Domesticating Slavery

The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837

Jeffrey Robert Young

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780807847763, 9780807824900
• eBook ISBN: 9780807876183
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In this carefully crafted work, Jeffrey Young illuminates southern slaveholders' strange and tragic path toward a defiantly sectional mentality. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and integrating political, religious, economic, and literary sources, he chronicles the growth of a slaveowning culture that cast the southern planter in the role of benevolent Christian steward — even as slaveholders were brutally exploiting their slaves for maximum fiscal gain.

Domesticating Slavery offers a surprising answer to the long-standing question about slaveholders' relationship with the proliferating capitalistic markets of early-nineteenth-century America. Whereas previous scholars have depicted southern planters either as efficient businessmen who embraced market economics or as paternalists whose ideals placed them at odds with the industrializing capitalist society in the North, Young instead demonstrates how capitalism and paternalism acted together in unexpected ways to shape slaveholders' identity as a ruling elite. Beginning with slaveowners' responses to British imperialism in the colonial period and ending with the sectional crises of the 1830s, he traces the rise of a self-consciously southern master class in the Deep South and the attendant growth of political tensions that would eventually shatter the union.

Chapter One: Slavery and the Cultural Marketplace in the Colonial Deep South

The difficulties [met by] a few who would wish to deal with [their] servants as with brethren in a state of subordination ... are almost insurmountable.

HENRY LAURENS, 1763

The desire for profit motivated Europeans to risk their lives and capital in colonizing the New World. And from the first journeys of Columbus, European exploration and settlement of the Americas entailed an international slave trade—one that originally moved slaves from the West Indies to the courts of Spain and ultimately transported some twelve million African bondservants to new, infinitely more miserable homes in the New World.¹ Over the course of the early modern period, the proliferating international market for staple crops and precious metals enabled Europeans to transform the sufferings of these slaves into vast fortunes. White families such as the Manigaults—Huguenots who fled France for the New World in the late seventeenth century—rose to positions of social prominence in just a few generations. Judith Giton Royer, the matriarch of the Manigault family, arrived in South Carolina as an indentured servant and was forced to work in the field “like a slave.”² But within decades, her children acquired their own slaves and, eventually, became the colony’s wealthiest residents. In many ways, the story of the Deep South can be told in such terms of explosive economic growth and the attendant suffering inflicted by whites on African American slaves.

By the 1760s, elite slaveowners in South Carolina and Georgia had begun to reflect on the image that they presented both to their neighbors in the colonies and to powerful segments of English metropolitan society. Enriched by international commerce, white planters were discovering that global fiscal, political, and religious connections posed fundamental challenges to prevailing colonial conceptions of mastery. Even as their lives and fortunes depended on their ability to maintain absolute authority over their slaves, leading planters realized that their status as masters was undermining their campaign to be recognized as English gentlemen and ladies. Eighteenth-century government and church officials had struggled to reform plantation slavery—a crusade that faltered against the slaveowners’ unwillingness, as a group, to recognize their slaves as human beings. Amid the mounting tensions between England and America in the years following the French and Indian War, the planters staked their understanding of political liberty on their right to exploit their unfree labor force without interference from meddling representatives of church and state. A market for cosmopolitan culture was simultaneously heightening colonial planters’ preoccupation with English standards for gentility and, ironically, cultivating a political critique of mercantilism that the slaveowners could use to defend their pretensions to unlimited power over black and white dependents.

From the earliest days of English settlement in South Carolina, white colonists focused almost exclusively on extracting a fortune from the swampy wilds of their new home. The colony was first established as an extension of the plantation economy in the British West Indies. Coveting the vast tracts of uncultivated land in North America, Caribbean planters—particularly those on Barbados—lobbied King Charles II for permission to colonize the mainland. In 1663, the king granted a charter to a proprietary group organized by Barbados slaveowner John Colleton. When English settlers established Charlestown in 1670, they were extending a market-oriented system of slave-based production that had originated centuries earlier.³

Upon their arrival, entrepreneurial settlers experimented with different exports. Drawing on their African slaves’ agricultural knowledge, the South Carolina slaveowners quickly discovered that the cultivation of rice along the coastal swamplands could yield tremendous profits.⁴ Like businesspeople in any century, the planters sought to maximize the fiscal return on their investment by improving their methods of production and marketing.⁵ In 1691, for example, the colonial assembly passed legislation encouraging “ingenious and industrious persons” to build machines that would result in “the better propagation of any commodityes of the produce of this Collony.”⁶ By the middle of the eighteenth century, the rice planters had learned to construct elaborate irrigation systems for their rice fields—an advancement that typified their ongoing efforts to harness technology for their own profit.⁷ The plantation complex that evolved in the New World therefore rested on knowledge that circulated from diverse and distant points. The rice that grew in the Carolina lowcountry was the product of African ideas as well as African labor. The southern planters who financed these agricultural operations applied emerging western European standards of rational, efficient productivity to achieve the greatest possible profit from markets that required an intimate knowledge of economic trends in numerous European and Caribbean ports.

Just a few generations after establishing a beachhead in a hostile wilderness, South Carolina planters were annually producing millions of pounds of rice in an economy that linked their fortunes with those of distant traders and consumers.⁸ As rice traveled from the colony to markets around the world, consumer items from England and other developed countries poured into the southern market. In 1747, for example, Charlestown merchant Henry Laurens observed that the city was “glutted with European Goods.”⁹ Nine years later he noted that “a shocking Earthquake” which “almost totally destroy’d the whole City of Lisbon” also rattled the Charlestown financial community. The transatlantic economy had linked South Carolina’s fortunes to ports thousands of miles away.¹⁰ On one level, these global economic connections promised to turn the southern planters’ attention toward cultural imperatives emerging in western Europe. The transatlantic market for staple crops required colonists to think in terms of rational production of those commodities that could command a healthy price from distant consumers. The willingness of southern planters to orient their economy to derive maximum gain from the global market manifested itself in their rapid embrace of indigo as a new staple crop in the 1740s. Crucial information about indigo cultivation flowed into South Carolina in 1745 by way of Antigua—a movement of knowledge toward the periphery of the English imperial network that carried in its wake a burgeoning traffic in human property. By 1748 Laurens was expressing his certainty that “our Indigo Manufactory will prove an advantageous staple in this Colony.” Seven years later, he noted that “the cultivation of Indigo create[s] such a demand” for slaves that slave traders were commanding unprecedented prices during public auctions.¹¹ As this economy gathered momentum, elite colonists began to express contempt for those settlers interested only in subsistence farming. For example, Laurens complained about “the Dutch People” who “continue but in low circumstances making very little if any thing more than a subsistence for their Familys.” The Charlestown merchant regretfully concluded that “all that the bulk of them aim at is victuals & Clothing no matter how mean. Few of them seem to covet more.”¹² Having embraced profit from the international market as the centerpiece of their economy, wealthy residents in the Deep South were mystified by those who rejected the potential fruits of international commerce. Localism had become an inscrutable economic riddle to a planter elite whose existence rested on a global perspective. Yet, at the same time, even the wealthiest members of colonial society could not completely immerse themselves in cosmopolitan culture.

Despite the slaveowners’ thorough integration into a thriving international market, a sense of isolation and vulnerability plagued them for the better part of their colony’s first century. English settlers were persistently threatened by disease and the possibility of a painful and early death.¹³ The swamps that provided a hospitable environment for the cultivation of rice also harbored numerous pathogens such as malaria and dysentery, meaning that settlers could lose lives far more quickly than they could gain riches through distant business connections. In addition to incredibly high rates of disease-induced mortality, the colonists faced a disturbing human threat. Many Native American tribes already populated the land that the English king had awarded to the Carolina Proprietors. Although disease carried by European settlers thinned the ranks of the Cherokee, the Creek, and the Yamasee, these native inhabitants of the Deep South spent the colonial period making intermittent attacks on white interlopers. On an equally ominous note, the specter of violent reprisal also came from African slaves. By providing the Carolina planters with a captive labor force, the international market fostered a local demographic structure with unsettling implications for white masters. By 1708, blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina; by 1740, twice as many slaves as free whites inhabited the colony, and in certain lowcountry parishes, slaves made up 90 percent of the population.¹⁴

In 1739, the slaveowners confronted their worst fears about their isolated position in the global economy. Seeking to foster discord in English settlements, Spanish authorities in St. Augustine, some two hundred miles south of Charlestown, announced a royal edict offering freedom to any slave escaping from English territory. As a result, according to South Carolina lieutenant governor William Bull, the colony’s slaveholders worried that “their Negroes which were their chief support may in little time become their Enemies, if not their Masters, and that th[eir] Government [would be] unable to withstand or prevent it.” Pointing to the defection of several slaves to Spanish territory, Bull warned imperial authorities that the affair might “entirely ruin” the colony.¹⁵ White fears escalated when a band of slaves rebelled against their masters in a region near the Stono River some twenty miles from Charlestown. According to Bull, the insurrection began when “a great number of Negroes arose in Rebellion, broke open a Store where they got Arms[,] killed twenty one White Persons, and were marching the next morning in a Daring manner out of the Province, killing all they met.”¹⁶ Although white authorities captured and executed most of the insurgents the following day, those slaves that eluded pursuit kept white colonists in a constant state of alarm. By November 1739, according to records kept by the colonial assembly, a number of slaveholders in the Stono region had abandoned their plantations to live with other white families “at particular Places, for their better Security and Defence against those Negroes which were concerned in that Insurrection who were not yet taken.”¹⁷ One year later, South Carolina governor James Glen complained to Parliament about the colonists’ most “dangerous Enemies[,] their own Negroes, who are ready to revolt on the first Opportunity and are Eight Times as many in Number as there are white Men able to bear Arms.”¹⁸ In their quest for wealth, slaveowners in South Carolina sacrificed not only the well-being of their slaves but also their own peace of mind.

Cognizant of the threats posed by potentially rebellious slaves, the Trustees of Georgia envisioned a different path for the colony that they had established in 1733. They hoped that Georgia would strengthen the English empire in two ways. First, they intended for the new colony to fortify South Carolina against Spanish territory on the Florida peninsula; second, they planned Georgia as a haven for unemployed Englishmen and their families.¹⁹ Far more concerned with achieving these goals than with relieving the plight of suffering black bondservants, the Trustees banned slavery from Georgia in 1735.²⁰ They reasoned that the presence of large numbers of African Americans would undermine the colony’s security and alienate the poor white settlers. Although the Anglican ministers involved in launching the colony insisted that “religion is the best Guardian of the publick Peace,” they doubted that even a slave population exposed to Christian teachings could be controlled. “Perhaps it is imagined,” wrote Benjamin Martyn in 1741, “that by gentle usage the negro may be made a trusty servant; this cannot be depended on. Every man is naturally fond of liberty, and he will struggle for it when he knows his own strength.”²¹ Had the Trustees’ plan come to fruition, Georgia would not have developed the slave-based plantation economy that had played a formative role in the shaping of South Carolina. In planning the future of their colonial project, the Trustees sought to channel the colonists’ individual desires in directions that would serve the corporate whole. Without slavery, the colony promised to serve the interests of poorer whites, not to mention the geopolitical interests of the English government and the holy interests of the Anglican Church.

The prohibition of slavery, however, quickly proved untenable. To be a sure, a few settlers objected to slavery on moral grounds. In 1739, eighteen Scots from the town of Darien signed a petition characterizing slavery as “shocking to human Nature” and a certain source for racial warfare—for a future “Scene of Horror.” Their words reflected the first stirrings of an anti-slavery movement that, within a century, would sway the course of the mightiest nations. In the first half of the eighteenth century, however, such pleas fell largely on deaf ears.²² Most white colonists denied that “the people of Georgia can ever get forward in their settlement or even be a degree above common slaves, without the help and assistance of negroes.”²³ The Reverend John Martin Bolzius observed that his opposition to the importation of black slaves into Georgia made him an outcast. “All from the highest to the lowest” in the colony, he complained, “Vote for Negroes and look upon me as a Stone in their way .. . and they will, I suppose, not rest until they have removed it one way or other.”²⁴

By midcentury, colonists driven by the desire to profit from slavery overwhelmed government efforts to proscribe human bondage. Determined to acquire coastal land suitable for rice cultivation, slaveowners poured into Georgia from South Carolina.²⁵ In the face of widespread violation of the stricture against slavery, the Trustees formally repealed the ban in 1750.²⁶ Like their counterparts in South Carolina, Georgia settlers gained the freedom to experiment with different slave-produced staple crops to determine which ones promised the most wealth—a freedom they exercised with “the greatest pleasure.”²⁷ As was the case in South Carolina, those colonists with sufficient access to slaves and the rich soil along the coast focused their efforts on the production of rice. By the 1760s, Georgia’s economy and social structure greatly resembled those of South Carolina. The allure of profits from the international economy overpowered the Georgia Trustees, who were attempting to extend their Christian culture into a distant colony. The structure of the market, in other words, cultivated the thirst of individual settlers for personal profit. The Trustees’ corporate social vision had little chance of competing with a market for staple crops that promised fabulous wealth to those individuals w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670–1837
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Slavery and the Cultural Marketplace in the Colonial Deep South
• Chapter Two: An Unhappy Breach
• Chapter Three: Building a Nation Safe for Human Bondage
• Chapter Four: One in Christ
• Chapter Five: A Storm Portending
• Chapter Six: The Tyranny of the Majority
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index