Slavery

Slavery is a system of labor under which individuals are compelled to serve in perpetuity with little or no compensation. Slavery has existed, in one form or another, for thousands of years. The institution first came to the English colonies in North America in the early decades of the 17th century. It was quickly limited to African Americans and more gradually came to be restricted to the South.

Life under slavery was very harsh. Slaves were generally compelled to work long days doing backbreaking labor. As adequate clothing, food, and medical attention were generally not provided to slaves, death rates were very high. The laws of most states barely acknowledged slaves, and they were denied virtually every legal privilege, including the right to bring lawsuits or testify in court trials, the right to vote, and the right to marry. Masters’ power over their slaves was almost unlimited. Slaves could be sold apart from their families, denied food, raped, or whipped mercilessly. Although the murder of a slave was supposed to be illegal, such crimes were rarely punished.

Slaves actively resisted the system whenever possible. Physical confrontations between slaves and their masters were not uncommon. Occasionally, full-blown slave revolts would develop, as groups of slaves banded together with the hope of escaping en masse or punishing cruel owners. The best-known revolts were led by Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vessey in 1822, and Nat Turner in 1831, but there were a number of others. For some slaves, escape was a more feasible and more attractive option than revolt. The most widely repeated stories of escape involve the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves travel to the states of the North or to Canada.

It was difficult and risky for slaves to revolt or for an individual slave to try to escape, however. As such, passive forms of resistance were much more common. Slaves might steal extra food, fake illness, deliberately break equipment, or subvert the will of their masters and overseers in any of a hundred other ways. At the same time slaves resisted the slave system by developing a vibrant culture of their own. Slave religion usually blended African and Christian beliefs, while teaching slaves that they would ultimately be delivered from bondage, if not in this life, then in the next. Slaves also had their own unique art, music, folklore, and medical practices. Like slave religion, these things typically blended African and American influences.

By the early part of the 1800s slavery had all but disappeared from the states of the North, and some Northerners began to look southward in the hope of eliminating the institution there as well. A number of prominent Northerners came to believe that slaves should be purchased from their masters and returned to Africa. This plan came to be known as colonization, and it led to the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816. Ultimately, however, the colonization movement was surpassed in size and importance by the abolition movement, which advocated bringing slavery to an immediate end. By the end of the 1830s, the abolition movement was playing an important role in Northern politics, while at the same time increasing Southerners’ sense of alienation from the North.

Although most abolitionist leaders were white, a number of ex-slaves played key roles in the movement. Slave narratives powerfully recounted the horrors of slavery for the Northern public. These included James W. C. Pennington’s The Fugitive Blacksmith, William Wells Brown’s Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave, and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. In addition to penning books, Pennington, Brown, and Douglass also made tours throughout the North, delivering speeches to win converts to the abolition movement.

The antislavery arguments of abolitionists tended to focus on the immorality and inhumanity of slavery and on its negative effects on the slaves themselves. Meanwhile, a number of white Northern politicians began to develop an antislavery argument that emphasized the negative effects of slavery on white Northerners. The “Free-Soilers,” as they came to be known, were focused on the vast territories that the United States had added via the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War. Free-Soilers were content to allow slavery to remain where it already was, but they believed that it was imperative that the institution be barred in the territories, so that free white labor could continue to spread and to flourish.

As Northern abolitionist and Free-Soil sentiment grew, white Southerners felt that their way of life was under attack. A number of Southern writers defended slavery and its superiority as a system of labor. The most prominent was George Fitzhugh, who wrote a pair of pro-Southern treatises, Cannibals All! and Sociology for the South. “We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to the law,” declared Fitzhugh. “We have but few in our jails, and fewer in our poor houses.” Other Southern apologists echoed Fitzhugh’s sentiments. While Southerners of Thomas Jefferson’s generation had seen slavery as a “necessary evil,” Southerners of Fitzhugh’s generation came to see it as a “positive good.”

By the 1850s slavery was the dominant issue in the nation’s political discourse, with the debate often erupting into violent confrontations. In 1854 proslavery BUSHWHACKERS and antislavery JAYHAWKERS began a series of armed clashes over whether the state of Kansas would have slavery or not. The fight in Bleeding Kansas would last through the end of the Civil War. In 1856 Charles Sumner made an antislavery speech on the floor of the Senate that focused on the Kansas question and shortly thereafter was savagely beaten by Southern representative Preston Brooks. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that Congress could not restrict slavery anywhere in the United States. The ruling served to inflame Northern passions while resolving nothing. By the end of the 1850s, it was clear that slavery and free labor could not continue to coexist. In 1858 William H. Seward described the tension between the two labor systems as an “irrepressible conflict,” while Abraham Lincoln warned the nation that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In 1859 John Brown’s failed attempt to incite a slave revolt by capturing Harpers Ferry brought the tensions between North and South to the breaking point.

As the political debate over slavery was heating up in the 1850s, the institution itself remained strong in the South. Post-Civil War Southern apologists would later claim that slavery would have died a quick natural death in the 1870s or 1880s even if the Civil War had never happened, but the evidence suggests that this was not the case. For plantation owners, business was booming in the 1850s. Cotton-hungry manufacturers in the North and in Europe kept the cotton market strong, even through an 1857 recession. In the decade before the Civil War, “King Cotton” accounted for more than 50 percent of the United States’s total exports and, in 1860 alone, the South produced 2 billion pounds of cotton, with a value of $250,000,000. Other slave-driven enterprises, including rice, tobacco, and indigo production, also did well. And although a majority of Southerners did not own slaves, they, too, continued to derive important benefits from the slave system. A strong economy made it possible for small farmers and manufacturers to sell their goods at a favorable price. Perhaps more important, all Southern whites benefited from the rigid racial hierarchy of the antebellum South that assigned a high social status to all white people and a low status to all black people.

In 1860 Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States on a Free-Soil platform. Leaders in South Carolina decided they could not accept the results. Lincoln, they asserted, had been elected by Northern voters to bring an end to slavery. In Decem-

A slave family in South Carolina (Hulton/Archive)

Ber of 1860 South Carolina seceded from the Union. It was soon followed by 10 other states, and by April 1861 the Confederate States of America had been established. Slavery was the backbone of the new Confederacy. Even if the majority of the South’s white population did not own slaves, Southern economy, culture, and politics were all defined by the institution. Even the poorest of white Southerners was willing to volunteer to fight when the war started. Later in the war, however, many non-slaveholding Southerners came to resent the fact that they were being forced to fight to defend slavery, particularly while large plantation owners were exempt from the Confederate conscription, or draft.

The nature of the slave system also created other logistical problems for the Confederacy. The South’s economy was entirely tied up in slaves and land. When war came, this meant that the South lacked the money and factories needed to purchase or create war materiel. Another problem posed by the slave system was that Confederate leaders were not comfortable using the South’s 4 million slaves as soldiers. While Northern leaders depended upon the hundreds of thousands of free laborers who joined the Union ranks, the South’s inability to draw on its labor force left Confederate armies constantly undermanned.

As the Confederacy’s white population fought the Civil War, the South’s slaves were impacted in a number of different ways. The Confederate army regularly “impressed” slaves, compelling them to do whatever labor the military needed. The backbreaking work of digging trenches and graves, building fortifications, and hauling supplies was often even worse than plantation work. For those slaves fortunate enough to avoid impressment, however, the Civil War generally lightened their burdens. With the absence of so many Southern men, discipline became more lax and escape became much easier.

At the same time that masters’ control of their slaves was weakening, Union armies were dismantling the slave system throughout the South. In 1862 the second Confiscation Act defined slaves as enemy property and allowed Union commanders to free any slaves they captured. Huge contraband camps were set up and administered by the War Department. In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation went even further, declaring all slaves in the Confederate states to be free and allowing for the enlistment of African-American soldiers. Most of the 180,000 black men who ultimately served in the Union army were escapees who wanted to have a hand in bringing an end to slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment, adopted in December of 1865, made slavery’s demise official.

For many Northerners, however, the end of slavery was not enough. The Republican Party, particularly the radical republican faction, took steps to ensure the political, social, and economic equality of the freedmen. For a period of time after the war, it seemed that meaningful progress was being made. Former slaves became loyal Republican voters, and a number of them were elected to political office. Families were reunited or established, and schools for freedmen were set up throughout the South. By 1900, literacy rates among African Americans were above 50 percent. This was quite an accomplishment for a population that had been legally barred from learning to read only 35 years previous.

Such progress proved to be short lived, however. Throughout the era of Reconstruction, white Southerners were unwilling to accept African Americans as their equals. They pursued every possible means, both legal and extralegal, for returning freedmen to their former second-class status. Northerners eventually grew weary of the struggle, and by 1876 all of the former Confederate states were under the control of conservative white politicians. The freedmen were shut out of politics. Economically, the rise of the sharecropping system denied African-Americans much hope of upward mobility.

Ultimately, the reliance of the South on African slave labor had a number of negative long-term consequences. The Southern economy failed to modernize in the antebellum era, and by the time the damage from the Civil War was repaired, the economies of the former states of the Confederacy lagged far behind the rest of the country. It would take many decades for meaningful economic progress to occur. For African Americans, both inside the South and out, the legacy of the slave system was a century of racism and other forms of economic, political, and social oppression. Although important laws were adopted during Reconstruction, their promise did not begin to be fulfilled until the latter part of the 20th century.

See also economy; race and racism; secession.

Further reading: Ira Berlin, ed., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: The New Press, 1992); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, ed. by Deborah E. McDowell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976).

—Christopher Bates