Today, many Americans want to remember the American Civil War as one of the defining moments in United States history as it established the centrality of the federal government, confirmed our commitment to equality for all, and thrust us into a modern, industrial age. Unfortunately, this optimistic evaluation fails to recognize that racial equality and justice have not yet been achieved and that many Americans continue to question the value of a strong federal government and modernity. Although Abraham Lincoln was elected 160 years ago, the difficult social, political, and economic issues that tore the nation apart in 1860 have not been solved but rather have only evolved. In this light, combat operations may have ended but the central questions raised by the American Civil War continue to divide the United States.
The Cotton Kingdom vs. Abolitionism
Plantation agriculture dominated the southern economy from the 1620s to the 1860s. John Rolfeâs early experiments with tobacco led to financial success, population growth, and the adoption of a slave-based labor force in the Chesapeake region. While tobacco production brought the first Africans to North America, enslaved men and women were employed as artisans, craftsmen, and house servants as well as farmers. Eli Whitneyâs invention of the saw-tooth cotton gin in 1793 dramatically expanded the reach of plantation slavery and altered the course of American history. Whitneyâs gin separated short-staple cotton from the seed quickly and easily. Without the gin, a worker could separate five to six pounds of cotton fiber from the sticky green seeds in a day. With a large gin, the same person could separate 1,000 pounds of cotton from the seeds in the same period. Prior to Whitneyâs gin, cotton production had been restricted to a long-fiber variety and a very small region along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. Short-staple cotton which could be produced throughout the Southeast was suddenly viable with Whitneyâs invention. Ironically, a labor-saving device dramatically increased the need for slave labor across the entirety of the southeast.
Black slaves felt the economic jolt arising from cottonâs growth and the expansion of staple crop agriculture severely as many enslaved people from the Upper South were auctioned to the highest bidder in the large slave markets in Richmond and Alexandria, Virginia and Louisville, Kentucky. Families and friends were ruthlessly separated in order to meet the labor demands from the Cotton South. In 1790, the American slave population had been concentrated in the Chesapeake region where tobacco dominated. In the early nineteenth century, the demand for laborers in the new cotton fields led to the forced migration of approximately 1,000,000 enslaved men and women through the internal slave trade. Despite its steep human costs, cotton was the most important element in the U.S. economy from 1800 to 1840. As railroads became a larger industry after 1840, cotton remained highly profitable and the largest export of the United States (Gates, 2013).
The swift growth of the new cotton economy in the South occurred as new industries were opening in the New England states. Federal tariffs on imported goods led entrepreneurs to enter the marketplace and compete with European textile manufacturers. Young single women, often unmarried farm daughters, made up the bulk of the industrial workers. This work required parents to give up control of their daughters and their education, but it provided a significant financial reward to these farm families. Many southerners considered the rise of industrial society a move in the wrong direction. People who did not own their own land and who could not control their own lives, they suggested, were not independent citizens. Many feared that the broad equality, so essential to a democratic government, was at risk. Even so, Americans in the North and the South benefited from the better quality of life produced by an increasingly industrial society.
White southern society consisted of three distinct classes: planters who owned 20 slaves or more; yeoman farmers who owned their own land usually between 100 and 250 acres; and poor whites who did not own their own land or business. While planters held most political positions, they represented about 3 percent of the white population. Yeoman farmers constituted well over 50 percent of the white population in each slave state. At times, yeomen rented or purchased slaves to increase production, but they rarely had the resources to move up into the planter class. Landless whites made up less than 10 percent of the population and were generally considered unreliable by planters and yeomen. Often, yeoman farmers and poor whites have been lumped together in the literature as plain folk. Planters needed the support of plain folk to make slavery work. All whites were required to serve on slave patrols and were given authority to whip or punish enslaved men and women at their discretion. Further, yeomen were expected to vote for planter candidates and support laws meant to limit the economic and social rights of African Americans, slave or free. Relying on white supremacy, planters put forward the idea of a republican brotherhood linking slaveholders with non-slaveholders in âthe southern way of life.â This ideology exalted the idea of individual male independence with the key being land ownership. Planters further built upon this foundation by stressing their common bonds through kinship, equality at the ballot box, and the evangelical admonition that all are equal before God. Planters also stressed common problems of all farmers in periods of poor weather or low crop prices. Through such measures, planters prevented plain folk from connecting their lack of success to slavery and managed to persuade many that the slave-based economy was in the best interest of all white men (Harris, 1985).
Federal and state constitutions fully supported the concept of slave ownership. White planters carefully crafted these documents to ensure that African Americans remained classified as livestock and not people. This designation ensured that the institution of slavery remained a cheap, stable, and portable labor system. Slaves were routinely sold or moved without regard to their wishes or family connections. Force and the threat of force proved essential for slavery to be successful. Economic interests more than moral factors limited the degree of punishment a slave might face. Fugitive slave laws and the police power of the state combined to make any attempt to reach freedom a very dangerous effort. Under U.S. law, slaves had no rights that white people had to respect.
White southerners understood, but never publicly acknowledged, that African American farmers and craftsmen could compete effectively with their white peers if given the opportunity. Slave owners wanted to believe, and often proclaimed, that their slaves were happy with their condition. Planters liked to portray themselves as a paternal figure supervising a plantation family that encompassed White and Black members. As the central father figure, planters often depicted enslaved people as adult-sized children who needed their guidance to thrive. Despite these public assertions, many slaveholders recognized that their Black workers were fundamentally unhappy with their status. Astute planters knew that paternalism was only a convenient fiction that masked the true nature of slavery.
Abolitionism first appeared in the United States in the seventeenth century in Quaker and Moravian communities who strongly criticized the immorality of people owning people. More Americans began to consider the morality of slavery as Enlightenment ideas gained wider acceptance in the eighteenth century. As advocates of natural rights for all men, many Enlightenment proponents embraced the irrationality of the institution as a self-evident truth. Even before independence had been won, several northern states led by Pennsylvania had taken steps toward gradual emancipation. State delegations debated extensively how enslaved people should be counted for representation at the Constitutional Convention with the three-fifths compromise being the price paid to win southern support for ratification. Some in the convention accepted the compromise believing that slavery had reached its natural limits and hoped it would soon die out. A number of prominent leaders in the Upper South, including George Washington and Robert Carter, freed tens, and in some cases hundreds, of slaves at or shortly before their death. Such acts and broad popular support for the American Colonization Society suggested slavery might be receding in the U.S. Unfortunately for the nation, new wealth available in the cotton fields in the Southeast arrested this altruistic push.
Despite the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the U.S. and Britain moved in concert to limit slavery in the nineteenth century. The United Kingdom ended their participation in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and the U.S. followed suit on 1 January 1808. Only South Carolina had reopened the slave trade after the Revolution and no significant southern resistance arose as Thomas Jefferson signed the bill outlawing new slave importations from Africa. Subsequently, the British and U.S. navies worked together to suppress the transatlantic slave trade. During the South American wars for independence, SimĂłn BolĂvar and JosĂ© de San MartĂn offered freedom to slaves and enlisted slave soldiers in their armies. Thus, by 1825, slavery disappeared throughout Central and South America, leaving slavery alive only in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the U.S. With sugar wealth dwindling, the British ended slavery in their island possessions in 1834 with France ending slavery in their colonies in 1845.
The U.S. Congress did not seriously debate the merits of slavery until 1819 when Missouri applied for admission as a slave state. Southern politicians were surprised as northern congressmen argued against the admission of Missouri based on the immorality of slavery. Averting a serious crisis, the Missouri Compromise involved the admission of two states, Missouri and Maine, to keep the number of senators from slave and free states equal. Further, the creation of the 36°30Πline across the lands attained in the Louisiana Purchase solved the immediate question of where slavery might grow, but it placed both the North and the South on notice that differences over slavery could no longer be ignored.
As sectional tensions increased, the Second Great Awakening led to the formation of anti-slavery societies in the Midwest and New England. Having received threats for his anti-slavery editorials in slaveholding Maryland, William Lloyd Garrison moved to the abolition stronghold of Boston and founded the leading anti-slavery newspaper in the U.S., The Liberator, in 1831. Garrison, Arthur Tappan, and others founded the New England Anti-Slavery society the following year and the American Anti-Slavery society in 1833. In newspaper editorials, pamphlets, and public meetings abolitionists consistently denounced slavery for the following reasons: 1) slavery contradicts the ideal of natural rights upon which the United States was founded; 2) slavery stands in direct opposition to the Romantic ideals of self-reliance and individual freedom that have shaped America since Europeans first arrived; 3) slave owners regularly break up slave marriages and slave families for economic reasons; 4) slave masters rely on cruel and inhumane treatment of men, women, and children to enforce their will; and 5) slavery is an outrage against C...
