Discovery of Nat Turner [in 1831], an 1881
wood-engraving by According to
Herbert Aptheker, "there were few phases of ante-bellum Southern life and history that were not in some way influenced by the fear of, or the actual outbreak of, militant concerted slave action." Historians in the 20th century identified 250 to 311 slave uprisings in U.S. and colonial history. Those after 1776 include: •
Gabriel's conspiracy (1800) •
Igbo Landing slave escape and mass suicide (1803) •
Chatham Manor Rebellion (1805) •
1811 German Coast uprising (1811) •
George Boxley Rebellion (1815) •
Denmark Vesey's conspiracy (1822) •
Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831) •
Black Seminole Slave Rebellion (1835–1838) •
Amistad seizure (1839) •
1842 Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation •
Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion (1849) In 1831,
Nat Turner, a literate slave who claimed to have spiritual
visions, organized a
slave rebellion in
Southampton County, Virginia; it was sometimes called the Southampton Insurrection. Turner and his followers killed nearly sixty white inhabitants, mostly women and children. Many of the men in the area were attending a religious event in North Carolina. Eventually Turner was captured with 17 other rebels, who were subdued by the militia.
Post-revolution Southern manumissions ) Although Virginia, Maryland and
Delaware were slave states, the latter two already had a high proportion of free blacks by the outbreak of war. Following the Revolution, the three legislatures made
manumission easier, allowing it by deed or will. Quaker and Methodist ministers in particular urged slaveholders to free their slaves. The number and proportion of freed slaves in these states rose dramatically until 1810. More than half of the number of free blacks in the United States were concentrated in the Upper South. The proportion of free blacks among the black population in the Upper South rose from less than 1% in 1792 to more than 10% by 1810. In the United States as a whole, by 1810 the number of free blacks reached 186,446, or 13.5% of all black people. After that period, few slaves were freed, as the development of
cotton plantations featuring short-staple cotton in the Deep South drove up the internal demand for slaves in the domestic slave trade and high prices being paid for them. Alabama banned free black people from the state beginning in 1834; free people of color who crossed the state line were subject to enslavement. Free black people in Arkansas after 1843 had to buy a $500 good-behavior bond, and no unenslaved black person was legally allowed to move into the state.
Female slave owners a profitable criminal businessthe
Patty Cannon gang was at work in Northwest Fork Hundred, Delaware until 1829, when four bodies were found buried on property they had owned ("Kidnapping 250 Dollars Reward"
Constitutional Whig, April 27, 1827) Despite
coverture laws that gave the property of married women to their husbands, married women exercised their right to own and control human property without their husbands' interference or permission, and they were active participants in the slave trade. For example, in South Carolina 40% of bills of sale for slaves from the 1700s to the present included a female buyer or seller. Women also governed their slaves in a manner similar to men, engaging in the same levels of physical disciplining. Like men, they brought lawsuits against those who jeopardized their ownership to their slaves.
Black slave owners Despite the longstanding color line in the United States, some African Americans were slave owners themselves, some in cities and others as plantation owners in the country. Slave ownership signified both wealth and increased social status. The nature of
slavery in Cherokee society often mirrored that of white slave-owning society. The law barred intermarriage of Cherokees and enslaved African Americans, but Cherokee men had unions with enslaved women, resulting in mixed-race children. Cherokee who aided slaves were punished with one hundred lashes on the back. In Cherokee society, persons of African descent were barred from holding office even if they were also racially and culturally Cherokee. They were also barred from bearing arms and owning property. The Cherokee prohibited the teaching of African Americans to read and write. By contrast, the
Seminole welcomed into their nation African Americans who had
escaped slavery (
Black Seminoles). Historically, the Black Seminoles lived mostly in distinct bands near the Native American Seminole. Some were held as slaves of particular Seminole leaders. Seminole practice in Florida had acknowledged slavery, though not the chattel slavery model common elsewhere. It was, in fact, more like feudal dependency and taxation. The relationship between Seminole blacks and natives changed following their relocation in the 1830s to territory controlled by the
Creek who had a system of chattel slavery. Pro slavery pressure from Creek and pro-Creek Seminole and slave raiding led to many Black Seminoles escaping to Mexico.
High demand and smuggling confronting the slave ship Martha'' off
Ambriz on June 6, 1850 (
Sarony & Co. lithograph,
Andrew H. Foote's
Africa and the American Flag, 1854) The
United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, prevented
Congress from completely banning the
importation of slaves until 1808, although Congress regulated against the trade in the
Slave Trade Act of 1794, and in subsequent Acts
in 1800 and 1803. During and after the Revolution, the
states individually passed laws against importing slaves. By contrast, the states of Georgia and South Carolina reopened their trade due to demand by their upland planters, who were developing new cotton plantations: Georgia from 1800 until December 31, 1807, and South Carolina from 1804. In that period, Charleston traders imported about 75,000 slaves, more than were brought to South Carolina in the 75 years before the Revolution. Approximately 30,000 were imported to Georgia. By January 1, 1808, when Congress
banned further imports, South Carolina was the only state that still allowed importation of enslaved people. The domestic trade became extremely profitable as demand rose with the expansion of cultivation in the Deep South for cotton and sugar cane crops. Slavery in the United States became, more or less, self-sustaining by natural increase among the current slaves and their descendants. Maryland and Virginia viewed themselves as slave producers, seeing "producing slaves" as resembling animal husbandry. Workers, including many children, were relocated by force from the upper to the lower South. Despite the ban, slave imports continued through smugglers bringing in slaves past the U.S. Navy's
African Slave Trade Patrol to South Carolina, and overland from Texas and Florida, both under Spanish control. Congress increased the punishment associated with importing slaves, classifying it in 1820 as an act of piracy, with smugglers subject to harsh penalties, including death if caught. After that, "it is unlikely that more than 10,000 [slaves] were successfully landed in the United States." But, some smuggling of slaves into the United States continued until just before the start of the Civil War.
Colonization movement shows colonial settlements including
New Georgia,
Pennsylvania Colony,
Mississippi Colony,
Louisiana Colony, and
Maryland Colony In the early part of the 19th century, other organizations were founded to take action on the future of black Americans. Some advocated removing free black people from the United States to places where they would enjoy greater freedom; some endorsed
colonization in Africa, while others advocated
emigration, usually to Haiti. During the 1820s and 1830s, the
American Colonization Society (ACS) was the primary organization to implement the "return" of black Americans to Africa. The ACS was made up mostly of
Quakers and slaveholders, and they found uneasy common ground in support of what was incorrectly called "repatriation". By this time, however, most black Americans were native-born and did not want to emigrate, saying they were no more African than white Americans were British. Rather, they wanted full rights in the United States, where their families had lived and worked for generations. In 1822, the ACS and affiliated state societies established what would become the colony of
Liberia, in West Africa. The ACS assisted thousands of freedmen and free blacks (with legislated limits) to emigrate there from the United States. Many white people considered this preferable to
emancipation in the United States.
Henry Clay, one of the founders and a prominent slaveholder politician from Kentucky, said that blacks faced: Deportation would also be a way to prevent reprisals against former slaveholders and white people in general, as had occurred in the
1804 Haiti massacre, which had contributed to a consuming fear amongst whites of retributive black violence, a phobia dubbed Haitianism.
Domestic slave trade and forced migration based on a sketch made 1853 while visiting the United States with
William Thackeray The
U.S. Constitution barred the federal government from prohibiting the importation of slaves for twenty years. Various states passed bans on the international slave trade during that period; by 1808, the only state still allowing the importation of African slaves was South Carolina. After 1808, legal importation of slaves ceased, although there was smuggling via
Spanish Florida and the disputed Gulf Coast to the west. This route all but ended after Florida
became a U.S. territory in 1821 (but see
slave ships
Wanderer and
Clotilda). The replacement for the importation of slaves from abroad was increased domestic production. Virginia and Maryland had little new agricultural development, and their need for slaves was mostly for replacements for decedents. Normal reproduction more than supplied these: Virginia and Maryland had surpluses of slaves. Their tobacco farms were "worn out" and the climate was not suitable for cotton or sugar cane. The surplus was even greater because
slaves were encouraged to reproduce (though
they could not marry). The pro-slavery Virginian
Thomas Roderick Dew wrote in 1832 that Virginia was a "negro-raising state"; i.e. Virginia "produced" slaves. According to him, in 1832 Virginia exported "upwards of 6,000 slaves" per year, "a source of wealth to Virginia". A newspaper from 1836 gives the figure as 40,000, earning for Virginia an estimated $24,000,000 per year. "selling South" was greatly feared. A recently (2018) publicized example of the practice of "selling South" is the
1838 sale by
Jesuits of 272 slaves from Maryland, to plantations in Louisiana, to benefit
Georgetown University, which has been described as "ow[ing] its existence" to this transaction. The growing international demand for cotton led many plantation owners further west in search of suitable land. In addition, the invention of the
cotton gin in 1793 enabled profitable processing of short-staple cotton, which could readily be grown in the uplands. The invention revolutionized the cotton industry by increasing fifty-fold the quantity of cotton that could be processed in a day. At the end of the
War of 1812, fewer than 300,000 bales of cotton were produced nationally. By 1820, the amount of cotton produced had increased to 600,000 bales, and by 1850 it had reached 4,000,000. There was an explosive growth of cotton cultivation throughout the Deep South and greatly increased demand for slave labor to support it. As a result, manumissions decreased dramatically in the South. Most of the slaves sold from the Upper South were from
Maryland,
Virginia and the
Carolinas, where changes in agriculture decreased the need for their labor and the demand for slaves. Before 1810, primary destinations for the slaves who were sold were
Kentucky and
Tennessee, but, after 1810, the Deep South states of
Georgia,
Alabama,
Mississippi,
Louisiana and
Texas received the most slaves. This is where cotton became "king". Meanwhile, the Upper South states of Kentucky and Tennessee joined the slave-exporting states. By 1815, the domestic slave trade had become a major economic activity in the United States; it lasted until the 1860s. Between 1830 and 1840, nearly 250,000 slaves were taken across state lines. amounting to 8% of all American families. is a cloth that recounts a slave sale separating a mother and her daughter. The sack belonged to a nine-year-old girl Ashley and was a parting gift from her mother, Rose, after Ashley had been sold. Rose filled the sack with a dress, braid of her hair, pecans, and "my love always". (
Middleton Place Foundation, South Carolina) The historian
Ira Berlin called this forced migration of slaves the "Second Middle Passage" because it reproduced many of the same horrors as the
Middle Passage (the name given to the transportation of slaves from Africa to North America). These sales of slaves broke up many families and caused much hardship. Characterizing it as the "central event" in the life of a slave between the
American Revolution and the Civil War, Berlin wrote that, whether slaves were directly uprooted or lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people, both slave and free". Individuals lost their connection to families and clans. Added to the earlier colonists combining slaves from different tribes, many ethnic Africans lost their knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa. Most were descended from families that had been in the United States for many generations. The death rate for the slaves on their way to their new destination across the American South was less than that suffered by captives shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, but mortality nevertheless was higher than the normal death rate.
Slave traders transported two-thirds of the slaves who moved West. Only a minority moved with their families and existing master. Slave traders had little interest in purchasing or transporting intact slave families; in the early years, planters demanded only the young male slaves needed for heavy labor. Later, in the interest of creating a "self-reproducing labor force", planters purchased nearly equal numbers of men and women. Berlin wrote: The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the South outside the plantation itself, and probably the most advanced in its employment of modern transportation, finance, and publicity. The slave trade industry developed its own unique language, with terms such as "prime hands, bucks, breeding wenches, and '
fancy girls' coming into common use." The expansion of the interstate slave trade contributed to the "economic revival of once depressed seaboard states" as demand accelerated the value of slaves who were subject to sale. Some traders moved their "chattels" by sea, with
Norfolk to
New Orleans the most common route, but most slaves were forced to walk overland. Others were shipped downriver from such markets as
Louisville on the Ohio River and
Natchez on the Mississippi. Traders created regular migration routes served by a network of slave pens, yards and warehouses needed as temporary housing for the slaves. In addition, other vendors provided clothes, food and supplies for slaves. As the trek advanced, some slaves were sold and new ones purchased. Berlin concluded, "In all, the slave trade, with its hubs and regional centers, its spurs and circuits, reached into every cranny of southern society. Few southerners, black or white, were untouched." Once the trip ended, slaves faced a life on the frontier significantly different from most labor in the Upper South. Clearing trees and starting crops on virgin fields was harsh and backbreaking work. A combination of inadequate nutrition, bad water and exhaustion from both the journey and the work weakened the newly arrived slaves and produced casualties. New plantations were built at rivers' edges for ease of transportation and travel.
Mosquitoes and other environmental challenges spread disease, which killed many slaves. They had acquired only limited immunity to lowland diseases in their previous homes. The death rate was so high that, in the first few years of hewing a plantation out of the wilderness, some planters preferred when possible to use rented slaves rather than their own. The frontier's harsh conditions increased slave resistance and led owners and overseers to rely on violence for control. Many of the slaves were new to cotton fields and unaccustomed to the "sunrise-to-sunset gang labor" their new life required. Slaves were driven much harder than when they had been growing tobacco or wheat back East. Slaves had less time and opportunity to improve their quality of life by raising their own
livestock or tending vegetable gardens, for either their own consumption or trade, than they did in the East. in New Orleans (
Museum of African American History and Culture 2011.155.305) In
Louisiana, French colonists had established
sugar cane plantations and exported sugar as the chief commodity crop. After the
Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Americans entered the state and joined the sugar cultivation. Between 1810 and 1830, planters bought slaves from the North and the number of slaves increased from fewer than 10,000 to more than 42,000. Planters preferred young males, who represented two-thirds of the slave purchases. Dealing with sugar cane was even more physically demanding than growing cotton. The largely young, unmarried male slave force made the reliance on violence by the owners "especially savage". , a slave trading business in
Georgia, photographed by
George N. Barnard just before the 1864
burning of Atlanta New Orleans became nationally important as a slave market and port, as slaves were shipped from there upriver by steamboat to plantations on the Mississippi River; it also sold slaves who had been shipped downriver from markets such as Louisville. By 1840, the
New Orleans slave market was North America's largest. It became the wealthiest and the fourth-largest city in the nation, thanks chiefly to the slave trade and associated businesses. The trading season was from September to May, after the harvest. The notion that slave traders were social outcasts of low reputation, even in the South, was initially promulgated by defensive southerners and later by figures like historian
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. Historian
Frederic Bancroft, author of
Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931) found—contrary to Phillips's position—that many traders were esteemed members of their communities. Contemporary researcher
Steven Deyle argues that the "trader's position in society was not unproblematic and owners who dealt with the trader felt the need to satisfy themselves that they acted honorably";
Michael Tadman contends that "'trader as outcast' operated at the level of propaganda" whereas white slave owners almost universally professed a belief that slaves were not human like them, and thus dismissed the consequences of slave trading as beneath consideration. In the
1828 presidential election, candidate
Andrew Jackson was strongly criticized by opponents
as a slave trader who transacted in slaves in defiance of modern standards or morality.
Treatment , formerly enslaved on a cotton plantation along the
Atchafalaya River, photo taken at
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863; after the whipping, Peter's wounds were salted, a common practice; the overseer who whipped Peter was fired by slave owner
Capt. John Lyons (original
carte de visite by
McPherson & Oliver) The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, time, and place, but in general it was brutal, especially on plantations. Whippings and rape were routine. The power relationships of slavery corrupted many whites that had authority over slaves, with children showing their own cruelty. Masters and overseers resorted to physical punishments to impose their wills. Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer of the slave. Treatment was usually harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders, conditions permitting abuses.
William Wells Brown, who escaped to freedom, reported that on one plantation, slave men were required to pick eighty pounds of cotton per day, while women were required to pick seventy pounds per day; if any slave failed in his or her quota, they were subject to one lash of the whip for each pound that they were short. The whipping post stood next to the cotton scales. A New York man who attended a slave auction in the mid-19th century reported that at least three-quarters of the male slaves he saw at sale had scars on their backs from whipping. By contrast, small slave-owning families had closer relationships between the owners and slaves; this sometimes resulted in a more humane environment but was not a given. Historian
Lawrence M. Friedman wrote: "Ten Southern codes made it a crime to mistreat a slave.... Under the
Louisiana Civil Code of 1825 (art. 192), if a master was "convicted of cruel treatment", the judge could order the sale of the mistreated slave, presumably to a better master. Masters and overseers were seldom prosecuted under these laws. No slave could give testimony in the courts. , a branded slave from Louisiana—also exhibiting instruments of torture used to punish slaves (carte de visite by
Charles Paxson, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2019.521) According to Adalberto Aguirre's research, 1,161 slaves were executed in the United States between the 1790s and 1850s. Quick executions of innocent slaves as well as suspects typically followed any attempted slave rebellions, as white militias overreacted with widespread killings that expressed their fears of rebellions, or suspected rebellions. Although most slaves had lives that were very restricted in terms of their movements and agency, exceptions existed to virtually every generalization; for instance, there were also slaves who had considerable freedom in their daily lives: slaves allowed to rent out their labor and who might live independently of their master in cities, slaves who employed white workers, and slave doctors who treated upper-class white patients. After 1820, in response to the inability to import new slaves from Africa and in part to abolitionist criticism, some slaveholders improved the living conditions of their slaves, to encourage them to be productive and to try to prevent escapes. It was part of a paternalistic approach in the
antebellum era that was encouraged by ministers trying to use Christianity to improve the treatment of slaves. Slaveholders published articles in Southern agricultural journals to share best practices in treatment and management of slaves; they intended to show that their system was better than the living conditions of Northern industrial workers. Medical care for slaves was limited in terms of the medical knowledge available to anyone. It was generally provided by other slaves or by slaveholders' family members, although sometimes "plantation physicians", like
J. Marion Sims, were called by the owners to protect their investment by treating sick slaves. Many slaves possessed medical skills needed to tend to each other, and used folk remedies brought from Africa. They also developed new remedies based on American plants and herbs. An estimated 9% of
slaves were disabled due to a physical, sensory, psychological, neurological, or developmental condition. But slaves were often described as disabled if they could not work or bear a child, and often subjected to harsh treatment as a result. In some cases, enslaved persons were cruelly tortured to death as punishment while other slaves had to watch. According to Andrew Fede, an owner could be held criminally liable for killing a slave only if the slave he killed was "completely submissive and under the master's absolute control". For example, in 1791 the
North Carolina General Assembly defined the willful killing of a slave as criminal
murder, unless done in resisting or under moderate correction (that is, corporal punishment). on the plaza north of the
Exchange Building in
Charleston on March 10, 1853, of 96 people who had previously been enslaved near the
Combahee River (Eyre Crowe,
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba) While slaves' living conditions were poor by modern standards,
Robert Fogel argued that all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the 19th century were subject to hardship. Unlike free individuals, however, enslaved people were far more likely to be underfed, physically punished, sexually abused, or killed, with no recourse, legal or otherwise, against those who perpetrated these crimes against them.
Commodification of human tissue In a very grim fashion, the commodification of the human body was legal in the case of African slaves as they were not legally seen as fully human. The most popular means of commodifying slave tissues was through medical experimentation. Slaves were routinely used as medical specimens forced to take part in experimental surgeries, amputations, disease research, and developing medical techniques. Many slaves in these routine experiments were not given pain relief or analgesics, resulting in death by shock on the table. The bodies of such slaves were grouped with other medical cadavers, or sold with the bodies of other slaves sold, stolen, or grave robbed for medical experimentation. In many cases, slave cadavers were used in demonstrations and dissection tables, oftentimes resulting in their tissues being sold for profit. For the reason of slave punishment, decoration, or self-expression, the skin of slaves was in many instances allowed to be made into leather for furniture, accessories, and clothing, a common instance of which being that of wealthy clientele sending cadaver skin to tanners and shoemakers under the guise of animal leather. Slave hair could be shaved and used for stuffing in pillows and furniture. In some instances, the inner body tissue of slaves (fat, bones, etc.) could be made into soap, medicinal grease, trophies, and other commodities.
Sexual abuse, reproductive exploitation, and breeding farms As in any slave society,
slave women in the United States were at high risk of rape and sexual exploitation, due to their owners' rights over their bodies. Their children were repeatedly taken away from them and sold as chattel; usually they never saw each other again. Many slaves fought back against sexual attacks, and some died resisting. Others carried psychological and physical scars from the attacks. Sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern culture that treated black women as property or chattel. While publicly opposed to race mixing, in his
Notes on the State of Virginia published in 1785, Jefferson wrote: "The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life". Historians estimate that 58% of enslaved women in the U.S. aged 15–30 years were sexually assaulted by their slave owners and other white men. As a result of centuries of slavery and such relationships, DNA studies have shown that the vast majority of African Americans also have historic European ancestry, generally through paternal lines. The average Black American genome is roughly 20-25% European, and it is estimated that as much as one third of their Y chromosomes are of European origin. Portrayals of black men as hypersexual and savage, along with ideals of protecting white women, were predominant during this time and masked the experiences of sexual violence faced by black male slaves, especially by white women. Subject not only to rape and sexual exploitation, slaves faced sexual violence in many forms. A black man could be forced by his slaveowner to rape another slave or even a free black woman. Forced pairings with other slaves, including forced breeding, which neither slave might desire, were common. ; scholars of slavery have described the image of the "quadroon bride" and the Southern "fixation on interracial sex and violence" as a form of folk pornography (
Cincinnati Art Museum 1976.25) In the United States in the early 19th century, owners of female slaves could freely and legally
use them as sexual objects. This follows free use of female slaves on slaving vessels by the crews. The slaveholder has it in his power, to violate the chastity of his slaves. And not a few are beastly enough to exercise such power. Hence it happens that, in some families, it is difficult to distinguish the free children from the slaves. It is sometimes the case, that the largest part of the master's own children are born, not of his wife, but of the wives and daughters of his slaves, whom he has basely prostituted as well as enslaved. One commentator complained: "This vice, this bane of society, has already become so common, that it is scarcely esteemed a disgrace." , a 70-year-old physician, placed an unusually long and detailed
runaway slave ad in two Alabama newspapers in hopes of recovering a 20-year-old enslaved woman, whom he had purchased four years earlier, and her four-year-old daughter, who sometimes called herself Lolo "Fancy" was a code word that indicated that the girl or young woman was suitable or trained for sexual use. Special markets for the
fancy girl trade existed in New Orleans Historian Philip Shaw describes an occasion when
Abraham Lincoln and Allen Gentry witnessed such sales in New Orleans in 1828: In some cases, children were abused in this manner. Adolescent "fancy girls" were sometimes sold as "virgins"
Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., bought his wife when she was 13. The variations in skin color found in the United States make it obvious how often black women were impregnated by whites. For example, in the 1850 Census, 75.4% of "free negros" in Florida were described as
mulattos, of mixed race. Nevertheless, it is only very recently, with
DNA studies, that any sort of reliable number can be provided, and the research has only begun. Light-skinned girls, who contrasted with the darker field workers, were preferred. As it became popular on many plantations to breed slaves for strength, fertility, or extra labor, there grew many documented instances of "
breeding farms" in the United States. Slaves were forced to conceive and birth as many new slaves as possible. The largest farms were located in Virginia and Maryland. Because the industry of slave breeding came from a desire for larger than natural population growth of slaves, slaveowners often turned towards systematic practices for creating more slaves. Female slaves "were subjected to repeated rape or forced sex and became pregnant again and again", even by
incest. In horrific accounts of former slaves, some stated that hoods or bags were placed over their heads to prevent them from knowing who they were forced to have sex with. Journalist William Spivey wrote, "It could be someone they know, perhaps a niece, aunt, sister, or their own mother. The breeders only wanted a child that could be sold." As
Caroline Randall Williams was quoted in
The New York Times: "You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument." "I have rape-colored skin", she added. The sexual use of black slaves by either slave owners or by those who could purchase the temporary services of a slave took various forms. A slaveowner, or his teenage son, could go to the
slave quarters area of the plantation and do what he wanted, with minimal privacy if any. It was common for a "house" female (housekeeper, maid, cook, laundress, or
nanny) to be raped by one or more members of the household.
Houses of prostitution throughout the slave states were largely staffed by female slaves providing sexual services, to their owners' profit. There were a small number of free black females engaged in prostitution, or concubinage, especially in New Orleans.
Isaac Franklin and
John Armfield, co-founders of a successful slave trading firm and well-established community members, joked frequently in their letters about the black women and girls they were raping. It never occurred to them that there was anything wrong in what they were doing. An issue that came up frequently was the threat of sexual intercourse between black males and white females. Just as the black women were perceived as having "a trace of Africa, that supposedly incited passion and sexual wantonness", Another approach to the question was offered by
Quaker and Florida planter
Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr. He advocated, and personally practiced, deliberate racial mixing through marriage, as part of his proposed solution to the slavery issue:
racial integration, called "
amalgamation" at the time. In
an 1829 Treatise, he stated that mixed-race people were healthier and often more beautiful, that interracial sex was hygienic, and slavery made it convenient. Because of these views, tolerated in
Spanish Florida, he found it impossible to remain long in
Territorial Florida, and moved with his slaves and multiple wives to a plantation,
Mayorasgo de Koka, in
Haiti (now in the
Dominican Republic). There were many others who less flagrantly practiced interracial, common-law marriages with slaves (see
Partus sequitur ventrem).
Slave markets and slave prisons In New Orleans, most sales were made between September and May. Buyers visited the slave pen and inspected enslaved people prior to the sale. People were held until their means of transportation was arranged. They were transported in groups by boat, walked to their new owners, or a combination of the two. They were moved in groups in a coffle. This meant that people were chained together with iron rings around their necks which were fastened with wooden or iron bars. Men on horseback herded the groups, or coffles, to their destination. They used dogs, guns, and whips. Railroads brought a new, simpler means of travel that did not rely on the use of coffles. In some cases, slave traders, like Franklin & Armfield, had a network of slave depots that were located along their routes. Circa 1833, an Appalachian newspaper complained about the slave traders traveling through the region with coffles, and reported that private jails had been built by slave traders at Baltimore, Washington, Norfolk, and near Fredericksburg. Abolitionist
Theodore Dwight Weld wrote around 1840: Lumpkin's Jail, the largest in the state of Virginia, was a particularly inhumane place that resulted in people dying of starvation, illness, or beating. They were so cramped that they were sometimes on top of one another. There were no toilet facilities. Some jails may have been tidy and officious operations, but many or most were not. Henry Bibb described one jail where he was held as repugnant "on account of the filth and dirt of the most disagreeable kind...there were bedbugs, fleas, lice and mosquitoes in abundance to contend with. At night we had to lie down on the floor in this filth. Our food was very scanty, and of the most inferior quality. No gentleman's dog would eat what we were compelled to eat or starve." St. Louis slave trader Bernard M. Lynch offered jailing services to owners for 37½ cents per slave per day. A negro mart was usually a type of urban retail market, usually consisting of a dedicated showroom and/or a workyard, a jail, and storerooms or kitchens for food. Negro marts were urban "clearinghouses" that both acquired enslaved people from more rural districts and sold people for use as farm, skilled, or domestic labor. The term negro mart was most commonly used in Charleston, South Carolina, but can also be found in Memphis, Tennessee, and multiple locations in Georgia. In the 1850s, future Confederate military leader Nathan Bedford Forrest operated a heavily advertised negro mart on Adams Street in Memphis. In January 1860, the
New York Times reported that the Forrest & Jones negro mart in Memphis had collapsed and caught fire; two people died but the bills of sale for people, "amounting in the aggregate to US$400,000" were salvaged.
Slave codes 's hand as branded by the
U.S. Marshall of the Dist. of Florida for having helped 7 men to obtain 'Life Liberty, and Happiness.' SS Slave Saviour Northern Dist. SS Slave Stealer Southern Dist.'' To help regulate the relationship between slave and owner, including legal support for keeping the slave as property, states established
slave codes, most based on laws existing since the colonial era. The code for the District of Columbia defined a slave as "a human being, who is by law deprived of his or her liberty for life, and is the property of another". While each state had its own slave code, many concepts were shared throughout the slave states. According to the slave codes, some of which were passed in reaction to slave rebellions, teaching a slave to read or write was illegal. This prohibition was unique to American slavery, believed to reduce slaves forming aspirations that could lead to escape or rebellion. Informal education occurred when white children taught slave companions what they were learning; in other cases, adult slaves learned from free artisan workers, especially if located in cities, where there was more freedom of movement. In Alabama, slaves were not allowed to leave their master's premises without written consent or passes. This was a common requirement in other states as well, and locally run patrols (known to slaves as
pater rollers) often checked the passes of slaves who appeared to be away from their plantations. In Alabama slaves were prohibited from trading goods among themselves. In Virginia, a slave was not permitted to drink in public within one mile of his master or during public gatherings. Slaves were not permitted to carry firearms in any of the slave states. Slaves were generally prohibited by law from associating in groups, with the exception of worship services (a reason why the
Black Church is such a notable institution in black communities today). Following
Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, which raised white fears throughout the South, some states also prohibited or restricted religious gatherings of slaves, or required that they be officiated by white men. Planters feared that group meetings would facilitate communication among slaves that could lead to rebellion. Slaves held private, secret "brush meetings" in the woods. In Ohio, an emancipated slave was prohibited from returning to the state in which he or she had been enslaved. Other Northern states discouraged the settling of free blacks within their boundaries. Fearing the influence of free blacks, Virginia and other Southern states passed laws to require blacks who had been freed to leave the state within a year (or sometimes less time) unless granted a stay by an act of the legislature.
Religion 's 1863 oil painting painting
The Lord is My Shepherd (
Smithsonian American Art Museum 1979.5.13) Africans brought their religions with them from Africa, including Islam, Catholicism, and traditional religions. Prior to the American Revolution, masters and revivalists spread Christianity to slave communities, including Catholicism in
Spanish Florida and
California, and in French and Spanish
Louisiana, and Protestantism in English colonies, supported by the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In the
First Great Awakening of the mid-18th century,
Baptists and
Methodists from New England preached a message against slavery, encouraged masters to free their slaves, converted both slaves and free blacks, and gave them active roles in new congregations. The first independent black congregations were started in the South before the Revolution, in South Carolina and Georgia. Believing that, "slavery was contrary to the ethics of Jesus", Christian congregations and church clergy, especially in the North, played a role in the
Underground Railroad, especially
Wesleyan Methodists and
Quakers. Over the decades and with the growth of slavery throughout the South, some Baptist and Methodist ministers gradually changed their messages to accommodate the institution. After 1830,
white Southerners argued for the compatibility of Christianity and slavery, with a multitude of both
Old and
New Testament citations. They promoted Christianity as encouraging better treatment of slaves and argued for a paternalistic approach. In the 1840s and 1850s, the issue of accepting slavery split the nation's largest religious denominations (the
Methodist,
Baptist and
Presbyterian churches) into separate Northern and Southern organizations (see
Methodist Episcopal Church, South,
Southern Baptist Convention, and
Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America). Schisms occurred, such as that between the
Wesleyan Methodist Church and the
Methodist Episcopal Church. Southern slaves generally attended their masters' white churches, where they often outnumbered the white congregants. They were usually permitted to sit only in the back or in the balcony. They listened to white preachers, who emphasized the obligation of slaves to keep in their place, and acknowledged the slave's identity as both person and property.
Mandatory illiteracy In a feature unique to American slavery, legislatures across the South enacted new laws to curtail the already limited rights of black people. For example, Virginia prohibited blacks, free or slave, from practicing preaching, prohibited them from owning firearms, and forbade anyone to teach slaves or free blacks how to read. [E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes. Slave owners saw
literacy as a threat to the institution of slavery and their financial investment in it; as a North Carolina statute passed in 1830-1831 stated, "Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion." Literacy enabled the enslaved to read the writings of
abolitionists, which discussed the abolition of slavery and described the
slave revolution in Haiti of 1791–1804 and the
end of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. It also allowed slaves to learn that thousands of enslaved individuals had escaped, often with the assistance of the
Underground Railroad. Literacy also was believed to make the enslaved unhappy at best, insolent and sullen at worst. As put by prominent Washington lawyer
Elias B. Caldwell in 1822: Unlike in the South, slave owners in Utah were required to send their slaves to school. Black slaves did not have to spend as much time in school as Indian slaves.
Freedom suits and Dred Scott from
Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, 1849 With the development of slave and free states after the American Revolution, and far-flung commercial and military activities, new situations arose in which slaves might be taken by masters into free states. Most free states not only prohibited slavery, but ruled that slaves brought and kept there illegally could be freed. Such cases were sometimes known as transit cases.
Dred Scott and his wife Harriet Scott each
sued for freedom in
St. Louis after the death of their master, based on their having been held in a free territory (the northern part of the
Louisiana Purchase from which slavery was excluded under the terms of the
Missouri Compromise). (Later the two cases were combined under Dred Scott's name.) Scott filed suit for freedom in 1846 and went through two state trials, the first denying and the second granting freedom to the couple (and, by extension, their two daughters, who had also been held illegally in free territories). For 28 years, Missouri state precedent had generally respected laws of neighboring free states and territories, ruling for freedom in such transit cases where slaves had been held illegally in free territory. But in the Dred Scott case, the
Missouri Supreme Court ruled against the slaves. After Scott and his team appealed the case to the
U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice
Roger B. Taney, in a sweeping decision, denied Scott his freedom. The 1857
decision, decided 7–2, held that a slave did not become free when taken into a free state; Congress could not bar slavery from a territory; and people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants, could never be citizens and thus had no status to bring suit in a U.S. court. A state could not bar slaveowners from bringing slaves into that state. Many Republicans, including
Abraham Lincoln, considered the decision unjust and evidence that the
Slave Power had seized control of the Supreme Court. Anti-slavery groups were enraged and slave owners encouraged, escalating the tensions that led to civil war.
1850 to the firing on Fort Sumter '', oil on paperboard, by Eastman Johnson (
Brooklyn Museum 40.59a-b) In 1850, Congress passed the
Fugitive Slave Act, as part of the
Compromise of 1850, which required law enforcement and citizens of free states to cooperate in the capture and return of slaves. This met with considerable overt and covert resistance in free states and cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Refugees from slavery continued to flee the South across the
Ohio River and other parts of the
Mason–Dixon line dividing North from South, to the North and
Canada via the
Underground Railroad. Some white Northerners helped hide former slaves from their former owners or helped them reach freedom in Canada. As part of the
Compromise of 1850, Congress abolished the slave trade (though not the ownership of slaves) in the
District of Columbia; fearing this would happen,
Alexandria, regional slave trading center and port, successfully sought
its removal from the District of Columbia and devolution to Virginia. After 1854,
Republicans argued that the "
Slave Power", especially the pro-slavery
Democratic Party in the South, controlled two of the three branches of the Federal government. The abolitionists, realizing that the total elimination of slavery was unrealistic as an immediate goal, worked to prevent the expansion of slavery into the western territories that eventually would become new states. The
Missouri Compromise, the
Compromise of 1850, and the
Bleeding Kansas period dealt with whether new states would be slave or free, or how that was to be decided. Both sides were anxious about effects of these decisions on the balance of power in the
Senate. After the passage of the
Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, border fighting broke out in the
Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a
slave or
free state was
left to the inhabitants. Migrants from both free and slave states moved into the territory to prepare for the vote on slavery. Abolitionist
John Brown, the most famous of the anti-slavery immigrants, was active in the fighting in "Bleeding Kansas", but so too were many white Southerners (many from adjacent Missouri) who opposed abolition. Abraham Lincoln's and the Republicans' political platform in 1860 was to stop slavery's expansion. Historian
James M. McPherson says that in his famous "
House Divided" speech in 1858, Lincoln said
American republicanism can be purified by restricting the further expansion of slavery as the first step to putting it on the road to 'ultimate extinction.' Southerners took Lincoln at his word. When he won the presidency, they left the Union to escape the 'ultimate extinction' of slavery." The divisions became fully exposed with the
1860 presidential election. The electorate split four ways. The
Southern Democrats endorsed slavery, while the
Republican Party denounced it. The
Northern Democrats said democracy required the people to decide on slavery locally, state by state and territory by territory. The
Constitutional Union Party said the survival of the Union was at stake and everything else should be compromised. Lincoln, the Republican, won with a plurality of popular votes and a majority of
electoral votes. Lincoln, however, did not appear on the ballots of ten southern slave states. Many slave owners in the South feared that the real intent of the Republicans was the abolition of slavery in states where it already existed, and that the sudden emancipation of four million slaves would be disastrous for the slave owners and for the economy that drew its greatest profits from the labor of people who were not paid. The slave owners feared that ending the balance could lead to the domination of the
federal government by the northern free states. This led seven southern states to
secede from the Union. When the
Confederate Army attacked a U.S. Army installation at Fort Sumter, the
American Civil War began and four additional slave states seceded. Northern leaders had viewed the slavery interests as a threat politically, but with secession, they viewed the prospect of a new Southern nation, the
Confederate States of America, with control over the
Mississippi River and parts of the
West, as politically unacceptable. Most of all, they could not accept this repudiation of
American nationalism. ==Civil War and emancipation==