discussion

This economic system possessed several social and political consequences which made the South increasingly different from the North after 1815. Obviously, since all or most of the available capital in the slave states was poured into slavery and the production of cotton, that left little investment in labor saving machinery, or anything else which might lead to industrialization. Cities were also not particularly necessary in the Southern economic system (although they existed), and there were not nearly as many public schools, colleges, or universities as in the free states. Literacy rates were lower, and families were more isolated from each other, as the physical development of the South was spread out with the farms and plantations. Since the slave labor system was based upon brutality and force (notwithstanding what the planters claimed) there was a martial culture in the South, and Southern whites took very seriously the need to defend one’s honor, or to otherwise live under constant threat of having to physically defend their homes or property. The violence of Southern society can be seen in the internal slave trade, as well as in the treatment afforded native tribes in the years after 1815. Because native tribes stood in the way of whites trying to gain access to the best cotton land in the deep South, there was all the more reason for Southern whites to justify tactics approaching mass murder in order to develop cotton plantations. Therefore, the expansion of slavery became contingent upon the removal of thousands of native peoples in states such as Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

The domestic slave trade refers to this movement of slaves from east to west within the South, and highlights one of many examples of the new brutality of the invigorated slave economy of the early 1800s. For example, there were reports of suicides of slaves who did not want to leave behind the family ties they had made on their old plantations, and there were always going to be slaves who caught diseases or who were beaten to death by their slave drivers during the march to their new owners. The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., also saw a growth in slave trading firms, since slavery was legal in the city, and so visitors or politicians from around the country could see firsthand the brutality of human beings chained up and sold to the highest bidder during slave auctions.

The brutality of the domestic slave trade was of course simply one example of the numerous ways that slaves could be terrorized by their masters. On plantations or farms, slaves could be whipped to death, could be locked up for years in closets or other makeshift prisons, women could be sexually brutalized, and others might be fastened with all sorts of inhuman metal contraptions in order to stifle their ability to fight back against their owners. Slaves might only be fed just enough to stay alive, might be clothed just enough to avoid being killed by the elements, and old slaves might literally be thrown out into the woods to fend for themselves, and to die quietly. While slave owners might claim that the large financial investment made in slaves would discourage such treatment, the facts told a different story: slave owners needed to show slaves who was the boss, as it were, and besides, if slaves produced enough cotton, or reproduced children enough times, it wouldn’t matter so much to the bottom line of profits for whites if one or two were accidentally killed in a fit of rage. Female slaves were helpless, in many cases, against the sexual advances of their masters (though in some cases they may have tried to make the best of a bad situation in order to become a more privileged house servant), and the plantations of the South were filled with light skinned slaves who were the product of such unions. In this way, slavery completely dehumanized workers, even in an age where other, free workers were similarly taken advantage of in a new, industrialized system. But the reality of never having the chance to be legally free, of never having the right to legally marry, of never having the right to learn to read or write, or the chance to better oneself, made the enslavement of African-Americans increasingly anachronistic in the modern world. Freedom may not have been much for some industrial free workers, but it was infinitely better than being owned completely, in every sense, by another human being.

To say that slavery was brutal does not properly convey some of the complexity and different gradations of enslavement, however. The institution could vary according to the size of the farm or plantation, and depending upon how much direct supervision or force that whites could bring to bear on certain communities of the enslaved. Not all slaves were working all day in the fields on a labor gang- some privileged slaves were able to work in the masters’ house- and others might even be trusted with certain basic artisanal skills where they might avoid some of the drudgery of menial labor. Likewise, there were masters who treated their slaves better than most, or who were more attuned to the basic humanity of their chattel “property.” Usually by pointing to the exceptional situations where slaves were not treated as badly as the norm, slave owners would often enough advance elaborate justifications for the paternalism of their system. Slave owners chose to see themselves as kindly father-figures looking over all of the helpless subordinates on their plantations. These masters would insist that in the South an older, chivalric ideal was in place, dating back to feudal times, where masters understood that they “owed” something to those how served them. But the slave owners could never adequately explain away why they constantly lived in fear of slave rebellions, of slaves trying to rise up to slit their masters’ throats.

Those men who owned even one slave never constituted more than 20% of the white population in the South, but they were never the same 20% in the same generation (meaning that many men went in and out of the slave owning class during their lifetimes), and still additional numbers of whites rented slaves. In addition, because of the amazing rags to riches stories achieved by the boom in cotton prices in the period from 1815-1860, it can be argued that most whites aspired to be slave owners, or otherwise saw in slave ownership a variant of the “American Dream” of making a fortune. But also because of the dominance of the planter class in the political and social life of the slave states, being involved in the slave-based, cotton economy constituted the only way to achieve upward social mobility. In addition, what could be termed the agrarian ethic, where each family owned their land and produced a sufficiency of crops to maintain themselves, certainly took deep root in the slave states, especially in opposition the urbanizing, socially atomizing, industrial “free states.” Yet, many farmers in the slave states lived on the margins of poverty, prompting some historians to wonder why these poor whites did not rise up against, or otherwise make trouble for the planter elite. One plausible answer rests in the constant threat of slave revolts, and the resulting racial conservatism of the slave states: in other words why would poor whites stir up social unrest if it might lead to the deadly consequences of a Haitian-style revolution?