Slavery OverviewThe Slave TradeDevelopment and Expansion of SlaverySlave Families, Communities, and CultureHistorians and Slavery
Overview No field of United States history produced a larger body of scholarship in the decades after World War II, or underwent more substantial revision, than did slavery. We now understand that the Africans who came to the North American mainland formed only a small part of the stream of Atlantic slavery. Indeed, only in North America did the unfree population reproduce itself in substantial numbers. Further, contemporary historians now study North American slavery as part of a larger Atlantic history linking Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and recognize differences related to where slaves originated, the crops that they produced and the scale of plantations on which they labored, and the time period involved. The slave experience of those who arrived in North America early in the period of European colonization differed from those who toiled at the peak of the plantation system in the era of “King Cotton,” 1830–1860. On the eve of the Civil War, slavery remained a dynamic and expanding system, not an antiquated labor system on its way to extinction.

Recent scholarship also demonstrates how slaves maintained their humanity under the most trying circumstances. Historians have done much to uncover the extent to which African cultures survived in the Americas; how slave societies grew more hybrid as Africans adapted to new circumstances and as their offspring became African Americans; how slaves struggled to maintain families in the face of long‐distance migration and slave sales; how religion, Muslim as well as Christian, buttressed slaves' humanity; and how slaves strained to create for themselves a measure of space and liberty under the most oppressive conditions.

Melvyn Dubofsky

Bibliography

Frederic Bancroft , Slave‐Trading in the Old South, 1931; reprint 1996.
James A. Rawley , The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, 1981.
Michael Tadman , Speculators and Slaves, 1989.

Stanley L. Engerman

The Colonial and Revolutionary Eras.

The tobacco‐based plantation system that evolved in the area surrounding Chesapeake Bay proved to be the seedbed of slavery in British North America. As early as 1676, Bacon's Rebellion had demonstrated the settlers' passion for fresh lands on which to grow tobacco. As they pressed westward, white Virginians established satellite “quarters” where newly imported African slaves cleared the land and planted tobacco. Plantation routines, particularly those governing labor, evolved by trial and error. If smallholders often worked side‐by‐side with their slaves, larger planters embraced a more intense—and more exploitive—system characterized by long hours in the fields under the direction of overseers. Eventually called gang labor, this routine furnished little to the laborers other than food, clothing, and shelter.

Emulating the sugar plantations of the West Indies, the English built a plantation colony in South Carolina during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. When the colonists realized that the swampy soil favored rice cultivation, they developed a plantation system that, while different from the Chesapeake Bay pattern, nonetheless displayed important similarities. Recognizing their own susceptibility to malaria and the Africans' apparent immunity, the South Carolinians imported thousands of African slaves annually over the eighteenth century. After 1750, when the new colony of Georgia authorized slavery, Carolina planters pushed rice cultivation southward. They also revolutionized production, using slave labor to reshape the landscape, harnessing the tidal flow of rivers to flood the rice fields. The task system of labor that evolved in this setting rested on the individual laborer's responsibility for performing a fixed amount of work per day. Overseers assigned tasks to individual slaves and inspected the completed work at day's end. Obliged largely to support themselves, rice‐plantation slaves also controlled whatever surplus they produced from their allotment gardens.

The new plantation systems of Virginia and South Carolina increased social stratification among Europeans and gave rise to a division of labor among the slaves. Masters increasingly brought slaves into their households as cooks, butlers, maidservants, and carriage drivers. Other slaves, mostly men, began practicing trades. The balance between field and house labor on any particular slaveholding plantation depended on the personal circumstances of specific masters and the economic and political currents prevalent in different places at different times.

The farms and plantations of the Chesapeake region profoundly affected the evolution of slave culture in North America. The process whereby Africans became African Americans occurred unevenly, as slaves wielded traditional beliefs and customs against the cultural assault unleashed by their masters. By the mid–eighteenth century, however, slave culture in the Chesapeake Bay represented a blending of West African, European, and Native American influences. Even before large‐scale conversion to Christianity, slaves imbibed the political culture of the English colonial system. They petitioned and sued for their freedom, employing the language of personal rights and liberties that was gaining public currency. In the Carolina lowcountry, a combination of geographic isolation and the high proportion of Africans in the population accounted for a pronounced African influence on language, folklore, burial customs, medical practices, and crafts that in some respects persisted into the late twentieth century.

The Revolutionary War shook but did not topple slavery. The Virginia planters who played a major role in crafting the rationale for independence took care that the demand for freedom not reach the slaves. They took equal pains to assure that the new nation's fundamental law favored the property interest of slaveholders over the human rights of slaves. As northern slaveholders embraced gradual emancipation and some of their southern counterparts embraced the African colonization movement, most southern slaveholders clung ever more firmly to slavery.

Amidst this renewed commitment to human bondage, planters in the Chesapeake Bay region diversified their agriculture by growing wheat and other grains along with tobacco. As a result of declining soil fertility, a slave population growing rapidly through natural increase, and changes in international markets, planters confronted a surplus of slaves. Thus they allied with opponents of the trans‐atlantic slave trade to ban the importation of enslaved Africans after 1807. As the plantation system expanded westward with the new nation, the lower South provided a ready market for the “surplus” slaves of the upper South.

The Slave System Spreads Westward.

The South Atlantic states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia illustrate the post‐revolutionary expansion of slavery westward. Opposed to abolishing the slave trade, much less slavery, settlers streamed into the upcountry even before Eli Whitney's cotton gin made the large‐scale cultivation of short‐staple cotton profitable. They crossed the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, knowing that, although the Northwest Ordinance (1783) prohibited the formation of new slave states north of the Ohio River, no such prohibition applied south of the Ohio. Expanding cotton manufacturing in England (and soon in New England) created an apparently insatiable demand for raw cotton that sparked the explosive growth of plantation slavery throughout the South.

The expansion of slavery continued for the four‐score and seven years between the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas entered the Union as slave states between 1803 and 1845. Even before qualifying for statehood, these areas had witnessed the rapid spread of slavery and the equally rapid development of plantation clusters. The appropriation of Native American lands, particularly during Andrew Jackson's presidency, further facilitated this expansion. By 1850, the Black Belt stretched from the Carolinas to eastern Texas.

Gang labor under overseers quickly became the defining feature of the cotton‐plantation system. To outsiders, plantation life often appeared unusually monotonous, with fields, buildings, slave quarters, and even the crossroads towns displaying little distinctiveness. Work routines likewise seemed to lack variety: Daily toil began before sunrise and ended at sundown or later. Cultural aspects of the system also became routinized by the 1830s. Masters acquiesced in the religious instruction of their slaves, on the understanding that slavery was a system of labor ordained by God and that planters served as God's custodians for the putatively inferior descendants of Africa. Masters permitted slaves to marry in ceremonies that stopped short of sanction by church or state, and they generally refrained from selling small children apart from their mothers.

Considerable diversity, however, belied the appearance of uniformity. Seasonal rhythms varied the kind and the pace of work, as did the vagaries of geography and weather patterns. Even on large plantations, routines differed by the size of the slave force, the relationship between overseers and slaves, and—most importantly—the personality and beliefs of the master. If few masters renounced the whip, each wielded it with different frequency and intensity. Some offered their slaves such prerogatives as gardening and marketing. On smaller farms, the circumstances in which slaves lived and worked varied widely. Cities and towns offered masters and slaves additional possibilities for experimentation, depending on the size of the city, its racial and ethnic demography, the nature of its economy, and the local political climate.

A critical element in slavery's westward spread was the growth of a regional market in slaves. Trading houses emerged in areas where slaves were in abundant supply (such as Richmond) and where they were in demand (such as New Orleans). Between 1800 and 1861, perhaps as many as one million slaves were relocated from the Upper South to the Lower South and from the southeastern to the southwestern slave states. Like other forms of property, slaves were sold to speculators, deeded to heirs, given as wedding presents, and wagered in games of chance. The scant restraints on such exchanges intensified the slaves' most dreaded fate—the breakup of families through sale to strangers—a process intrinsic to the machinery of expansion.

As early as the 1830s, the lands settled in the years after the Revolution had begun to deteriorate under relentless cotton cultivation. In upcountry Georgia, for instance, travelers observed deep gullies where the topsoil had washed from the fields. The Panic of 1837, largely a product of heavy speculation in western lands, temporarily limited slavery expansion but in the long run fostered it. The ensuing contraction depressed cotton prices until after the Mexican War, but amidst the stagnation, cotton planters studied the prescriptions for agricultural reform that such Upper South figures as Edmund Ruffin of Virginia had long advocated: deep plowing; fertilizers; improved methods, implements, seeds, and work animals; and, most important of all, diversification. They organized agricultural societies to pursue these objectives, circulated tracts on improved farming, and subscribed to reform‐minded agricultural journals. If the rising price of cotton by the late 1840s produced some backsliding, the reform cause—and its cardinal tenet of self‐sufficiency—gained a new lease on life as the sectional crisis deepened.

The Expansive 1850s.

With the return of prosperity in the 1850s, a number of significant changes helped spread cotton cultivation—and slavery—into new areas. Prosperity, for instance, enabled planters to reduce the wild canebrakes of the Yazoo‐Mississippi Delta to the plow. Likewise, railroad promoters, perfecting the networks they had been envisioning since the 1820s, convinced cotton planters that railroads provided the key to the future of marketing their crops. The startling growth in rail mileage across the South generated profound social changes. Railroads sped the movement of goods, people, and ideas, but at a price. For many planters, railroads represented the distilled essence of the market and transportation revolutions that threatened the stability of the region.

The 1850s also witnessed the expansion of cotton cultivation into yeoman‐farming areas outside the Black Belt. Not surprisingly, the railroad played a part in this development. Traditionally, yeoman farmers had viewed market production as a supplement to subsistence‐oriented production. Railroads introduced an alluring range of consumer goods to which cotton growing promised access. Although the full effects of the yeoman farmers' switch from subsistence to market production did not materialize until after the Civil War, the numbers of new cotton growers, fresh cotton acres, and additional bales of cotton profoundly affected the institution of slavery on the eve of the Civil War. Cotton mania even gave rise to a short‐lived but intense campaign to reopen the transatlantic slave trade. Although the proposal failed, it alerted the North to the growing demand for slaves amid the rising tide of cotton prosperity.

Through the secession crisis and the events leading up to the Civil War, many white southerners became convinced that leaving the Union would not only guarantee their independence, but also improve the prospects for expanding slavery. They looked approvingly on the fact that between 1790 and 1860 the slave population had grown from approximately .7 million to nearly 4 million. On the eve of the Civil War, the two most populous slave states, Virginia and Georgia, alone had more slaves than had been in the entire United States in 1790. Eyeing Central America and the Caribbean (especially Cuba), planters believed that the future of slave expansion looked bright. Beyond generating wealth, they believed, they would also demonstrate to the world slavery's ability to harmonize capital and labor and thereby avoid the class conflicts that threatened to plunge urban, industrial societies into chaos. Not until invading northern armies moved south and by 1863 undertook an all‐out war against slavery did planters realize the unreality of that dream.
See also African American Religion; Agriculture: Colonial Era; Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Antebellum Era; Antislavery; Brown, John; Business Cycle; Calhoun, John C.; Colonial Era; Compromise of 1850; Cotton Industry; Depressions, Economic; Early Republic, Era of the; Expansionism; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Fugitive Slave Act; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Industrialization; Nat Turner's Uprising; Racism; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Scott v. Sandford; Slave Uprisings and Resistance; Textile Industry; Tobacco Industry.

Bibliography

Kenneth M. Stampp , The Peculiar Institution, 1956.
Eugene D. Genovese , Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1974.
Lawrence W. Levine , Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 1977.
Albert J. Raboteau , Slave Religion, 1978.
James Oakes , The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders, 1982.
Sterling Stuckey , Slave Culture, 1987.
Michael Tadman , Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, 1989.
Ira Berlin , Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, 1998.
Philip D. Morgan , Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth‐Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, 1998.

Joseph P. Reidy

Bibliography

John W. Blassingame , The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, 1972.
Herbert G. Gutman , The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, 1976.
Sterling Stuckey , Slave Culture, 1987.
Larry E. Hudson Jr. , To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina, 1997.
Michael A. Gomez , Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, 1998.
Ira Berlin , Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, 1998.

Peter H. Wood

Bibliography

David Brion Davis , The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 1996.

Sterling Stuckey

Edmund Ruffin

Edmund Ruffin (1794-1865), American editor and publisher, was a prominent scientific agriculturist as well as his period's most renowned advocate of establishing an independent Southern nation.

Edmund Ruffin was born in Prince George County, Va. Educated at home until he was 16, he attended the College of William and Mary for a year before he was dismissed. He saw brief military service in the War of 1812 and then began a life as a Southern planter. Agriculture in Virginia was in a depressed state, largely because of the dominant farming practices of the time. Ruffin developed methods of restoring the fertility of soils and described them in "An Essay on Calcareous Manures." This discovery and others, which Ruffin announced in his publication, the Farmer's Register, were adopted by large numbers of Virginia planters and led to an agricultural revival. Thereafter he contributed systematically to agricultural science— popularizing, distributing, writing, speaking, and informing Southern farmers of theoretical as well as practical, progressive agricultural methods.

In 1841 Ruffin was appointed a member of the Board of Agriculture of Virginia and became its secretary, and a year later he became agriculture surveyor of South Carolina. His detailed and clearly written Report of the Commencement and Progress of the Agricultural Survey of South Carolina became a landmark in the agricultural history of the state. On his estate, Malbourne, in Hanover County, Va., he applied his scientific farming ideas so successfully that the plantation became a showplace where record harvests were almost commonplace.

Ruffin is most widely known as a radical spokesman for Southern nationalism. Early in his career he became convinced that blacks were inferior and that a slave system was necessary and generally superior. He was the first outspoken advocate of Southern secession, viewing the competition of the North and South for advantage in the Union as one which would inevitably end in Southern defeat. The South as an independent nation would enjoy great advantages: direct trade with Europe, the end of the hidden subsidy by the South of Northern industries in the form of tariffs on imports, and a general strengthening of the slave society.

Ruffin announced his views in assorted publications which he sometimes printed and distributed at his own expense. He advocated secession at the Democratic convention in Charleston in 1860; welcomed the election of Abraham Lincoln as a portent of the impending separation of the South from the Union; fired the first shot on Ft. Sumter to initiate the war; and fought in the Battle of Bull Run. He committed suicide when Confederate defeat became a fact.

Further Reading

The best biography of Ruffin is Avery O. Craven, Edmund Ruffin, Southerner: A Study in Secession (1932). His agricultural work is recounted in Albert Lowther Demaree, The American Agricultural Press, 1819-1860 (1941).

Additional Sources

Allmendinger, David F., Ruffin: family and reform in the Old South, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Craven, Avery Odelle, Edmund Ruffin, southerner: a study in secession, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Mathew, William M., Edmund Ruffin and the crisis of slavery in the Old South: the failure of agricultural reform, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.

Mitchell, Betty L., Edmund Ruffin, a biography, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Ruffin, Edmund, Incidents of my life: Edmund Ruffin's autobiographical essays, Charlottesville: Published for the Virginia Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1990. □