C 10 The South and Slavery 1790-1850

In 1834 Samuel Townes of South Carolina caught “Alabama Fever”. As a lawyer he saw more opportunity in Marion, Alabama. Samuel had a strong desire for wealth and drove his slaves very hard. “Whip them like the devil.”

Charlestown, South Carolina

Marion, AlabamaHome of Samuel Townes

Home of Samuel Townes Mobile, Alabama

Africa slaves built their own communities by using the language of kinship for example brother, sister, uncle, aunt and child.

Cotton was the only crop that Townes family grew. The price of cotton went up and down; so boom or bust periods did occur. Slaves were sold and bought and traveled a great deal.

King Cotton and Southern Expansion

Eli Whitney had been hired to tutor the children of Catherine Green a South Carolina plantation owner and widow of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene. Whitney a Yale University graduate built a prototype cotton engine dubbed “gin” for short a simple device consisting of a hand cranked cylinder with teeth that tore the lint away for the seed. By 1811 the south was exporting 60 million pounds of cotton a year mostly to England

Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765 – January 8, 1825) was an American inventor best known for inventing the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution and shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.[1] Whitney's invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the United States. Despite the social and economic impact of his invention, Whitney lost many profits in legal battles over patent infringement for the cotton gin. Thereafter, he turned his attention into securing contracts with the government in the manufacture of muskets for the newly formed United States Army. He continued making arms and inventing until his death in 1825.

Alabama Fever was the land rush that occurred as settlers and speculators moved in to establish land claims in Alabama as Native American tribes ceded territory. It came to be characterized as a movement of farmers and their slaves ever further west to new slave states and territories in the pursuit of fertile land for growing cotton.[1][2][3] It was one of the first great American land booms until superseded by the California Gold Rush in 1848

A Slave Society in a changing World

Thomas Jefferson claimed that, ”a total emancipation with the consent of the masters” could not be too far in the future.” However Jefferson could not envisage an equal society immediately. There should be a gradual evolution with removal of former slaves to Haiti or Africa.

The invention of the cotton gin delayed the freedom of the slaves. Cotton was the main export of the United States and became necessary.

At a time when the North was experiencing the greatest spurt of urban growth in the nation’s history most of the South remained rural less than 3% of Mississippi’s population lived in cities of more than 2500 residents and only 10% of Virginia have urban population

England eliminated slavery on the sugar plantations of the West Indies in 1834. The South felt increasingly hemmed in by northern opposition to the expansion of slavery.

The Slave states could not keep up with the population of the North hurting the position in Congress.

The Second Middle Passage: The Internal Slave Trade

The Cotton boom caused a huge increase in the domestic slave trade. Plantation owners in the Upper South Delaware Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia and Tennessee sold their slaves to meet the demand for labor in the new and expanding cotton growing regions of the Old Southwest. In every decade after 1820 at least 150,000 slaves wee uprooted either by slave trading or planter migration to new areas and the expansion of the cotton industry in th 1830’2 and 1850’s. 50% of the Upper South slaves were relocated for the interest of the slave trade. Example Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Slave trading block in Louisiana near the French Quarters. Most slaves were sold as individuals, family were split up with no care for emotional attachments.

Slaves at the block being sold

Families broken apart at the slave trading block

The African American Community

The slave population grew from 700,000 in 1790 to more than 4 million in 1860. The size of cotton plantations fostered the growth of slave communities now 75% of all slaves lived in groups of ten or more. This is different when there were smaller cotton farm which usually one to three slaves before the cotton gin explosion.

Some Slavery Codes made teaching Mulatto, Indian and indentured slaves illegal.[3]Alabama, 1833, section 31 - "Any person or persons who attempt to teach any free person of color, or slave, to spell, read, or write, shall, upon conviction thereof by indictment, be fined in a sum not less than two hundred and fifty dollars, nor more than five hundred dollars."Alabama, 1833, section 32 - "Any free person of color who shall write for any slave a pass or free paper, on conviction thereof, shall receive for every such offense, thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, and leave the state of Alabama within thirty days thereafter..."Alabama, 1833, section 33 - "Any slave who shall write for any other slave, any pass or free-paper, upon conviction, shall receive, on his or her back, one hundred lashes for the first offence, and seven hundred lashes for every offence thereafter.

Virginia, 1705 – "If any slave resists his master...correcting such a slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction...the master shall be free of all punishment...as if such accident never happened."South Carolina, 1712 - "Be it enacted by the authority aforesaid, That no master, mistress, overseer, or other person whatsoever, that hath the care and charge of any negro or slave, shall give their negroes and other slaves leave...to go out of their plantations.... Every slave hereafter out of his master's plantation, without a ticket, or leave in writing, from his master...shall be whipped...."Louisiana, 1724 - "The slave who, having struck his master, his mistress, or the husband of his mistress, or their children, shall have produced a bruise, or the shedding of blood in the face, shall suffer capital punishment

In law slaves were property to be bought, sold, rented, worked and otherwise used as the owners saw fit.

Health remained a lifelong issue for slaves. Malaria and infectious diseases such as yellow fever and cholera were endemic in the South. White people as well as black died. Life expectancy was 43 years for whites and 33 years for blacks.

From Cradle to Grave

A Television mini series which explained the growth of the slave community, abuses of slavery and the slave machine cradle to grave.

Of course slaves could not be educated. Yet, there were a few “pet slaves” of the masters who gained the privilege of reading and writing through whites teaching them this skill. These pet slaves now were supposedly indebted to their masters

Blacks that could read and write were controlled by the whites. Exception would be Phyllis Wheatley who got her word out to the public

At age twelve the slaves were put in the field and were to work their the rest of their lives.

Field Work and the Gang System

In 1850 Slave occupation labor breakdown:

55% of all slaves were engaged in cotton growing Another 20% labored to producing other cops like tobacco sugar, rice and hemp.10% mining lumbering and construction15% domestic labor

Owners of slaves divided their slaves into gangs of twenty to twenty-five a communal labor pattern reminiscent of parts of Africa but with a crucial difference these workers were being supervised by people with whips.

Old slaves were honored by the slave community. When they were too old to work they took on other tasks within the black community such as caring for the young.

House Servants and Skilled Workers

Slave Women usually spent more time with infant and young children than did the natural white mother.

Domestic slave labor did the Ironing, cleaning of house, wash, cooking and any other menial chores for the white masters.

Whites had a high protein rich in vitamins, fruits and vegetables. Slaves ate rice and gravy not as rich or healthy

Living quarters for the poor slaves were less than adequate. The smaller the planation the better you were treated. You were usually treated better if you were owned by a borderline slave state.

Slave house were similar to a wood shed or a barn.

Black people worked as lumberjacks 16,000 in the South as lumberjacks, miners and deckhands on the Mississippi river boats.

Slave Families

Slave marriages were more equal than that of the white marriages. Both the husband and wife were powerless within the slave system. Both knew that neither could protect the other from abuse at the hands of white people.

Marriage was more than a haven from cruelty it was the foundation of the community. Family meant continuity. Parents made great efforts tot each their children the family history and to surround them with a supportive and protective kinship network. The strength of these ties is ho families would search for decades to find family after the Civil War.

The family atmosphere was seen in the fact that all adults were called auntie or uncle, to illustrate the importance of family.

Freedom and Résistance

African religions managed to survive from the earliest days of slavery in forms that white people considered as “superstition” o “folk belief” such as the medicinal use of roots by conjurers. Religious ceremonies survived too, in late night gathering deep in the woods where the sound of drumming sing and dancing could not reach white ears. The African traditions allowed African Americans to reshape white Christianity into their own distinctive faith that expressed their deep resistance o slavery

Slaves had a way of expressing their emotion with an outlet of religious expression with music, dance and gospel.

Richard Allen (February 14, 1760 – March 26, 1831)[1] was a minister, educator, writer, and one of America's most active and influential black leaders. In 1794 he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first independent black denomination in the United States. He opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He was elected the first bishop of the AME Church in 1816. He focused on organizing a denomination where free blacks could worship without racial oppression and where slaves could find a measure of dignity. He worked to upgrade the social status of the black community, organizing Sabbath schools to teach literacy and promoting national organizations to develop political strategies

St. Andrew African Methodist Episcopal ChurchThis Church was rebuilt on a site of a slave cabin in Savannah, Georgia.

Slave Revolts

Nat Turner’s Rebellion

Nat Turners group killing the white establishment.

Nat Turner captured and brought to the courts

Nat Turner and lawyer Thomas Gray in jail before execution

Home of Thomas Gray lawyer for Nat Turner

Denmark Vesey home in Charleston, South Carolina

Another source of repletion came from free blacks. By 1860 nearly 250,000 free black people lived in the South. For most freedom dated before 1800 when anti slavery feeling among slave owners in the Upper South was widespread and cotton cultivation had yet to boom. Cities such as Charleston, Savannah and Natchez were home to flourishing free African American Communities that formed their own churches and fraternal order.

Free African Americans

A typical home of free slave in the south.

The White Majority

Poor White People

Plain Folk of the Old South is the title of a 1949 book by Vanderbilt University historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, one of the Southern Agrarians. In it he used statistical data to analyze the make-up of southern society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought of.

Relationships between poor whites and black slaves were complex. White men and women often worked side by side with black slaves in the fields and were socially and intimate with enslaved and free African Americans. White people engaged in clandestine trade to supply slaves with items like liquor that slave owners prohibited helped slaves to escape.

Yeoman could refer to a free man holding a small landed estate, a minor landowner, a small prosperous farmer (especially from the Elizabethan era to the 17th century), a deputy, assistant, journeyman, or a loyal or faithful servant. Work "performed or rendered in a loyal, valiant, useful, or workmanlike manner", especially work requiring a great deal of effort or labor, such as would be done by a yeoman farmer, came to be described as "yeoman's work."[1] Thus yeomen became associated with hard toil.[2]

Yeoman was also a rank or position in a noble or royal household, with titles such as Yeoman of the Chamber, Yeoman of the Crown, Yeoman Usher, and King's Yeoman. Most of these, including the Yeomen of the Guard, had the duty of protecting the sovereign and other dignitaries as a bodyguard, and carrying out various duties for the sovereign as assigned to his office

The Yeoman was a social class in late medieval to early modern England. In early recorded uses, a yeoman was an attendant in a noble household; hence titles such as Yeoman of the Chamber, Yeoman of the Crown, Yeoman Usher, King's Yeoman, Yeomen Warders, Yeomen of the Guard. The later sense of yeoman as "a commoner who cultivates his own land" is recorded from the 15th century; in military context, yeoman was the rank of the third order of fighting men, below knights and squires, but above knaves. A specialized meaning in naval terminology, "petty officer in charge of supplies", arises in the 1660s.

Where yeoman and large slave owners lived side by side as in the Georgia black belt where cotton was the major crop slavery again provided a link between the rich and the “plain folk.” Large plantation owners often bought food for their slaves from small local farmers ground the latter’s corn in the plantation mill, ginned their cotton and transported and marketed it was well. Although planters and much smaller yeoman were part of a larger community network in the black belt

the large slave owners were dominant.

Middle Ranks

The effort of William Gregg of South Carolina to establish the cotton textile industry illustrates some of the problems facing entrepreneurs. Gregg a successful jeweler from Columbia, South Carolina became convinced that textile factories were a good way to diversify the southern economy and to provide a living for poor whites who could not find work in the slave-dominated employment system. He published the findings of the northern textile mills. He request to the planter dominated South Carolina legislature. He built a model mill and a company town in Graniteville, South Carolina.

Planters

Remarkably few slave owners fit the popular stereotype of the rich and leisured plantation owner with hundreds of land and hundreds of slaves. Only 36% of southern white people owned slaves in 1830 and only 2.5% owned fifty slaves or more. Just as yeoman and poor whites were diverse so, too, were southern slave owners.

For a smaller group of slave owners the economic struggle was not so hard. Middle-class professional men, lawyers, doctors and merchants frequently managed to become large slave owners because they already had capital to invest in land and slaves. Sometimes they received payment for their services not in money.

The Planter Elite

Tombee, South Carolina Planation Home

Tombee Plantation is a historic plantation home located on Saint Helena Island near Frogmore, Beaufort County, South Carolina. It was built about 1790-1800, and is two-story, T-shaped frame dwelling. It is sheathed in clapboard and has a gable roof. It features a single-story front portico with four square columns and a two-story balustrade rear porch with six square columns on each floor. Along with Seaside Plantation, it is one of the few surviving antebellum plantation houses remaining on St. Helena Island. The Tombee Plantation property was divided into tracts during the days of the “Port Royal Experiment” in 1862. It remained in the hands of descendants of freed slaves until 1971

St. Joseph Plantation is one of the few fully intact sugar cane plantations in the River Parishes." The Plantation is located in Vacherie, LA.

Creating a Plantation Ideology

The economic reality of plantation life was that large numbers of black slaves had to be forced to work to produce the wealth that support the planters gracious lifestyle. Each plantation like the yeoman farm but on a larger scale aimed to be self sufficient producing not only the cash crop but also most of food and clothing for both slaves and family. There were stables of horses for plowing an transportation.

Even if they were absentee landlords planers usually required careful accounts from their overseers and often exercised the right to overrule their decisions.

Many southern plantation mistresses spent most of their lives tending family members including slaves in illness an in childbirth and supervising their slaves. Plantation mistresses often spent day preparing for crowds of guest she was expected to welcome as a gracious host

John Calhoun Plantation owner

John C Calhoun’s plantation home. Calhoun spent less time than his wife on the family plantation. (Above Fort Hill). He spent years in Washington as a politician while Floride Calhoun who had accompanied him in his early career remained at Fort Hill. After the first five of their ten children were born

Coercion and Violence

House servants bore the brunt of the petty and persistent punishment by their mistresses and personal servants often suffered mental cruelty. Although on every plantation black women served as nursemaids to their white children and as lifelong maids to white women. There are only a few white women who seem to realize the sadness frustration and despair often experienced by their lifelong maids

In Defense of Slavery

There were 12 million people who lived in the South in 1860 and 4 million of them were in slavery.

The Missouri Crisis 1819-1820 deeply alarmed most Southerners where shocked by the evidence of wide spread antislavery feeling in the North.

After Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831, Governor John Floyd of Virginia blamed the uprising on “Yankee peddlers and trades”. Who supposedly told slaves that “all men were born fee and equal.” thus, northern anti- slavery opinion and the rear of slave uprising were linked in southern minds.

After Nat Turner

William Lloyd Garrison (December 12, 1805 – May 24, 1879) was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, which he founded in 1831 and published in Massachusetts until slavery was abolished by Constitutional amendment after the American Civil War. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United States. In the 1870s, Garrison became a prominent voice for the woman suffrage movement

In the 1830 southern states began to barricade themselves against “outside” antislavery propaganda. In 1835 a crowd broke into a Charleston post office, made off with bundles of antislavery literature and set an enormous bonfire to fervent state and regional acclaim. By 1835 every southern legislature had tightened its laws concerning control of slaves. In only three border states Kentucky, Tennessee and Maryland did slave literacy remain legal. By 1860, it is estimated only 5% of all saves could read. Slaves were forbidden to gather for dances, religious services of any kind without a whit person present.

After the beginning of the earnest agitation of the Northern abolitionists against the institution of slavery in 1831, petitions of various kinds poured into the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate praying for the abolition or the restriction of that institution. These were generally presented by John Quincy Adams, who as a member of Congress identified himself particularly with the struggle against any Congressional abridgment of the right of petition.[2] It was Adams who ultimately repealed the rule, by authoring a resolution for repeal, and assembling the coalition necessary to pass it.[3]

The pro-slavery forces responded with a series of gag rules that automatically "tabled" all such petitions, preventing them from being read or discussed. The House passed the Pinckney Resolutions on May 26, 1836, the third of which was known from the beginning as the "gag rule" and passed with a vote of 117 to 68[4] (The first stated that Congress had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the states and the second that it "ought not" do so in the District of Columbia.)

From the inception of the gag resolutions, Adams was a central figure in the opposition to the gag rules. He argued that they were a direct violation of the First Amendment right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances". A majority of Northern Whigs joined the opposition. Rather than suppress anti-slavery petitions, however, the gag rules only served to offend Americans from Northern states, and dramatically increase the number of petitions.[5] The growing offense to the gag rule, as well as the Panic of 1837, may have contributed to the first Whig majority, in the 27th Congress.

Since the original gag was a resolution, not a standing House Rule, it had to be renewed every session, and Adams and others had free rein until then. In January 1837, the Pinckney Resolutions were substantially renewed, more than a month into the session. The pro-gag forces gradually succeeded in shortening the debate and tightening the gag. In December 1837, the Congress passed the Patton Resolutions, introduced by John M. Patton of Virginia. In December 1838, the Congress passed the Atherton Gag, composed by Democratic States-Rights Congressman Atherton of New Hampshire, on the first petition day of the session.

In January 1840, the House of Representatives passed the Twenty-first Rule, which greatly changed the nature of the fight - it prohibited even the reception of anti-slavery petitions and was a standing House rule. Before, the pro-slavery forces had to struggle to impose a gag before the anti-slavery forces got the floor. Now men like Adams or Slade were trying to revoke a standing rule. However, it had less support than the original Pinckney gag, passing only by 114 to 108, with substantial opposition among Northern Democrats and even some Southern Whigs, and with serious doubts about its constitutionality. Throughout the gag period, Adams' "superior talent in using and abusing parliamentary rules" and skill in baiting his enemies into making mistakes, enabled him to evade the rule. The gag was finally rescinded December 3, 1844, by a vote of 108-80, all the Northern and 4 Southern Whigs voting for repeal, along with 78% of the Northern Democrats.[6] It was John Quincy Adams who had successfully assembled the coalition that approved his resolution to repeal the rule.[3]

In the Senate in 1836, John C. Calhoun attempted to introduce a gag rule. The Senate rejected this proposal, but agreed on a method which, while technically not violating the right to petition, would achieve the same effect. If an anti-slavery petition was presented, the Senate would vote not on whether to accept the petition but on whether to consider the question of receiving the petition.

James Henry Hammond (November 15, 1807 – November 13, 1864) was a politician and planter from South Carolina. He served as a United States Representative from 1835 to 1836, the 60th Governor of South Carolina from 1842 to 1844, and United States Senator from 1857 to 1860. He was considered one of the major spokesmen in favor of slavery in the years before the American Civil War.

Acquiring property through marriage, he ultimately owned 22 square miles, several plantations and houses, and more than 300 slaves.[2] Through his wife's family, he was a brother-in-law of Wade Hampton II and uncle to his children, including Wade Hampton III. When the senior Hampton learned that Hammond had abused his four Hampton nieces as teenagers, he made the scandal public. It was thought to derail Hammond's career for a time,[2] but he was later elected as senator. The Hampton family suffered more, as none of the girls married

George Fitzhugh (November 4, 1806 – July 30, 1881) was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era. He argued that "the negro is but a grown up child"[1][2] who needs the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as spawning "a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another"[3] – rendering free blacks "far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition."[4] Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized.

Fitzhugh practiced law and was a painter for years, but attracted both fame and infamy when he published two sociological tracts for the South. He was a leading pro-slavery intellectual[5] and spoke for many of the Southern plantation owners. Before printing books, Fitzhugh tried his hand at a pamphlet titled "Slavery Justified" (1849). His first book, Sociology for the South (1854) was not as widely known as his second book, Cannibals All! (1857).

Fitzhugh differed from nearly all of his southern contemporaries by advocating a slavery that crossed racial boundaries. Writing in the Richmond Inquirer on 15 December 1855, Fitzhugh proclaimed: "The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion", "Nature has made the weak in mind or body slaves ... The wise and virtuous, the strong in body and mind, are born to command", and "The Declaration of Independence is exuberantly false, and aborescently fallacious

In spit of these defensive and repressive proslavery measures which made the South seem monolithic in northern eyes. In 1832 there was the state of Virginia debate whether to have slavery or not; Virginia was alarmed with the Nat Turner situation.

From the 1830s on financial changes increasingly underlined class differences among southern whites. It was much harder to become a slaveholder; from 1830 to 1860 slave owners declined from 36 to 25% of the population. In 1860 the average slave holder was ten times as wealthy as the average non-slaveholder

A major reason for the shrinking number of slave owners and their increased wealth was the rapidly increasing price of slaves a prime field hand was worth more than $1,500 in 1855. Such princes caused internal slave trade to flourish during the 1850’s slave owners from the Upper South sold some 250,000 slaves to the Lower South for handsome profits. American slavery had its origin the percentage of slave owns had fallen to 28% while the comparable figures for Louisiana and Mississippi were 45%

Hinton Helper: The Impending Crisis His protest was an indicator of the growing tensions between the haves and have not’s in the south

Hinton Rowan Helper (December 27, 1829 – March 8, 1909) was a Southern US critic of slavery during the 1850s. In 1857, he published a book which he dedicated to the "nonslaveholding whites" of the South. The Impending Crisis of the South, written partly in North Carolina but published when the author was in the North, argued that slavery hurt the economic prospects of non-slaveholders, and was an impediment to the growth of the entire region of the South. Anger over his book due to the belief he was acting as an agent of the North attempting to split Southern Whites along class lines led to Southern denunciations of 'Help

The book, which was a combination of statistical charts and provocative prose, attracted little attention until 1859 when it was widely reprinted in condensed form by Northern opponents of slavery. Helper concluded that slavery hurt the Southern economy overall (by preventing economic development and industrialization), and was the main reason why the South had progressed so much less than the North (according to the results of the 1850 census). Helper spoke on behalf of the majority of Southern whites of moderate means—the Plain Folk of the Old South—whom he said were oppressed by a small (but politically dominant) aristocracy of wealthy slave-owners.[6]

The reaction in the South was very negative. According to John Spencer Bassett, who studied the issue and wrote in 1898, circulating Helper's book could be the basis of criminal charges and politicians often accused each other of having read it, but many of the most successful politicians read it and used it to change the problems stated.[7] In his 1867 essay, "War of races. By whom it is sought to be brought about. Considered in two letters, with copious extracts from the recent work of Hilton R. Helper", John Harmer Gilmer calls Helper a profane miscreant, one of many insults directed at Helper in that e