Slavery

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SLAVERY

Understanding the origins, justification, and economy of slavery is crucial to understanding American society, the coming of the Civil War, and the effect of that war on American culture and identity. Chattel slavery has existed throughout world history, and U.S. slavery grew out of older European and African forms of enslavement. Yet slavery in the United States was distinctive for two important reasons. First, there have been relatively few true slave societies (as opposed to societies with slaves) in world history: ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States. Second, among these only the last three were based on race. Thus the slave system in place in the United States from about the mid-seventeenth century until the war's end was one of only three societies in world history to be a race-based slave society.

how slavery was justified

Slavery began in what would become the United States with the importation of twenty enslaved Africans into Virginia in 1619. Given the universality of slavery, its legitimacy was rarely questioned or explained. By the 1660s, English settlers clearly believed that enslavement was a normal, if unfortunate, position in society for which Africans and their descendants were perfectly and naturally suited. However, racism—far from being the original justification for American slavery—emerged over time. In the early seventeenth century, English colonists used a longstanding rationale for enslavement: Africans were not Christian. Because enslaved Africans sometimes converted to Christianity in order to be freed, this definition created a good deal of fluidity in early Virginia. Some Africans were enslaved, but others were not. Some slaves were freed for exemplary service, whereas others were enslaved for life. Some even enjoyed social mobility, becoming not only free but landowners and slaveholders.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Virginia's lawmakers passed laws that shifted the reason for enslavement from heathenism to Africanness, and they made enslavement lifelong. These laws connecting enslavement with place of origin provided the legal foundation for ideas about race that persist today by associating a degraded status (enslavement) with descent. By the end of the seventeenth century the linkage of Africanness or blackness with deserved enslavement was solid. Racism gained more weight over the eighteenth century as the growing trend toward rationalism sought to catalogue the world and its people.

The spread of Enlightenment thought during the eighteenth century changed this view of slavery. The Enlightenment's insistence on human rights and equality inspired an age of revolution in the late eighteenth century; the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution were all inspired in part by these ideals. In the 1740s, a spiritual movement swept the American colonies. The Great Awakening preached the importance of a direct experience of God's love, the value of expressing spiritual rapture, and the equal worth of all souls before God. In addition, the slow rise of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the North caused some to question slavery's devaluation of competition, its degradation of work, and the absence of wages as incentive.

For all these reasons, a small minority of Americans began to question the validity of slavery; and by the late eighteenth century, a group of Philadelphians had formed the world's first antislavery society. Upon its heels followed organizations in New York, Boston, Baltimore and other cities throughout the North. Among this first generation of abolitionists it was commonplace for elite white men to form organizations that excluded white women and all black persons. Women's and black organizations were formed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and by about 1830, these groups came together in a second-generation abolitionist movement. The first generation had fought (successfully) for an end to the African slave trade, which ceased in 1808, and for the gradual abolition of slavery in the North. The second generation distinguished itself by working interracially in societies that included both women and men, and demanding immediate abolition; the most radical also promoted rights for black Americans.

Though abolitionists remained few in number, they were a vocal group that made it difficult for slaveholders (and to a certain extent, non-slaveholders) to unthinkingly accept the legitimacy of slavery. Increasingly, slave-holders had to explain what before had scarcely been questioned. Slowly the idea that slavery was a natural but unfortunate status died out, and the idea of paternalism took its place.

Paternalism idealized slavery as a family-like institution, which had a protective (if demanding) father-figure at the head of the household and many dependents (a wife, children, and slaves) below him. In exchange for care, protection and support, paternalists expected obedience and deference; some even hoped for love. They preferred to think of themselves as kind custodians of a childlike and dependent race rather than as cruel oppressors of their fellow men. Paternalism was also a method of control: It was the kid glove over the iron fist of violence that enforced the Old South's social order. For when slaveholders' provision of food and clothing, medical care, time off for holidays and the occasional frolic failed to garner the submission they expected, most used the lash without hesitation.

how the system brought wealth to the united states

Racial slavery brought great wealth to the nation. The skills of West Africans in rice cultivation made South Carolina's planters among the richest in the Americas, and Louisiana's sugar barons were not far behind them. But it was King Cotton that brought the greatest profits. In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, an instrument that separated seed from the cotton lint that could be used to make thread and cloth. Cotton could now be processed sixty times faster than before, and production boomed. Not only did cotton become the nation's first-ranked export, but its dollar value was greater than that of all other American exports combined. Cotton was key to social mobility in the Old South, and slaves were key to cotton. Just as the non-landowner often aspired to landownership and then to the ownership of larger tracts of land, so the non-slaveholder hoped one day to own a few slaves, and perhaps in time to become the master of many.

Throughout the colonial period, slavery could be found in every colony. The profits from cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice fed many parts of southern society. The slave trade needed slave traders, landlords to house slaves being transported to market, cook-shops to feed them, doctors to inspect them and treat their illnesses, insurance agents to insure their lives, and notaries public to notarize sales. Southern cities and states profited from slave sales, which they taxed.

Northern businesses and farms also counted on slavery for some of their revenues. Northern insurance companies, too, insured the lives of slaves in the market, and northern as well as southern banks collected interest on loans granted to slave traders to procure their initial shipments of slaves. The textile mills of the North would have ground to a halt without the constant supply of slave-grown cotton that went into the factory-made cloth and clothing. Many of the earliest contributions to elite northern universities came from those who made their money buying and selling human chattels. Northern farmers sold food crops to feed the slaves of the Caribbean, and barrels to hold the sugar they produced.

why most white southerners embraced slavery

Most southern whites did not own slaves. In some places as few as one-quarter of all landowners owned slaves, in others no more than half did; and in mountainous areas, where plantations could not thrive, hardly any were slave-holders. In spite of this, many supported slavery. By the antebellum period, feelings of contempt and hatred for blacks were widespread among white southerners. Underlying the belief in white supremacy was the assumed existence of a common white identity, an identity that gained much of its essence from the existence of black slavery. The nineteenth century exhibited the full development of racist thought in everything from limericks, ephemera, and minstrel shows to politics and the law. Common whites, though subjugated to and held in contempt by slaveholding whites, nonetheless overwhelmingly supported slavery, for though they may have resented elite whites, they despised enslaved blacks more.

Black slavery also provided an economic and social "mudsill," as slaveholder, Governor and Senator James Henry Hammond put it in a famous speech he made in 1858—a drudge class at the bottom of society that elevated whites and freed them from the worst work. By the antebellum period, few white southerners could imagine any method of farming that would approach the level of agricultural production possible through forced labor. Ambitious whites sought to improve their financial situation by climbing through the ranks of slaveownership. In this way, slavery provided the most basic tool for social and economic mobility in the South as well as opportunities for whites in the supporting trades of slave trader, overseer, preacher, and doctor. Only in the mountainous regions of the South did support for slavery and slaveholding flag.

laws regulating slave behavior and the treatment of slaves

Southern law enshrined racist beliefs; indeed, even before racist beliefs were widespread and consistent in

southern society, the law led the way in giving slavery a racial basis and then separating enslaved blacks from the rest of society. The behavior of slaves was strictly controlled: They were barred from learning to read and write, working in printing offices, drinking, gathering after dark, bearing arms, gathering in large numbers, traveling without a pass, or running away (whether permanently or temporarily). Slaves lacked legal personhood; consequently, they could not testify against whites (but only against blacks), and crimes against their persons were treated as trespasses against their owners. The law also restricted the actions of whites in regard to slaves: It did not permit them to help slaves run away, sell them alcohol, teach them to read or write, or intermarry with them. Laws also limited and governed the conditions of manumission and taxation.

family, community, survival

Thus dramatically separated from much of the rest of American society, enslaved Americans lived largely in a world unto themselves—though it was a world profoundly shaped by the European and American Indian cultures around and within slave society. By the early nineteenth century, most slaves in the United States had been born on American soil, not in Africa. These native-born blacks had known only slavery, as had their parents and perhaps even their grandparents. Thus, syncretism occurred through which enslaved people became a new people, a people with a very strong identity as such. At the same time, enslaved communities were rife with conflict between women and men, between those with power or property that others lacked, between the faithful and the secular—all the ordinary conflicts that can erupt between individuals.

During the Great Awakening, U.S. slaves converted to Christianity in large numbers, drawn to the Old Testament's message of sympathy for the downtrodden and deliverance from oppression and suffering. Afro-Christianity continued to be an important source of spiritual strength and social rejuvenation for generations. Alongside, and sometimes overlapping, this faith were social and healing practices that mixed African traditions with Christianity and to a much lesser degree, Islam. In Louisiana, this mixture was often formalized as Voudoun, whereas throughout the rest of the South, it remained informal. Whatever its form, spirituality offered courage and hope to the enslaved.

For almost all American slaves, the family was a source of both sustenance and suffering. Only a minority lived in nuclear families; many couples were separated either by the sale of the husband or wife in the slave market or by living "abroad" from one another—living on different farms. Enslaved families adapted to the vicissitudes forced upon them. Extended family relationships were vital and compensated, in part, for missing family members, who were remembered in naming practices and oral culture.

slavery and the civil war

In writing the U.S. Constitution, slavery was one topic among many that delegates to the Constitutional Congress had to address. After some debate, they decided to count each slave as three-fifths of a person in determining population for apportionment of state representation in Congress, to eliminate the external slave trade in 1808, and to impose a fugitive slave law that required that runaway slaves be returned to their owners. Thus, slavery was included in the Constitution. However, many northern states passed laws to begin the process of gradually emancipating slaves. Many northern slaveholders sold their slaves to the South where slavery was extremely profitable.

Because of the extra representation their states gained from counting three-fifths of slaveholders' human property, slavery gave southern elites disproportionate power in Congress. This power extended into other branches of government: Until the Civil War, southern slaveholders dominated the presidency and the Supreme Court, and most northerners who occupied those offices were pro-slavery as well.

During the 1850s, as the question of the expansion of slavery into new western territories was debated in Congress and on the streets, the perspective of many formerly neutral northerners began to shift. Increasingly, they came to see slaveholders as a "slave power" whose influence was spreading—not only within the traditional realm of the nation's political sphere, but into the West and even into the North, to the great consternation of growing numbers of northerners. Not to be mistaken for a conflict over the morality of slavery itself, the Civil War was the culmination of mounting tensions between southerners who believed each new state had the right to decide whether or not it would allow slavery and northerners who were increasingly resentful of the extending reach of the slave power.

During the years of the Civil War, the institution of slavery slowly fell apart. As the Union army advanced into parts of the Confederacy, many slaveholders fled into the Confederate interior. In coastal South Carolina, the land abandoned by planters was quickly claimed by those who had worked it for generations. After the war's end, landowners and Union officials found the task of prying the land away from the freedpeople difficult.

From the beginning of war onward, slaves ran away by the thousands. After a few years of war and flight, the Union army desperately needed a uniform policy for either sending the "contrabands of war" back to their owners (a policy objected to by many as aiding the enemy) or keeping them and using them in the army. A reluctant Abraham Lincoln was increasingly convinced of the need to arm these fugitives as well as the free blacks of the North clamoring for inclusion, and in 1863 he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, in part to satisfy the military need for men. The Proclamation freed enslaved people in the Confederacy, and paved the way for a general emancipation at the end of the war in 1865.

Slavery was at the heart of the issues that led to the outbreak of Civil War in April 1861. Whereas a probable majority of Americans accepted the existence of slavery in southern states, many opposed its expansion into new states and territories. And among slaveholding societies, the United States was unique in going to war to resolve the question of slavery and of how the nation would define itself. The end of the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 resolved that question forever.

Stephanie M. H. Camp