For the next 12 years, Northup lived in bondage in the sugarcane and cotton regions of Louisiana.  His first slaveholder, William Ford, treated him well, but Northup never stopped dreaming of freedom.  In 1852 he was finally able to obtain documentation proving he was a free man.

Reflecting on his experience, Northup cut to the central cruelty of the institution of slavery:

“There may be humane masters, as there certainly are inhumane ones; there may be slaves well-clothed, well-fed, and happy, as there surely are those half-clad, half-starved and miserable; nevertheless, the institution that tolerates such wrong and inhumanity ...is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one.”

—quoted in Twelve Years a Slave

The Southern Economy

The South thrived on the production of several major cash crops.  In the upper Southern states—Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee—farmers grew tobacco.  Rice paddies dominated the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia.  In Louisiana and parts of eastern Texas, fields of sugarcane stretched for miles.  No crop, however, played a greater role in the South’s fortunes than cotton.  This crop was grown in a wide belt stretching from inland South Carolina, west through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and into eastern Texas.

TURNING POINT
Cotton Becomes King

During a visit to the South in 1793, Eli Whitney, the inventive young New Englander, noticed that removing cotton seeds by hand from the fluffy bolls was so tedious that it took a worker an entire day to separate a pound of cotton lint.  An acquaintance knew of Whitney’s mechanical ingenuity and suggested that he try building a machine to pick out the seeds.  In only 10 days Whitney built a simple cotton gin—“gin” being short for engine—that quickly and efficiently combed the seeds out of cotton bolls.

The invention of the cotton gin happened at the same time that textile mills were expanding in Europe.  Mills in England and France clamored for all the cotton they could get.  In 1792, the year before Whitney invented his cotton gin, the South produced about 6,000 bales of cotton.  By 1801, annual production reached 100,000 bales.

Cotton soon dominated the region.  By the late 1840s Southerners were producing more than two million bales of cotton annually, and in 1860 production reached almost four million bales.  That year, Southern cotton sold for a total of $191 million in European markets—nearly two-thirds of the total export trade of the United States.  Southerners began saying, rightly, “Cotton is King.”

“The whole interior of the Southern states was languishing,” said one Southern official in describing the region before the cotton gin.  After Whitney’s invention, he added, “Individuals who were depressed with poverty, and sunk with idleness, have suddenly risen to wealth and respectability.  Our debts have been paid off, our capitals increased; and our lands are treble [triple] in value.”

While the cotton gin made some Southern planters rich, it also strengthened the institution of slavery.  The spread of cotton plantations all over the Deep South made the demand for slave labor skyrocket.  Congress had outlawed the foreign slave trade in 1808, but a high birthrate among enslaved women—encouraged by slaveholders eager to sell new laborers at high prices—kept the enslaved population growing.  Between 1820 and 1850, the number of enslaved people in the South rose from about 1.5 million to nearly 4 million.

Industry Lags

Although the South became prosperous from agriculture, it did not industrialize as quickly as the North.  For the most part, the South remained a region of rural villages and plantations, with only three large cities:  Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans.

The South did have some industry.  Coal, iron, salt, and copper mines, as well as ironworks and textile mills, could be found there.  The region still relied heavily on imported goods, however, which worried some people.  As one Southerner noted, “For what have we not looked to our Northern friends?  From them we get not only our clothes, carriages, saddles, hats, shoes, flour, potatoes, but even our onions and horn buttons.” At this time, in 1860, manufacturing in the South accounted for only 16 percent of the nation’s manufacturing total.  Most Southerners were content to rely on agriculture.

Synthesizing
What effect did the cotton gin have on slavery in the South?
 

Society in the South

Social attitudes shaped Southern life and produced a definite class structure for the region.  At the top were the planters, who owned the region’s larger plantations.  The 1850 census showed that in a Southern white population of just over 6 million, a total of 347,725 families were slaveholders.  Of this number, around 37,000 were planters, defined as those who held 20 or more enslaved people.  Less than 8,000 of these planters held 50 or more people in slavery, and only 11 held 500 or more.

A very small percentage of Southern slaveholders lived a life of gentility in grand mansions.  Many planter mansions were little more than cottages with newly built facades.  The boom in cotton production allowed some smaller-scale planters to rapidly ascend the social ladder, quickly adopting refined habits as they expanded their property.  Although the wealthy planters made up a tiny group—representing less than half of one percent of white Southern families and slightly over two percent of slaveholding families—they dominated the region’s economy as well as its political and legal systems.

Ordinary farmers—who were often called yeoman farmers—and their families made up the vast majority of the white population.  They may have held four or fewer enslaved persons, though most held none at all, and they worked on the land themselves.  Here, writer Mark Twain gives his impressions of a typical small Southern farm in his book Huckleberry Finn:

“A rail fence around a two-acre yard ...  big double log house for the white folks—hewed logs, with the chinks stopped up with mud or mortar ... outside of the fence a garden; ... then the cotton fields begin; and after the fields, the woods.”

—from Huckleberry Finn

Near the bottom of the social ladder stood the rural poor.  This group, made up mostly of families living on land too barren for successful farming, scratched a meager existence from hunting and fishing, vegetable gardening, and raising a few half-wild hogs and chickens.  They made up less than 10 percent of the white population.

At the bottom of society were African Americans, 93 percent of them enslaved.  In 1850 nearly 3.6 million African Americans lived in the South—about 37 percent of the total Southern population.

Rounding out Southern society was a small urban class of lawyers, doctors, merchants, and other professionals.  Agriculture’s influence was so great that even many of these city dwellers invested in or owned farms.  As one observer noted, “No matter how one might begin, as lawyer, physician, clergyman, mechanic, or merchant, he ended, if prosperous, as proprietor of a rice or cotton plantation.”

Identifying
What classes made up the South’s social structure?
 
 

The Cotton Gin

While visiting Catherine Greene’s Georgia plantation in 1793, Eli Whitney had an inspiration.  He built a device that removed the seeds of the “green-seed” cotton variety that grew in abundance throughout the South.  Whitney devised a “gin” (short for engine) that combed the seeds out of the cotton.  This simple cotton gin was easy to mass produce, and it increased cotton’s profitability for many Southern farmers.

1
Cotton bolls are dumped into the hopper.

2
A crank turns the cylinder with wire teeth.  The teeth pull the cotton past a grate.

3
Slots in the grate allow the cotton, but not its seeds, to pass through.

4
A second cylinder with brushes pulls the cotton off the toothed cylinder and sends it out of the gin

How did the invention of the cotton gin affect slavery in the South?
 
 

Slavery

The rice and cotton plantations depended on enslaved labor for their existence.  The overwhelming majority of enslaved African Americans toiled in the South’s fields.  Some, however, worked in the South’s few industrial plants or as skilled workers, such as blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers.  Others became house servants.

Enslaved African Americans working in the fields were organized using two basic labor systems.  On farms and small plantations that held few enslaved people, the task system was used.  Under this system workers were given a specific set of jobs to accomplish every day and worked until these were complete.  After completing their tasks, the individuals were allowed to spend the remainder of the day on their own.  Some enslaved people earned money through their skill as artisans.  Others cultivated personal gardens or hunted for extra food.

In the 1800s, as cotton production became more common and slavery more widespread, slaveholders who owned large plantations adopted the gang system of labor.  Under this system, enslaved persons were organized into work gangs that labored from sunup to sundown—plowing, planting, cultivating, or picking, depending on the season.

A driver acted as the director of a work gang.  Often these individuals were enslaved people themselves, chosen for their loyalty or willingness to cooperate.  They supervised the progress of the gangs, ensuring that the workers continued laboring throughout the entire day.

No matter which labor system was used, slavery was a degrading experience.  Frederick Douglass, who rose from slavery to become a prominent leader of the anti-slavery movement, recalled how life as an enslaved person affected him:

“My natural elasticity was crushed; my intellect languished; the disposition to read departed; the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died out; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me, and behold a man transformed to a brute.”

—from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

African Americans’ Legal Status

In addition to enduring a lifetime of bondage, enslaved persons had few legal rights.  State slave codes forbade enslaved men and women from owning property or leaving a slaveholder’s premises without permission.  They could not possess firearms or testify in court against a white person.  Furthermore, laws banned them from learning to read and write.  Society viewed enslaved persons as property and treated them that way.

Free African Americans

Although most African Americans of the time lived in slavery, some did not.  By 1850 some 225,000 free African Americans resided in the South.  Most lived in the towns and cities of the upper Southern states, especially Maryland and Virginia.  A few were descended from Africans brought to the United States as indentured servants in the 1700s before the slave system became universal.  Some had earned their freedom fighting in the American Revolution, and still others were the half-white children of slaveholders, who had granted them freedom.  There were also some former enslaved persons who had managed to purchase freedom for themselves and their families or whose slaveholders had freed them.

Free African Americans occupied an ambiguous position in Southern society.  In cities like Charleston and New Orleans, some were successful enough to become slaveholders themselves.  One such African American was Cecee McCarty, who amassed a fortune in New Orleans by retailing imported dry goods.  McCarty dispatched a sales force of 32 enslaved Africans around the state to merchandise her highly prized wares.  Still, the experiences of freed African Americans differed from state to state.  In some states they had to obtain special licenses to preach or to own firearms.  Like those in slavery, they always had to remember how dangerous it was to act any way but humble and subservient when dealing with white people.

Another 196,000 free African Americans lived in the North, where slavery had been outlawed, but they were not embraced there either.  Samuel Ringgold Ward, who was African American, lamented that racial prejudice was “ever at my elbow”:

“As a servant, it denied me a seat at the table with my white fellow servants ... along the streets it ever pursued, ever ridiculed, ever abused me.  If I sought redress, the very complexion I wore was pointed out as the best reason for my seeking it in vain; if I desired to turn to account a little learning, in the way of earning a living by it, the idea of employing a black clerk was preposterous—too absurd to be seriously entertained....”

—quoted in Long Memory:  The Black Experience in America

Still, free African Americans could organize their own churches and voluntary associations, plus earn money from the jobs they held.

An African American who not only kept his wages but also multiplied them many times over was James Forten of Philadelphia.  He went to sea in his teens as a powder monkey—the person on board a warship who handled explosives—on a Revolutionary privateer.  Privateers were private ships licensed to attack enemy ships.  Later, he worked as a maker of sails.  By the age of 32, he owned a thriving sail factory employing 40 African American and white workers.  He devoted much of his wealth to the cause of abolishing slavery.

Summarizing
What were some basic rights denied to enslaved persons?

Coping With Enslavement

African Americans dealt with the horrors of slavery in a variety of ways.  From language to music to religion, they developed a culture that provided them with a sense of unity, pride, and mutual support.

African American Culture

African American Culture

Songs were important to many enslaved people.  Field workers often used songs to pass the long workday and to help them enjoy their scant leisure time in the evening.  Some songs were more provocative than most plantation owners knew, using subtle language and secret meanings to lament the singers’ bondage and express a continuing hope for freedom.

Songs also played a key role in one of the most important parts of African American culture:  religion.  By the early 1800s, large numbers of African Americans were Christians, though their Christianity sometimes incorporated religious traditions from Africa.  The religious services enslaved persons held often centered around praying about their particular concern—their dreams of freedom or a better life in the next world.

Resistance and Rebellion

Many enslaved men and women found ways to oppose the dreadful lifestyle forced on them.  Some quietly staged work slowdowns.  Others broke tools or set fire to houses and barns.  Still others risked beatings or mutilations to run away.

Some enslaved persons turned to more violent means of rebellion.  Despite the awful consequences they faced for doing so, some African Americans turned on their slaveholders and killed them.

On occasion, enslaved persons plotted uprisings.  In 1822, for example, Denmark Vesey, a free African American who operated a wood-working shop in Charleston, South Carolina, was accused of planning an armed revolt to free the region’s slaves.  Whether or not Vesey actually planned an uprising is not known.  The Charleston authorities claimed to have learned of the plot from an informer, and in 1822 Vesey was tried, convicted, and hanged.

A group of African Americans in Virginia did carry out an armed uprising during the early hours of August 22, 1831.  Leading the attack was Nat Turner, an enslaved minister who believed God had chosen him to bring his people out of bondage.  Turner and his followers killed more than 50 white men, women, and children before state and local troops put down the uprising.  A court then tried Turner and sentenced him to hang.
 
 

Nat Turner
1800–1831

The man who led perhaps the nation’s best-known slave revolt believed from an early age—through his mother’s encouragement—that he was divinely inspired.  “I was intended for some great purpose,” he once declared.

Although many considered Nat Turner a religious fanatic—he claimed to take his directions from mysterious voices and the movements of heavenly bodies—others knew him to have a sharp mind.  “He certainly never had the advantages of education,” said the man later appointed to be his lawyer, “but he can read and write .  .  .  and for natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension is surpassed by few men I have ever seen.”

As he awaited execution, Turner reportedly showed little remorse for his deeds, certain that he had acted in the name of God to free his people.  “I am here loaded with chains and willing to suffer the fate that awaits me,” he said.  Turner’s lack of remorse chilled those around him, including his lawyer, who described the calm, deliberate composure with which Turner spoke of what he had done.  “I looked on him,” the lawyer wrote, “and my blood curdled in my veins.”

Turner’s revolt sent a wave of terror through the South and heightened fears of future uprisings.  As a result, many states adopted even harsher restrictions on both enslaved and free African Americans.

Describing
What was life like for African Americans in the 1800s?
 

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