Cotton is King: The Antebellum South, 1800–1860

This is Unit Twelve, part two, on the people of the antebellum South — the enslaved, the free, and the White majority who owned nobody. Part one closed on the cotton economy and the auction block at its centre. This half turns to who lived inside that machine. Two entries here answer the two questions students ask most often. One is whether the South could have chosen differently, and the largest slave state in the country debated exactly that in eighteen thirty-two and voted it down. The other is why White men who enslaved nobody would fight to preserve slavery, and the anchor gives an answer that is not about their being deceived. By the end you will be able to explain why the upper South's laws were harsher than the Deep South's. To state what Virginia debated and decided. To explain what the reopening question reveals. To state how slaveholding was distributed. And to explain why non-slaveholders defended the institution.

Four entries on what enslaved people made and kept, and every one is a technique.

What the children were taught.

USH1 1677 Storytelling and Brer Rabbit

Enslaved parents taught their children survival skills and discretion around White people through storytelling, with trickster tales featuring figures such as Brer Rabbit, who outwitted their stronger antagonists. A story about a weak animal defeating a strong one by cunning is instruction rather than entertainment, and the children knew it.

What they sang.

USH1 1678 Work Songs

Work songs carried double meanings, a literal one acceptable to White listeners and a deeper one for the enslaved, commenting on the harshness of slavery within earshot of those enforcing it. Concealment inside plain sight is the technique, and it is the same technique as the trickster tale.

What survived from Africa.

USH1 1679 African Practice Preserved

White people labelled non-Christian African ritual as witchcraft, and enslaved healers used those practices to maintain community and identity, with traditional naming patterns, basket-making, and the cultivation of native African plants continuing. Cultural survival under these conditions was itself a form of resistance, not a residue.

The faith they were given, and remade.

USH1 1680 Christianity Reinterpreted

Many enslaved people embraced Christianity and reinterpreted the slaveholders' emphasis on obedience and heavenly reward, with Methodist and Baptist emotional worship drawing enslaved congregants and producing enslaved preachers. Spirituals on the biblical Exodus carried freedom messages, and Roll, Jordan, Roll made the river a path out.

One entry, from the man you heard at the market in part one.

Northup on the quota.

USH1 1681 Northup on the Quota

Northup recorded the ordinary daily quota as two hundred pounds, with cotton plants growing five to seven feet high, and work from as soon as it is light in the morning until it is too dark to see. Carrying the basket to the gin house happened with fear and trembling, because short weight meant punishment and exceeding the quota raised it.

Four entries on free Black southerners, and the last overturns what you would expect.

How many, and where.

USH1 1682 Free Black People

Approximately two hundred sixty-one thousand free Black people lived in slave states, and two hundred twenty-six thousand in northern free states, concentrated in the upper South rather than the Deep South. Sources of freedom included post-Revolutionary manumission, the shift to wheat, and arrivals from Cuba and Haiti.

The hierarchy imposed among them.

USH1 1683 The Colour Hierarchy

Most urban free Black people were lighter-skinned women, reflecting unions between White men and Black women, and the anchor records terms used to rank people by degrees of ancestry. Lighter-skinned Black people often despised darker counterparts, internalising the racist hierarchy imposed on all of them.

The rarest case.

USH1 1684 Free Black Slaveholders

Andrew Durnford, born in New Orleans in eighteen hundred, became a Louisiana sugar planter and slaveholder, and William Ellison, born enslaved in South Carolina in seventeen ninety, bought his family's freedom and manufactured cotton gins. Ellison became one of South Carolina's largest slaveholders by the Civil War. Such wealth was exceedingly rare.

Where the law was harshest.

USH1 1685 Upper South Laws Were Harsher

Southern states made manumission increasingly illegal and stripped free Black people of rights, forbidding them to testify against White people in court or to seek employment freely, and Virginia required free Black people to leave the state. The anchor records a fact that runs against intuition: upper South laws were harsher than those of the Deep South. Historians attribute the difference to economics. Slavery in the Deep South was strong and profitable, so a free Black population was an irritant. In the upper South slavery was economically uncertain, tobacco was giving way to wheat, and the free Black population was growing, so insecurity expressed itself as restriction. Where an institution feels secure it tolerates exceptions. Where it feels threatened it legislates.

Two entries on armed risings, and note how each one ended.

The largest rising.

USH1 1686 The 1811 Louisiana Rising

In January eighteen eleven, in Louisiana's sugar parishes, perhaps five hundred enslaved people took up arms under Charles Deslondes, a mixed-race slave driver, in a rising inspired by Haiti, killing Andry's son, burning three plantations and marching toward New Orleans. Deslondes was mutilated and burned. Other rebels were beheaded and their heads placed on pikes along the Mississippi.

The rising that changed Virginia.

USH1 1687 Nat Turner

Nat Turner had endured enslavement and his wife's sale, and his Christianity convinced him he should lay down his life like Christ to end slavery. The rising began on August twenty-second, eighteen thirty-one, in Southampton County, Virginia, killing scores of White residents. White mobilisation ended it within forty-eight hours.

One entry now, and it is the first of the two I promised at the start.

What Virginia did next.

USH1 1688 The Virginia Debate

After Turner's rising the Virginia legislature considered ending slavery for the sake of security. It was the legislature of the largest slave state in the country, debating abolition in eighteen thirty-two. It chose instead to keep slavery, and to keep the state's central role in the domestic slave trade — the alternative debated seriously and voted down. This is the counterfactual that makes the decision visible. Nothing about the South's course was inevitable, and the clearest proof is that its largest slave state examined the alternative and declined it. Anyone who believes the South could not have chosen otherwise should be shown that it considered choosing otherwise and did not. Unit Fourteen's secession looks different once you know this debate happened.

Two entries on the trade that decision preserved, and the first is the longest here.

The second middle passage.

USH1 1689 The Second Middle Passage

After eighteen oh eight the largest source of enslaved people was the legal internal market, in which upper South states sold men, women and children to the Lower South. Between eighteen twenty and eighteen sixty, White American traders sold over a million captives in that domestic market, and the anchor calls it the second middle passage. Groups travelled by ship from Virginia, which specialised in raising enslaved people for sale, to New Orleans for sale to Mississippi Valley planters. Others made overland treks from North Carolina to Alabama and the Deep South. New Orleans held the largest slave market in America and Natchez the second largest, and slave auctions took place daily across Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. A healthy young enslaved man in the eighteen fifties sold for a thousand dollars, and prices had doubled since the eighteen twenties, when the same person would have brought four hundred. Demand ran so high by the fifties that southerners pressed to reopen the international slave trade, and upper South sellers opposed them, because cheaper imports would have cut the price of the people they were selling. Hold that last fact. The reopening question split the South against itself along exactly the line of the internal trade, with Virginia and Maryland defending their market against South Carolina and the Gulf states who wanted cheaper labour. The domestic trade was not a regrettable necessity of the cotton economy. It was a business with its own lobby, its own price index and its own sectional politics, and the people in it were its inventory. Note also that phrase, second middle passage, which is the anchor's, and which places this trade beside the Atlantic crossing rather than treating it as a lesser thing.

How that inventory was produced.

USH1 1690 Forced Reproduction

Slaveholders forced enslaved men and women together, and routinely raped enslaved women, and the anchor says the resulting births significantly expanded slavery. Frederick Douglass recorded that enslavers sold their own children by enslaved women to appease White wives who despised the offspring. Douglass escaped Maryland in eighteen thirty-eight and published his narrative in eighteen forty-five.

Two entries of testimony, and the second carries a warning about a name.

William J. Anderson.

USH1 1691 William J. Anderson

William J. Anderson described a Mississippi slaveholder who whipped a woman with a handsaw until he broke it over her body, then raped her and fathered a child. Anderson named it the curse of slavery, concubinage and illegitimate connections, carried on to an alarming extent. He recorded that enslaved husbands visited wives very seldom while other men cohabited with them.

A witness whose name causes confusion.

USH1 1692 John Brown the Autobiographer

John Brown was enslaved in Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, escaped to England, and dictated his autobiography in eighteen fifty-five, giving an account of a master who made his people work eighteen hours a day on one meal. This is not the John Brown of Harpers Ferry, taught in Unit Fourteen. Two men, one name.

Three entries on who actually owned the South, and the numbers are smaller than you expect.

The distribution of wealth.

USH1 1693 The Distribution of Wealth

By eighteen sixty the Mississippi River Valley held more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States, with only three percent of White people enslaving more than fifty individuals. Two-thirds of southern White households enslaved no one, and between eighteen forty and eighteen sixty the distribution became less democratic, not more.

The class at the top.

USH1 1694 The Planter Elite

The planter elite fell into two groups, the upper South's aristocratic gentry with generations of slaveholding behind them, and the Deep South's newly wealthy cotton planters. Nathaniel Heyward, a South Carolina rice planter, enslaved more than eighteen hundred people in eighteen fifty, and his estate at his death in eighteen fifty-one was worth about two million dollars.

A plantation seen from inside.

USH1 1695 Edward Lloyd and Douglass

Edward Lloyd the Fifth of Talbot County, Maryland, inherited holdings that peaked at forty-two thousand acres and a thousand enslaved people. Frederick Douglass, enslaved on that plantation, described its elaborate gardens and racehorses against an underfed and brutalised enslaved population. Lloyd was Maryland's governor and later a senator, and defended slavery as America's economic foundation.

Three entries to close, and the last is the second promise from the opening.

The yeoman farmers.

USH1 1696 The Yeoman Farmers

Below the planters stood yeoman farmers, small landowners who worked their own land and sometimes enslaved a few people — a class holding land but not the scale that produced political power. They generally opposed active federal government, distrusted banks, and feared a strong national government might tamper with slavery.

The majority.

USH1 1697 The Landless Majority

Below the yeomen were poor, landless White people, who made up the majority of southern Whites, with landless men serving as slave overseers, drivers and traders. Owning land and enslaved people was, the anchor says, one of the only opportunities for upward social and economic mobility available to them.

What held it together.

USH1 1698 What Held It Together

Non-slaveholding and slaveholding White people shared a belief in White supremacy, and racism bound them together. Slavery diffused class tension, because even the poorest White southerner shared a race with the plantation owner. Non-slaveholders accepted planter rule as defenders of a racial hierarchy they benefited from, and all Whites were bound by the constant, prevailing fear of slave uprisings. Non-slaveholders also staffed the neighbourhood patrols. This is the answer to the question students ask most often about the Civil War, which is why men who enslaved no one fought to preserve slavery. The anchor's answer is that slavery's perpetuation was a source of commonality among different economic and social tiers, and that its abolition threatened the only social floor the poorest White southerners had. Do not treat that as false consciousness. It was a correct assessment of where they stood.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain why the upper South's laws against free Black people were harsher than the Deep South's: where slavery felt secure it tolerated exceptions, and where it felt threatened it legislated. You can state what Virginia debated in eighteen thirty-two — abolition, in the largest slave state in the country, after Turner's rising — and that it declined, which is the proof that nothing here was inevitable. You can explain what the reopening question reveals: the domestic trade had its own lobby and its own price index, and Virginia and Maryland fought the Gulf states to protect the value of their inventory. You can state how slaveholding was distributed, with two-thirds of White households enslaving nobody and three percent holding more than fifty people. And you can explain why those non-slaveholders defended slavery, which the anchor treats as a correct reading of where they stood rather than a delusion.