From Ordeal by Fire: The Civil and Reconstruction (3rd Ed.

),
by James M. McPherson, McGgraw Hill Publ., NY, 2001

Chapter Outline

/Jle The Southern Economy 27

Slavery in the American South 35

We are an agricultu1·al people. ... We have

c/[ute- no citie~we don 't want them . ... We

want no manufactures; we desirn no
trading, no mechanical or manufacturing

f5effr.u11 classes. As long as we have our rice, our

sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can

Q)~>utt
command wealth to purchase alt we want.
-Louis T. Wigfall,
Confederate senatorfrom Texas, 1861

~
~-F. The Southern Economy

The South was the great exception to many of the foregoing generalizations about
American modernization. The slave states remained overwhelmingly rural and agri-
cultu ral. Their economy grew, but it did not develop a substantial commercial and
industrial sector. Southe rn agriculture was as labor intensive in 1860 as it had been
in 1800. Upward social mobility was impossible for the half of the Southern labor
force who lived in slavery. In contrast to the vigorous educational system and near-
universal lite racy of the No1th, the South's commitment to education was weak, and
nearly half of its population was illiterate. The proliferation of volunta1y associations,
reform movements, and self-improvement societies that flourished in the free states
largely bypassed the South. The slave states valued tradition and stability more than
change and progress. As the No1th hurtled toward a future of competitive, merito-
cratic, free-labor capitalism, many Southerners responded with distaste and alarm.
Southern separatism was rooted in resistance to this Northern vision of what Amer-
ica should become.

Some North-South Comparisons

Tables 2.1 through 2.5 illustrate some key statistical differences between North and
South. In the tables, the categ01y "slave states" includes the four border states that
remained in the Union in 1861 ; had it included only the eleven states that eventu-
ally seceded, the North-South contrasts would have been even greater.
28 'L~ Chapter Two The Antebellum South

Table 2.1 Percentage of Ui·banized Table 2.2 Percentage ofLabor Force

Population (Living in Towns o/2,500 in Agriculture
or More) Free States Slave States
Free States Slave States
1800 82%
1820 10% 5% 1860 81
1840 14 6
1860 26 10

Table 2.3 Value ofFarmland and Implements, 7860

Value of Value ofFarm Value ofFann
Farmland Machinery and Machinery and
per Acre Jrnplements per Acre Implements per Worker

Free states $25.67 $0.89 $66

Sia vc states 10.40 0.42 38

Table 2 .4 Capital Invested in Manufacturing

FREE STATES SLAVE STATES

Percentage of Percentage of
U.S. Total Per Capita U.S. Total Per Capita

1840 80% $21.92 20% $ 7.25

1860 84 43.73 16 13.25

Table 2.5 Literacy and Education, 1860

Percentage
ofPree Average
PERCENTAGE OF POPULATION LITERATE Population Number
Aged5-19 ofSchool
Total Free Enrolled in Days per
Population Population Slaves School Year

Free states 94% 94% 72% 135

Slave states 58 83 lO"Ai (est.) 35 80

Other kinds of data confirm the picture presented by these tables. In 1860, Mass-
achusetts produced more manufactured goods than all the future Confederate states
combined, while New York and Pennsylvania each produced more than twice the
goods manufactured by all the future Confederate states combined. The states that
grew all the cotton possessed only 6 percent of the nation's cotton manufacturing
capacity. New York state had nearly as much banking capital in 1860 as all fifteen
slave states combined. The per capita circulation of newspapers and magazines
~The Southern Economy 29

among Southern whites was less than half that among the Northern population. With
one-third of the country's white population, Southerners contributed only 7 percent
of the important inventions from 1790 to 1860. The inventor of the cotton gin, which
revolutionized the Southern economy, was the Massachusetts native Eli Whitney,
who had gone to Georgia in 1792 as a tutor. A large proportion of antebellum South-
ern college presidents and professors, academy principals, tutors, and newspaper
editors came from the No1th.

The South as a "Colonial" Economy

From the first Virginia experiments with tobacco culture in the 1610s, the growing
of staple crops for the world market dominated Southern economic life. Four-fifths
of all colonial exports to England before 1776 came from the Southern colonies-to-
bacco from Virginia and Ma1yland, rice and indigo and naval stores from the Caroli-
nas and Georgia. Indigo virtually disappeared and tobacco underwent a relative de-
cline after the Revolution. But Whitney's invention of the cotton gin made the
commercial growing of short-staple cotton feasible, 1 while the rise of the textile in-
dustry in England and in New England created a vast new demand for cotton. South-
ern plantations and farms doubled their cotton output each decade from 1800 to
1860. Cotton exports provided more than half of all American exports from 1815 to
1860. Defenders of slavery and of the South argued with much truth that King Cot-
ton ruled the American economy.
Much of the capital and entrepreneurship to finance and market Southern crops
came from outside the South. The key figure in this process was the "factor," or com-
mission merchant. The origins of factoring went back to the colonial period, when
tobacco-importing firms in London sent their agents to Virginia to buy and ship the
crop. The factor advanced credit to the planter, with future crops as collateral, and
functioned as the planter's purchasing agent to obtain consumer goods from London
or elsewhere. This system adapted itself easily to the marketing of cotton in the nine-
teenth centuty, except that factors became increasingly the representatives of North-
ern rather than British firms. Although they lived in the South, most of the factors-
two-thirds by a contemporary estimate-were Yankees or Britons.
The factor took charge of the planter's crop when it reached Memphis or New Or-
leans or Mobile or Charleston or Savannah-or any of several other cities. He pro-
vided storage facilities and contracted for transportation and sale to the ultimate pur-
chaser. He arranged for insurance and credit and supplies for the planter. For each
of these services he charged a commission. The total amount of the cornmissions-
including interest if the planter went into debt, as many of them did-might be as

'Before 1793, little "short-staple" cotton was grown, as the amount of hand labor required to
remove the seeds from the short and tenacious cotton fibers made this crop commercially unprofitable.
The cotton gin was a simple device in which a spiked cylinder rotating through a grid of bars separated
the fiber from the seeds. The higher-quality (but more expensive) long-staple cotton, in which the seed
could be easily separated from the fibers, had been grown commercially before 1793, but its growing
area was limited to the coastal and sea-island areas of Georgia and South Carolina. The adaptability of
short-staple conon to widespread areas of the South set off a veritable cotton boom after Whitney's
invention in 1793.
30 1i,.__rS{:' Chapter Two The Antebellum South

ARKANSAS

Principal Staple Crop Regions of the South, 1860

much as 20 percent of the value of the crop. Factoring represented a drain of wealth
from the South estimated at between $100 million and $150 million annually in the
late antebellum period .
Thus while plantation agriculture was a profitable enterprise, many of the profits
on marketing the crop-not to speak of the profits on its manufacture into finished
goods-went to outsiders. Indeed, as an exponer of raw materials and an importer
of manufactured goods, the South sustained something of a colonial economic rela-
tionship to the North and with Britain. Complained a resident of Mobile in 1847, "our
whole commerce except a small fraction is in the hands of Northern men. 7/ 8 of our
Bank Stock is owned by No1thern men ... . Our wholesale and retail business:-
eve1ything in short worth mentioning is in the hands of [Yankees]. . . . Financially
we are more enslaved than our negroes." 2 "At present, the North fattens and grows
rich upon the South ," declared an Alabama newspaper in 1851.
We purchase all our luxuries and necessities from the North .... Northerners abuse and de-
nounce slave1y and slaveholders, yet our slaves are clothed with Northern manufactured
goods, have Northern hats and shoes, work with Northern hoes, ploughs, and other imple-
ments . ... The slaveholder dresses in Northern goods, rides in a Northern saddle ... sports
his Northern carriage ... reads Northern books . ... In Northern vessels his products are car-
ried to market, his cotton is ginned with Northern gins, his sugar is crushed and preserved by

2
]. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978),
p. 255.
 i f ' The
~.r Southern Economy 31

Noithern machinery; his rivers arc navigated by Northern steamboats .... His son is educated
at a Northern college, his daughter receives the finishing polish at a Northern seminary; his
doctor graduates at a No1thern medical college, his schools are furnished with Northern teach-
ers, and he is furnished with Northern inventions. 3

In 1852, Southerners who wanted to do something about this state of affairs re-
vived the Southern Commercial Convention (originally founded in 1837), which met
annually through the rest of the 1850s. Its purpose was to promote the construction
with Southern capital of railroads, steamship lines, port facilities, banks, factories,
and other enterprises to achi~ve economic independence from the North. The lead-
ers of this movement exhorted fellow Southerners to buy only Southern-made
goods, to boycott Northern textbooks and teachers, to patronize only Southern au-
thors and vacation resorts. South Carolina's William Gregg urged the creation of a
Southern textile industiy, and led the way by building a model textile mill at Gran-
iteville in the 1840s. The fierce Southern partisan Edmund Ruffin wore only clothes
of Southern manufacture. Senator James Mason of Virginia proudly appeared in the
U.S. Senate wearing a homespun suit.
But all of this availed little. The achievements of the Southern Commercial Con-
vention turned out to be more political than economic. The Convention became in-
creasingly a forum for secessionists. While Southern per capita investment in manu-
facturing nearly doubled between 1840 and 1860, as illustrated by Table 2.4 on page
28, this increase lagged behind the No1thern growth rate, and the South's share of
the nation's manufacturing capacity actually declined. James B. D. DeBow of New
Orleans, publisher of the commercial magazine DeBow's Review and a leading ad-
vocate of Southern economic independence, found it necessa1y to have his Review
printed in New York because of inadequate facilities in New Orleans. Three-quarters
of DeBow's advertising income came from Northern businesses, and an important
collection of Review articles on the industrial potential of the South sold six times as
many copies in the No1th as in the South. Even William Gregg was obliged to hire
a Nonhern superintendent and Yankee foremen for his Graniteville textile mill.
A crucial aspect of the Southern economy helps to explain its failure to mod-
ernize: slaves were both capital and labor. On a typical plantation, the investment
in slaves was greater than the investment in land and implements combined. Slave
agriculture could not follow the path blazed by Northern agriculture and become
more capital intensive because, paradoxically, an increase of capital became an in-
crease of labor. Instead of investing substantial sums in machinery, planters in-
vested in more slaves. As a contempora1y observer put it: "To sell cotton in order
to buy negroes-to make more cotton to buy more negroes, 'ad infinitum,' is the
aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thorough going cotton planter."
A planter explained why: "Having abundance of prime cotton land, I can make
three or four times as much annual income by vesting capital in Negroes, as I can
by any Stock annuities." 4

3
Quoted in Robert R Russel, Economic Aspects ofSouthern Sectionalism, 1840-1861(Urbana,111.,
1924), p. 48.
4
Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing /he Cotton Crop of
the South, 1800-1925 (Lexington, Ky., 1968), p. 135; Stuait l:lrnchey, Enteiprise: The Dynamic Economy
ofa free People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 241.
32 ~ Chapter Two The Antebellum South

Antebellum Southern agriculture underwent little technological change after the

invention of the cotton gin in 1793. As indicated by Table 2.3 (page 28), the ab-
sorption of capital by labor meant that the per-unit value of land and machinery in
the South was less than half the No1thern average. The per capita output of South-
ern agriculture did increase between 1800 and 1860, but the cause was not prima-
rily technological change. Rather, it was the improved organization of the plantation
labor force and the westward movement of the plantation frontier to virgin soil, as
indicated by the maps on pages 30 and 33.
Thus tl1e Southern economy grew, but it did not develop. As indicated by Table
2.2, the proportion of the Southern labor force in agriculture was virtually the same
in 1860 as it had been in 1800. The South failed to develop a substantial urban mid-
dle class and skilled-labor population or to generate a diversified economy produc-
ing a wide variety of goods and se1vices. Because slaves along with other kinds of
personal and real property were counted as wealtl1, the per capita wealth of Souili-
ern whites in 1860 ($3,978) was nearly double ilie Northern average ($2,040). With
only 30 percent of ilie nation's free population, the South furnished 60 percent of
the nation's wealthiest men. Southern per capita income for ilie free population was
6 percent greater than the No1thern average. But when the slaves are included,
Southern per capita income was 27 percent less than Northern. 5
Economic historians have demonstrated that slave1y was profitable. But profitable
for whom? Certainly for cotton and sugar planters (probably less so for tobacco, rice,
and hemp planters), whose average return on investment probably equaled that of
Northern industrialists and exceeded that of Northern farmers. It was also profitable
for the many slave owners in the upper South who sold their surplus slaves to the
thriving cotton plantations of the Southwest. But it was not "profitable" for the slaves.
Two economic historians have calculated that slaves on cotton plantations received
in the form of food, clothing, and shelter only 22 percent of the earnings produced
by iliese plantations. With emancipation, the proportion of output retained by labor
6
rose to 56 percent. It was also not profitable for the small-holding Southern farm-
ers, who were crowded off the best land by large p lanters and could scarcely afford
to buy slaves in the rising market.
Another way to look at the economics of slavery is to ask whether the institution
promoted or inhibited Southern development. Many contemporaries believed that in
this respect slavery's impact was negative. Obse1vers of Southern life-ranging from
the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville to the British economist John Elliott Cairnes
to the Yankee traveler Frederick Law Olmsted-maintained that slave1y caused
Southern backwardness. As de Tocqueville steamed down the Ohio River in 1831,
with Kentucky on his left and Ohio on his right, he mused on the contrast between
slave and free society.

5
Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth in the United States 1850-1870 (New Haven, 1975), pp. 65, 101;
Roger L. Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy ofSlavery, Emancipation, and the
American Civil W'ar (Cambridge, 1989), p. 76.
6
Roger L. Ransom and l{ichard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of
Emancipation (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 3-4.
 D Areas without slaves, or unsettled
D Under 10 percent
llllllllllllO 1Oto 30 percent
- 30 to 50 percent
- 50 percent and over

NEW MEXICO
TERRITORY

Percentage of Slaves in Total Population, 1790 and 1860

33
34 L~ Chapter Two The Antebellum South

On the left bank of the river the population is sparse; from time to time one sees a troop of
slaves loitering through half-deserted fields .... One might say that society had gone to sleep.
But on the right bank a confused hum proclaims from afar that men are busily at work; fine crops
cover the fields ... there is evidence of comfort; man appears rich and contented; he works.

Equally harsh were Olmsted's conclusions after three extended trips chrough che
South in che 1850s, each of which resulted in a book. The slave stares, wroce Olm-
sted, lacked "che characteristic feacures of a free-labor communicy, including an
abundance and variety of skilled labor, a home market for a variecy of crops, dense
sectlemencs [and] a large body of small proprietors." If a man recurned to a Northern
state after twency years' absence, he would be struck by:
... w hat we call the "improvements" which have been made: better buildings, churches,
schoolhouses, mills, railroads ... roads, canals, bridges ... the better dress and evidently
higher education of the people. 13ut where will the returning traveler see the accumulated cot-
ton profits of twenty years in Mississippi? Ask the cotton-planter for them, and he will point
in reply, not to dwellings, libraries, churches, schoolhouses, mills, railroads, or anything of the
kind; he will point to his negroes-to almost nothing elsc.7

A fundamental reason fo r the South's failure to modernize and become econom-

ically independent was a lack of diversity in its economy-that is, too great a de-
pendence on a single staple crop, cotton. The soaring demand for cotton in the 1850s
intensified this problem. As the nation's economy recovered from the 1837-1843 de-
pression, cotton prices rose from cheir 1844 low of five cents a pound to an average
of eleven cents a pound chroughout che 1850s. Plancers scrambled to put every avail-
able acre into cotton, and they set new production records almost every year. This
also bid up che price of slaves, which nearly doubled during che 1850s and chereby
absorbed most of the available capical in the South. A discouraged promoter of tex-
tile mills in Georgia asked rhetorically: "Why should all our cotton make so long a
journey to the North, to be manufactured there, and come back to us ac so high a
price? It is because all spare cash is sunk here in purchasing negroes. "8 Although the
cotton South enjoyed unprecedented prospericy in che 1850s, its economy became
even more narrowly specialized in staple-crop agriculcure.
Yet anocher reason for che Souch's failure to develop economically was rooced in
the values of Southern society.

Southern Values versus Economic Change

In the South che voices of chose calling for induscrial development were sometimes
drowned out by the voices of those who branded che entrepreneurial echic a form
of vulgar Yankee materialism. The South's ideal image of itself po1trayed country

7
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democ1-acy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trnns. George L. Lawrence (Garden
City, N.Y., 1969), pp. 345- 346; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Selection, ed. David
Freeman Hawke Qndianapolis, J 971), pp. 184-185; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Slave States Before the
Civil Wai; ed. Harvey Wish (New York, 1959), p. 253.
8
Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slave1y (New York, 1918), p. 396.
..__~ Slavery in the American South 35

gentlemen as practicing the arts of gracious living, hospitality, leisure, the ride and
the hunt, chivahy toward women, honor toward equals, and kindness toward infe-
riors. The Yankees, on the other hand, appeared as a nation of shopkeepers-always
chasing the almighty dollar, shrewd but without honor, hardworking but lacking the
graces of a leisured class. "The No1therner loves to make money," said a Mississip-
pian, "tl1e Soutl1erner to spend it." The author George Cary Eggleston recalled after
the Civil War how he had come from Indiana to Virginia to inherit the family plan-
tation. "I quitted the rapidly developing, cosmopolitan, kaleidoscopic West [for] the
restful leisureliness of life in Virginia [witl1] its repose, the absence of stress or strain
or anxious anticipation, the appreciation of tomorrow as the equal of today in the
doing of things.,,9
Many leading Southerners in the 1850s echoed Thomas Jefferson's praise of farm-
ers as the "peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue" and his warning
against the industrial classes in the cities as sores on the body politic. "We have no
cities," said a Texas politician at the outset of the Civil War. "We don't want them....
We want no manufactures; we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing
classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can
command wealth to purchase all we want." In 1857, Governor Henry Wise of Vir-
ginia gloried in the gentleman slaveholder class, "civilized in the solitude, gracious
in the amenities of life, and refined and conservative in social habits ... who have
leisure for the cultivation of morals, manners, philosophy, and politics. " A South Car-
olina planter rejected the concept of progress as defined in Northern terms of com-
merce, industry, internal improvements, cities, and reform. The goals of these "noisy,
brawling, roistering progressistas," he warned, could be achieved in the South "only
by the destruction of the planter class. ulO The popularity of such views posed a pow-
erful obstacle to economic change in the South.

(i' ~
~<.:" Slavery in the American South

Slavery formed the foundation of tl1e South's distinctive social order. Although some
historians have argued that plantation agriculture rather than slave1y per se was the
basic institution of the Southe rn economy, the distinction scarcely seems important.
Slavery and the plantation were inextricably linked from the seventeenth century
onward. In the 1850s, only 10 percent of the slave labor force worked in mining,
transportation, construction, lumbering, and industry; another 15 percent were do-
mestic servants or performed other nonagricultu ral labor. The overwhelming ma-
jority of slaves, about 75 percent, worked in agriculture- 55 percent raising cotton,

9
Eugene D. Genovese, Tbe Political Economy ofSlavery (New York, 1965), p. 30; George Cary
Eggleston, Recollections of a Varied Life (New York, 1910), pp. 46--49.
'°william Howard Russell, My Diary North ctnd South (Boston, 1861), p. 179; David Be1telson, The
Lazy South (New York, 1967), p. 190; "The Prospects and Policy of the South, as They Appear to the
Eyes of a Planter," Southern Quarterly Review, 26 (October 1854), 432, 448.
36 "-~ Chapter Two The Antebellum South

10 percent tobacco, and the remaining 10 percent sugar, rice, or hemp. Slave labor
raised more than half of the tobacco, three-quarters of the cotton, and nearly all of
the rice, sugar, and hemp, as well as a major portion of the South's food crops.
Although only one-third of the South's white families owned slaves, this was a re-
markably widespread distribution of ownership for such expensive propeity. By
contrast, only 2 percent of American families in 1950 owned corporation stocks com-
parable in value to one slave a centu1y earlier. Nearly half of all owners in the 1850s
held fewer than five slaves, but more than half of all slaves belonged to the 12 per-
cent of owners who possessed twenty or more-the number that unofficially distin-
guished a plantation from a farm.

Herrenvolk Democracy
What stake did nonslaveholding whites have in the slave system? A number of dif-
ferent views have existed concerning this group. To some observers they have ap-
peared as an undifferentiated mass of ragged, dirty, illiterate "poor whites" eking out
a miserable living on the margins of the plantation economy. At the opposite pole,
some Southern historians have portrayed these "plain folk" as a proud, intelligent,
prosperous, and politically important rural middle class who raised food crops and
small amounts of tobacco or cotton or hogs for the market. Many contemporaries,
Northern and Southern alike, viewed the nonslaveholding whites as a potential an-
tislave1y force who, because they had no stake in the plantation system, might feel
that slavery degraded all labor to the level of bond labor.
None of these viewpoints is entirely correct, though all possess elements of truth.
To disentangle truth from stereotype, one must distinguish among three distinct
groups of rural nonslaveholding whites. One group consisted of the residents of the
"hill countty"-the Appalachian highlands and valleys stretching from western Mary-
land and eastern Kentucky to northern Alabama, and the Ozark Plateau of southern
Missouri and northern Arkansas. These regions contained few slaves. Their inhabi-
tants were mainly small-holding farmers who raised food crops and livestock. In pol-
itics, the hill-country residents often opposed the piedmont and lowland areas of
their states over matters of legislative apportionment, state aid to internal improve-
ments, and taxation of land and slaves. No friends of the plantation regime, the hill-
country folk came closest to fitting the image of an antislave1y fifth column within
the South. During the Civil War, many of them remained loyal to the Union.
A second group of nonslaveholders lived in the "piney woods" or "wiregrass" re-
gions-areas of sandy or marshy soil in eastern North Carolina, southern Georgia
and Alabama, eastern Mississippi, and numerous pockets elsewhere. These people
came closest to fitting the traditional image of poor whites. Many of them were ten-
ants or squatters rather than landowners. They raised a few acres of corn and grazed
scraggy herds of livestock in the woods. Although they sold some of their hogs to
richer areas of the South, these whites, like those in the upcounuy, pa1ticipated min-
imally in the staple-crop economy.
The largest group of nonslaveholding whites, however, played an important role
in that economy. They lived in the piedmont districts or in the less fertile areas of
the tidewater, where they raised each year a bale or two of cotton or a hogshead of
v.._~ Slavc1y in the American South 37

tobacco, as well as food crops. They were li~ed to the plantation regime by nu-
merous ties of self-interest and sentiment. They ginned their cotton and perhaps sold
some of their pork at the nearest plantation. Many of them aspired to become slave-
holders, and the more successful or lucky achie ved this goal. Moreover, given the
traditional patterns of kinship in the South, a nonslaveholder was quite likely to be
a cousin or a nephew of the planter down the road. The big planter was in the habit
of treating his poorer neighbors once or twice a year to a barbecue-especially if he
happened to be running for the legislature.
While subtle ties of kinship and mutual interest blunted potential class conflict be-
tween slaveholders and some nonslaveholders, the most important tie was the bond
of race. Not all Southern whites owned slaves, but they all owned white skins. Slav-
e1y was not only a system of labor exploitation, it was also a method of racial con-
trol. However much some nonslaveholders may have disliked slave1y, few could see
any alternative means of prese1ving white supremacy. An Alabama farmer told Fred-
erick Law Olmsted that he believed slave1y to be wrong-but he did not believe
emancipation to be right. "Now suppose they was free, you see they'd all thinl( them-
selves just as good as we .... How would you like to hev a nigger feelin' just as good
as a white man? How'd you like to hev a nigger steppin' up to your daiter?" Another
dirt farmer said to Olmsted that he wished "there warn't no niggers here. They are a
great cuss to this count1y.... But it wouldn't never do to free 'em and leave 'em here.
I don't know anybody, hardly, in favor of that. Make 'em free and leave 'em here and
tl1ey'd steal eve1ything we made. Nobody couldn't live here then." 11
Olmsted perceptively concluded that "from childhood, the one thing in their con-
dition which has made life valuable to the mass of whites has been that the niggers
are yet tl1eir inferiors." The Soutl1's leading proslave1y political spokesman, John C.
Calhoun of South Carolina, also grasped this truth. "With us," said Calhoun in 1848,
"the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black;
and all the former, the poor as well as ilie rich, belong to the upper class, and are
respected and treated as equals ... and hence have a position and pride of charac-
12
ter of which neitl1er pove1ty nor misfortune can deprive them."
The sociologist PieJTe L. van den Berghe has described this rationalization for slav-
e1y and white supremacy as "HeITenvolk democracy"-the equal superiority of all who
belong to the HetTenvolk (master race) over all who do not. 13 The HeITenvolk concept
had a powerful appeal in both the South and tl1e North. "Your fathers and my fathers
built this government on two ideas," said the Alabama champion of Southern rights
William L. Yancey. "The first is that the white race is the citizen, and the master race,
and the white man is tl1e equal of eve1y other white man. The second idea is that the
Negro is the inferior race." The Jacksonian Democrats aggressively championed white
supremacy; their Herrenvolk ideology helped attract Irish, Butternuts, and unskilled

11
0lmsted, Cotton Kingdom, pp. 106, J.92.
12
0lmstcd, Slave States Before the Civil War, p. 251; The Wo1·ks ofjohn C. Calhoun, ed. Richard K.
Cralle, 6 vols. (New York, 1854-57), IV, 505- 506.
13
Pierre van den 13erghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York, 1967). George M.
Fredrickson, Tbe Black Image in the White Mind (New York, 1971), chap. 2, applies this concept to
antebellum race relations in a penetrating analysis.
38 ~~ Chapter Two The Antebellum South

laborers in the North to the Democratic party, for it proclaimed that no matter how poor
they might be, these people were still better than blacks. Like the Southern nonslave-
holders, they feared emancipation because it would render their whiteness meaning-
less. "Slave1y is the poor man's best government," wrote Governor Joseph E. Brown of
Georgia, because "the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. ... He belongs to
the only true a1istocracy, the race of white men."14 Here was the central paradox of
American history: slave1y was for many whites the foundation of liberty and equality.

The Conditions of Slavery

For the slaves there was no paradox: slave1y was slavery, and freedom was its op-
posite. Chattel bondage gave the master great power over his slaves to buy or sell,
to punish without sanction of the courts, to separate families, to exploit sexually,
even to kill with little fear of being held legally responsible. As a form of property,
the slaves had few human rights in the eyes of the law. They could not legally marry,
nor own property, nor be taught to read or write in most states. Owners might let
them have a family, earn money, or (in rare cases) even buy their freedom; but un-
til they were free, money, spouse, and children could be taken away at any moment.
Several states permitted manumission only on condition that the manumitted slave
leave the state. Of the 250,000 free blacks in the slave states in 1860, only 35,000
lived in the eight lower-South cotton states, where they suffered galling restrictions
that made life for many of them little better than slavery.
In practice, the master's power over his slaves was often tempered by economic
self-interest and sometimes by paternalism. Masters and overseers could not rule by
the whip alone. Dead, maimed, bmtalized, or mnaway slaves could grow little if any
cotton. Persuasion, inducement, rewards for good work, and concessions were nec-
essary in this as in other relationships between employer and employees. The slaves
spoke the same language and worshipped the same Christian God as their owners.
Relations of trust and affection as well as alienation and hatred could exist between
slave and master.
Slave1y was, in sho1t, a human institution as well as a legal and economic one. This
helped to neutralize its dehumanizing tendencies and to give the slaves latitude to cre-
ate cultural institutions that sustained them through generations of bondage. Natural
leaders in the slave quarters often became eloquent preachers in the "invisible institu-
tion" of the black church, whose congregations worshipped apart from whites (some-
times secretly) in spite of laws to the contrary. The slaves created the most original and
moving music in antebellum America-the spirituals-which expressed their longing
for freedom as well as their resignation to sorrow, and evolved after the Civil War into
the blues and eventually into jazz. While slavery made stable family life difficult, a ma-
jority of slaves nevettheless formed strong ties of kinship and family. Thus, although
slave1y's impact on black people could be repressive, tl1e countervailing force of a pos-
itive black culture provided an impressive example of survival in the face of adversity.

14
Yancey quoted in Fredrickson, Black Image, p. 61; Hrown quoted in Michael A. Morrison, Slave1y
and the American West: The i:!clipse ofManifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill,
1997), p. 175.
SLAVES IN THE AMERICAN SOUTII.
The photograph above portrays a typical slave cabin-this one in Georgia-with dirt floors
and no glass in the windows. The photograph below shows slaves gathered before "the
Great House" and outbuildings on a large plantation near Baton Rouge, Lou isiana.

39
40 L~ Chapter Two The Antebellum South

Slavery in the United States operated with less physical harshness than in most
o ther parts of the Western Hemisphere. For most slaves o n West Indian sugar plan-
tatio ns or Brazilian coffee plantations, life was indeed nasty, brutish, and sho rt. Cli-
matic conditions and disease took a higher toll of black lives there than in North
America. Food, clothing, medical care, and the material necessities of life were less
abundant, and the pace of work on tropical s ugar plantations was more brutally de-
manding than work in the cotton or tobacco fields further north.
Slavery in the Caribbean and in South America flourished w h ile the African slave
trade was still open. In the United States, by contrast, the slave system reached its
height only after the African slave trade had ended in 1808. This had important im-
plications for the physical treatment of slaves. In Latin America, many plante rs had
considered it cheaper to import slaves from Africa and almost litera lly work them to
death than to create an environment in which the slaves could raise families and
maintain their population through natural reproduction. Jn the United States, the cut-
off of imports made planters dependent on natural reproduction fo r the maintenance
and increase of their slave "stock." It was in the slave owner's interest to encourage
good health and a high bitth rate among his slaves. One former slave said that his
master "fed us reg'lar on good, 'stantial food , just like you'd tend to you boss, if you
had a real good one." Another fo rmer slave recalled a Lo uisiana planter w ho liked
to point out healthy slave children to visitors. " 'Dat one be worth a t'ousand dol-
lars,' or 'Dat one be a whopper.' You see, 'twas just like ra isin' young mules." 15
The U.S. slave population increased by an average of 27 percent per decade af-
ter 1810, almost the same natural growth rate as for the white population. This rate
of increase was unique in the histo1y of bondage. No o ther slave population in the
Western Hemisphere even maintained, much less increased, its population through
natural reproduction. At the time of emancipation, the black population of the United
States was ten times the number of Africans who had been imported, but the black
p opulation of the West Indies was only half the number of Africans who had been
imported. Of the estimated e leven million Africans brought across the Atlantic by the
slave trade, the United States received only 5 percent; yet at the time of emancipa-
tion it had more than 30 percent of the hemisphere's black population.
Impo1tant social implications underlie these bare demographic facts. For exam-
ple, Spanish and Po rtug uese laws in Latin America allowed slaves to many and pro-
vided som e protectio n to their families, w hereas slave marriages had no legal basis
in the United States. But because West Indian and Latin American countries relied o n
the slave trade to maintain their supply of slaves, and because twice as many male
as female Africans were imported, marriage and a family were impossible for large
numbers of male slaves in these countries. By contrast, the sex ratio among slaves
in the United States was virtually equal from 1820 onward. This enabled most slaves
to form families, and helps to explain why the natural reproduction rate was so much
higher in North America than elsewhere. It also helps to explain why large-scale
slave revolts were rarer in the United States than in t11e Caribbean or in Latin Amer-
ica: men with family responsibilities were less like ly to start an insurrection.

15
Paul D. Escou, Slave1y Remembered: A Record of the Twentieth-Centwy Slave Narratives (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1979), p. 25.
"-~ Slavery in the American South 41

Lacking legal protection, however, slave faniilies in the United States were frag-
ile. One of the most tragic aspects of slave1y was the breakup of families. Even a
master w ho refused to sell fam ily members apart from each other could not always
prevent such sales to settle debts after his death. Several studies of slave1y have
found that from one-fifth to one-third of slave marriages were broken by owners-
gencrally by selling one or both of the partners separately. 16 The percentage of chil-
dren sold apart from their parents or siblings cannot even be estimated.

Slavery and the Work Ethic

In a modernizing society, status depends on achievement as well as o n ascription.
But most slaves could achieve upward mobility only within the narrowest of ranges:
from field hand to driver o r house servant, for example. Even those few slaves who
earned their freedom found their mobility blocked by racism and by the legal re-
strictions on free blacks.
Slavery also undermined the work ethic among Southern whites. When most
kinds of manual labor are associated with bondage, work becomes servile rather
than honorable . The Virginia statesman George Mason acknowledged that "slavery
discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by
slaves." The South Carolina industrialist William Gregg lamented that his state was
"destitute of eve1y feature which characterizes an industrious people." 17 Primarily be-
cause of the paucity of employment opportunities and the lack of esteem for white
labor, o nly one-eighth of the immigrants to the United States settled in the South.
Twice as many native-born whites migrated from slave to free states as vice versa.
Perhaps the most o utspoken critic of the work habits of both whites and blacks
in the South was Frederick Law Olmsted, whose writings on the South portrayed
slipshod farming practices, wretched roads and public services, trains and steam-
boats that ran late or not at all, and a general air of shiftlessness. The root of the
problem, as Olmsted and others saw it, was the inefficiency of slave workers. Forced
labor was reluctant labor. Slaves "seem to go through the motions of labor without
putting strength into them ," wrote Olmsted, who believed that the average free
worker in the North accomplished twice as much as the average slave. Most slaves,
he argued, had little motivation to improve their output through harder work or
greater efficiency. They lacked the time discipline of modern work habits. "Their
time isn't any value to themselves," said one Southern white in a remark that Olm-
sted considered profound. 18
Planters' records as well as black folklore also provide evidence that slaves en-
gaged in slowdowns and careless practices as a form of resistance to compulsory
labor. They feigned illness, ceased to work when the overseer looked the other

16
John \YI. Blassingame, Th e Slave Community (New York, 1972), pp. 89-92; Herbert Gutman and
Richard Sutch, "The Slave Family: Protected Agent of Capitalist Masters or Victim of the Slave Trade?" in
Paul A. David et al., Reckoning with Slavery (New York, 1976), pp. 127-1 29; Herbert Gutman, The
Black Family in Slave1y and Freedom (New York, 1976), pp. 146-147; Escott, Slave1y Remembered,
pp. 46-48; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery 1619-1877(New York, 1993), pp. 125-127.
17
Mason and Gregg quoted in 13ertelson, Lazy Sowh, pp. 159, 195.
18
0lmsted, Cotton Kingdom, pp. 28, 153-154.
42 fJ,_~ Chapter Two The Ante bellum South

way, pretended to misunderstand orders, broke tools, abused work animals, ran
away to the woods or swamps. Slavery helped cause the technological Jag in South-
ern agriculture. Southern hoes were heavy and clumsy be cause slaves were said to
break the lighter ones customarily used on Northern farms. Slaves continued to use
hoes for tillage and cultivation long after Northern farmers had begun to use horse-
drawn plows and cultivators. The plows that were used in Southern agriculture
tended to be the old shallow-furrow mule-drawn shovel plows, rather than the new
deep-furrow horse-drawn moldboard plows common in the North by the 1830s.
Mules were the common Southern draft animals because, while less strong than
horses, they could better withstand the reputed carelessness and abuse of slaves. In
1860, the slave states contained 90 percent of the mules but only 40 percent of the
horses in the United States. 19
The denial of education to slaves produced the most jarring disjunction between
slavery and modernization. At least 90 percent of the slave population was illiterate.
Although the slaves developed a vigorous oral tradition, their inability to read and
write barred them from the principal means of communicating knowledge, ideas,
and culture in a modernizing society. The low level of literacy was one of the chief
features distinguishing the slave from the free population and the South from the
North (see Table 2.5, page 28). In the eyes of abolitionists, it was one of the main
reasons for the "backwardness" of the South and the immorality of slaveiy.

1
9Two economic historians, Robert Fogel a nd Sta nley Engerman, have challenged the thesis of slave
inefficiency. Indeed, they maintain that because of careful management, high morale among sla ve
workers, and eco nomies of scale on large plantations, Southern agriculture was more efficient than
Northern. Few othe r historians, however, have accepte d this argument. See Robe rt W. Fogel a nd
Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Econ omics c!f American Negro Slave1y (Bosto n, 1974), and
two volumes criticizing these arg uments: Paul A. David et al. , Reckoning with Slavery (New Yo rk, 1976),
and He rbert G. Gutma n, Slavery and the Numbers Game (Urbana, Ill., 1975). In a subse q ue nt study,
Robert Fogel reiterated the thesis abo ut the superior efficiency of slave -labor a griculture, but now
attributed it mainly to "the enormo us, almost unconstrained degree of force available to masters."
Fogel, Without Consent or Con tract: 1be Rise and Fall of American Slave1y (Ne w York, 1989), p. 34.