Before the American Civil War of between 1861 and 1865, black slavery in the United States thrived on the pillars of white supremacy. Otherwise dubbed the antebellum period, the years ranging from 1820 to 1860 witnessed a gradual yet steady increase in the country’s reliance on slave labor. As per the ideologies of white supremacy, the dominance of white people warranted the inferiority of colored individuals and as a result, everyone belonging to the former group could hold those of the latter faction in bondage. Accordingly, the cultural norms of the country during the given era encompassed the enslavement of black people for the benefit of the Caucasians, and as one would expect, whites sought to maintain that specific social order. In the plantation south, laws protected the interests of slave owners by denying slaves any rights to government protection. Meanwhile, the industrial north exploited black people for menial labor in exchange for meager wages as a guarantee of maximum profits on their part and were the main buyers of Southern cotton. To that end, the institution of slavery in the United States was primarily a dehumanizing system that rendered black people useless even when they were free. Now, just how much effort went into protecting the slavery system as an economic interest in Antebellum America? Moreover, how did the States benefit from such an arrangement? In answer, this paper explores the nature of slavery during the antebellum period before determining the impact of slave labor on the Southern and Northern regions of the United States.
Foremost, for black slavery to exist in the United States and thrive amidst people who claimed democracy as their guiding principle, certain conditions had to be in place. The States needed a decisive factor on who was eligible for the liberties and opportunities in the land and who had no access to the same. To that end, the Caucasian populace adopted racism and went on to have it deeply embedded in all spheres of their societies. A perfect illustration of the given claim is evident in the fact that Jim Crow “minstrel shows” were popular throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Apparently, such performances depicted white actors darkening their skin before going on to imitate stereotypical blacks as a form of entertainment for their white audience.
The acts stemmed from the widely accepted belief that persons of color were an illiterate lot and incapable of acting rationally. For instance, in one particular jig, the chorus made little sense because the words and actions used in its composition were mainly comical: “Weel about and turn about and do jis so. Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” From the fact that the words described ridiculous movements to the knowledge that the shows were entertainment for white people, it is safe to use the Jim Crow shows as evidence of the countrywide acceptance of black inferiority on the grounds of their supposed stupidity. By extension, it was a deeply rooted understanding that black people could not survive if left to their devices. Accordingly, in 1832, Kennedy Pendleton insisted that blacks were essentially parasites since they could never endure life on their own without leeching off stronger hosts, who at the time happened to be the white men and women. Hence, contrary to abolitionists’ belief, blacks were reliant on the institution of slavery without which they would not have their “most indispensable necessaries.” The idea portrayed in both cases was that the intellectual abilities that were present in every white person were absent in all blacks. For that reason alone, menial labor was the most acceptable form of work for the black race, as they required physical strength with little to no application of the mind. Thus, the North hired blacks in their factories and the South held them in bondage; hard tasks were present in each section, and both went hand in hand with the traditions.
Notably, while the notion of black people lacking any brains was rampant in the nation, the views were subject to the racially biased ideologies of the white people and in no way depicted those of the group in question. In other words, what the whites preached was not what the blacks believed and as a result, different tactics were necessary to subdue the determination of the inferior persons to climb the social ladder. For example, in the Northern States, low wage white workers made sure to “bar [blacks] from skilled employment” as the two groups competed for the same work opportunities. Outside the factories, the same hindrances to black progression were evident as churches and learning institutions refused to admit black people on the same basis as their white counterparts. They did not own slaves, but Northerners certainly adhered to the cultural norms of the land. Meanwhile, in the South, Caucasian masters went about stripping their human chattels of any sense of self-worth. Once entered into the slavery system, by either birth or sale, blacks could own no properties and used all their energy to profit their owner[s]. Additionally, while slave families faced constant fears of separation and the females doubled as sex captives, any form of insubordination prompted a quick and brutal response from the white master or plantation overseer. The fear that whites instilled into the slaves worked to their advantage as they exercised absolute authority with little to no resistance and very rare cases of self-emancipation. Still, perhaps the main form of restriction to black freedom came from the federal government as it recognized the profits of slavery across the territories and enacted laws to protect the system.
Concurrently, the government’s involvement in the degradation of the black race and the bondage of its people dates back to the American War of Independence, which apparently was to give autonomy to white people only. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the original draft contained a clause that “condemned the inhumanity of the slave trade.” However, at the insistence of the slave-holding States of Georgia and South Carolina, Congress deleted said clause before endorsing the document in 1776. Again, before the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1789, delegates from the then thirteen States of America engaged in multiple debates over adopting the document as the supreme law. Based on the division into the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists group, slave-holding States made another move. Aside from demanding the protection of the slave trade by insisting it not formally end for another 20 years, the inclusion of the Three-Fifths Compromise declared every five blacks as only three people. Thus, not only did the government allow the importation of more Africans for the slavery institution, but it also declared them a fraction of a human being the minute they landed on American soil. Just as their predecessors. In the words of Howard Zinn, commercial blocks that considered “[the] slaveholding interests of the South” and the “moneyed interests of the North” created the foundations on which the country founded its laws. Hence, as the slavery system made up the economic backbone of the South, its contribution to the monetary fabric of the entire country remained recognizable.
With the given facts in mind, the next step entails looking at the connection between the economy of the slave-holding Southern States and that of the industrial-based Northern States. Naturally, the analysis should begin with a concentration of the Southern economy. The methods through which slaves benefited their owners revolved around supply and demand model. Where the master saw potential, the slaves would work to earn them money. Consequently, it was normal to have slave-owners pocket any money made by their slaves when they rent them out to other whites. For example, Frederick Douglass mentions his master refusing to take him from the evil clutches of one Mr. Covey, a “nigger-breaker,” because doing so meant that “[the master] would lose the whole year’s wages” due after loaning his slave to the other man. Extensively, the purpose of the given illustration is twofold: it discloses the control that masters exercised over black slaves and the helplessness of slaves in the Southern States. Subsequently, that was an indirect economic benefit from slave ownership. The direct economic advantage of the slavery system in the South encompassed the free and hard labor that slavery availed at a very cheap cost. Subsequently, the understanding of every master and slave relationship as one in which the master must record significant profit greatly aided Southerners in maximizing the system.
Thus said, in what Eric Foner dubs “the rise of the Cotton Kingdom,” the Southern States thrived on vast plantations that propelled them to the forefront of both “national and world [cotton] markets.” Central to the profitable nature of the cash crop was the invention of the “cotton gin” by Eli Whitney, the small machine that allowed planters to process picked cotton at a faster rate. Because of the device, cotton growth and sale was possible on a large scale during the period covered in this study. Now, about the given claim of slave ownership being cheap, the proof of that statement lies in the small and sometimes nonexistent efforts that white people made towards providing for their slaves. According to the narration of Harriet Jacobs’s life, the masters provided small huts for their slaves and paid “little attention” to the slaves’ meals. Therefore, aside from the money spent at the point of purchase, limited funds went into caring for the slaves’ well-being and as a result, slave ownership was as cheap as it was profitable in Antebellum America.
As the Southerners focused on utilizing slave labor in plantations, the Northern States did the exact opposite as the Market Revolution swept across their regions between 1800 and 1840; and covered the first twenty years of the antebellum era. The Second Industrial Revolution that had its heart in England spread to parts of the North and the people responded with the building of “factories producing cotton textiles.” However, unlike in the South, the soil and climate of the Northern States made the area unsuitable for cotton growth. For that reason, Northern factory owners imported cotton from the South and in that sense, tapped into the economic reservoirs of slavery outside their States. Another connection between the North and Southern slavery revolved around the banks. Southern planters could access loans from Northern banks to purchase machines and lands for more cotton growth. At the same time, insurance companies offered policies that recognized slaves as property and protected the owners’ interests in the same. Apparently, the government’s recognition of blacks as legal property of whites and the cultural acceptability of such a trend propelled Northern business owners to devise means of profiting from the same. On that note, the Northern industries produced the cotton gin[s] mentioned before and the mass production of the tool went on to cement the institution of slavery in the South. Hence, one could argue that the Northerners were secondary beneficiaries of the slavery system without which their economy would have been non-existent.
In conclusion, slavery was vital to the economy of the United States during the antebellum period as it was not only legal but also subject to the whims of the whites. Consequently, Caucasians adopted means of protecting the institution from the national to the social levels as cultures condoned black inferiority and federal laws made black people the legal properties of whites. Extensively, it is safe to argue that the slavery connected the Northern and Southern States before wrenching them apart and causing the American Civil War. After all, as long as the Northern industries required raw materials that they could only get from the South, economic relations between the two sides were inevitable. In turn, both areas utilized slave labor for their benefit.
Works Cited
Daddy Rice. "Jim Crow." n.d. Library of Congress. Web. 2 March 2016. <http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/civil-rights/pdf/jimcrow.pdf>.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. Print.
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty!: An American History. 4th. Vol. I. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.
Jacobs, Harriet Ann. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Seven Years Concealed. Ed. L. Maria Child. Auckland, N.Z.: The Floating Press, 2008. Print.
Kennedy, John Pendelton. "Swallow Burn (1832)." Register, Bruce Dorsey and Woody. Crosscurrents in American Culture: A Reader in United States History, Volume I: To 1877. 1st. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2008. 185-188. Print.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Print.
