The Consolidation of Slavery in the South, 1790-1836

The invention of the cotton gin led to the expansion and consolidation of slavery in the South. This, in turn, encouraged the acquisition of new territories and the establishment of new states, and fueled the birth of industry in England and the northern United States. These developments sparked the first major sectional controversy over slavery in the nineteenth century, resulting in the Missouri Compromise of 1821. Cotton’s success also led to the forced removal of Native Americans from southern soil, to make more room for plantations, and the sale of African Americans from the upper to the lower South.

In the 1780s, the future of slavery had seemed uncertain as profits from traditional crops—especially tobacco and indigo—declined. As many white southerners began moving west to find new opportunities, New England–born Eli Whitney, living on a Georgia plantation, revived the southern economy when he invented the cotton gin in 1793. This simple device transformed southern agriculture. Long-staple cotton, with its resistance to rot and characteristic long fibers and smooth seeds, was already profitable in the Sea Islands of the Carolinas and Georgia. By 1791, planters there, responding to demands from British factory owners, had produced some two million pounds. But long-staple cotton could be grown only in the mineral-rich alluvial soils of the southern coast. Short-staple cotton could be grown much more widely, but enslaved persons required substantial time and effort to pluck out its sticky seeds by hand, limiting the crop’s profitability.

Whitney solved this problem by constructing a wooden box filled with a series of combs attached to a handle. As a worker (usually an enslaved person) cranked the handle, the combs separated seeds from fiber. Using even the most primitive gin (short for engine), a worker could clean ten times more than was possible when plucking seeds by hand. By the early 1800s, cotton could be produced profitably almost anywhere south of Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri. It was produced not only on large plantations by bound labor, but also on small farms where white families, sometimes assisted by one or two enslaved persons, could hope to turn a profit.

The spread of short-staple cotton generated by the invention of the cotton gin coincided with two other developments that guaranteed “King Cotton” would rule throughout the region. The first happened just after 1750, when a population explosion in Europe created an enormous demand for food, clothing, and shelter. Technological innovations further fueled the booming market, enabling English textile factories to increase production and lower the price of cotton goods. By the mid-eighteenth century, British craftsmen, utilizing the power of water and steam, had developed machines to drive textile looms and spin thread. Entrepreneurs then built factories where workers, paced by machines, produced much greater quantities of cloth than ever before.

In the early nineteenth century, the domestic demand for cotton also began to grow. While the Embargo Act of 1807 (see Chapter 5) devastated the economy of the nation’s young seaports, crippled merchants, and threw sailors and dockworkers out of work, New England’s nascent textile manufacturers benefited. Entrepreneurs had managed to replicate some of the most important British inventions and now, for a short time at least, had access to cheap southern cotton and protection from the flood of English cloth. This combination helped create a domestic market in raw cotton and manufactured cloth. Cotton soon became not just the South’s but the nation’s leading export, assuring that a vast army of enslaved workers and huge expanses of fertile soil would be harnessed to produce cotton. Realizing that the importation of enslaved persons would come to an end in 1808 (as allowed by the U.S. Constitution), planters undertook frenzied purchases of Africans and then participated in an expanding internal slave trade. By the 1810s, that internal slave trade stretched across the Deep South, into the Mississippi Territory and the southern portions of the Louisiana Territory. The invention of the cotton gin, then, transformed the South and the nation and even helped to fuel industrial growth internationally. It also inspired resistance and rebellion among the growing population of enslaved persons, posed new challenges for non-enslaving white Americans, and fed antislavery sentiments among wary whites, North and South. As the new republic grew, it was influenced at every turn by the profits and problems associated with slavery and cotton.

Throughout the early 1800s, the United States acquired vast tracts of new territory through purchase, the repayment of debts, and military conquest. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was the most important in opening lands to small farmers and large planters. It also set the stage for the national government to play a new role, as land deemed the “frontier” by those living along the eastern seaboard was turned into “property” that could be legally owned by white Americans. Throughout the 1810s and 1820s, the President and Congress supported explorations of western territories, such as the groundbreaking journey of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804, as well as land surveys and the establishment of legal land titles. They also debated whether the U.S. government should fund internal improvements, such as roads, bridges, canals, and other forms of transportation, to assist settlement in these new territories. They argued as well over whether and how to remove Native Americans who lived in regions now desired by white planters and farmers.

In the long run, geographical expansion assured political conflict as slavery became more entrenched in the South and free labor grew dominant in the North. In 1790, the populations of North and South were about equal, and so was their representation in Congress. But the North’s population grew faster, and the balance of power in Congress shifted accordingly. By 1820, the states that relied on slave labor found themselves with just 42 percent of the votes in the House of Representatives; only in the U.S. Senate was North-South parity maintained.

During these years of declining southern political power, many white southerners left the Piedmont region of the Carolinas and Georgia. More than 100,000 headed west to Kentucky and Tennessee as early as 1790. Beginning then and increasing throughout the early 1800s, state governments chartered private companies that invested in internal improvements. Most of these charters granted these companies the power of eminent domain, a legal device that allowed them to force owners to sell land at “a reasonable price,” thereby allowing states to gain land along the rights-of-way for bridges, roads, and canals. Although challenged by small farmers and others whose land was taken, state courts upheld eminent domain on numerous occasions, with judges agreeing that “progress for great numbers” of Americans should prevail over the lesser rights of individual property owners.

A number of Democratic-Republican leaders, including James Madison and James Monroe of Virginia and Henry Clay of Kentucky, argued that the federal government should promote internal improvements that benefited more than one state. Clay followed the economic nationalist logic of Federalist Alexander Hamilton, but he proposed an “American System” that would aid the common man as well as planters and merchants by funding roads that linked new western settlements to eastern ports and markets. But President James Monroe’s 1817 veto of the Bonus Bill, which would have established a national fund for roads and other internal improvements, left the states in charge of internal improvements. Most states continued to charter private companies to perform the actual work of building and improving the nation’s transportation system.

As these debates continued, western migration accelerated. The network of roads expanded, and the steamboat was invented and improved. Furnace-heated boilers powered steam engines that allowed these boats to travel as quickly upstream as downstream. Despite early problems with fires, explosions, and sinkings, steamboats greatly increased the speed and ease of transporting goods and people. In 1817, the port of New Orleans welcomed some seventeen steamboats, loaded with migrants and freight. Just three decades later, more than five hundred steamboats arrived and departed each year. A large proportion of the early migrants were single men, seeking adventure as well as economic opportunity. Often as practiced at drinking, gambling, and fighting as farming, they embraced frontier life.

The level of violence that characterized everyday existence in the region shocked many Americans. Eye-gouging contests, ear biting and teeth bashing, stabbings, and knifings all reflected the rough-and-tumble quality of life on the southern frontier. The stories of Davy Crockett and other legendary figures, who killed bears or Native warriors with their bare hands, epitomized the raw virility that defined and dominated much of frontier culture.

The earliest migrants, whether they moved out to the Louisiana Territory or closer to home in western Georgia, Tennessee, or Kentucky, often chose to “squat” on land rather than to buy it. Squatters simply staked claims to what they considered empty acreage by selecting a spot, settling on it, and implementing “improvements”—building a rough cabin, clearing the land, and planting crops. In most newly opened frontier areas, squatters were as prevalent as owners. Over time, however, state and federal agents, land speculators, and planters sought to regularize land ownership, demanding land titles and payments to assure continued occupancy.

The state of Georgia, which claimed lands reaching to the Mississippi River, instituted a lottery to distribute land in the sparsely settled western part of the state. Most winners, however, took cash for their land certificates from speculators who then resold the land to small farmers. The federal government also sold western land on credit. In 1800 and 1804, Congress hoped to assist cash-poor migrants by lowering both the minimum acreage for purchases and the price per acre. Again, however, most land ended up in the hands of speculators rather than individual owners.

By the 1810s, improved transportation facilitated the movement of people and products between the East and the new Northwest settlements in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. With the aid of the steamboat, northwesterners could market their surplus grain and livestock in the new South, just as new planters in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee could sell some sugar, rice, and cotton in the Northwest. Towns and cities along steamboat routes—including Pittsburgh and Cincinnati on the Ohio River, and New Orleans and St. Louis on the Mississippi—flourished. In this manner these newly settled western areas, north and south, became temporarily linked in an economic partnership. Representatives from these areas were among the strongest supporters of federal funds for internal improvements and government removal of Native Americans to lands further west.  

Unlike small farmers who lived in the cotton belt, those on the frontier were less likely to raise crops demanded by the export economy. For most, staking everything on cotton was too risky: a sudden drop in prices could land them in debt, even strip them of their land. Ferdinand Steel farmed a small plot with his brother in Mississippi in the 1830s. He noted in his diary, “I do not think it is a good plan to depend so much on cotton; it takes up all our time. . . . raise corn and keep out of debt and we will have no necessity of raising cotton.” Farm families like the Steels concentrated on fishing, hunting, and raising grain to produce the food, tools, and clothing they needed to survive. If they produced more than they needed, they could sell or exchange the surplus locally for such necessities as coffee, molasses, nails, needles, and cooking utensils. Corn was the preferred crop because it was useful regardless of its market price; it could be eaten by family members and by livestock, and it could easily be bartered for other goods. Fishing was another important source of food and income.

For frontier residents, family labor and local exchange networks were the keys to success. Trade among neighbors led to the formation of social as well as economic ties and created communities out of scattered households. In this context, the marriage market was as important as the cotton or produce market for those seeking a larger stake. Landless men hoped to marry the daughters of settled farmers, and farmers sought to marry the daughters of neighbors as a way of increasing their holdings. Wives and daughters enhanced a family’s standing by selling domestic manufactures for cash or raising chickens, churning butter, and working in the fields. Expansion, then, shaped not only economic opportunities and choices but also family and community relations.

Although these frontier communities seemed far removed from events in the nation’s capital, they were in fact deeply affected by both domestic and foreign politics. Small farmers were particularly concerned about the acquisition of territory and the building of roads into the trans-Appalachian region. Threats from Native peoples, on whose lands white settlers repeatedly trespassed, led to frequent demands that the government provide protection to settlers. The War of 1812 heightened tensions between migrants and local Native nations who had hoped that alliances with the British would end white encroachment. Instead, western expansion after the war widened sectional fissures over slavery and sparked heated political conflicts.

The War of 1812 had inspired intense opposition from many merchants and politicians in the Northeast because of its devastating effect on maritime trade. (see Chapter 5) Farmers in the South and West, however, enthusiastically supported the war. They hoped victory would reopen the British cotton market and lessen Native peoples’ ability to thwart white settlement. Indeed, the federal government did open new lands for settlement after 1815, thereby expanding opportunities available to landless sons and daughters, small farmers, and large planters. The U.S. government also rewarded War of 1812 veterans with land warrants, increasing pressure on western territories. In 1820, Congress lowered the price per acre, from $2.00 to $1.25, to make settlement even more appealing. International developments provided the opportunity for further expansion. In 1817, on the heels of a military incursion into Florida led by U.S. General Andrew Jackson, Spain agreed to sell the territory to the United States. According to the terms of the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty, Spain gave Florida to the United States along with its lands in the Northwest, and the United States gave up its claims to Texas. 

That same year, one long-term implication of the U.S. expansion became clear. In 1819, the Missouri Territory applied for admission to the Union as a slave state and touched off a fierce debate over the place of enslaved and free labor in the nation. Confirming planter fears that the North would apply its political power to weaken the institution of slavery, New York congressman James Talmadge, Jr. proposed as a condition of Missouri statehood that no additional enslaved persons be admitted within its borders and that all enslaved children born following statehood be emancipated at age twenty-five. Such gradualist approaches to emancipation were popular among white northerners. Despite the limited form of manumission in Talmadge’s proposal, it triggered a sectional battle. Most northern congressmen, 87 of 101, voted for the proposal; the vast majority of southerners opposed it. The U.S. Senate, where enslavers exercised more power, voted to impose no restrictions on slavery in Missouri. But the Senate alone could not admit a state into the Union.

Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, broke the impasse. The architect of the American System, Clay was committed to putting national interests first, politically as well as economically. When Maine applied for statehood in 1820, Clay engineered a compromise that a majority of northern and southern congressmen could support. According to this Missouri Compromise, Missouri would be admitted with no restrictions on slavery. At the same time, Missouri’s southern border (see map) would be extended westward through the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. Henceforth, no territory north of that line would be admitted to the Union as a slave state. The Missouri Compromise also opened the way for the statehood of Maine, blocked in the U.S. Senate until the Missouri issue was resolved.

Many northerners bitterly denounced the 1820 compromise as an enslaver victory. But planters were unhappy, too; the entire affair confirmed their suspicions about the North’s attitude toward their labor system. Congress’s freewheeling debate over the Missouri Compromise had made public views that southerners considered subversive. Worse, free Black people living in the capital had filled the House galleries during the debates and listened intently to the antislavery speeches. Who knew how far these words might travel and what their effect might be?

Still, the conflicts engendered by territorial expansion did not stop southerners from seeking lands farther west. As early as the beginning of the century, some white Americans had settled in the Mexican province of Coahuila-Texas. Despite the terms of the Adams-Onís Treaty, systematic colonization of the area began in earnest during the 1820s, organized by Virginia-born Stephen Austin. Even after Mexico, now independent from Spanish control, outlawed slavery in 1829, southerners continued to move into the region. In 1830, about a thousand enslaved persons, owned by U.S. citizens, also lived in the province. Austin had secured a special provincial law permitting slavery to operate under a different name: “permanent indentured servitude.”

Planters also moved in great numbers into the rich and fertile U.S.-controlled lands along the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. The mixed population of poor white people, small farmers, free Black people, and Native people that had earlier characterized the lower Mississippi was supplanted in the 1820s and 1830s by a vast plantation society in which small white populations controlled the labor of thousands of enslaved persons. Over time, differences in access to land, enslaved persons, and wealth would increase antagonism among white southerners of different classes. In addition, planters increased profits through the massive importation of enslaved persons and more brutal work regimens, prompting growing fears of slave rebellions. These problems would not surface in their most acute forms for another generation, however. In the early 1800s, Native peoples provided the greatest resistance to white Americans’ plans for westward expansion.

King Cotton set white settlers on a collision course with Native Americans. In 1790, Native peoples occupied villages throughout the twenty-five million acres of what would become the cotton-growing states. During the early 1800s, many were herded into reservations. Others moved west, voluntarily or not. Still others tried to survive by adopting the ways of white missionaries and farmers. Some shifted property ownership from women to men, adapted to plows and spinning wheels, and sent their children to English-language schools and Christian churches. Cherokees welcomed Moravian missionaries in 1799, for instance, because they offered to open a school. Some Native farmers even adopted slavery. Such efforts at integration ultimately failed, however.

Among the largest nations in the Southeast were Cherokees, Muscogees (Creeks), Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. Despite the fierce resistance offered by Seminoles to white invaders in Florida, these Native nations became known among white Americans as the “Five Civilized Tribes” because they adopted many of the institutions of the surrounding white settlers. For many Native Americans, conversion to Christianity seemed to offer one of the best hopes for peaceful coexistence. Moravians, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists all sent missionaries into southeastern Native nations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with limited success. Even where missionaries enjoyed success, however, many Native converts continued to practice traditional burial and marriage rituals.

Government officials hoped to replace Native nations and values with those more appropriate to a market-oriented society, and specifically targeted communal land ownership. A U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs argued, “Common property and civilization cannot coexist.” Yet replacing communal land ownership meant weakening the ties connecting the individual Native person to the community and binding the community as a whole to its land. Dividing Native land into private plots made it easier for white settlers to acquire legal title to that land. One method was already tried and true: merchants drew Native peoples into debt, often through questionable bookkeeping, and then accepted land in payment of that debt.

As a result of government policy, missionary intervention, and trade relations, by the early 1800s a new class of Native Americans (many of mixed Native and white parentage) embraced Euro-American ways of life. Because clan membership passed through the mother’s line in many of these nations, the sons of white men and Native women could claim seats on Native councils. The children of such marriages were often bilingual and familiar with both white American and Native ways. With white backing, these men acquired growing political power within Native councils and used it to promote the transformation of Native polities into an approximation of white male-dominated America. Indeed, many sought to deprive women of traditional property and Native inheritance rights that were rooted in matrilineal descent.

The decision to embrace white ways spurred resistance within many nations. For instance, some young Muscogee warriors became increasingly estranged from Muscogees elders, who favored accommodating to U.S. authority. In 1813, a bloody war erupted, pitting these young “Red Sticks,” as they were known, against thousands of white southern militiamen, as well as against Muscogee, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw warriors who hoped for greater leniency from white settlers in exchange for this alliance. The fierce, but unequal, combat ended in March 1814 at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, where more than a thousand Native people died. White Americans considered Andrew Jackson, then commanding the Tennessee militia, the hero of this engagement.

Among the losers were Muscogees who allied with Jackson. The Treaty of Fort Jackson, which ended the fighting, transferred fourteen million acres (more than half the land in Alabama) from Muscogees to U.S. control. Moreover, the defeat of Native people at Horseshoe Bend opened the floodgates to southern white migrants. By 1826, Muscogees of Georgia had been driven westward, setting a precedent that would eventually unseat almost the entire population of the Five Civilized Tribes. Throughout the 1820s, white southerners repeatedly sought to secure lands owned by Native peoples, setting off jurisdictional disputes not only between sovereign nations and state courts, but also between state courts and federal authorities. Georgia led the way, forcing Muscogees to cede land to the state in 1825 and 1827 and claiming in 1828 that the Cherokee was not an independent nation but simply a collection of individuals subject to state laws.

What approaches do historians take to writing the histories of Indigenous people in North America from 1790-1850?

In response to these threats of removal, some southeastern Native peoples turned to U.S. courts. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, Native nations—although technically recognized as independent nations—were increasingly subject to federal and state laws. They now hoped to use those laws, along with existing treaties, to save themselves from eradication. In 1827, the Cherokees adopted a formal constitution modeled on that of the United States. White leaders, however, were less interested in "transforming" Native peoples than in removing them from the region altogether. When it became clear that removal was the ultimate goal of white southerners, a majority of Cherokees opposed further concessions and fought their removal right up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Led by Chief Justice John Marshall, who had shaped the federal judiciary since his appointment in 1801, the U. S. Supreme Court held responsibility for adjudicating cases between states and foreign governments. Marshall had been involved in many landmark decisions, including Marbury v. Madison (1803), which established the court’s right to review the constitutionality of acts of Congress and of state legislatures. He was an ardent defender of the authority of the national government. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Supreme Court ruled that the establishment of the Bank of the United States was constitutional, and Marshall declared: “The government of the Union, though limited in its powers, is supreme within its sphere of action.”  In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), Marshall once again reinforced the power of the central government, this time at the expense of Native polities as well as states. The plaintiffs argued that their polity was a sovereign, thereby “foreign” nation, requiring the protection of the federal courts. Sympathetic to the Native peoples’ claims but unwilling to grant them independent political authority, the Court ruled that Native nations had a special but still dependent status within the nation. Marshall used the analogy of “a ward to his guardian” to express this special status, and on that basis argued that the Cherokee Nation had no standing before the U.S. Supreme Court. Still, he viewed Native people as federal, not state, wards.

Just a year later, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Marshall Court strengthened federal authority over Native Americans, while also strengthening tribal sovereignty. The Court determined that Native peoples were members of “domestic dependent nations” with a right to their own land and “distinct political communities” with exclusive authority within their territorial boundaries. Upholding his earlier commitment to federal authority, the Chief Justice concluded that only the federal government, not the states, could regulate commerce with Native polities.

The Court’s rulings proved largely meaningless, however. Andrew Jackson, elected president in 1828, had pushed through an Indian Removal Act in 1830, offering Native reservations west of the Mississippi in exchange for their current lands. Despite some opposition from northern religious groups and a massive anti-removal petition initiated by northern women, Native removal had substantial popular support among white people, especially among southern planters and backcountry settlers. Under pressure from federal agents and threat of military intervention, many Native nations, or at least Native leaders, signed away most of their eastern territory. The federal government quickly set out to relocate all southeastern polities.Twenty-three thousand Choctaws and some Cherokees were pressured into moving west in 1831–32. Most of the Seminole Nation was removed between 1832 and 1835. Others were transported by force—the Muscogees in 1836, the Chickasaws the next year. In 1838, Cherokees who had refused the government’s offer of land in the West were uprooted by federal troops. The troops herded some fifteen thousand members of the polity across the eight-hundred-mile “Trail of Tears” to present-day Oklahoma. One in four Cherokees died on the way.

The removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from lands that could be profitably cultivated in cotton and sugar opened the door to an expanded plantation economy based on slave labor. In the two decades before the 1808 stoppage of slave importations, planters purchased some quarter million Africans, doubling the number who had been imported in the previous two centuries. In the following years, natural reproduction and the internal slave trade would replace importation from Africa in meeting the demand for workers.

The need for labor was motivated in large part by the rapid expansion of cotton production. “To sell cotton in order to buy negroes,” one Mississippian noted, “to make more cotton to buy more negroes, ad infinitum, is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thoroughgoing cotton planter.” Yet cotton was not the only source of profit for enslavers. Rice and sugar also underwrote the expansion of slave labor and, in the case of sugar, the movement westward as well. Following the fate of Native peoples, tens of thousands of enslaved Black workers from the Chesapeake and the Carolinas were forced to move to new homes and adapt to new work regimens. For enslaved persons, those work regimes were shaped most significantly by the size of the farm or plantation and the particular crops being cultivated—cotton, tobacco, sugar, or rice.

The growing number of enslaved persons trapped in bondage labored under a variety of conditions. In 1830 a significant portion of enslaved persons still worked on small farms, where a laborer might cook one day and hoe cotton the next. Here patterns of labor varied from season to season as owners tried to assure profits and, at the same time, cultivate sufficient food and raw materials to sustain their own families. In such situations, enslaved persons had more direct interaction with owners and could hope that a successful owner might purchase nearby family members. But African Americans who lived on small holdings also had less chance of developing kin and community ties within their own quarters, and they faced a greater danger that one bad season could cause them to be transferred as payment for debts.

On large plantations, the demands on laborers differed from place to place, from crop to crop, and from job to job. For instance, house enslaved persons lived under quite different conditions from field hands. Frederick Douglass remembered that domestic enslaved persons “constituted a sort of black aristocracy” who “resembled the field hands in nothing except their color.” Yet house enslaved persons, although privileged in certain ways, still worked hard. Moreover, female domestics lived in closer proximity to white people and were thus more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse. Black women washed clothes, cleaned, and cooked, tasks that involved heavy and tedious labor in the early nineteenth century.

Fugitive slave James Curry recalled the burdens his mother faced as a cook on a North Carolina plantation. “My mother’s labor was very hard.” She milked fourteen cows early each morning, started preparing the bread for breakfast, and churned the cream. After feeding and “clearing away the family breakfast, she got breakfast for the slaves. . . .” Once she completed chores around the house, she cooked the family dinner, simple or fancy depending on whether there were guests. She was still working in the kitchen at eight to nine o’clock at night, when the “slaves’ dinner was to be ready,” and then she milked the cows again. “She would not get to her log cabin until nine or ten o’clock at night. She would then be so tired that she could scarcely stand,” so she would sit by the fire and sew and darn clothes for her children until she fell asleep.

James Curry’s mother was also responsible for watching the youngest children of those mothers who worked in the field. Although the specific demands on field hands varied from crop to crop, the general conditions of agricultural labor were harsh indeed. From planting time through harvest season, dawn signaled the start of a working day that often extended far into the night. Most fieldwork ended at dusk, but there might be cotton to gin, sugar to mill, corn to grind, or any number of other jobs that could be done indoors by the light of a lantern. Even in winter there were miscellaneous chores: fences to build and mend, hogs to slaughter, and wood to chop, haul, and stack. Enslaved persons also performed the carpentry and blacksmithing that kept a plantation productive and in good repair.

Whatever the season, after laboring for the white enslaver, enslaved persons needed to prepare their own meals; feed and wash their children and put them to bed; clean their cabins; wash and mend their clothes; and do all the other chores of daily life. If enslaved persons were fortunate enough to have their own gardens or access to hunting or fishing, late nights and early mornings were almost the only times they could take advantage of these opportunities to improve their diet.

The work that women and men performed in the slave quarters was essential to their survival, since most enslavers spent as little as they could on food, shelter, and clothing for their slaves. Even generous enslavers supplied enslaved persons with inferior and inadequate clothing, shelter, and food. Planters typically supplied a weekly food ration of only three and a half pounds of salt pork or bacon and a quarter bushel of cornmeal. Although high in the calories needed for heavy labor, that diet had serious nutritional deficiencies.

Enslaved persons on rice plantations worked according to a task system that allowed many of them more time to take care of their own needs. Still, rice cultivation—of major importance in the South Carolina and Georgia low country and in Louisiana—required highly skilled but backbreaking labor. Women generally were responsible for March plantings. Unlike cotton, corn, or wheat, rice could not be scattered about a plowed field; each grain had to be carefully placed in a single row along the deep trenches that had been plowed and shaped earlier. Over the next five months, the fields had to be alternately flooded, left to dry in the sun, and hoed. Delay in any of these steps could ruin an entire crop. Beginning in August, the harvest kept every able-bodied enslaved person in the fields until October. Men cut the rice plants with sickles while women followed, bundling the plants. Later the plants had to be flailed by hand to separate the grain from the stalk. Rice cultivation involved intricate systems of dams and dikes to flood and drain the land; these were usually built or repaired by enslaved persons after the harvest and before the spring planting.

Much of the work on rice plantations was organized according to the task system, in which each enslaved person was assigned a particular task each day. Those who worked slowly might find themselves working long hours, but if the task was completed early, the rest of the day was free. This arrangement was intended to encourage enslaved persons to do their work quickly even without close supervision. It also shifted some of the responsibility for feeding the enslaved persons onto themselves. Former enslaved person George Gould remembered that his enslaver “used to come in the field, and tell the overseers not to balk [us], if we got done soon to let us alone and do our own work as we pleased.” For some enslaved persons, the task system permitted a degree of personal autonomy and even modest economic wellbeing. Those finishing their tasks early might spend their free time producing or acquiring fish, game, handicrafts, crops, even livestock for personal use, barter, and sale.

But rice cultivation also involved special perils. Work in the fields exposed enslaved persons to malaria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. One visitor attributed the high number of deaths among the enslaved to the “constant moisture and heat of the atmosphere, together with the alternate floodings and dryings of the fields, on which the negroes are perpetually at work, often ankle-deep in mud, with their bare heads exposed to the fierce rays of the sun . . . At such seasons every white man leaves the spot, as a matter of course, and proceeds inland to the high grounds; or, if he can afford it, he travels northward to the springs of Saratoga, or the lakes of Canada.”

Unlike rice cultivation, tobacco plantations relied primarily on gangs of enslaved persons performing the largely unskilled work. Plowing began in April. In May the tobacco plants that had been growing indoors since March were transplanted to the fields. For the next several months, gangs periodically worked in the fields, weeding, hoeing, and pruning the lower leaves of the tobacco plants. The plants were harvested in August and September, and hung to dry. Enslaved persons then stripped the stalks and prepared the leaves for export or manufacturing. Charles Ball, an enslaved person who worked both rice and tobacco, recalled that in the winter, there was “some sort of respite from the toils of the year,” as he and other enslaved persons “repaired fences, split rails for new fences, slaughtered hogs, cleared new land, [and] raised tobacco plants for the next planting.”

Large gangs also cultivated sugar and cotton, and planters could profit from the labor of the entire enslaved family—men, women, and children. In the interest of profit, cotton planters emphasized supervision and discipline, dividing most jobs by age and sex. In general, men plowed and women hoed, working side by side with members of their own sex. As schoolteacher Emily Burke observed, “During the greater part of the winter season, the negro women are busy in picking, ginning and packing cotton for market,” while men repaired buildings and cleared land.

During the harvest season, men and women worked together as they swept across one field after another, picking at an unrelenting pace. Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York, was kidnapped and sold to a Louisiana cotton planter. He recalled that the fastest worker took “the lead row,” and anyone who fell behind or was “a moment idle [was] whipped.” Through the heat of August, September, and October, all able-bodied men and women picked the cotton, stooping as they walked, pulling the bolls from the prickly pods, which cut their hands. This unrelenting labor kept them in the fields from sunrise until it was, Northup wrote, “too dark to see, and when the moon is full, they oftentimes labor till the middle of the night.” No one stopped “until the order to halt” was heard. Each day ended at the scales, where an overseer weighed the cotton each enslaved person had picked. Those who fell short of their quota were whipped.

Punishment was used more often than reward to induce enslaved persons to work harder, and whipping was the most common means. In the South Carolina rice-growing region, according to former enslaved person Hagar Brown, “Don’t do your task, driver wave that whip, put you over a barrel, beat you so blood run down.” On the Louisiana cotton plantation of Bennett Barrow, some three-quarters of the incidents that led to physical punishments were work-related: “for not picking as well as he can,” for picking “very trashy cotton,” “for not bringing her cotton up,” and so forth. On average, Barrow whipped one of his enslaved persons every four days. Others were imprisoned, chained, beaten, shot, or maimed in other ways. And with all this, his biographer tells us, Barrow treated enslaved persons better than did many of his neighbors.

The growing importance of slavery to southern agriculture was accompanied by rising prices for enslaved persons. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, competition from Caribbean sugar planters had begun to bid up enslaved persons' prices. Congress’ 1808 prohibition against the importation of Africans further constricted the supply, boosting prices even higher. These high prices led early nineteenth century owners to place a premium on the survival and natural reproduction of the enslaved persons they already owned, sometimes limiting their cruelty and even inspiring them to more generous food and housing allotments. Yet the value of enslaved persons and the movement of plantation agriculture into new areas also ensured the expansion of the internal slave trade. Perhaps nothing symbolized the human cost of bondage so vividly as the wholesale destruction of slave families through this trade—the key to success for some enslavers, especially in the Chesapeake. They managed to adapt to the declining profits of tobacco production by turning to the sale of surplus slave labor.When sold to an Alabama cotton planter, a Louisiana sugar baron, or a Carolina rice grower, a enslaved person born and raised in Maryland or Virginia fetched his or her enslaver a handsome return on his investment, often thousands of dollars.

Although some planters tried to sell slave families intact or at least to keep mothers and their children together, this practice declined over time. Increasingly, buyers sought younger and less expensive enslaved persons, and sellers ultimately complied with the demands of the market. Of course, some white owners never recognized the existence of slave families at all. Of those who did, many felt no obligation to maintain kin connections when high prices promised otherwise unobtainable profits.

Particularly from the 1820s on, the market in enslaved persons wreaked havoc on the families of African Americans, causing them enormous anguish. In March 1829, a Virginia resident wrote to the Genius of Universal Emancipation, an antislavery paper, describing “a most tragic occurrence...occasioned by those monsters who traffic in HUMAN FLESH.” A planter in the town of Hillsborough had sold a group of enslaved persons to a trader, who held the chattel in a room overnight. In the morning, a middle-aged woman among those sold was found dead, “choosing death rather than be dragged off by these tyrants.” Henry Watson, another Virginia enslaved person, recalled his agony when, as a small child, his mother was sold away. An older woman tried to comfort him, but Watson was inconsolable. “Every exertion was made on my part to find her, or hear some tidings of her, but all my efforts were unsuccessful; and from that day, I have never seen or heard from her.”

Enslaved families were also broken apart by the death of owners, which led to the division of estates for inheritance or payment of debts. Enslaved families might be broken up through the marriage of white planters, which were often accompanied by “gifts” of young enslaved persons to the new couple. Or an enslaver moving from one county to another might take his chattel with him, thereby severing connections between enslaved husbands and wives who lived on neighboring plantations. Enslaved persons, then, were dependent on their enslavers not just for food, clothing, and shelter, but for the very existence of their families.

Although the lives of all white southerners were affected by the spread of slavery, they did not share the same relationship to that institution. Wealthier white people, who obtained larger and larger numbers of enslaved persons, formed an elite planter class that controlled much of the economic and political power in the region. Small farmers often became dependent on neighboring planters for the transportation and sale of their cotton, yet they also challenged the right of planters to fence off property, dam rivers, and in other ways encroach on the customary privileges of local residents. Poorer white Americans generally lived short and brutal lives. The most fortunate hired themselves out to planters and farmers or headed west in hopes of finding cheaper land and new opportunities.

The planter class was a powerful group economically and politically, but they were not united on every issue. They differed in their ideas about slave management, in the roles played by women in their families, and in their ideas about the future of slavery. These differences were shaped in part by the size of their holdings in land and enslaved persons. Non-enslaving white people also differed in their wealth, ideas about slavery, and attitudes toward those above and below them in the southern social order. Successful farmers might hope to rise into the planter class one day, while those barely scratching out a living often resented the wealth and power wielded by local and regional elites. During the 1820s and early 1830s, the future of slavery, at least in upper South states like Virginia, hinged not only on relations between Black and white people but also between planters and non-enslaving whites.

Planters were, of course, dependent on their enslaved persons. Slavery was first and foremost a way of controlling the labor that produced profits from the commercial production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. Yet planters responded in different ways to the Black workers who served as the foundation of their world. Some planters were incredibly cruel, frequently employing the lash and the branding iron. Others, particularly those with close ties to the church, believed in a more benevolent style of authority. They might teach a few enslaved persons to read, allow them to attend church, and provide lighter workloads for pregnant and nursing women. At the same time, many planters who embraced evangelical teachings used religion to defend slavery as an institution and assert their authority over enslaved persons.

Plantation mistresses as well as enslavers varied in their responses to enslaved persons. Most mistresses were responsible for directing the house enslaved persons and for organizing clothing, food, and health care for field hands. While many mistresses complained about these responsibilities, few thought slavery should be eliminated. At most, they sought to improve enslaved persons’ living conditions and to diminish harsh punishments. But some were as likely as their husbands to inflict the whip or the branding iron. Plantation mistress Lucilla McCorkle, angry at “some disobedience, much idleness, sulleness and slovenliness” among the enslaved persons on her plantation, “Used the rod.” Others, like Sophia Smede, reminded her daughters that enslaved persons “are not machines, they are just like you, made from the same flesh and blood.”

The ranks of enslavers expanded steadily in the early nineteenth century. By 1830, some 225,000 white Southerners owned enslaved persons. Because slave labor yielded enslavers their wealth, power, and leisure, successful planters felt compelled to accumulate more enslaved persons. Although the absolute number of enslavers grew, the total white population grew faster. Enslaved persons were becoming more expensive, and a shrinking proportion of all white southerners could afford to own them. The 36 percent of white families who owned enslaved persons in 1830 shrank to 31 percent in 1850 and to 26 percent by 1860. Nonetheless, it was this enslaver segment of the white population that controlled the great bulk of the region’s wealth and wielded most of its political power.

Of course, not all enslavers were wealthy planters. The elite among plantation owners were those who held fifty or more enslaved persons and owned enough land to make such an investment in labor profitable. Next were the more numerous but less wealthy middling planters who owned between fifteen and fifty enslaved persons. Even more numerous were the small farmers who owned five or six enslaved persons and land valued at about three thousand dollars. Even that much property made the small southern enslaver many times wealthier than the average northerner. But dependence on the export economy left the southern farmer vulnerable to sharp decreases in crop prices or increases in the cost of land, transport, and most significantly, enslaved persons. Debt and economic uncertainty affected such people much more than they did the planter aristocracy. And as eastern lands became depleted, some elite planter families were compelled to uproot themselves, join the southwestern migration, and submit to the ruder life on the cotton frontier.

We know the planter elite best from its self-descriptions and later from novels and films that romanticized their life as elegant, cultured, and removed from the hectic pace and pressures of commerce or industry. Planters liked to see themselves in the role of stern but loving fathers guiding the lives of their plantation families—especially their enslaved “children”—with paternal wisdom and justice. But the story of enslavers and mistresses seated on the porches of grand mansions sipping mint juleps and ordering others benevolently to do their bidding was largely fictive and had little to do with life on most plantations in the 1820s and 1830s. Instead, many planters along the coast and on the frontier built modest homes on their country estates. When Pierce Butler brought his new wife, British actress Fanny Kemble, to his South Carolina Sea Islands rice plantation in 1834, she considered herself “on the outer bounds of civilized creation.” The house, she noted in despair, “consists of three small rooms . . . a wooden recess by way of a pantry, and a kitchen detached from the dwelling.

At least through the 1830s, the expansion of planters’ power was visible mainly in cities and towns rather than in the more remote agricultural hinterlands where their wealth was produced. Urban centers offered the chance to inhabit fancier living quarters, participate in the best social and political circles, join in courting rituals and marriage arrangements with other planter families, buy new furniture and the latest fashions, and keep up with news on national and international markets and prices.

On election and court days, held in county seats and major cities, planters could mingle with non-enslaving white people, small farmers, and lesser enslavers to cement ties of credit, kinship, and political clout. Meanwhile militia musters, market days, and slave auctions in cities and towns provided regular opportunities for white elites to demonstrate their enslaver authority, and largesse. The wives of wealthy planters did their part by assisting the sick and poor and planning church and social events. Such functions were particularly important in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, when unstable markets, slave rebellions, antislavery campaigns, evangelical revivals, and the pressure for westward expansion buffeted the planter elite.

Still, despite the uncertainties of the early nineteenth century, the planter class was increasingly in control of the South’s economy and politics. Southern elites controlled political offices in their home states and maintained a powerful presence in the nation’s capital. In towns and cities across the South, they established a strong political, religious and economic presence. These elites stood on the cusp of a new era, in which cotton was king and the plantation owner its favored subject.

After about 1820, opportunities began to narrow for the South’s small farmers, known as yeomen. The frontier no longer offered them the chance to start a better life, as large planters took over the most fertile areas. The removal of Native peoples, however, provided access to new lands in the Georgia upcountry, the western Carolinas, and northern sections of Louisiana and Mississippi. Here many independent farm families managed to secure a comfortable livelihood, while others at least succeeded in owning their own home and land.

The South’s small farmers were never completely isolated from the plantation economy. But from the 1820s on they became more enmeshed in its web as cotton, rice, and sugar became more central to the region’s economy. Small farmers often depended on planters for credit in hard times, and members of yeoman families might be employed on plantations as overseers or skilled laborers. In addition, the extensive family networks that characterized southern life assured that some small farmers and even poor white citizens might claim kinship with their more well-to-do enslaving neighbors.

Despite their ties to the planter elite, yeomen farmers did not always side with planters in their defense of slavery. By the 1820s and 1830s, throughout the upper South—in Missouri and Kentucky as well as Maryland and Virginia—residents questioned the financial profitability of slavery. Many farmers turned from tobacco to other crops, such as wheat, that did not require year-round labor. In 1831–32, the Virginia state legislature considered resolutions that supported the gradual emancipation of enslaved persons or their shipment back to Africa. Representatives from the western part of the state (what is today West Virginia), where yeomen rather than planters dominated the population, supported most of these resolutions. The resolutions received a substantial number of votes but failed to pass. This debate and the defeat of the resolutions was the result, in part, of timing, for in 1831 a major slave rebellion, led by Nat Turner, erupted in Virginia. Nonetheless, the existence of such a debate suggests the problems upper-South planters faced in sustaining the institution of slavery.

In states such as North Carolina and Georgia with strong plantation economies in their coastal counties, residents who lived in more mountainous regions often questioned the wisdom of expanding slavery. Small farm families in the South also objected to the ways in which wealthy planters usurped their rights and privileges as landowners. In the post-revolutionary era, southern legislators had expanded the voting rights of white men and the representation from newly settled western counties. Wielding their increased political clout, yeomen petitioned for better fence laws, payment for wartime damages, and fishing rights. In Georgia and the Carolinas in the early 1800s, upcountry farmers found their access to shad, a source of cheap and abundant food, severely curtailed by plantation owners who built dams and millraces down river, thereby diminishing the fish supply up river. Arguing that “the allmity [sic] intended” the fish “for all man kind,” petitioners complained, “We are rogued out of a part of our rights.” These non-slave-owning yeomen may have accepted slavery as an institution, but they continued to protest when planters trampled on rights they held dear.

Poor white people, on the other hand, who owned neither land nor enslaved persons, were largely at the mercy of planters and yeomen for their sustenance. In frontier areas, they might survive by hunting, fishing, and trapping, but in established regions, poor white women and men generally sold their labor to more well-to-do neighbors. Some moved to southern seaport cities, seeking work along the docks or as seamstresses or day laborers, but there they had to compete with free Black as well as slave labor, making steady employment unlikely. Although some managed to remain in the same community for years, others drifted from place to place, seeking opportunities wherever they might be.

By the 1830s, then, poor white people and small farmers across the South found themselves simultaneously pushed to the margins and enmeshed in a slave-based market economy. The plantation economy rewarded single-crop agriculture and reinforced a clear social hierarchy. Of course, being white and male promised some measure of status and protection against dependency. But increasingly it was large enslavers who ruled the South, politically, socially, and economically.

As slavery grew and spread into new areas of the South, African Americans sought new sources of support and honed older forms of resistance. The evangelical church provided one of the few arenas in which more harmonious relations between the races could develop in the eighteenth century. By the early 1800s, however, white churches had become more deeply involved in sustaining slavery even as growing numbers of Black people embraced evangelical Protestant beliefs. All-Black congregations offered one means of resisting white domination, but most were located in cities. For the vast majority of African Americans enslaved in rural areas, more direct means of resistance were necessary.

On plantations and small farms, enslaved women and men employed a variety of methods to slow the pace of work, subvert the owners’ authority, and create a sense of identity and community distinct from the white population. A small number of enslaved persons chose open rebellion over everyday resistance. Although none of these uprisings succeeded in toppling the institution of slavery, or even doing significant damage to it, each sent a shockwave of fear through the white South. Along with a small but growing movement opposed to slavery in the North, Black southerners' embrace of religion, resistance, and rebellion made clear that the institution of slavery could only be maintained by physical force and a strong political will. 

In the early 1800s, evangelical Protestantism had questioned the sense of hierarchy favored by most large planters, but by the 1820s this challenge began to fade. Nationwide, those churches that embraced the new evangelical creed—Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—saw their combined formal membership multiply more than thirteen times between 1800 and 1860. African Americans comprised nearly one-third of Baptist membership and perhaps one-quarter among Methodists. Yet a vision of a Christian community united across race and class lines did not materialize.

In the 1820s southern evangelical churches still housed diverse congregations, but increasingly such mixed bodies of worshippers reinforced rather than subverted social and political hierarchies. Although poor white people and enslaved persons might pray alongside yeomen farmers and large planters, the minister to whom they listened was beholden to the wealthier parishioners. Those denominations and ministers who continued to preach a more radically egalitarian message—the Quakers and Wesleyan Methodists, for instance—found themselves marginalized in the South, even silenced. Religion still provided solace for those less fortunate, but at least among white southerners, it no longer provided a powerful vehicle for resistance against planter domination.

From its emergence in the late 1700s, evangelical religion held a strong appeal for Black people as well as whites. Many African Americans sought to combine traditional African beliefs with elements of Christianity introduced by white preachers or by their owners. Although owners often used Christian beliefs to support the institution of slavery, claiming that it was God’s will that Africans were in bondage and white people were free, enslaved persons still found solace in religion. By accepting Christianity, enslaved persons could claim membership in the same spiritual world as white people. Indeed, one unnamed Black man, probably an enslaved person of the Reverend John Fort, challenged a white preacher to include enslaved persons equally in his ministries. “If God sent you to preach to sinners,” the man asked, “did he direct you to keep your face to the white folks constantly or is it because these give you money[?] The money might be “handed to you by our master,” he noted, but “we are the very persons who labor for this money.”

Some Protestant denominations allowed independent Black congregations to form in the early 1800s. They were often linked to free Black denominations in the North, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Although frequently sponsored and supervised by white individuals, these churches were the first and only community-wide institutions that allowed enslaved persons membership. Their deacons and preachers (commonly free Black people) were some of the only African Americans whom whites permitted to play any kind of leadership role among enslaved persons. Some Black ministers even attracted a white following.

In rural and frontier areas, ordained Black ministers and established Black or mixed-race congregations were harder to find. There, charismatic individuals gathered groups of believers around them, opening leadership roles to enslaved persons and to African American women, who were largely excluded from the ordained ministry. A traveler in the Georgia backcountry in the 1830s witnessed a group of some two hundred enslaved persons attending an open-air funeral service under the direction of a “preacher” from the local enslaved community.

Black women were especially active in the evangelical movement. Evangelical practices could replace traditional African birth rituals as protection for their children. Evangelicalism could also be wielded as a weapon against sexual abuse, with women calling on church authorities to discipline owners, employers, and even ministers who exploited them. Women comprised well over half of Black evangelical converts throughout the early 1800s, and some women drew on African customs that recognized women as spiritual leaders. Clarinda, a self-appointed preacher in Beaufort, South Carolina, attracted unrelenting hostility from white and Black church leaders, but also welcomed a steady stream of followers to attend weekly meetings in her home.

Relying on African American forms of evangelical Protestantism, enslaved and free Black people were able to formulate their own standards of proper behavior. They used them to judge their treatment by white people and to clarify mutual rights and obligations among themselves. For instance, the all-Black Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia, expelled a man named David for adultery and for slandering “every Sister in the Church.” Through such means, Black southerners strengthened their sense of group identity and their ties to one another. At the same time, they asserted an increased (if still very restricted) degree of self-regulation and self-rule.

Although some African Americans accommodated themselves to their owners’ wishes in order to avoid sale, brutal beatings, or other forms of punishment, others demonstrated their opposition to bondage through everyday acts of resistance. Using white people's own prejudices about the laziness and irresponsibility of Black labor, they broke tools, worked at a slow pace, damaged property, feigned illness or pregnancy, and engaged in other forms of sabotage. Enslaved cooks might spoil meals or spit in the soup before serving it. A few even poisoned their owners. Suspicious fires were also common on plantations. Enslaved persons might use them to distract enslavers from other crimes, such as the theft of meat or other goods. Many enslaved men and women also ran away, hiding out for days or weeks at a time. Some of them, mostly men, found their way to freedom in the North.

Despite nearly impossible odds, a small number of enslaved persons chose open revolt over daily resistance. These revolts revealed the deep feelings and aspirations that enslaved persons normally had to conceal from their enslavers. Although such open rebellions were rare, they were greatly feared by white southerners of all classes, and their outbreak often resonated across the region no matter how limited the actual event.

In these direct challenges to planter authority, enslaved African Americans often wielded the values, language, and symbols of evangelical Protestantism regularly invoked by the white enslavers who held them captive. Free African Americans who supported such rebellions made use of the nation’s revolutionary and republican heritage to express their views. Certainly the events in Saint Domingue and the enslaved person Gabriel's planned revolt in Richmond (see Chapter 5 ) worried southern planters. Most enslavers were unaware of day-to-day resistance on their own plantations—both because it was concealed by the enslaved persons’ skilled performance and because their own social blindness led them to regard their enslaved persons as docile, shiftless, or clumsy. Nonetheless, the image of the contented enslaved person never fully managed to calm the enslavers’ deep-seated fear that, given the right circumstances, their enslaved persons might rise up and cut their enslavers’ throats. As Virginia Congressman John Randolph reported, “the night bell never tolls for fire in Richmond, that the [white] mother does not hug the infant more closely to her bosom.”

In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a free Black carpenter living in Charleston, South Carolina, was charged with organizing one of the broadest and best-planned insurrectionary conspiracies in southern history. Vesey, a merchant seaman, traveled widely, read antislavery literature, and quoted antislavery speeches and the Bible to convince other Black people of the possibility of emancipation. The white authorities believed he had organized an insurrection that might involve as many as 9,000 enslaved persons. Despite questionable evidence of an actual conspiracy, white authorities quickly arrested 131 Charleston Black Americans. Whatever the actual extent of Vesey’s activities, he had managed to terrify the local white population. In the summer of 1822, as a brutal warning to other would-be rebels, Vesey and thirty-six others were hanged.

Open rebellion against white domination did not end in 1822, however. Free Black people and skilled enslaved persons, inspired by evangelical religion and white thinkers' debates over the place of slavery in the nation, would continue to play central roles in slave rebellions until the Civil War. Yet by 1830, it was clear that armed resistance was unlikely to overcome white hunger for bound labor, just as Native American resistance was unable to thwart white hunger for land. With the power of government regulation and military force behind them, white southerners seemed destined to defeat all who stood in their way.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, many white southerners, particularly in the upper South, had imagined that slavery would one day end. After all, George Washington had left instructions in his will to free his enslaved persons upon his death, and Thomas Jefferson had worried about sustaining the institution of bondage in a republic. In this context, ideas circulated regarding systems of gradual emancipation in which planters would be repaid for their investment in human flesh. Some, such as the wealthy white southerners who helped found the American Colonization Society in 1816, planned for that day by raising funds to ship African Americans back to their “homeland.” The organization received funds from private donors in the North and the South, evangelical churches, the U.S. Congress, and the Virginia and Maryland state legislatures, and did manage to send several boatloads of African Americans out of the country. In 1830, the Society established the nation of Liberia on the west coast of Africa to receive those it bought out of bondage.

Southern antislavery societies, usually dominated by Quakers, Methodists, or Baptists, also continued to exist during the first third of the nineteenth century, especially in the upper South. Some white craftsmen and farmers may have supported them. There were certainly instances in which white workers and tenant farmers encouraged and even helped individual enslaved persons to escape from their enslavers.

Yet during the early 1800s the total number of enslaved persons freed by colonization or antislavery societies was tiny compared to the rapid growth in the slave population. With the profits promised by cotton, sugar, and rice, the entrenchment of slavery was assured. More and more opponents of human bondage, South and North, abandoned hopes for the peaceful and gradual disappearance of slavery, which was increasingly considered a “peculiar institution” within American society.

By the mid 1820s, some northern states had abolished slavery, while others passed laws to ensure its eventual demise. New York was the last northern state to end slavery. In 1810, more than 60 percent of white households in Flatbush, on western Long Island (in what is today Brooklyn), contained enslaved persons. Owners of vast estates in New York’s Hudson River Valley also held large numbers of enslaved persons. Under New York’s 1817 abolition act, children born into slavery before July 4, 1827, would have to serve as indentured servants until the age of twenty-eight if male, and twenty-five if female. Most Black people throughout the North and Midwest were still denied voting rights, the right to testify in court, equal access to public accommodations and public schools, and entrance into an array of occupations. They were confined to menial and low-paying jobs and were subject to racist abuse and physical attacks. Still, more and more were technically free, and they founded an array of churches, schools, and mutual aid and literary societies to improve the quality of their lives.

Northern free Black people expressed their horror of slavery in a variety of ways. In 1826, members of the Massachusetts General Colored Association advocated both abolition and the advancement of free Black people. One especially compelling spokesperson was David Walker, the free-born son of an enslaved father. Walker had left his hometown in North Carolina for Boston as a youth and there earned a living by selling clothing. He soon became a leading figure in the city’s growing free Black community and an agent and writer for the New York–based Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first newspaper published by African Americans.

In 1829, Walker published Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that caused a sensation. Its militant tone and call to action by the enslaved marked a fundamental breach with earlier antislavery arguments. “Brethren,” Walker urged, “arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour.” When he did address white readers, Walker quoted their own revolutionary principles: “ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Walker claimed for enslaved persons the rights proclaimed “in this Republican Land of Liberty.”

On an oppressively hot August night in 1831, Walker’s demands were written in blood in an uprising in Southampton County, Virginia. Nat Turner, a religious leader and self-styled Baptist minister, was also a skilled enslaved person who had been forced into fieldwork and then sold away from his wife. Turner had received a vision while working in the fields, and he believed God had assigned him a mission. Although he was polite and respectful when in the company of white people, he plotted with a close circle of friends and family to overthrow their enslavers. On the night of August 21, Turner and a group of supporters killed all the members of the Travis family, his owners, beginning a bloody insurrection and a desperate, ultimately unsuccessful, bid for freedom that would end in the deaths of some sixty white men, women, and children.

Turner and all his co-conspirators were captured and tried, but Turner refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. In prison, the rebellious prophet continued to draw strength from his Christian faith. “Was not Christ crucified?” he proclaimed. Although Turner and sixteen of his compatriots were executed, the uprising continued to haunt white southerners. A letter published in the Richmond Whig a month after Turner’s capture placed responsibility for his religious zealotry squarely in the hands of white evangelical preachers and their “canting about equality.” It was they, or perhaps the enslaver’s son who had taught Turner to read, who had infected “an imagination like Nat’s” with “the possibility of freeing himself and his race from bondage.”

Enslaved persons paid dearly in the aftermath of the rebellion. Many were randomly killed all over Southampton County; some were beheaded, their heads posted along roads to serve as a warning to others. In nearby Richmond, the Virginia legislature defeated the proposal that would have instituted gradual emancipation and colonization. Instead, southern planters now tightened their grip on Black people, free and enslaved, and on anyone else who challenged their right to hold humans in bondage.

These hard-nosed planter tactics allowed northern abolitionists to gain a more sympathetic audience for their cause. Labor leader George Henry Evans openly defended Turner’s insurrection in his New York City abolitionist paper, the Daily Sentinel. Regretting the bloodshed, Evans noted that the rebels

...no doubt thought that their only hope...was to put to death, indiscriminately the whole race of those who held them in bondage. If such were their impressions, were they not justifiable in doing so? Undoubtedly they were, if freedom is the birthright of man, as the declaration of independence tells us.... Those who kept them in slavery and ignorance alone are answerable for their conduct.

In the year of Turner’s uprising, important new voices arose in the enslaved persons’ defense. William Lloyd Garrison, a white journalist and reformer living in Boston, invoked evangelical and republican principles to demand the “immediate abolition” of slavery. Noting that the U.S. Constitution failed to abolish the institution of slavery, he called it “a covenant with death, an agreement with Hell.” He insisted that enslavers should receive no compensation for enslaved persons who were liberated through abolition since they had already received the profits of their labor. Such demands, however, only hardened resistance to the antislavery message among the planter class.

Faced with resistance by enslaved persons and a small but growing critique of human bondage by white voices, southern planters worked to shore up the institution of slavery. They did so by further limiting the rights of enslaved persons and free Black people in the South and by reinforcing their economic supremacy through political dominance. They depended as well on the support of white northerners, whose financial success was tied to the spread of plantation agriculture, especially cotton. Still, fearing that these efforts were not sufficient to protect the system of slavery, southern Congressman tried to silence discussions of abolition in Congress. They also argued with growing vehemence that the rights of states to determine their own economic and social policies had to be defended against unconstitutional assertions of federal authority.

Only a small minority of northerners ever signed an antislavery petition or subscribed to abolitionist newspapers, yet those who did represented a serious threat to white southerners. Legislators in Virginia and North Carolina, fearing the influence of antislavery literature, made it illegal to teach enslaved persons to read. Other states outlawed Black-controlled worship services. James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina planter, informed his journal in 1831, “Intend to break up negro preaching and negro churches. . . . [And] ordered night [prayer] meetings on the plantation to be discontinued.”

Increasingly, the only preaching that was allowed by planters was that which bound enslaved persons more tightly to their enslavers. Enslaved persons were clear about the effects of this shift in attitudes. “Talk not about kind and Christian master,” James W. C. Pennington, a Maryland-born enslaved person, wrote after his escape. “They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them.”  One of the last hopes for racial cooperation in the South, the evangelical church with a mixed-race congregation, was lost.

By 1830, the growth of the free Black population in the South had slowed considerably. Those who managed to avoid the chains of enslavement and to remain in the region lived predominantly in urban areas, such as Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Savannah, and New Orleans. They supported themselves as manual laborers, domestics, petty traders, artisans, or small shopkeepers. Within these free Black communities, women generally outnumbered men, making it difficult to form and sustain intact free Black families. And the children of free mothers, especially when a father was not present, were subject to apprenticeship laws that placed them in virtual bondage to white employers. To survive in this setting, free Black southerners formed support networks among themselves, founded their own churches and clubs, and demonstrated, at least in public, deference to those whites individuals who paid their wages, bought their goods and services, and tolerated their presence.

Yet in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion, whites assumed that the freedom of any Black people could stimulate dangerous notions among enslaved persons. An 1831 petition to Virginia’s legislature explained white people's fears. Once “indulged with the hope of freedom,” otherwise “submissive and easily controlled” enslaved persons “reject restraint and become almost wholly unmanageable.” The Virginia legislature immediately passed new restrictions on their activities, denying free Black people the right to own firearms, be ordained as ministers, or meet for worship without the sanction of local white officials. By the 1830s, free Black people in every southern state found their rights limited, their movements restricted, and their very presence assailed and sometimes banned. The mere presence of free Black people in a society built upon racial slavery marked a powerful contradiction, one that white elites worked hard to contain.

Having further restricted the rights and movements of enslaved persons and free Black people, state and local governments in the South also suppressed nearly all opposition to, and even doubts about, chattel slavery. They banned antislavery messages conveyed in books, newspapers, schools, politics, or any other public forum. And they fought back directly against northern abolitionists. Georgia offered a $5,000 reward for the trial and conviction “under the laws of this state” of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison. A reward of $1,000 was offered for the delivery of David Walker’s corpse, $10,000 if he was captured and returned to the South alive.

Southern planters were relieved that as the battles over slavery escalated, they could count on the support of the nation’s highest authority, the President of the United States. Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee enslaver, opponent of Native peoples, and celebrated military leader, had captured the White House in 1828 with widespread support from southern and western voters (see Chapter 7).

In most cases, Jackson rewarded his southern constituency by supporting their goals, particularly when it came to slavery. In his annual message to Congress in 1835, the President called for legislation to prohibit, “under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the enslaved persons to insurrection.” Recognizing their support in the White House, in May 1836 southern congressmen succeeded in instituting a “gag rule” in the House of Representatives so that all antislavery petitions were rejected without consideration.

Yet aware of the dangers posed by antislavery advocates, by the North’s greater representation in the U.S. Congress, and by the nation’s commercial and industrial development, southern planters could not depend on federal power alone, even with a sympathetic president in the White House. They needed as well to reassert the power of the states to control their own destinies. Thus they argued with renewed force that the U.S. Constitution had given only certain powers to the federal government; the rest were reserved for the states. This reassertion of states’ rights drove a wedge between President Jackson and southern political leaders.

Determined to assert the primacy of state’s rights, South Carolina seized the political initiative in the early 1830s. The tariff of 1832 provided the pretext. In 1828, Congress had increased tariffs on a range of manufactured goods, passing a bill known to southern critics as the “tariff of abominations.” Before the northern and southern economies had begun to diverge sharply, enslavers such as South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun had supported protectionism. As cotton prices plunged from 1819 on, however, high tariffs on manufactured goods created a crisis. Although the Tariff of 1832, signed into law by President Jackson, moderated some high rates, it did not lower rates on cloth or iron products. Moreover, southern politicians had now come to despise tariffs on imported, manufactured goods as an arbitrary tax levied by the industrializing North on the agricultural South. Because of their emphasis on growing cotton and other crops for export, Southern planters wanted to lower the price of manufactured goods, most of which they had to purchase at tariff inflated prices. This way, they could keep their profits from flowing into the pockets of northern merchants. In November 1832, South Carolina’s leadership met in special convention and declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 “null, void, no law, nor binding upon this state, its officers or citizens.” Sounding surprisingly like the Cherokee Nation in declaring its sovereignty, South Carolina forbade the collection of the tariff by federal agents and refused its enforcement within state boundaries.

This stance was backed by sentiments stronger and calculations deeper than those connected simply with the tariff. By nullifying this federal law, South Carolina meant to serve notice that it would not allow the federal government to impose any laws harmful to planter interests. Thus, even as government agents and troops were welcomed in Georgia and the Carolinas to help in the removal of Native people, planters were asserting their freedom from unwanted federal interference. As Robert Turnbull, a South Carolina planter, explained of his opposition to the tariffs:“[G]reat as is this evil, it is perhaps the least of the evils which attend an abandonment of one iota of the principle of controversy. Our dispute involves questions of the most fearful import to the institutions and tranquility of South Carolina.”

Although sympathetic toward his fellow planters, President Jackson considered Carolinians’ fears exaggerated and responded angrily to their attacks on the federal government, of which he was after all the chief executive. He promptly reinforced the federal fort in Charleston Harbor and obtained a “force bill” from Congress authorizing the use of the military to implement federal law. Henry Clay, his opponent in the presidential race, joined with other congressmen to fashion a compromise. Congress agreed to reduce tariffs over the next nine years, and in early 1833 South Carolina repealed its nullification act. But to demonstrate its continued belief in the right of states to veto federal law, South Carolina also nullified Jackson’s force bill. The defiant gesture kept the states’ rights claim alive, but it could not conceal the defeat of the nullification strategy at this stage.

Despite southern planters’ attempts to isolate themselves from northern antislavery advocates and unpopular federal mandates, the expansion of agricultural production continued to link them with merchants, manufacturers, cotton factors (entrepreneurs involved in the cotton trade), and industrial and maritime workers in the North and in England. Although other goods were important in the South’s economy, cotton was the one that formed the strongest ties to those outside the region. It also served as the main thread that connected poor white Americans, small farmers, and enslaved persons with plantation owners. Within the web of southern labor and economic relations, growing distinctions appeared between Black and white people, between free people and enslaved, and between wealthy planters and yeoman farmers. By the mid 1830s, as the plantation system expanded and consolidated, differences among these diverse groups crystallized, and social movement became more and more difficult. Yet one consequence of the growing differentiation among southerners was the increasing dependence of enslaved persons, free Black people, and yeomen on the resources and largesse of large planters. Plantation owners considered the growing classes of dependents as evidence of their success. Those lower down the ladder chafed at the restrictions placed upon them, but few could seriously contest the new order.

At the same time, planters themselves were caught up in a larger web of regional, national, and global connections, where they found themselves dependent on others for their own success. In fact, protecting the plantation system depended in part on the ability of planters to ensure that the strength of a cotton economy would bind together white people of all classes across the South, as well as affluent whites across the nation and across the sea who served as the planters’ trading partners.

Moreover, even as northern states gradually abolished slavery within their own borders, residents of those areas continued to rely on the products and profits of slave labor to support the industry and commerce that fueled their economic growth. Manufacturers who supplied the South with textiles, shoes, plows, and other finished products were deeply committed to the cotton economy. Such economic ties assured that, even as those in the free states saw themselves as increasingly distinct from their southern neighbors, they were still intimately connected to the success of slavery. In this sense, King Cotton spun a web that encompassed the entire nation.