Four bi-weekly write-ups of 700-800 words are to be submitted by the indicated Mondays at noon on the previous two weeks lectures and readings. Write-ups should not be merely a list of lec

Slavery in the United States

“‘Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense comes!’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope–fervently do we pray–that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’.”

–Abraham Lincoln

Most people have little idea how slavery in the United States actually worked. Though slavery existed in the British North American colonies for more than a century before the United States declared independence in 1776, and though slavery continued to exist in the United States during its first 89 years of national existence through the end of the Civil War in 1865, of what slavery consisted–how many slaves there were, where they lived, what their conditions and circumstances were, how they lived, and how the system of slavery functioned–is not well known.

It is not, indeed, too much to say that popular impressions in many of these areas and–at least as leading scholars present them–significant empirical findings appear not infrequently to be almost opposed. I rely here largely on the landmark work of Robert Fogel, Nobel laureate in economics from the University of Chicago, primarily in his book with Stanley Engerman on the economics of slavery in the United States, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), as modified by Fogel in Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989).

Most economic historians agree with Fogel and Engerman’s essential conclusion: slavery in the United States was an economically profitable system in the short and even intermediate term. Slave holders had a pecuniary incentive to treat slaves well enough to obtain maximum income from them, and most slave holders treated their slaves to maximize their economic production. I here also consider Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its role in symbolizing and molding concepts of slavery in the United States, and trace development of political events concerning and discussion of slavery in the United States in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

I

Slavery was widely practiced for almost all of recorded history in almost all parts of the world. In ancient Greece, slaves were denied rights that citizens had. These denied rights included, on the basis of manumission decrees that former slaves received, “legal status as a protected member of the community,” “immunity from arbitrary arrest,” the “right to work at whatever he desires to do,” and “the right to movement according to his own choice.” 1 Slavery was also widely practiced in ancient Rome. It has been estimated that during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire as many as three of every four residents in the Italian peninsula were slaves.

Slavery was much practiced outside of Europe. In ancient China, many rich families had slaves, and the royal court and aristocracy possessed abundant slaves. Slavery was practiced in the Arabian peninsula and in Africa for hundreds, even thousands, of years. It is thought that more black African slaves may have crossed the Sahara Desert, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean between the 7th and 20th centuries than crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Slavery of black Americans in the Americas commenced soon after the discovery and initial colonization of the “New World” by Europeans in the late 15th and 16th centuries. Following historical patterns established mostly by Africans and Arabs, almost all black African slaves were captured or conquered by black Africans in battle. They were then traded, often through Muslim intermediaries, to in the case of the Americas slave traders from European nations, preeminently Portugal, England, France, and the Netherlands. Black slaves went primarily to the Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English colonies in South and North America.

Almost 10 million slaves survived transit to the Americas in the three centuries between 1550 and 1850, when the great bulk of slaves from Africa was captured and transported against their wills. Twelve million captured black Africans started the journey, so the mortality rate in transit approached one-fifth.

Only a small minority of black African slaves transported to the Americas wound up in the English colonies that became the United States–about 6 percent, or 600,000 slaves. By country or area, the distribution of slaves to the New World was approximately as follows:2

Figure 1. Slave Imports to the New World

Portuguese America, Brazil 38% Spanish Americas, Caribbean 17% French Caribbean 17% English Caribbean 17%

2

1 In Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 20.

2 Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1974), 14.

English continental colonies, U.S. 6% Dutch, other 6%

About 94% of slaves imported to the Americas went elsewhere than to the British continental colonies in North America that became the United States and subsequently to the United States. Brazil was by far the largest single importer of slaves. The large majority of slaves not transported to Brazil became slaves in the Caribbean in one of the colonies of a number of European countries, primarily Spain, England, and France.

II

Slavery in the United States is usually dated to 1619, when 20 blacks were purchased from a Dutch vessel by a member of the Jamestown colony, which at this time was the only English colony in what would become the United States. The Plymouth colony of the Pilgrims would not be founded until the next year. Thus, as Benjamin Quarles wrote, except for Native Americans, African Americans are America’s “oldest ethnic minority.” With the exception of the English settlers at Jamestown, African Americans’ “roots in the original 13 colonies sink deeper than those of any other group from across the Atlantic.” 3

Relatively few slaves were imported to the English colonies in continental North America in the 1600s. In 1700, there were about 27,000 African Americans in the colonies that would become the United States out of a total population of about 275,000. At this point in national prehistory, African Americans thus constituted about 10 percent of the population. About 15,000 had been born in Africa or the Caribbean; the remaining 12,000 or so were born in what would become the United States. In most of the decades between 1620 and 1700, no more than about 100 African slaves were acquired each year in the United States, until the 1680s and 1690s, when, during the 1690s, the average number of slaves purchased each year grew to about 600.4

The status of these early African Americans was somewhat different that what later black slaves would experience. Some, if not most, of the first few thousand blacks transported during the 1600s to what became the United States were treated more as indentured servants than subsequently became the case, and many eventually received freedom. As much as one-quarter of the black population in Virginia and Maryland in the 1660s may have been free.5 However, by the later decades of the 1600s, semi-indentured servant status for blacks became no longer the case. The system of permanent and intergenerational bondage for black slaves came into existence. Nonetheless, at the time of the first national census in 1790, close to 8 percent of the approximately 750,000 African Americans in the United States were free, close to 60,000 people.

By way of contrast to the system of slavery that developed in the British continental colonies, there was a much higher mortality rate among slaves in the Caribbean Islands and

3

3 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Making of America (New York, NY: Collier, 1964), 7.

4 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 21-23, 25.

5 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 38, 52.

elsewhere in North and South America. As seen, of the 94 percent or so of slaves imported to the New World during the 16th through 19th centuries other than to what became the United States in 1776, the overwhelming majority went to the Caribbean and Brazil (relatively few went to the mainland possessions of Spain in the Americas). Conditions in almost all of the European colonies in the Caribbean and Brazil were hellish. While there was a substantial natural increase of blacks in the British continental colonies in North America, there was a substantial natural decrease, through higher adult mortality rates, in New World colonies elsewhere.

Sugar was, through the 18th century, the primary commodity that slave plantations produced in most of the New World. The mortality rate among slaves in the Caribbean and elsewhere, largely as a result of disease, was exceedingly high (as was the case among European settlers in these areas). As Fogel and Engerman remark: “In the British and French West Indies, in Dutch Guiana, and in Brazil, the death rate of slaves was so high, and the birthrate so low, that these territories could not sustain their population levels without large and continuous importations of Africans.” 6

Colonies elsewhere in the Americas actually experienced declining population, without the importation of new slaves. Though what became the United States and then the United States accounted for only about 6 percent of slave imports to the New World, by 1825 slaves in the Untied States accounted for about 36 percent of slaves in the Americas.7 While this figure includes a relatively small number of slaves and their descendants who previously were in Spanish Florida or French Louisiana, nevertheless, that the black slave population increased naturally more in the United States than elsewhere in the western hemisphere is certain.

Indeed, the rate of natural increase among slaves in the United States was higher than the rate of natural increase in the population of any European country, and nearly twice that of England. The rate of natural increase among slaves in the United States was perhaps the highest of any slave society in history. As hard as it may be to believe, the natural rate of increase among African Americans in the United States during slavery may have been among the highest for any substantial group in the world for an extended period to that point.8

III

As mentioned at the outset, Uncle Tom’s Cabin played and continues to play a significant role in shaping conceptions of slavery in the United States–it certainly symbolizes many of these conceptions. Southern slavery became a major issue in the United States in the first half of the

4

6 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 25.

7 Ibid., 28.

8 Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review (December 2000), 1534-1535: “The North American slave experience is perhaps even more remarkable when compared with free white populations…. By the 1850s, the rate of natural increase was higher even that that of the white population of the United States. This was a remarkable outcome because, as Thomas Malthus suggested as early as 1798, white Americans expanded with a rapidity ‘probabl[y] without parallel in history’” (ibid.).

19th century. From the beginning, slavery was very disproportionately practiced in southern colonies. Of the approximately 750,000 African Americans who lived in the United States at the time of the first census in 1790, more than 90 percent lived in the south. About 60 percent of the relatively few African Americans living outside the south were free in 1790; this figure was fewer than 5 percent in the south. As a result of the much greater number of African Americans in the south, though, there was a greater absolute number of free African Americans in the south than the north.

Between 1777 and 1783, while the war for American independence was being fought, the New England states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut passed laws banning slavery. To this list, of the original 13 colonies, were added the middle Atlantic states of Pennsylvania in 1780, New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1804. Of the original 13 colonies, 6 were slave states and the 6 above, and New Hampshire, became free. The 6 slave states of the original 13 states were Maryland and Delaware (which did not fight for the Confederacy) and Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

At the first census in 1790, the population of the United States was approximately 3.9 million, of whom the 750,000 African Americans constituted 19.3 percent. Of this 19.3 percent, 1.5 percent of the whole population of the United States were free African Americans and 17.8 percent of the whole population were African American slaves. Of the total population in the north in 1790, 3.4 percent were black. In the southern states, 35.2 percent of the population were black.

When the Northwest Ordinance passed in 1787 under the Articles of Confederation– allowing for future states from Ohio to part of Minnesota–slavery was banned in the Northwest Territory on the basis of a proposal made by Thomas Jefferson. The United States Constitution, drafted in 1787, allowed the importation of slaves to be restricted by Congress in 1808 and provided that slaves (though not free African Americans, who would be counted fully) would be counted at three-fifths of their total number for purposes of determining state representation in the House of Representatives.

IV

Slavery was waning in the United States until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin (short for en“gin”e) in 1793, which allowed for vastly increased production of cotton. The perspective of slavery in the United States through the Revolutionary War was more that it was a necessary evil (more in the north) and that it was an economic necessity (more in the south) than became the case. The perspective was not so much–as it became in the first half of the 19th century–that slavery was a moral evil (as it came to be viewed in the north), or that it was a moral good (as it came to be viewed in the south). To be sure, there were always crosscurrents, and different views

5

were represented in different areas at different times.9 But relative emphases changed over time. There was not as sharp a distinction between north and south in the 18th century as there became in the first decades of the 19th century.

The cotton gin changed everything–an example of the influence of technology on social organization and structure. Suddenly, there was a highly valuable agricultural product capable of great and almost limitless expansion. Slavery was transformed ideologically from a necessary evil probably going out of existence eventually (most of the American founders’ view) to the cornerstone of a highly profitable industry localized in the south and creating a new style of life, the large plantation system. Previously, units of agricultural production utilizing slaves were not as large as they then became.

About 3,000 bales of cotton were produced in the United States in 1790 (a bale weighs about 500 pounds). By 1801, 100,000 bales of cotton were produced. This figure reached almost 4 million just before the Civil War. In 1800, the United States exported $5 million of cotton, about 7 percent of national exports. In 1860, the United States exported $191 million of cotton, about 57 percent of national exports.10

The period of greatest absolute expansion of slavery in the United States was from 1800 to 1860. In 1800, there were about 850,000 slaves in the south. In 1860, there were more than 3.8 million. While the proportion of African Americans declined in the north between 1800 and 1860, to 1.7 percent, the proportion increased slightly in the south, to 36.8 percent.

With the acquisition of the Louisiana territory in 1803, the question arose whether new states in this territory would be slave or free. No longer was it the case, as it had been in 1787 with the Northwest Ordinance, of banning slavery from future states for moral and practical reasons. The question increasingly became, what sort of future should the United States have– slave or free? The south increasingly said the former and the north, the latter.

The first half of the 19th century was the era of “King Cotton,” one of the most desirable products in newly industrializing Europe and America. The south’s climate was ideal for growing cotton. But African Americans did not merely produce cotton on southern plantations. They grew many other crops, tended livestock, participated in all aspects of agricultural production and management, and often were artisans in towns and cities. Some free African Americans even owned slaves. The caricature of all African Americans, even in the south, merely picking cotton on plantations is false.

6

9 Much of the original support for banning slavery in northern states in the 18th century came mostly not from individuals morally opposed to slavery, but from those opposed to more African Americans in their states. As early as the 17th century, laws were passed in several northern colonies regulating and restricting the conduct of African Americans, slave and free. Laws banning slavery in northern states resulted in the movement of slave-holders and slaves to southern states.

10 Bruce Catton, The American Heritage Short History of the Civil War (New York, NY: Dell, 1960), 11.

V

The period in which the most slaves were imported to the United States was the 25 years from the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 until Congress banned the importation of slaves from outside the United States pursuant to the Constitution in 1808. During this quarter of a century, close to 10,000 slaves were imported from Africa each year. Indeed, about as many slaves were brought to the United States during these 25 years as during the whole previous period since 1619.11

While Fogel and Engerman do not provide data on the average number of generations the typical adult African American’s family had been in the United States in 1865, a rough idea can be inferred from their work. As late as 1750, about two in five blacks in the British continental colonies had been transported to them, and the total population of African Americans in the continental colonies was about 250,000 out of a total population (black and white) of about 1.2 million. The period of greatest importation of slaves to the colonies–before the Revolutionary War period, when importation was disrupted–was the 1760s, when about 60,000 slaves were transported to what became the United States.

Given that the median age of an African American slave mother when she first gave birth was close to 21, this would indicate that the duration of a slave generation was perhaps about 25 years (the average age of slave mothers at their first birth was 22.5).12 Based upon comparisons among the number of African Americans brought to the continental colonies, the percentage of foreign-born Africans in the total African American population, and the number of African Americans in different years in the colonies and then the United States, it can be estimated that the average number of generations a typical adult African American and his forebears had lived in the United States in 1865 was his own and the four preceding it, a total of five generation, 125 years back in time, to 1740.

As late as 1810, about 20 percent of African Americans had been born outside of the United States, a figure that had been constant for 30 years. Since virtually all African American children were born in the United States, and the median age was young, this would indicate that about two-thirds of the adult, chid-bearing population in this period would have been born in the United States, and about one-third outside of it (with fathers more likely to be born outside the United States than mothers). As late as 1810, about two-thirds of African American children in the United States would have had, on average, one parent who was born outside of it. In 1750, the typical African American child born in the British continental colonies would have had one parent and three grandparents not born there. Strong links to Africa lasted throughout almost all of the slave period in the United States.

Slavery was big business in the south. The economy was a slave economy. Though African Americans constituted merely 37 percent of the population in the south in 1860, because African American women worked and white women did not, African Americans began working

7

11 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 24-25.

12 Ibid., 137-138.

at a younger age than whites, and African Americans worked to a later age than whites and did not live as long after they stopped working, slaves comprised about half, or slightly more, of workers throughout the south. Free African Americans were perhaps another 3 or 4 percent of the workforce across the south, often in towns and cities.

Thus, all African Americans, free and slave, constituted perhaps 55 to 60 percent of workers in the south. In states with higher percentages of African Americans, the workforce participation proportion was even higher. Interestingly, states with lower total percentages of African Americans tended to have higher percentages of free African Americans, and vice versa. Much white labor was expended in areas of plantation operation, and transportation of raw products from plantations and of finished goods to them. The south was more rural, agrarian, and agricultural, and less urban and industrialized, than the north. There were substantially fewer miles of railroads in the south than in the north.

It was just a matter of time before the passions ignited over the issue of slavery would burst forth in civil war. Slavery became less feasible as more African Americans and their families had been in the United States for a longer period of time. Moreover, slavery was inconsistent with the principles and ideals of the American founding documents. Everyone is created equal. Government exists to serve the people. The force of technology on the development of society is well exemplified by the Civil War. Had it not been for technological innovation, slavery might have gradually dwindled and disappeared in the United States, as was generally foreseen at the founding.

VI

Uncle Tom’s Cabin played a major role in shaping northern opinions of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. Originally published in serial form, the work was published as a book in 1852 and was an immediate sensation. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in the north.

The story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is now unfortunately often misunderstood. To be called an “Uncle Tom” is, for most African Americans, a slur. An “Uncle Tom” is considered for African Americans to be a lackey of whites, or even a traitor to African Americans. But this picture does not do justice to the character Uncle Tom at all.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was a Christian, and she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the perspective of its final scene. It is therefore worthwhile to turn first to this final scene in order to understand her purposes in writing the novel and the nobility of Uncle Tom’s character.

Uncle Tom is as Christ-like a character as portrayed in fiction. He is ultimately sold to as evil a slaveowner as can be imagined, Simon Legree, in the deep and invisible south. Any degradation and punishment that can be inflicted on Uncle Tom is inflicted, because of Legree’s evilness. Legree wishes to see African American men and women suffer just because of the color of their skin. Legree will even suffer loss of profit in order to see pain inflicted upon African Americans. He hates Uncle Tom most of all because he will not budge in his devotion to Jesus. Legree decides that Uncle Tom must die:

8

When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage. So was it now with Tom. The atheistic taunts of his cruel master sunk his before dejected soul to the lowest ebb; and, though the hand of faith still held to the eternal rock, it was a numb, despairing grasp. Tom sat, like one stunned, at the fire. Suddenly everything around him seemed to fade, and a vision rose before him of one crowned with thorns, buffeted and bleeding. Tom gazed, in awe and wonder, at the majestic patience of the face; … his soul woke, as, with floods of emotion, he stretched out his hands and fell upon his knees,–when, gradually, the vision changed: the sharp thorns became rays of glory; and, in splendor inconceivable, he saw that same face bending compassionately toward him …

‘I hate him!’ said Legree, that night, as he sat up in his bed; ‘I hate him! And isn’t he MINE? Can’t I do what I like with him? …’ And Legree clenched his fist, and shook it, as if he had something in his hands that he could rend in pieces….

‘Well, Tom!’ said Legree, walking up, and seizing him grimly by the collar of his coat, and speaking through his teeth, in a paroxysm of determined rage, ‘do you know I’ve made up my mind to KILL you?’

‘It’s very likely, Mas’r,’ said Tom, calmly …

Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear. What brother-man and brother- Christian must suffer, cannot be told us, even in our secret chamber, it so harrows the soul! And yet, oh my country! These things are done under the shadow of thy laws!…

‘He’s most gone, Mas’r,’ said Sambo, touched, in spite of himself, by the patience of his victim.

‘Pay away …! Give it to him!–give it to him!’ shouted Legree. ‘I’ll take every drop of blood he has …’

Tom opened his eyes … ‘there ain’t no more ye can do! I forgive ye, with all my soul!’ and he fainted entirely away.13

Uncle Tom’s death is meant to parallel Christ’s crucifixion.

9

13 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (New York, NY: Penguin, 1986 [1852]), 554, 578, 582-584.

When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, he said that she was “the little lady who made this big war.” 14 Ann Douglas writes of Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “No woman before or since Stowe has so successfully written a novel designed to stir up the nation in the cause of the major issue of the day. In March 1850, when John C. Calhoun expressed his wishes as to what the new ‘compromise’ should ensure the South, he demanded that the United States ‘cease the agitation of the slave question.’ Daniel Webster backed him, and so, less openly, did Stowe’s own father. Stowe defied the male establishment, picked up her pen, and helped to make what had been the protest of only a small minority of abolitionists the concern, even the preoccupation, of hundreds of thousands of Americans.” 15

VII

Slavery in the United States was economically profitable. During the King Cotton era in the first half of the 19th century, slavery expanded as never before. There was a great movement of slaves with their owners to the new lands that were becoming cultivated to the west of the Atlantic seaboard.

Slave families were usually not separated. Perhaps 10 to 20 percent of slave families were separated. Fogel and Engerman summarize evidence with respect to family separation and related issues: “The belief that slave-breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myth. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery. It was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would have been normal for them to have left the family.” Fogel and Engerman also write that “available evidence indicates that about 84 percent of slaves engaged in the westward

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