SLAVERY

SLAVERY. What does it mean to dehumanize a human being? To ponder this question is to approach some definition of slavery, one of the most extreme forms of dehumanization. We know enough about life in the antebellum South to know that slaves resisted dehumanization, that they created a folk culture, a family structure, and a spiritual life that blunted the dehumanizing force of slavery. What was it, then, that made slavery slavery?

The problem of slavery, and not just in the American South, was that it defined slaves as outsiders within the very societies of which they were a part. In America this meant that although the slaves got married and formed families, their families were not legally sanctioned and were therefore liable to be torn apart at the will of the master. Put differently, the slave family had no social standing. From youth to old age, from sunup to sundown, slaves spent the bulk of their waking lives at work, for slavery in America was nothing if not a system of labor exploitation. Yet the slaves had no right whatsoever to claim the fruits of their labor. This was "social death," and to the extent that humans are social beings, slavery was a profoundly dehumanizing experience.

What it means to be socially dead, an outsider, varies depending on how a society defines social life. Over the course of slavery's two and a half centuries of life in what became the United States, Americans developed a very specific understanding of social life. In so doing, they were specifying the definition of slavery in America. They saw membership in society in terms of rights, thereby defining the slaves as rightless.

To be sure, social death did not extinguish the slaves' cultural life. The slaves sometimes accumulated small amounts of property, for example, but they had no right to their property independent of the master's will. They bought and sold merchandise, they hired out their labor, but their contracts had no legal standing. In their sacred songs, their profane folktales, and in their explicit complaints, the slaves articulated their dissatisfaction with slavery. But they had no right to publish, to speak, or to assemble. They had no standing in the public sphere, just as their private lives had no legal protection. Thus the distinction between public and private—a central attribute of American society beginning in the eighteenth century—did not apply to the slaves. In all of these ways American slavery dehumanized its victims by depriving them of social standing, without which we cannot be fully human.

Origins of American Slavery

Slavery was largely incompatible with the organic societies of medieval Europe. After the collapse of ancient slavery human bondage persisted on the margins of medieval Europe, first on the islands of the eastern Mediterranean and later in the coastal areas of southern Europe. But western slavery did not revive until the feudal economies declined, opening up opportunities for European merchants and adventurers who were freed from the constraints that prevailed elsewhere. Over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries Europe's consciousness of itself expanded to the point where no "Europeans" were considered "outsiders," and as such available for enslavement. This was a far cry from conditions in Africa, where a much more local conception of social membership made Africans subject to enslavement by other Africans. Thus, during those same centuries, entrepreneurs—first from Spain and Portugal and later from Holland and England—took to the seas and plugged themselves into Africa's highly developed system of slavery, transforming it into a vast Atlantic slave trade.

Finally, the collapse of an organically unified conception of European society, reflected in the Protestant Reformation's destruction of the "one true church," paved the way for the critical liberal distinction between the public and private spheres of life. Modern slavery flourished in this setting, for the slaveholders ironically required the freedom of civil society to establish the slave societies of the Atlantic world. Thus did the slave societies of the Americas grow up alongside, and as part of, the development of liberal capitalism. This is what distinguished "modern" slavery from its predecessors in antiquity.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic SLAVE TRADE was in some ways an extension of a much older Mediterranean slave trade. Over the course of the late Middle Ages slave-based sugar plantations spread from Turkey to the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, and westward to coastal regions of southern France and Spain before breaking out into the Atlantic and spreading southward to the Azores, Madeira, and São Tomé. To some extent this line of expansion followed the source of slaves, for by the time sugar was being planted on the islands of the Mediterranean, Arab traders were transporting sub-Saharan Africans across the desert to sell them as slave laborers in southern and eastern Europe. Thus as Europe expanded it grew increasingly dependent

on the continued willingness of Africans to enslave one another.

When the Spanish and the Portuguese first encountered West Africans the Europeans were too weak to establish plantations on the African mainland. But by establishing slavery on the island off the African coast—Madiera, the Azores, and São Tomé—the Europeans created the network of connections with Africans that later allowed them to expand their operations into a vast transatlantic slave trade. Thwarted on the African mainland the Europeans turned westward, leaping across the Atlantic to establish sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Over the course of several hundred years, European and colonial slavers purchased approximately thirteen million slaves from their African captors. Perhaps eleven million of those Africans survived the Atlantic crossing to be put to work on the farms and plantations of the New World.

Slavery and the slave trade grew as the economy of western Europe expanded and developed. It peaked in the eighteenth century, when a "consumer revolution" centered in England and North America created unprecedented demand for the commodities produced by slaves, especially sugar. Indeed, the history of slavery in the Americas can be written in terms of the rise and fall of a series of sugar economies, first in Brazil, and then on a succession of Caribbean islands beginning with Jamaica and ending, in the nineteenth century, with Cuba. By the time the British got around the establishing permanent settlements on the North American mainland, the Atlantic slave trade that fed the booming sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean was fully operational. If the English colonists in Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere chose to develop slave economies of their own, the means to do so were readily at hand.

From "Societies with Slaves" to "Slave Societies"

In 1776 slavery was legal in every one of the thirteen colonies that declared its independence from Great Britain. Most of the leading ministers in Puritan Massachusetts had been slave owners. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century a significant percentage of the population of New York City was enslaved, and in 1712 several dozen of that city's slaves openly rebelled. By then there were substantial numbers of slaves in Newport, Rhode Island, which was rapidly becoming a center for the North American slave trade. To the south, African slaves first arrived in the Chesapeake region of Virginia and Maryland in

1619. Slaves appeared in the Carolinas a generation or two later. The ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth century America was not unusual, however: slaves had been present in human societies throughout history, and colonial America was no exception.

What made the colonies—and ultimately the American South—exceptional was the fact that the Chesapeake and lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia became full-scale slave societies rather than merely societies with slaves. Slave societies are rare things in human history, and so its emergence in North America is one of the most important historical developments of the eighteenth century. Slave society, not slavery, is what distinguished the northern colonies from the southern colonies and explains why slavery was abolished in the northern states but persisted in the South. Thus the emergence of slave society, rather than the emergence of slavery itself, is the first major turning point in the history of American slavery.

In the Chesapeake slave society developed fairly slowly. For most of the seventeenth century African slaves in Maryland and Virginia numbered in the hundreds. When English settlers first discovered the profitable potential of large-scale tobacco production, their first source of labor was indentured servants, most of them from Great Britain. Thus, tobacco planting was an established business when, in the late seventeenth century, the English economy improved and the supply of indentured servants dried up. It was only then that Chesapeake planters turned to African slaves in large numbers. Between 1680 and 1720 the Chesapeake was transformed from a society with slaves to a slave society. In those same years, a slave society based on rice planting was constructed in the Carolina lowcountry.

By 1750 the economy and society of both the Chesapeake and the lowcountry were based on slavery. But the two regions differed in significant ways. Tobacco plantations were relatively small; they could be run efficiently with twenty or thirty slaves. Rice plantations were most efficient with fifty slaves or more, whereas the sugar plantations of the Caribbean—and later Louisiana—required so much initial capital that they were most efficient when they had a hundred slaves or more. Because tobacco required some care to cultivate, slaves were organized in gangs that were directly supervised either by the master, an overseer, or a slave driver. Rice planting, by contrast, demanded certain skills but it did not require direct supervision. So in the Carolina lowcountry, slave labor was organized under a "task" system, with individual slaves assigned a certain task every day and left largely on their own to complete it.

Because of these distinctions, slave life in the eighteenth-century lowcountry differed in important ways from slave life in the Chesapeake. Large rice plantations made it easier for slaves to form families of their own. On the other hand, high death rates in the lowcountry destabilized the families that did form. Smaller farms meant that tobacco slaves were much more likely to marry "away" from their home plantations, with all the disruptions and difficulties that such marriages inevitably entailed. On the other hand, Chesapeake slave families were less disrupted by disease and death than were the slave families of the Carolina lowcountry.

Because sugar cane was such a labor-intensive crop, sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean were death traps for slaves; they required constant infusions of new laborers imported from Africa. But sugar could not grow in Virginia or Carolina; and the relative health of slaves working the crops grown there made a family life among slaves possible. As a result, the slave population of the North American colonies developed the ability to reproduce itself naturally over the course of the eighteenth century. In the tobacco regions the slaves achieved a fairly robust rate of population growth, whereas the rice slaves did little more than reproduce their numbers. As a result, the expansion of the rice economy required substantial imports of African slaves throughout the eighteenth century, whereas in the Chesapeake the slave population was largely native-born after 1750. The high density of blacks, combined with sustained African immigration, created a distinctive culture in the coastal lowcountry, a culture marked by its own "gullah" dialect and the persistence of significant African traditions. In Virginia and Maryland, by contrast, a largely native-born population and smaller plantations led to an English-speaking slave community that was more assimilated to the culture of the English settlers.

Although the rice plantations grew more technologically sophisticated, and therefore more productive, over the course of the eighteenth century, the rice culture itself was largely restricted to the lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia. The tobacco culture of the Chesapeake proved more adaptable. In the upper South, planters shifted readily to wheat production when the tobacco economy faltered. But more important, the tobacco pattern spread at the end of the century into the inland regions of the lower South, where it facilitated the expansion of short-staple COTTON. Thus the form slave society took in the colonial Chesapeake—relatively small plantations, a gang labor system, relatively high birth rates, and a native-born slave population—became the model upon which the cotton economy of the nineteenth century depended. Before that happened, however, the American Revolution had dramatically altered the history of slavery in the United States.

Slavery and the American Revolution

The American Revolution had a profound but ambiguous effect on the history of slavery in the United States. It established the terms of a ferocious debate, without precedent in history, over the morality of slavery itself. It resulted in the creation of the first sizable communities of free blacks in the United States. It made slavery into a sectional institution by abolishing or restricting it in the North while protecting it in the South. And by defining a "citizen" of the new nation as the bearer of certain basic rights, it definitively established the status of American slaves as rightless.

As soon as the conflict between the colonies and Great Britain erupted, the English began to encourage southern slaves to rebel against their masters. Thousands of slaves took advantage of the British offer, thereby transforming the war for independence into a civil war in the southern colonies. As a result, southern slaveholders came to associate their struggle for freedom from Great Britain with the struggle to preserve slavery. The slaves, meanwhile, began to define freedom as the acquisition of rights.

Some of the revolutionary changes had important social consequences. For example, the revolutionary commitment to fundamental human equality inspired the abolition of slavery in every northern state between 1776 and 1804. In the upper South the same ideology, combined with the relative weakness of the slave economy, prompted a wave of MANUMISSIONs (formal emancipations) in Virginia and Maryland. Northern abolition and southern manumissions together produced the first major communities of free blacks in the United States.

There were important legal changes as well. Slave codes across the South were revised to reflect the liberal humanist injunction against cruelty: some of the most barbaric punishments of slaves were eliminated and the wanton murder of a slave was made illegal for the first time. The new Constitution gave Congress the power to ban, by a simple majority vote, the entire nation from participating in the Atlantic slave trade after 1808. In addition the first U.S. Congress reenacted a Northwest Ordinance, first passed by the Continental Congress, substantially restricting the western expansion of slavery in the northern states. All of these developments reflected the sudden and dramatic emergence of an antislavery sentiment that was new to the world.

But the Revolution did not abolish slavery everywhere, and in important ways it reinforced the slave societies of the South even as it eliminated the last societies with slaves in the North. Humanizing the slave codes made slavery less barbaric, for example, but also more tolerable. More important, the new Constitution recognized and protected slavery without ever actually using the word "slave." It included a fugitive slave clause and two "three-fifths" clauses that gave the southern states a discount on their tax liabilities and enhanced representation in the House of Representatives. Finally, the same liberal ideology that provided so many Americans with a novel argument against slavery became the basis for an equally novel proslavery argument. The rights of property in slaves, the claim that slaves were happy, that they were not treated with cruelty, that they were less productive than free laborers: all of these sentiments drew on the same principles of politics and political economy that inspired the Revolution. They became the mainstays of a developing proslavery ideology.

The Westward Expansion of the Slave Economy

Beginning in the 1790s, a previously moribund slavery came roaring back to life. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented

a machine that made the cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable. Almost immediately the cotton economy began a relentless expansion that continued for more than half a century and eventually provided the catalyst for the Civil War.

The COTTON boom commenced with the migration of slaveholders from the upper South down the Piedmont plateau into South Carolina and Georgia. By 1800 slave-holders were spilling across the Appalachians planting tobacco in Kentucky and Tennessee and cotton in Georgia and Alabama. The population of Alabama and Mississippi, 40,000 in 1810, leaped to 200,000 in 1820 and kept growing until it reached over 1.6 million by 1860. By then cotton and slavery had crossed the Mississippi River into Louisiana, parts of Missouri, and Texas. In those same years slave plantations in Kentucky and Tennessee expanded their production of tobacco and to a lesser extent, hemp. And in southern Louisiana the rise of the cotton kingdom was paralleled by the rise in huge, heavily capitalized sugar plantations.

But rice, tobacco, and sugar could not match the dynamism and scope of short-staple cotton. Indeed, cotton quickly established itself as the nation's leading export, in both tons and dollars. Although its growth was erratic—slowing in the 1820s and again in the early 1840s—it never stopped. And far from stagnating, the cotton economy was never more vibrant than it was in the 1850s. Thus on the eve of the Civil War many white Southerners were persuaded that "Cotton is King" and could never be dethroned.

The consequences of slavery's expansion were not confined to economic history, however. For both free and enslaved Southerners, the cotton boom had powerful effects on social and cultural life. Among the slaveholders, the cotton boom bred an aggressively expansionist ethos that influenced everything from family life to national politics. Wives and mothers complained about the men who were prepared to pull up stakes and move westward in search of new opportunities. Sons were urged to leave their towns and families to start up new plantations further west. And slaveholding presidents, including Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk, carried these expansionist convictions with them to Washington, D.C., provoking wars and international confrontations all for the sake of facilitating slavery's expansion. But it was the slaves whose lives, families, and communities were most profoundly disrupted by the rise of the cotton kingdom.

The Deterioration of Slave Life

In the second half of the eighteenth century the lives of most slaves improved. Infant mortality rates among slaves declined; the average height of adult slaves rose, indicating an adequate level of nutrition. With that the slaves reached a healthy rate of natural population growth, the ratio of men to women evened out, and it was possible for most slaves to form families of their own. In addition, the American Revolution had inspired many masters in the upper South to free their slaves, and for the vast majority who remained in bondage the laws of slavery became

somewhat less severe. After 1800, however, this progress came to a halt, and in some ways reversed itself.

In the nineteenth century the conditions of slave life deteriorated. Beginning in the 1790s the state legislatures made it harder and harder for masters to manumit (free) their slaves, further choking the already narrow chances the slaves had of gaining their freedom. After 1830 most southern states passed laws making it a crime to teach a slave to read, adding legally enforced illiteracy to the attributes of enslavement. The health of the slaves declined as well. The number of low-birth-weight infants increased, and the average height of the slaves fell—both of them indications of deteriorating levels of nutrition. With the rise of the sugar plantations of Louisiana, a new and particularly ferocious form of slavery established a foothold in the Old South. Sugar plantations had a well-deserved reputation for almost literally working the slaves to death. They averaged a stunning population decline of about 14 percent each decade. But sugar planting was so profitable that it could survive and prosper anyway, thanks to an internal slave trade that provided Louisiana planters with a steady supply of replacement laborers.

The growth of the internal slave trade in the antebellum South made the systematic destruction of African American families a defining element of the slave system. In colonial times, when new slaves were imported through the Atlantic slave trade, the internal trade was small. But with the expansion of the cotton economy after 1790 and the closing of the Atlantic trade in 1808, a robust market in slaves developed. At first Virginia and Maryland but later South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee exported their slaves to the newer slave states further west and south. Eventually even Alabama and Mississippi became net exporters of slaves. Between 1790 and 1860 nearly a million slaves were exported from one part of the South to another, making it one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Between one third and one half of these slaves did not migrate with their masters but were sold through the interstate slave trade.

Slaveholders protested that they sold family members apart from one another only when absolutely necessary. But "necessity" was a flexible concept in the Old South. When the cotton economy was booming and slave prices were high, for example, it became more "necessary" to sell slaves. Furthermore, the ages of the slaves put up for sale suggest that husbands were regularly sold away from wives and children were regularly sold away from parents. The paradox was appalling: cotton cultivation was healthy enough to sustain a natural growth of the slave population through the creation of slave families, but the expansion of the cotton economy broke up those families by the tens of thousands. The forced sale of a close relative became a nearly universal experience for the slaves of the Old South.

The Plantation Regime

Since the late eighteenth century, Americans both North and South accepted that slave labor was less efficient than free labor. Even the slave owners agreed that a slave lacked the incentives to diligent labor that motivated the free worker. Slaves could not be promoted for hard work or fired for poor work. They did not get raises. Harder work did not bring more food, better clothing, a finer home. The slaves could not accumulate savings hoping to buy farms of their own; they could not work with the aim of winning their ultimate freedom; nor could they work to insure that their children's lives would be easier than theirs. Lacking the normal incentives of free labor, the slaves were universally dismissed as lackluster and inefficient workers.

And yet the slave economy grew at impressive, even spectacular rates in the nineteenth century. The returns on investment in slave plantations were comparable to the returns on businesses in the North. Despite the ups and downs of the market for slave-produced commodities, slavery was by and large a profitable system in the Old South. This was no accident. The slaveholders organized their farms and plantations to be as productive as possible. They constructed a managerial hierarchy to oversee the daily labor of the slaves. They employed the latest techniques in crop rotation and manuring. They planted corn and raised livestock that complemented the cash crops, thus keeping the slaves both busy and adequately nourished.

Any free farmer could have done as much, but the slaveholders had advantages that counteracted the weaknesses of their labor system. They put otherwise "unproductive" slaves to work. Slave children went to work at an earlier age than free children, for example. And elderly slaves too old for fieldwork were put in charge of minding very small children and preparing the meals for all the slaves. These and other economies of scale turned a labor system that was in theory unproductive and inefficient into what was, in practice, one of the great economic successes of the nineteenth century.

On a well managed plantation the slaves were kept busy year round, fixing tools and repairing buildings during the winter season, tending to the corn when the cotton was taken care of, slaughtering the hogs after the last of the cotton was ginned. Since most slaves lived on units with twenty or more slaves, most were introduced to some form of systematic management. Slave "drivers" acted as foremen to oversee the gangs in the fields. On larger plantations overseers were hired to manage day to day operations. The larger the plantation the more common it was for particular slaves to specialize in various forms of skilled labor. The "well managed plantation," the slaveholders agreed, took into consideration not simply the amount of cotton produced, but the overall productivity of the farm's operations.

Yet the fact remained that the slaves lacked the incentive to care very much or work very hard to maximize the master's profits. As a result, much of the management of slaves was aimed at forcing them to do what they did not really care about. This was the underlying tension of the master-slave relationship. It was the reason almost all masters resorted to physical punishment. In the final analysis, the efficiency of southern slavery, and the resentment of the slaves, was driven by the whip.

Slave Culture

Slaves responded to the hardships and disruptions of their lives through the medium of a distinctive culture whose roots were in part African and in part American but whose basic outlines were shaped by the experience of slavery itself.

Slave culture developed in several distinct stages. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as the slave population stabilized and the majority of slaves became native-born, a variety of African dialects gave way to English as the language through which most American slaves communicated with one another. A native-born slave population in turn depended on the existence of slave families.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a growing number of slaves converted to evangelical Christianity and by 1860 Protestantism was the dominant religion of enslaved African Americans.

Despite the fact that most slaves eventually spoke English and practiced Christianity, elements of West African culture persisted. In some parts of the South, such as lowcountry South Carolina and southern Louisiana, the African influence could be strong. The mystical practices of voodoo common among Louisiana slaves, for example, were only one example of African cultural practices that survived in the Old South. More generally, slaves continued to put their faith in the conjurers and potions that were a part of the mystical life of West Africans. Other African cultural traces could be found in the slaves' funeral practices, their marriage ceremonies, and in the way they treated the sick and the dying. Slave music evinced a rhythmic complexity more common to West Africa than to western Europe. And slave dancing, which masters commonly dismissed as mere wild gyrations, were more often a legacy of African traditions such as the "ring shout."

Even the fact that the slaves spoke English, formed families, and practiced Christianity did not mean that they had simply absorbed the culture of their masters. In important ways the slaves used their language to construct a folk culture of rituals, music, and storytelling that reflected the continuing influence of African traditions and that remained very much the culture of slaves rather than masters. The slaves reckoned kinship more broadly and more flexibly than did their masters, providing some measure of emotional protection from the disruptions of family life. Nor was slave Christianity a mere carbon copy of the religion of the masters. Slaves did not distinguish the sacred from the profane as sharply as their owners did; they empathized more with the Moses of the Old Testament, who led his people out of bondage, than with the New Testament Epistles of St. Paul, which exhorted slaves to obey their masters.

For the masters, however, slave culture was as important for what it lacked as for what it contained. Try as they might, the slaveholders could not overcome the structural constraints of a labor system that gave the slaves no reason to respond to the bourgeois injunctions to diligence, thrift, and sobriety. Slave culture was distinguished less by the persistence of African traditions than by its distance from the culture of the masters.

The Culture of the Masters

Years ago, a pioneering historian of the Old South wrote that slavery was "less a business than a life; it made fewer fortunes than it made men." Maybe so. But slavery made more than its share of fortunes: in 1860 almost all of the richest counties in America were located in the South. And the men who made those fortunes did not do so by lolling about on their verandas, sipping mint juleps and reading the Old South's version of the daily racing form.

The slaveholders were a hard-nosed and aggressive lot. Those who inherited their plantations added to their wealth by buying second and third plantations. Sometimes they pulled up stakes, moved west, and built more plantations. Slaveholders who started with a handful of slaves often used their professional careers to subsidize their accumulation of more land and more slaves. It was the rare planter whose wealth did not entail careful management of his farm, constant supervision of his slaves, and a keen eye for a chance to expand his operations or move on.

Because successful slave ownership was hard work, the planters liked to think that they had arrived at their exalted social standing not by the advantages of privileged upbringings but through their steady adherence to the bourgeois virtues of thrift, diligence, and sobriety. No doubt a few generations of wealth smoothed out the rough edges on many a planter family, and the temptation to fancy themselves aristocrats of a sort could become irresistible. But the demands of the slave economy and the plantation regime could not be ignored: to lose sight of the bottom line was to risk financial and social ruin.

Faced with rising antislavery criticism from the North, the slaveholders looked to their experience and filtered it through the prevailing political culture to produce a provocative series of proslavery arguments. If cruelty was immoral, the slaveholders insisted that the slaves were well treated and that brutality was frowned upon. If happiness rested upon a decent standard of living, the slaves were so well treated that they were among the happiest people on earth. Only as slaves did Africans, who would otherwise languish in heathenism, have access to the word of God. Although slave labor was in principle less efficient than free labor, southern slavery put an otherwise unproductive race of people to work in an otherwise unproductive climate, thereby creating wealth and civilization where it could not otherwise have existed. In a culture that sentimentalized the family, the slaveholders increasingly insisted that the families of slaves were protected against all unnecessary disruption. Thus by the standards of liberal society—the immorality of cruelty, the universal right to happiness, freedom to worship, the sanctity of the family, the productivity of labor, and the progress of civilization—southern slave society measured up.

Or so the slaveholders claimed. Northerners—enough of them, anyway—thought differently. As the relentless expansion of the slave states pushed against the equally relentless expansion of the free states, the two regions sharpened their arguments as well as their weapons. When the war came North, with more guns and more machines and more free men to put in uniform, suppressed the slaveholders' rebellion and put down slavery to boot. Thus did American slave society, wealthier and more powerful than ever, come to its violent and irreversible end.