Empire and Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

The greatest reform effort based on republican ideals in this era was the anti-slavery movement.

While the Revolution fell short by freeing only a fraction of slaves it was greatly successful in changing the culture and attitudes around slavery.

Unfortunately this success also created a reaction where, since slavery could not be justified in this new egalitarian era based on old justifications, it had to be justified based on race and so the anti-slavery movement “inadvertently produced racism in America” (508).

Slavery wasn’t unique to the New World but what took place in America, in the form of plantation slavery, was different from other forms of slavery in history.

Slavery in the Americas wasn’t uniform across all of the colonies (both North America and Caribbean, English possessions and Spanish, etc).

By the time of the Revolution North American Colonists owned 460m African slaves, about 1/5 of the total population of the colonies.

Virginia was the largest colony with about 188m African slaves (~40% of Virginia’s population) and South Carolina was the colony with the highest proportion of slaves at 60% or about 75m slaves out of a total population of 124m.

Since the beginning of the 17th century the South’s economy and system of slavery was dominated by staple crops with the two main crops and areas being rice in the South Carolina Lowcountry and tobacco in the Chesapeake.

The two different staple crops led to two different paths of development for the institution of slavery.

Tobacco plantations tended to be smaller with fewer slaves and on the eve of the Revolution less than 30% of slaves lived in plantations with 20 or more slaves in the Chesapeake region.

Tobacco also depleted the soil quickly and so the small plantations in the Chesapeake area were constantly moving west.

It was also common for tobacco to be grown by non-slaveholding families so slaves in the Chesapeake lived in areas surrounded by whites.

Chesapeake plantations were also more diverse and grew wheat and other foodstuffs which led to African slaves in the region gaining skills in areas other than tobacco cultivation and it was common to hire out African slaves to other plantations and endeavors.

It was common in the Chesapeake region for African slaves to pick up skills outside of agriculture as well with many learning to be carpenters, smiths, etc.

Plantations in the Chesapeake area relied on the fertility of American-born slaves to maintain the slave o pulsation and by the Revolution Virginia had stopped importing slaves.

Slaves in the Chesapeake did not have much free time due to the nature of tobacco cultivation and the use of gang labor, closely supervised labor of small groups of slaves, by the masters.

This took away an incentive for slaves in the region to finish their work quickly and became one of the reasons Washington would end up opposing the institution of slavery as he realized that this was a flaw of slavery and that without incentives to work hard the system could never be efficient.

Rice plantations in South Carolina’s Lowcountry were larger than their Chesapeake tobacco counterparts with more than 80% of slaves in this region living on plantations with 20 or more slaves.

Rice cultivation, unlike tobacco, required large plantations and had to remain close to estuaries.

Unlike the Chesapeake slaves in the Lowcountry we’re surrounded mostly by other African slaves with many areas having more than 80% African slaves.

Rice was more lucrative than tobacco so African slaves in this region didn’t pick up other skills like their Chesapeake counterparts and plantation owners weren’t willing to diversify their crops in the same way that Chesapeake plantation owners were.

The natural growth rate of slaves in the Lowcountry was retarded as most plantation owners imported male slaves and South Carolina had to continuously import slaves to maintain their population.

By the time the international slave trade was abolished in 1808, South Carolina had imported twice as many African slaves as Virginia while its slave population was only about half that of Virginia’s.

With its greater reliance on importation of African slaves South Carolina’s slave population had a culture that was much more distinctive with African roots.

Because rice cultivation didn’t require close supervision masters relied on a task system and once the slaves completed these tasks they were able to grow their own crops or produce other goods that they were allowed to sell.

While there were many difference between slavery in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and the Chesapeake region both areas relied on force to maintain the institution of slavery and in both areas the institution “bred a pervasive sense of hierarchy” (514).

Masters having slave concubines was not uncommon and was more prevalent in the Chesapeake area where African slaves and whites lived closer together with the most famous example being Jefferson’s sexual involvement with Sally Hemings.

Jefferson, by all accounts was a good master comparably and while even though he reportedly never whipped a slave himself other did for him and he had sold slaves away as a form of punishment.

This this behavior was seen as good is telling for how evil the institution of slavery was.

While slavery was most prevalent in the South it wasn’t unique to the South and about 50m slaves lived in the North by the time of the Revolution.

Most African slaves we’re clustered around port towns and while many families who owned slaves usually owned only one there were areas where the proportion of households who owned slaves (such as in and around New York City) were comparable to areas of the South.

Only in King’s County (now South County) Rhode Island did anything like the plantations of the South exist.

Large, multi-hundred acre plantations, producing dairy products and livestock existed but even here it was typically less than 20 slaves who lived on plantations and many of the slaves were racially mixed with Narragansett Indians who were displaced after King Philip’s War in the 17th century.

Slavery was prevalent in every area of colonial America but was not seen as something unusual but rather accepted as one of many different levels of a hierarchical society.

The Revolution with its talk of liberty and the disappearance of bonded white servitude made the institution of slavery more visible as a hypocrisy.

By 1774 both Rhode Island and Connecticut had outlawed new slaves from entering their colonies and other states soon followed.

Revolutionary leaders had assumed that slavery was in the way out and that the “march of liberty and progress” (519) would be the institutions demise.

This was a mistaken hope though as following the Revolution slavery would see its greatest expansion in America.

Revolutionary leaders understandably had hoped and thought slavery as an institution would decline due to the events at the time.

In 1777 Vermont’s constitution abolished slavery; in 1780 the government of Pennsylvania declared the gradual emancipation of slaves; in 1783 the Massachusetts Superior Court declared that the institution of slavery was contrary to the state’s constitution; by the early 1800s “every Northern state had provided for the eventual end of slavery” (520).

Even in the South, Virginia most prominently, there were signs of slavery’s end.

Many Virginian masters had become more reluctant to break up families of slaves by the time of the Revolution; black codes in the Upper South had stopped being enforced with fraternization between whites and blacks being commonplace; Baptists and later Methodists had congregated with blacks and vocally voiced their opposition to slavery; hiring out of slaves in the Upper South became common and hunted at a future where slave labor would be replaced by wage labor; emancipation societies were more prevalent in the South than the North; Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware began to allow for private manumission; Congress outlawed the importation of slaves from abroad into the Mississippi Territory in 1798 (though this was short lived).

The growing calls for an end, and the eventual end, to the international slave trade deluded Northerners into thinking slavery was coming to an end.

Slavery could still expand due to natural reproduction of slaves and a surplus in the Upper South that could be sold to the Deep South or West.

As an example, just in the state of Virginia, which had vast lands in it’s state to the west, by 1810 most families owned slaves which was not the case prior to the Revolution.

Most of the South became Jeffersonian Republicans but not all of the South was Republican at first.

Parts of the South Carolina Low Country, especially Charleston, was strongly Federalist in the 1790s as many of the merchants who made Charleston a prominent center of trade were from the North and used their wealth to dress themselves in English fashion as they fancied themselves English aristocrats.

Planters in the Lowcountry never strayed away from focussing on rice but did eventually start to grow some cotton.

The cotton they grew was long staple cotton which was difficult to grow and sell in large quantities but the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s and more widespread usage in the early 1800s allowed cotton to take off as planters in the South Carolina Upcountry were now able to efficiently produce short-staple cotton which hadn’t been very profitable prior to the cotton gin because it was too time consuming to separate the cotton seeds from the fibers by hand.

With cotton now becoming profitable the Upcountry turned into the greatest cotton producing area of the U.S. and the planters capitalizing on it required slaves.

By 1820 most of the slaves in South Carolina worked in the Upcountry whereas before most of the state’s slaves worked in the Lowcountry.

Cotton spread along with slavery, in greater numbers, into the new territories of the Southwest.

New Orleans merchants began intensely competing to sign contracts with cotton planters and any opposition to slavery’s spread was strongly attacked by the groups in the region who now had a strong interest in the cultivation and sale of cotton.

In the Orleans Territory sugar became the main crop now that the economy of Saint-Domingue had collapsed.

This area also saw an increase in population and an increase in slavery.

Politics, society, and economic development of the South and Southwest were strongly influenced by the institution of slavery.

While there was a semblance of democracy and talk of equal rights, denunciations of aristocrats, etc. politics and society in the South remained very hierarchical.

Even Virginia, a fairly popular government, compared poorly to those of New England.

Tidewater planters still held an outsized power in the state’s government and voting was restricted to those with 50 acres.

Legislatures were elected but almost all other offices were filled via appointments and while slaveholding planters didn’t hold all of the political positions they did exert great influence and even the officeholders who were slaveholding planters were smaller farmers who often also had slaves.

The North began to view wage labor as valuable whereas the South began to more and more see labor as undesirable.

The institution of slavery created an environment of deference to the major slaveholders as nearly everyone relied on them to market their crops overseas and while the majority of people in many areas didn’t own slaves the major slaveholders we’re able to use their power to protect their interests.

As an example, the slaveholding powers were able to get the Kentucky constitution to make it illegal for the legislature to pass any laws regarding the emancipation of slaves unless the slaveholders agreed.

With so much power resting in so few there was less need to develop canals, invest in education, issue paper money, etc.

The North and South were growing further apart at a quicker pace than ever before and Northerners, especially Federalists, began to fear the growing influence of the South in the federal government.

Federalists saw the three-fifths clause of the Constitution as resulting in a “slave power” that allowed the Southern slave interests to unfairly influence influence and control the federal government at the expense of the Northern states.

Slave rebellion on Saint-Domingue frightened slaveholders in America and inspired a slave uprising in Virginia which was not successful but did increase the fear of slaveholders and other whites in the South.

New black codes implemented in the South, manumissions greatly declined, free blacks are greatly restricted in how they can live their daily lives, Christian denominations like Baptists that had mixed congregations before stop the practice, and Virginia passed a law requiring free blacks to move out of the state with other Southern states passing laws keeping those free blacks from being able to move to their states.

As any liberality in race relations or incremental moves towards slavery’s end that had developed in the 1790s were reversed by the early 1800s the South was put in a position where they needed to justify slavery.

Slaveholders argued that there were innate differences between the races, that because of those differences Africans had no capacity for freedom, and as a result the slaveholders had a Christian duty to look after them.

It was a paternalistic and anthropological argument that would remain popular until the Civil War.

As the South strengthened the institution of slavery in the early 1800s the North was simultaneously becoming less liberal as whites reacted to the greater number of free blacks moving from the South.

The franchise was taken away from free blacks in New York by the Republican legislature (while they simultaneously supported illegal voting by Irish immigrants who weren’t citizens); interracial messages were legally prohibited in Massachusetts; Ohio required free blacks entering the state to post a bond guaranteeing their good behavior and providing paperwork proving they were free.