The first half of the nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in the nature of southern slavery. After the development of the cotton gin, slavery within the South moved southward and westward, and by the start of the Civil ar more slaves lived in the newer areas of the South than resided in the original colonies of settlement. With this geographic expansion of the slave population there was also a movement of southern whites — planters, yeomen, and others. The major crop grown by slave labor was now short-staple cotton, and it is estimated that in 1850 nearly three-quarters of all agricultural slaves worked where cotton was the principal crop. Cotton plantations thus accounted for more than half of all southern slaves. The optimum size for a cotton plantation was between sixteen and fifty slaves, and this size range came to account for the largest proportion of the slave population. In general these farms consisted of the family of the owner and, depending on size, an overseer, but relatively few other white laborers. Thus as the plantation size increased, so did the ratio of black slave to free white. Some cotton (in 1850 less than io percent) was grown on farms without slaves. This share rose in the cotton boom of the 1850s. The reasons for the continued low level of cotton production by free white labor in the antebellum period relative to the amounts after the Civil War, remains one of the debated issues of southern economic development, but their increased output during the cotton booms, and then after the disappearance of the plantation with emancipation, suggests the impact of competition between the different forms of production.
Slave labor dominated cotton production, and U. S. cotton production dominated the world cotton market, accounting for over three-quarters of the input into British cotton textile production. Yet there remained many other uses for slave labor within the South. In 1850 in the states of Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, slaves were used on tobacco units, and these accounted for about 14 percent of all agricultural slaves. There was some use of slave labor in the Virginia wheat economy, while hemp production in Kentucky took about 2 percent of agricultural slaves. Rice, grown in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, accounted for about 5 percent of agricultural slaves in 1850, while sugar, grown in Louisiana, utilized about 6 percent of agricultural slaves. The average size of producing units in rice and sugar exceeded that of the average cotton unit, as well as those in tobacco, wheat, and hemp. About 10 percent of the slaves resided in urban areas, where their functions included skilled crafts as well as domestic service, and several hundred thousand were also considered to be doing domestic work on agricultural units.
The expansion of cotton production, and the increased concentration of slave labor, represented a dramatic shift in a period of about one-half century. Those few slaves producing cotton before the start of the nineteenth century were primarily involved in the growing of sea island, not short-staple, cotton. Clearly this transition reflected the great expansion in demand in the textile mills of England and New England for raw cotton, leading to an increase in cotton production averaging almost 7 percent per annum between 1800 and i860. Export growth in tobacco and rice was more limited, as was the growth in the production of sugar, produced mainly for sale in internal markets, behind tariff barriers. Thus, as suggested by the nature of the geographic movements, the cotton kingdom expanded by drawing labor away from use in producing other crops, a pattern seen both in secular movements as well as in the response to cyclical fluctuations in cotton demand. Cotton accounted for about one-fifth of overall southern output, as well as for about 50 percent of total U. S. exports during much of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The slave plantation was an integral aspect of the U. S. economy, solidly linked to the world market, and entailing a wide range of distribution services to market this production.
The westward and southward movement of the southern economy was influenced by the new crop technology that permitted the expansion of short-staple cotton production, as well as the innovations in transportation — steamboats, canals, railroads — that increased accessibility to markets at lowered cost. The westward movement was persistent throughout the period, but greatly accelerated in the cotton booms of the 1830s and the 1850s. These periods were years of sharply rising slave prices. While these relocations provided a dramatic shift in the residence of the southern population, Virginia remained the state with the largest number of slaves even at the start of the Civil War. The nature and impact on the older parts of the South of the interstate movement of slaves remains somewhat controversial. One issue concerns the proportion of the nearly one million slaves who left the older areas of the South for newer regions who went with relocating owners or family members of slaveowners in the Old South, in contrast with the proportion of slaves who were sold by owners from one part of the South to another without other members of their families. No scholarly consensus with respect to the relative magnitudes of movements by sale or with owners has been achieved, but both factors clearly played a role in interstate migrations and both, being involuntary, had disruptive effects on marriage and family patterns. A related debate concerns the extent to which the economies of the older parts of the South were dependent on the slave sales to maintain their economic viability. On this the answer seems more straightforward, both because the contribution of slave sales to incomes in older areas of the South could not have been large, and because there were clearly other causes of the continuing economic prosperity of most of these areas. And, to the extent that these older areas did experience some economic problems, they often were the consequence of, and not the cause of, the interregional competition generated by the
Geographic expansion of production of cotton and other crops into new areas of high productivity.
The westward movement had a relatively limited impact on the percentages of whites owning slaves, at least until the 1850s. About one-third of the southern white population owned slaves up to 1850, falling to 25 percent in the cotton boom of the next decade. Many owners owned only one or two slaves; only about 10 percent of slaveowners in 1850 had the twenty or more slaves necessary to be considered members of the planter class. Yet these plantations had more than one-half of southern slaves. Plantations in the Lower South were larger than those in the other states, so that the geographic movement led to increases in the concentration of slaves and of slave ownership.
Given the different optimum size of units for different crops, and the differences in extent of slave ownership by whites (and the small number of free blacks), the distribution of wealth as well as of slave ownership differed within the regions of the South. Overall, there was a small increase in wealth inequality over time. The distribution of wealth for the free population of the South differed little from that in the North in the first half of the nineteenth century. While the rural South, because of the presence of large slaveowners, had more inequality than did the rural North, with its family-sized farms, the frequency of nonwealthholders in urban areas and the greater number of urban dwellers in the North made for a roughly similar distribution of wealth for the free population in both regions. In both North and South wealth inequality led to disproportionate political representation. For the South this meant, at state and national levels, a high degree of representation by larger slaveowners, although this was not always sufficient for them to obtain all their political demands.
While there remains debate between scholars of different political and methodological persuasions as to the pre-, non-, or a-capitalist nature of the overall southern economy (as well as debates as to whether such distinctions are meaningful for many political and economic issues), it seems agreed that the plantation itself had many of the characteristics of modern industrial firms, being described as “a factory in the field.” Indeed slave plantations, even in the U. S. South, were often among the most heavily capitalized firms anywhere in the early nineteenth century. The planter, as entrepreneur, made production decisions based upon the profits expected from producing crops for sale in local or export markets, and for consumption on the plantation. Increased foreign and northern demands for export crops, initially tobacco and rice and then cotton, led to increased use of slave labor, and the shifts in the relative prices of different crops influenced the relative amounts of crops produced. Within the plantation there was an extensive division of labor and an effective use of labor of different ages and sexes. Even on cotton plantations there was extensive production of other crops, including foodstuffs; indeed plantations were more frequently self-sufficient than were yeoman farms. Slaves were engaged in skilled, artisan-like functions, such as blacksmithing, carpentering, coopering, as well as performing as nurses and domestic servants. Slave children after about age 7 or 8 often found themselves doing odd jobs, before joining the field gangs when they reached the prime ages, after about i6. Some then did other work, but gang labor continued for most until they were in their 40s or early 50s, when those older workers performed other functions, such as being watchmen and doing other less physically demanding work. The ability to assign functions in this manner led to an (involuntary) increased labor force participation rate among the slave population, and an ability by the slaveowner to extract a higher measured output from slave children and females than was obtained from members of free populations, where measured labor force participation tended to be lower.
In addition to the higher labor force participation rate, what made the plantations so productive and profitable was the ability to force slave workers into large-scale gangs to produce primarily export commodities. The efficiency of production of southern farms rose dramatically with the numbers of slaves actually used in production. Slave labor only became highly productive on farms of over 15 slaves, where gang labor was possible. Farms of this size could be efficiently maintained only for the production of certain crops, particularly cotton, sugar, and rice. The ability to force slaves into units of this size in a manner that free workers would not accept did not, however, eliminate all problems for slaveowners. Measures were necessary to provide incentives, positive as well as negative, for slaves, so that they would be made willing to do the work and to be sufficiently productive to yield high incomes to their owners. In addition to whippings and the threat of sale, incentives included rewards of time off, occupational change, and enhanced material consumption. The highly seasonal nature of agricultural work in the South meant that planning and decisions on labor allocation were necessary. Thus, while the profitability of the slave plantation rested on the ability to legally coerce labor onto plantations producing export crops, a location that free workers avoided wherever possible, the ability to benefit from this coercion still required
Considerable planning and management in coordinating and controlling labor and in making effective production choices.
The expansion of the cotton kingdom of the nineteenth century flowed from the growth of demand for raw cotton, mainly from Great Britain, which took over two-thirds of U. S. exports (the share of the cotton crop exported was over three-quarters in the last three antebellum decades), and New England, for use in producing cotton textiles. British cotton textile production expanded dramatically at the end of the eighteenth century, with a shift from woolens, and the increase continued at high rates through at least the first half of the nineteenth century. There had been, and continued to be, other sources of raw cotton, some based on slave labor (e. g., the West Indies), others not (e. g., Turkey, India, and Egypt), and the initial expansion of British textiles preceded large-scale cotton imports from the United States. Once cotton supplies from the United States began to enter Britain, however, with the exception of the American Civil War and its immediate aftermath, the South dominated the world cotton trade into the twentieth century. The South was the world’s major exporter of tobacco in the first half of the nineteenth century, but the value and importance of the crop to the southern economy was considerably less than that of cotton.
Given the importance of foreign demand in influencing cotton production, the southern economy participated in the major international business cycles in the early decades of the nineteenth century as well as those of the 1830s and 1850s. The impact of these cycles was felt throughout the nation, moreover, due to the linking of the sectional economies via finance, services, and manufactured commodities. The one antebellum cyclical depression that was not so widely diffused was that of 1857, which was more severe in the Northeast and Midwest than in the South, an aspect widely commented on in the late antebellum debates comparing the sectional economies. It has been argued that cotton, which accounted for about one-half of U. S. exports throughout the antebellum period, was the “leading sector” of the early-nineteenth-century U. S. economy, at least through the 1840s. While such a claim might overstate its role, clearly the cotton economy was a large and conspicuous part of the overall economy drawing, directly and indirectly, upon resources, commerce, and manufacturing throughout the nation (particularly the Northeast) and tied in with the important cotton textile-producing sector of the world’s most advanced economies.
The other primary export crops also increased in production throughout the antebellum years, although at rates below that of cotton. Tobacco
Production moved westward into Kentucky but remained important in
Rginia and, to a lesser extent, North Carolina. Rice and sugar remained concentrated in South Carolina and Louisiana, respectively, but they expanded their output and used larger numbers of slaves than at the start of the century. And slave labor produced other crops, including foodstuffs, on smaller units as well as on the large farms producing staples. Cotton was the most noted and important use of southern slave labor, but not its only use, and the dominating importance of cotton came only with the last decades of southern slavery.
There had been a long debate, among both contemporaries and historians, concerning whether slavery was profitable to slaveowners, in the sense of earning a market return from ownership sufficient to justify the costs of purchasing and/or raising of slaves. While this is not the same question as whether the South could have been better off with free than with slave labor, given the different effects upon southern society and institutions, it is a question with important implications for understanding the southern planting class and southern economic structure. It has come to be generally held that the slaveowners who raised and purchased slaves tended to make a competitive return on their investments, and that all indications are that, prior to the political events leading to the Civil War, they expected to continue to do so for a long period into the future. The fact that southern planters were disproportionately among the wealthiest Americans in 1850 and i860, with an average wealth that had risen throughout the antebellum period, suggests the profitability to planters of slave ownership.
The South had developed modern transportation and banking sectors, generally with the same types of state and local government aids that were used in the North, and southern urban centers provided financial and other services, including slave markets. New Orleans was one of the major export centers for the United States, and until the 1840s had served as a major outlet for midwestern, as well as southern, commodities. The level of industry was limited compared to the North, but there had developed some iron manufacturing, mainly in Virginia, and several textile mills, in addition to a broader range of industries, many of which were based on the use of slave labor.
An excellent indication of the behavior of the slave economy and of the expectations of the planters was in the prices of slaves. These prices were observed at times when slaves were sold in the market or evaluated for transfers at the time of owner death or for other commercial purposes. The prices of slaves were determined by expectations concerning physical output of goods produced by the slaves, the prices at which these goods could be sold, the amount of consumption allowed slaves, the other costs (e. g., overseers) of slave ownership, the expected period over which returns and costs would be realized (that is, time to death, individual emancipation, or the legal abolition of the slave system), and the rate of interest. Slave productivity was influenced by a number of factors, including age, sex, skill, and health. Slave prices were influenced by changes in the demand for slaves, based upon changes in the demand for the crops they produced and their productivity in crop production, and the supply of slaves. Within the antebellum South slave prices rose with the cyclical increases in the demand for cotton and fell in periods, such as the 1840s, when the cotton market was in recession. Prices in the late 1850s were two to three times those of the 1820s and 1840s. The influence of slave price changes upon the southern economy can be seen in the shifts in the mix of crops produced and in the variations in the rate of geographic mobility when prices varied. The fact that slave prices were high in the 1850s, and that, earlier, the decline in prices the 1840s did not lead to a belief in any imminent ending of the system, suggests that southern planters had anticipated that the slave economy would survive for many more decades.
There were dramatic differences in the demography of the slave population in the United States in comparison with slave populations elsewhere in the Americas, as well as those of earlier slave societies. The U. S. slave population grew at a natural rate of over 2 percent per annum after the closing of the slave trade. This natural increase started sometime in the eighteenth century, although at first growth was probably at a lower rate than it was in the nineteenth century. In contrast, the slave population of the British and French West Indies experienced continued natural decrease, from settlement to the ending of slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century, a pattern of decline that was not reversed by the ending of the transatlantic slave trade. No other major slave society had so large a rate of natural increase as did the United States; indeed few free white societies, the U. S. North and South being major exceptions, had as high a rate of natural increase as did southern slaves. When compared to Caribbean slaves, what was most striking demographically about U. S. slaves was their higher rate of fertility, even more than any differences in their death rates. The southern slave fertility rates were roughly equivalent to those of southern whites, about the world’s highest at that time.
This fertility pattern has become central to a number of important debates about the nature of U. S. slavery. To those who argued, as did many in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that slaves would not wish to have children or that slaveowners did not provide adequate subsistence to permit high rates of reproduction, a pattern of low fertility and natural decrease was the obvious expectation, buttressed by the examples of slave societies elsewhere and at earlier times. The finding of high fertility for U. S. slaves thus posed a major challenge for understanding the condition of slaves in the United States. To those who believed slaves were otherwise unwilling to have children, the pattern reflected something called slavebreeding: a deliberate interference with slave reproduction to encourage more children for sale. The evidence that children had a positive value at birth and early ages, and the considerable westward movement of younger slaves, were seen to be consistent with the argument of deliberate encouragement of reproduction for purposes of sale. Those arguing a relation between owner mistreatment and low fertility found that the U. S. slave population increase raised important questions concerning the depiction of the treatment and material conditions of life for U. S. slaves. This evidence suggested more favorable circumstances on the mainland, whether due to different natural resources, different crops grown, or different owner attitudes.
Recent research has introduced alternative explanations for the high fertility of U. S. slaves. Breakdowns of the characteristics of slave fertility have pointed to the fact that the slaves had an earlier start of childbearing, a higher percentage of childbearing women, and somewhat shorter spacing between births, than did Caribbean slaves. The first was the result of the better diet of U. S. slaves, and thus the earlier onset of menarche and the potential for childbearing; the second was influenced by what has come to be seen as the greater marital stability of the U. S. slave population, with a greater frequency of continued two-adult households, and the impact of the lower adult mortality rate on the continuity of these family relationships; and the third was attributed to differences in childnursing patterns, reflecting differences in diet and in cultural adjustments after arrival from Africa. These factors, in conjunction with the relative magnitude of sales in the westward movement, as well as consideration of the costs of bearing and raising offspring, have shifted attention from the hypothesized existence of “slave-breeding” to explanations dealing with slave family patterns and material living standards in accounting for the high U. S. slave fertility.
It is now clear that the somewhat lower mortality of U. S. slaves than those in the Caribbean, although their rates were above those of U. S. whites, even those in the South, reflected the better living standards found on U. S. plantations, and the more favorable working conditions on the mainland than in the sugar-producing areas of the Caribbean. Estimates suggest a high rate of food consumption in general, although there were cyclical variations over the antebellum era, depending on weather and on the allocation of labor between staples and foodstuffs. There was geographic variation in mortality within the South, e. g., higher in the coastal lowlands growing rice in wet fields in South Carolina, lower in the upland areas where cotton and other crops could be grown. Tropical diseases, such as malaria, were not as frequent a cause of death as in the Caribbean, although U. S. slaves were hit by epidemics of yellow fever and cholera (as were southern whites). It is probable that mortality rates for slaves fell over time, even after adjusting for the measured impact of the ending of the international slave trade with its higher age-specific mortality during the period known, euphemistically, as “seasoning.”
Recent work on slave height-by-age in the antebellum South has reinforced some of the recent interpretations of slave health, while raising some new (as well as old) issues. Heights of adult slaves in the U. S. tended to be quite close to those of adult whites, above those of Caribbean slaves and, by several inches, greater than those of Africans. These data suggest that factors influencing height, such as nutritional input and work intensity, were more favorable for U. S. slaves than for Caribbean slaves. An important issue raised, however, is the apparent shortfall of U. S. slave heights for children of younger ages prior to entry into the labor force. The reasons for this shortfall and the subsequent recovery at older ages is currently under examination, with attempts to understand possible factors causing differing treatment of slaves by their masters at different times in the slave’s life-cycle, including their responses to cost considerations or their imperfect knowledge of food requirements. Little is yet known about whether such a pattern characterized slaves elsewhere, as well as the southern white population.
In addition to the economic questions, there have long been many related debates about the nature of southern society and culture. There have been recent reinterpretations of the nature of slave life, and of slave and southern culture, with important implications for the understanding of the southern economy. This work is difficult to summarize, in part since many patterns varied with the size and location of the slave units. The complex psychological issues concerning the balance of slave autonomy and owner control, as well as the precise degree of flexibility and of cruelty within the South, all remain open for more analysis. Resistance to enslavement by individuals and groups, by running away and by malingering, persisted. Rebellions were planned and undertaken. Revolts, although they failed to become widespread or great in number, influenced white reactions (and overreactions). The major U. S. slave rebellions were those in New York City in 1712, the Stono Rebellion (1739), Gabriel Prosser’s Revolt (i8oo), the Point Coupee Uprising (i8ii, in Louisiana, the largest in the United States), Denmark Vesey’s Revolt (1822), and Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831), but there were numerous others. The important role of African-Christianity in the slave population, the depth of the two-parent pattern of slave families, and the importance of slave production on their own plots (for sale or consumption by the slave), have been studied, and this research has yielded rather different interpretations of the operations of the slave system than had been presented in earlier generations, interpretations pointing to greater accomplishments by the slaves, with more space allowed to them on a day-to-day basis.
Relative both to slaves and to whites, little is known of the less than percent of the black population who lived in the South as free blacks. Some, particularly in the Upper South, were from families who had been free for several generations, while others were newly manumitted, whether by grant or by self-purchase. About one-half of the southern free blacks were described in the census as mulattos, not blacks; they were more frequently female than male; and they more frequently lived in urban areas than did slaves. There were important communities of free black families of propertyholders in Charleston and New Orleans. While several states had passed laws that would have required manumitted blacks to migrate out of state, these laws were seldom enforced, and there were free black owners of slaves, land, and other forms of property throughout the South. Nevertheless, the social, if not legal, controls over free blacks persisted, and their status was frequently under attack.
To a great extent, the economic and social role of Native Americans within the nineteenth-century South was quite limited. Their numbers were relatively small, and particularly after the 1820s, with governmental removal policies, many lived in areas isolated from the rest of the southern population. Some, such as the Cherokees, were owners of slaves, and there were often schisms within tribes based upon relative degrees of acculturation to white society. With the initial declines in population with the
White settlement, however, the numbers and direct economic impact of Native Americans upon southern society declined.
There has recently been considerable re-examination of the behavior of the planter class, including their commercial behavior and responsiveness to market incentives. To the extent they responded to price incentives and acquired relatively large amounts of wealth, clearly they fit into a market-based economy, albeit one based upon the use of unfree rather than free labor. More complex is the nature of their dealings with the slave labor force. At issue is the extent to which paternalism played a role in mitigating commercial influences and moderating behavior and whether it is meaningful to regard these as separate influences upon the control of the enslaved. In trying to account for the origins of planter culture under slavery, as well as its absence in non-slave areas, it still remains an issue whether slavery was initially created by individuals with a different culture than among those in non-slave societies or if the prior existence of slavery, however generated, led to the emergence of individuals and a society with different beliefs than what is considered to be characteristic of capitalist societies. That the planters were often wealthy and behaved like rich men is clear, as is the fact that they regarded the continuation of the slave-based economy as central to their existence.
There has also been debate about the characteristics of the many nonslaveholding whites within the South, both those groups residing within the plantation belts and those residing in upland areas that had relatively few plantations. Some of these yeomen were relatively well-off by the standards of rural agriculture in the North, some were poor and considered relatively backward by the standards even of those times. The former group contained many farmers who were productive and earned returns from family labor, even if generally producing few of the agricultural staples in most normal years. They did gain from, and were involved in, the emergence of the transportation improvements necessary to increase access to markets. Some also became slaveowners, if not moving immediately into the plantation-owning class, and clearly increased their wealth. The extent to which their limited (compared to planters) involvement with the market economy was due to limitations resulting from the competition of the large-scale staple-producing plantation or, rather, indifference (for whatever cultural reasons) to the market, is still debated, and is an issue to which we shall return when examining the yeomen’s postbellum adjustment to the ending of the plantation system. Yeomen produced cotton and tobacco, among the staples, their production varying with the levels of market demand. They also produced corn and other foodstuffs, livestock, and other agricultural commodities. They differed from planters not in what they produced, but in the mix and amount of what was produced.
Raditionally described as being in a lower economic condition than yeomen were the so-called poor whites, who were, however, relatively few in number. They lived in low-income conditions, either as owners of small farms on poor soil or as migrants and vagrants doing seasonal labor, and were not upwardly mobile in wealth or status. Their numbers, their cultural backgrounds, their beliefs, and their differences from other members of southern society are still the basis of disagreement.
Most political issues of antebellum America had some connections to the South and slavery, if only because they often involved the differing economic concerns of the North and the South. Even while disagreements were not immediately threatening to slavery, they often provided the potential for dramatic shifts in the geographically based political balance, and thus for debates about the future course of slavery. Slavery had been ended in several northern states by the start of the nineteenth century. More dramatically, it had been ended by a slave revolution in the French colony that was to become Haiti in 1804. Slavery had also ended in the first half of the nineteenth century in several of the South American countries where slavery had been of lesser importance, after their successful revolts against Spain. The first legislated American ending of slavery by a major nation with an extensive and productive slave economy came with British emancipation, to start in 1834. The British scheme entailed a payment to slaveowners in the West Indies (and other colonies), as well as a projected period of some four to six years of compelled labor under a system called apprenticeship. An antislavery movement had begun in the northern states of the United States in the first decades of the century, but it was only after the 1830s that it began to become a major force, with both white and black, free and ex-slave, speakers and advocates, and not until the 1850s that it become a major political force with the emergence of the Republican Party. It was this link of antislavery sentiment and political concern that ultimately was to play a role in the secession of the southern states and onset of the Civil War.
The antislavery ideology consisted of a number of strands, religious and secular. It was most prevalent among the Methodists and other dissenting groups, who placed a heavy value on the individual. It was influenced by the “free labor” ideology, advocating the benefits of free labor in contrast with the argued-for limited productivity of slave labor and the evils of the slave-based society for whites as well as blacks. The free labor ideology, with its call for “free labor, free land, free men,” was most closely identified with the small artisan, independent farmer, segment of northern society, concerned with the continued availability of land for further expansion, and it was often nativist, anti-immigrant in belief.
The emergence of a significant antislavery movement in the North led to the more explicit statement of proslavery defense in the South in the 1830s. While many strands of the proslavery argument had been presented previously, it was this first major questioning of the nature of slavery that led to the drawing together of a full-scale defense. This defense was generally one of conservatism, befitting an institution that had existed for thousands of years, and thus was reflected in southern religion, politics, and social organization. The economic defense often drew upon comparisons of U. S. southern economic expansion with the reduction in export production in Haiti and in the British West Indies after emancipation. The proslavery advocates also provided a strong critique of the disarray and hardships of wage-earners in capitalist society. In addition, the southern proslavery argument contained a strong component of racism — stronger than earlier — arguing for the limited abilities and civilizing potential of the black population. These sets of views influenced whites at all wealth levels, and the southern interest in maintaining slavery was widely diffused throughout the population in the antebellum era. Indeed, the major political attack on slavery by a southern white, Hinton Helper, was based on the deleterious effects of slavery upon the non-slaveowning whites of the South, not its impact on blacks.
The closing of the international slave trade in 1808, after the ending of the twenty-year period allowed it by the Constitution, was not a very controversial action, since it did not bear on the continued existence of slavery, and may have aided some slaveowners in the Old South by raising slave prices as a result of restricting the number of new slaves imported from Africa. It was with the opening of the debate on the Missouri Territory in 1819 that slavery became a central political issue. The major focus was on the expansion of slavery and the limits set originally by the Northwest Ordinance. The compromise resolution of 1820 left the sections politically balanced, and while there were a number of actions relating to slavery in the next quarter-century that had Congressional implications, it was the Wilmot Proviso of 1846 that began the legislative process that led to the Civil War and the ending of slavery. The controversy was based on problems created by geographic expansion into new territories, and the effects of geographic expansion upon political representation. While both sections anticipated some economic benefits from expansion, these benefits did not become central to the discussion.
Compounding the geographic problems, requiring the Congressional action taken in the Compromise of 1850 and in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, were the economic and social aspects of the economic expansion of the 1850s and the great burst of immigration in that decade. Antislavery and antiimmigration forces came together, with the demand for “free land” for settlement by northerners, with the formation of the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln’s election in i860 led to secession, disunion, and Civil
Ar. There seemed no direct economic cause of this southern action — indeed the pre—Civil War decade was one of unusual southern prosperity. There seemed, to those at the time as well as later scholars, no economic need for southern expansion in the immediate future, and southern prosperity could be maintained without movement into areas basically unsuited for the production of staples. Nor, for the North, was there an explicit goal of freeing and benefiting the black. Many states in the North had laws discriminating against the black in matters such as voting, education, and other issues, and the various forms of discrimination and limits imposed on blacks in practice suggest that ending slavery was not intended to lead to black equal. Thus, while it seems that in the absence of slavery the Civil War might not have occurred, there was no economic need for the South to fight nor was the cause of the war northern humanitarianism and a concern for the black slave. Whatever prevented a political settlement in i86i, it was the outcome of complex political conditions and concerns, including the symbolic and political value of expansion and its impact on representation. As seen in the prices of land and slaves, as late as i86i the southern planter did not believe the institution of slavery to be threatened, and its demise was seen only in a distant future — a view shared by most northerners at the time. Slave prices were near all-time highs, reflecting slaveowner optimism as to the future course of the cotton market and economy, and the expected continuation of the institution.
World History
