La institución legal de la esclavitud humana , que comprendía la esclavización principalmente de africanos y afroamericanos , prevaleció en los Estados Unidos de América desde su fundación en 1776 hasta 1865, predominantemente en el sur . La esclavitud se estableció a lo largo de la colonización europea en las Américas . Desde 1526, durante el período colonial temprano , se practicó en lo que se convirtieron en las colonias británicas , incluidas las Trece Colonias que formaron los Estados Unidos. Según la ley, una persona esclavizada era tratada como una propiedad que podía comprarse, venderse o regalarse. La esclavitud perduró en aproximadamente la mitad de los estados de EE. UU. hasta su abolición en 1865, y las cuestiones relacionadas con la esclavitud se filtraron en todos los aspectos de la política nacional, la economía y las costumbres sociales. [1] En las décadas posteriores al final de la Reconstrucción en 1877, muchas de las funciones económicas y sociales de la esclavitud continuaron a través de la segregación , la aparcería y el arrendamiento de convictos .
En la época de la Guerra de la Independencia de los Estados Unidos (1775-1783), el estatus de las personas esclavizadas se había institucionalizado como una casta racial asociada con la ascendencia africana. [2] Durante e inmediatamente después de la Revolución, se aprobaron leyes abolicionistas en la mayoría de los estados del Norte y se desarrolló un movimiento para abolir la esclavitud. El papel de la esclavitud en la Constitución de los Estados Unidos (1789) fue el tema más polémico durante su redacción. La Cláusula de las Tres Quintas Partes de la Constitución dio a los estados esclavistas un poder político desproporcionado, [3] mientras que la Cláusula del Esclavo Fugitivo ( Artículo IV, Sección 2, Cláusula 3 ) disponía que, si un esclavo escapaba a otro estado, el otro estado no podía impedir la devolución del esclavo a la persona que afirmaba ser su dueño. Todos los estados del Norte habían abolido la esclavitud en algún grado en 1805, a veces con la finalización en una fecha futura, a veces con un estatus intermedio de sirviente contratado no remunerado.
La abolición fue en muchos casos un proceso gradual. Algunos propietarios de esclavos, principalmente en el Alto Sur , liberaron a sus esclavos, y grupos caritativos compraron y liberaron a otros. El comercio atlántico de esclavos fue ilegalizado por estados individuales a partir de la Revolución Americana. El comercio de importación fue prohibido por el Congreso en 1808 , aunque el contrabando fue común a partir de entonces, [4] [5] momento en el que el Servicio de Guardacostas de los EE. UU . comenzó a hacer cumplir la ley en alta mar. [6] Se ha estimado que antes de 1820 la mayoría de los congresistas en servicio poseían esclavos, y que aproximadamente el 30 por ciento de los congresistas que nacieron antes de 1840 (algunos de los cuales sirvieron hasta el siglo XX) en algún momento de sus vidas, fueron dueños de esclavos. [7]
La rápida expansión de la industria del algodón en el Sur Profundo después de la invención de la desmotadora de algodón aumentó enormemente la demanda de mano de obra esclava, y los estados del Sur continuaron como sociedades esclavistas. Estados Unidos, dividido en estados esclavistas y libres , se polarizó cada vez más sobre el tema de la esclavitud. Impulsado por las demandas laborales de las nuevas plantaciones de algodón en el Sur Profundo , el Alto Sur vendió más de un millón de esclavos que fueron llevados al Sur Profundo. La población total de esclavos en el Sur finalmente alcanzó los cuatro millones. [8] [ página necesaria ] [9] A medida que Estados Unidos se expandió, los estados del Sur intentaron extender la esclavitud a los nuevos territorios occidentales para permitir que las fuerzas proesclavistas mantuvieran el poder en el Congreso. Los nuevos territorios adquiridos por la Compra de Luisiana y la Cesión Mexicana fueron objeto de importantes crisis políticas y compromisos. [10] La esclavitud fue defendida en el Sur como un "bien positivo" , y las denominaciones religiosas más grandes se dividieron sobre el tema de la esclavitud en organizaciones regionales del Norte y el Sur.
En 1850, el Sur, ahora rico y productor de algodón, amenazó con separarse de la Unión . Estallaron sangrientas luchas por la esclavitud en el Territorio de Kansas . Cuando Abraham Lincoln ganó las elecciones de 1860 con la promesa de detener la expansión de la esclavitud, los estados esclavistas se separaron para formar la Confederación . Poco después, comenzó la Guerra Civil cuando las fuerzas confederadas atacaron el Fuerte Sumter del Ejército de los EE. UU. en Charleston, Carolina del Sur. Durante la guerra, algunas jurisdicciones abolieron la esclavitud y, debido a medidas de la Unión como las Leyes de Confiscación y la Proclamación de Emancipación , la guerra terminó efectivamente con la esclavitud en la mayoría de los lugares. Después de la victoria de la Unión, la Decimotercera Enmienda a la Constitución de los Estados Unidos fue ratificada el 6 de diciembre de 1865, prohibiendo "la esclavitud [y] la servidumbre involuntaria, excepto como castigo por un delito". [11]
Durante la mayor parte del período colonial británico, la esclavitud existió en todas las colonias. Las personas esclavizadas en el Norte generalmente trabajaban como sirvientes domésticos, artesanos, trabajadores manuales y artesanos, con el mayor número en las ciudades. Muchos hombres trabajaban en los muelles y en el transporte marítimo. En 1703, más del 42 por ciento de los hogares de la ciudad de Nueva York tenían personas esclavizadas en cautiverio, la segunda proporción más alta de cualquier ciudad en las colonias, solo detrás de Charleston, Carolina del Sur . [12] Las personas esclavizadas también fueron utilizadas como trabajadores agrícolas en comunidades agrícolas, especialmente en el Sur , pero también en el norte del estado de Nueva York y Long Island , Connecticut y Nueva Jersey . En 1770, había 397.924 negros de una población de 2,17 millones en lo que pronto se convertiría en los Estados Unidos. Los esclavos de la era colonial estaban distribuidos de manera desigual: 14.867 vivían en Nueva Inglaterra , donde eran el tres por ciento de la población; 34.679 vivían en las colonias del Atlántico medio , donde eran el seis por ciento de la población; y 347.378 en las cinco colonias del sur , donde eran el 31 por ciento de la población. [13]
El Sur desarrolló una economía agrícola dependiente de los cultivos básicos . Sus plantadores adquirieron rápidamente un número y una proporción significativamente mayores de personas esclavizadas en la población general, ya que sus cultivos básicos requerían mucha mano de obra. [14] Al principio, las personas esclavizadas en el Sur trabajaban principalmente en granjas y plantaciones de cultivo de índigo , arroz y tabaco ( el algodón no se convirtió en un cultivo importante hasta después de la década de 1790). En 1720, alrededor del 65 por ciento de la población de Carolina del Sur estaba esclavizada. [15] Los plantadores (definidos por los historiadores en el Alto Sur como aquellos que tenían 20 o más esclavos) usaban trabajadores esclavizados para cultivar cultivos básicos. También trabajaban en los oficios artesanales en grandes plantaciones y en muchas ciudades portuarias del Sur. La ola posterior de colonos en el siglo XVIII que se estableció a lo largo de los Montes Apalaches y el interior del país eran agricultores de subsistencia de la zona rural , y rara vez tenían personas esclavizadas.
A principios de la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII, surgió un debate sobre la continua importación de esclavos africanos a las colonias americanas. Muchos en las colonias, incluida la esclavocracia sureña , se opusieron a una mayor importación de esclavos debido al temor de que desestabilizaría las colonias y conduciría a más rebeliones de esclavos . En 1772, los virginianos prominentes presentaron una petición a la Corona , solicitando que se aboliera el comercio de esclavos a Virginia; fue rechazada. [17] Rhode Island prohibió la importación de esclavos en 1774. Las influyentes Resoluciones revolucionarias de Fairfax exigieron el fin del comercio de esclavos del Atlántico "malvado, cruel y antinatural". [18] Todas las colonias prohibieron las importaciones de esclavos durante la Guerra de la Independencia. [19]
La esclavitud había existido durante miles de años en todo el mundo. En Estados Unidos y en muchas partes del mundo era una práctica legal y se había arraigado social y económicamente en muchas sociedades. Los ideales y principios promovidos en la Ilustración y la Revolución estadounidense ayudaron a poner la esclavitud y el deseo de su abolición en la agenda política. Como dijo el historiador Christopher L. Brown, la esclavitud "nunca había estado en la agenda de manera seria antes", pero la Revolución estadounidense "la obligó a convertirse en una cuestión pública de ahí en adelante". [20] [21] [22] [23] [24]
Después de que la nueva nación se independizara, la esclavitud fue un tema de controversia en la Convención Constitucional de 1787. Muchos de los Padres Fundadores de los Estados Unidos eran dueños de plantaciones que poseían grandes cantidades de trabajadores esclavizados; la Constitución original preservaba su derecho a poseer esclavos, y además obtuvieron una ventaja política al poseer esclavos. Aunque los esclavos de la República temprana eran considerados propiedad sensible, no se les permitía votar y no tenían derechos de los que hablar, debían ser enumerados en los censos de población y contabilizados como tres quintas partes de una persona a los efectos de la representación en la legislatura nacional, el Congreso de los Estados Unidos .
Los rebeldes comenzaron a ofrecer la libertad como incentivo para motivar a los esclavos a luchar de su lado. Washington autorizó la liberación de los esclavos que lucharon con el Ejército Continental estadounidense . Rhode Island comenzó a alistar esclavos en 1778 y prometió una compensación a los propietarios cuyos esclavos se alistaran y sobrevivieran para obtener la libertad. [26] [27] Durante el curso de la guerra, aproximadamente una quinta parte del ejército del Norte era negro. [28] En 1781, el barón Closen, un oficial alemán del Regimiento Real Deux-Ponts francés en la Batalla de Yorktown , estimó que el ejército estadounidense estaba compuesto aproximadamente por una cuarta parte de negros. [29] Estos hombres incluían tanto a antiguos esclavos como a negros nacidos libres. Miles de negros libres en los estados del Norte lucharon en las milicias estatales y el Ejército Continental. En el Sur, ambos bandos ofrecieron la libertad a los esclavos que realizaran el servicio militar. Aproximadamente 20.000 esclavos lucharon en la Revolución estadounidense. [25] [30] [31] [32] [33]
Después de que estallara la Guerra de la Independencia, los británicos se dieron cuenta de que carecían de la mano de obra necesaria para llevar adelante la guerra. En respuesta, los comandantes británicos comenzaron a emitir proclamas a los esclavos propiedad de los patriotas, ofreciéndoles la libertad si huían a las líneas británicas y ayudaban al esfuerzo bélico británico. [34] Dichas proclamas se emitieron repetidamente a lo largo del conflicto, lo que dio lugar a que hasta 100.000 esclavos estadounidenses huyeran a las líneas británicas. [35] Los esclavos autoemancipados que llegaron a las líneas británicas se organizaron en una variedad de unidades militares, que sirvieron en todos los teatros de la guerra. Las mujeres y los niños que anteriormente habían sido esclavos, en lugar de realizar el servicio militar, trabajaron como trabajadores y sirvientes domésticos. Al final de la guerra, los esclavos liberados en las líneas británicas fueron evacuados a otras colonias británicas o a la propia Gran Bretaña, fueron esclavizados nuevamente por los estadounidenses victoriosos o huyeron al campo. [36]
A principios de 1775, el gobernador real de Virginia , Lord Dunmore , escribió al conde de Dartmouth sobre su intención de liberar a los esclavos propiedad de los patriotas estadounidenses en caso de que organizaran una rebelión. [37] [38] El 7 de noviembre de 1775, Dunmore emitió la Proclamación de Dunmore , que prometía la libertad a cualquier esclavo de los patriotas estadounidenses que abandonara a sus amos y se uniera a las fuerzas británicas. [39] Los historiadores coinciden en que la proclamación fue diseñada principalmente por razones prácticas más que morales, y los esclavos propiedad de los leales estadounidenses no se vieron afectados por la proclamación. Alrededor de 1.500 esclavos propiedad de patriotas escaparon y se unieron a las fuerzas de Dunmore. Un total de 18 esclavos huyeron de la plantación de George Washington , uno de los cuales, Harry, sirvió en el regimiento lealista totalmente negro de Dunmore llamado "los Pioneros Negros". [40] Los fugitivos que se unieron a Dunmore tenían "Libertad para los esclavos" cosido en sus chaquetas. [41] La mayoría murió de enfermedades antes de poder luchar, pero trescientos de estos esclavos liberados lograron llegar a la libertad en Gran Bretaña. [42] La historiadora Jill Lepore escribe que "entre ochenta y cien mil (casi uno de cada cinco esclavos negros) abandonaron sus hogares... apostando por la victoria británica", pero Cassandra Pybus afirma que entre 20.000 y 30.000 es un número más realista de esclavos que desertaron al lado británico durante la guerra. [40]
Muchos esclavos aprovecharon la interrupción de la guerra para escapar de sus plantaciones hacia las líneas británicas o para desvanecerse entre la población general. Al ver por primera vez los barcos británicos, miles de esclavos en Maryland y Virginia huyeron de sus dueños. [43] : 21 En todo el Sur, las pérdidas de esclavos fueron altas, muchas de ellas debido a fugas. [44] Los esclavos también escaparon por toda Nueva Inglaterra y el Atlántico medio, y muchos se unieron a los británicos que habían ocupado Nueva York. [40] En los últimos meses de la guerra, los británicos evacuaron a los libertos y también se llevaron a los esclavos propiedad de los leales. Alrededor de 15.000 leales negros se fueron con los británicos, la mayoría de ellos acabaron como personas libres en Inglaterra o sus colonias. [45] Washington contrató a un cazador de esclavos durante la guerra, y al final de la misma presionó a los británicos para que devolvieran los esclavos a sus amos. [40] Con los certificados británicos de libertad en sus pertenencias, los leales negros, incluido el esclavo de Washington, Harry, navegaron con sus homólogos blancos desde el puerto de Nueva York hacia Nueva Escocia . [40] Más de 3.000 fueron reasentados en Nueva Escocia, donde finalmente se les concedió tierra y formaron la comunidad de los negros de Nueva Escocia .
En las dos primeras décadas posteriores a la Revolución estadounidense, las legislaturas estatales y los individuos tomaron medidas para liberar a los esclavos. Los estados del norte aprobaron nuevas constituciones que contenían lenguaje sobre la igualdad de derechos o abolían específicamente la esclavitud; algunos estados, como Nueva York y Nueva Jersey, donde la esclavitud estaba más extendida, aprobaron leyes a fines del siglo XVIII para abolirla gradualmente. En 1804, todos los estados del norte habían aprobado leyes que proscribían la esclavitud, ya sea de inmediato o con el tiempo. En Nueva York, los últimos esclavos fueron liberados en 1827 (celebrado con un gran desfile el 5 de julio). La servidumbre por contrato , que había sido generalizada en las colonias (la mitad de la población de Filadelfia había sido sirvientes contratados ), disminuyó drásticamente y desapareció en 1800. Sin embargo, todavía había sirvientes contratados por la fuerza en Nueva Jersey en 1860. Ningún estado del Sur abolió la esclavitud, pero algunos propietarios individuales, más de un puñado, liberaron a sus esclavos por decisión personal, a menudo previendo la manumisión en testamentos, pero a veces presentando escrituras o documentos judiciales para liberar a los individuos. Numerosos propietarios de esclavos que liberaron a sus esclavos citaron ideales revolucionarios en sus documentos; otros liberaron a los esclavos como una recompensa prometida por el servicio. De 1790 a 1810, la proporción de negros libres en los Estados Unidos aumentó del 8 al 13,5 por ciento, y en el Alto Sur de menos del uno a casi el diez por ciento como resultado de estas acciones. [46] [47] [48]
A partir de 1777, los rebeldes prohibieron la importación de esclavos estado por estado. Todos actuaron para poner fin al comercio internacional, pero, después de la guerra, se reabrió en Carolina del Norte (abierto hasta 1794), Georgia (abierto hasta 1798) y Carolina del Sur (abierto hasta 1787, y luego reabierto nuevamente en 1803). [49] En 1807, el Congreso de los Estados Unidos actuó siguiendo el consejo del presidente Thomas Jefferson y, sin controversia, convirtió la importación de esclavos del extranjero en un delito federal, que entró en vigencia el primer día que la Constitución de los Estados Unidos permitió esta prohibición: el 1 de enero de 1808. [50]
Durante la Revolución y en los años siguientes, todos los estados al norte de Maryland (la línea Mason-Dixon ) tomaron medidas para abolir la esclavitud. En 1777, la República de Vermont , que todavía no era reconocida por los Estados Unidos, aprobó una constitución estatal que prohibía la esclavitud . La Sociedad de Abolición de Pensilvania , liderada en parte por Benjamin Franklin , se fundó en 1775, y Pensilvania comenzó la abolición gradual en 1780. En 1783, el Tribunal Supremo Judicial de Massachusetts dictaminó en Commonwealth v. Jennison que la esclavitud era inconstitucional según la nueva constitución del estado de 1780 . New Hampshire comenzó la emancipación gradual en 1783, mientras que Connecticut y Rhode Island siguieron su ejemplo en 1784. La Sociedad de Manumisión de Nueva York , dirigida por John Jay , Alexander Hamilton y Aaron Burr , se fundó en 1785. El estado de Nueva York comenzó la emancipación gradual en 1799, y Nueva Jersey hizo lo mismo en 1804.
Poco después de la Revolución, Manasseh Cutler y Rufus Putnam (que había sido el ingeniero jefe de George Washington) fundaron el Territorio del Noroeste . Tanto Cutler como Putnam procedían de la Nueva Inglaterra puritana , que creía firmemente que la esclavitud era moralmente incorrecta. Su influencia en la cuestión de la esclavitud fue duradera y la Revolución le dio un impulso mucho mayor. El Territorio del Noroeste (que se convirtió en Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin y parte de Minnesota) duplicó el tamaño de los Estados Unidos y se estableció por insistencia de Cutler y Putnam como "suelo libre", sin esclavitud. Esto resultó crucial unas décadas más tarde. Si esos estados hubieran sido estados esclavistas y sus votos electorales hubieran ido al principal oponente de Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln no habría sido presidente. La Guerra Civil no se habría librado. Incluso si finalmente se hubiera librado, el Norte bien podría haber perdido. [51] [52] [53] [54] [55]
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La esclavitud fue un tema polémico durante la redacción y aprobación de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos . [56] Las palabras "esclavo" y "esclavitud" no aparecían en la Constitución tal como se adoptó originalmente, aunque varias disposiciones se referían claramente a los esclavos y a la esclavitud. Hasta la adopción de la 13.ª Enmienda en 1865, la Constitución no prohibía la esclavitud. [57]
La Sección 9 del Artículo I prohibía al gobierno federal prohibir la importación de esclavos, descritos como "aquellas personas que cualquiera de los Estados ahora existentes considere apropiado admitir", durante veinte años después de la ratificación de la Constitución (hasta el 1 de enero de 1808). La Ley de Prohibición de la Importación de Esclavos de 1807 , aprobada por el Congreso y firmada como ley por el presidente Thomas Jefferson (quien había pedido su promulgación en su discurso sobre el Estado de la Unión de 1806), entró en vigor el 1 de enero de 1808, la fecha más temprana en la que la importación de esclavos podía prohibirse bajo la Constitución. [58]
Los delegados aprobaron la Cláusula de Esclavos Fugitivos de la Constitución ( Artículo IV, Sección 2, Cláusula 3 ), que prohibía a los estados liberar a aquellos "obligados a trabajar o prestar servicios" (es decir, esclavos, trabajadores contratados y aprendices) que huyeran de otro estado hacia ellos y exigía que fueran devueltos a sus dueños. [59] La Ley de Esclavos Fugitivos de 1793 y la Ley de Esclavos Fugitivos de 1850 dieron efecto a la Cláusula de Esclavos Fugitivos. [60] Salmon P. Chase consideró que las Leyes de Esclavos Fugitivos eran inconstitucionales porque "la Cláusula de Esclavos Fugitivos era un pacto entre los estados, no una concesión de poder al gobierno federal". [61]
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En una sección negociada por James Madison de Virginia, la Sección 2 del Artículo I designó que "otras personas" (esclavos) se agregarían al total de la población libre del estado, a razón de tres quintos de su número total, para establecer la población oficial del estado para los fines de la distribución de la representación en el Congreso y los impuestos federales. [62] El "Compromiso de los Tres Quintos" se alcanzó después de un debate en el que los delegados de los estados del Sur (esclavistas) argumentaron que los esclavos deberían contarse en el censo al igual que todas las demás personas, mientras que los delegados de los estados del Norte (libres) respondieron que los esclavos no deberían contarse en absoluto. El compromiso fortaleció el poder político de los estados del Sur, ya que tres quintos de la población esclava (sin derecho a voto) se contabilizaron para la distribución en el Congreso y en el Colegio Electoral , aunque no fortaleció a los estados del Sur tanto como lo habría hecho si la Constitución hubiera previsto contar a todas las personas, ya fueran esclavas o libres, por igual.
Además, muchas partes del país estaban vinculadas a la economía del Sur. Como señaló el historiador James Oliver Horton, los políticos esclavistas prominentes y los cultivos básicos del Sur tuvieron una fuerte influencia en la política y la economía de los Estados Unidos. Horton dijo:
En los 72 años transcurridos entre la elección de George Washington y la elección de Abraham Lincoln, 50 de esos años [tuvieron] un esclavista como presidente de los Estados Unidos , y, durante todo ese período de tiempo, nunca hubo una persona elegida para un segundo mandato que no fuera esclavista. [63]
El poder de los estados sureños en el Congreso perduró hasta la Guerra Civil , afectando las políticas nacionales, la legislación y los nombramientos. [63] Un resultado fue que la mayoría de los jueces designados para la Corte Suprema eran dueños de esclavos. La élite de los plantadores dominó las delegaciones del Congreso del Sur y la presidencia de los Estados Unidos durante casi cincuenta años. [63]
La esclavitud en los Estados Unidos era algo variable, en "constante cambio, impulsado por la búsqueda violenta de ganancias cada vez mayores". [64] Según los cálculos demográficos de J. David Hacker de la Universidad de Minnesota, aproximadamente cuatro de cada cinco de todos los esclavos que alguna vez vivieron en los Estados Unidos o en el territorio que se convirtió en los Estados Unidos (a partir de 1619 e incluyendo todas las colonias que fueron finalmente adquiridas o conquistadas por los Estados Unidos) nacieron o fueron importados a los Estados Unidos en el siglo XIX. [65] Los esclavos eran la fuerza laboral del Sur, pero la propiedad de esclavos también fue la base sobre la que se construyó la supremacía blanca estadounidense. El historiador Walter Johnson sostiene que "una de las muchas cosas milagrosas que un esclavo podía hacer era convertir una casa en blanca...", lo que significa que el valor de la blancura en Estados Unidos se medía de alguna manera por la capacidad de comprar y mantener esclavos negros. [66]
Harriet Beecher Stowe describió la esclavitud en los Estados Unidos en 1853: [67]
¿Qué es, entonces, la esclavitud estadounidense, tal como la hemos visto en la legislación y en las decisiones de los tribunales? Empecemos por decir lo que no es:
1. No es un aprendizaje.
2. No es tutela.
3. No es en ningún sentido un sistema de educación de una raza más débil por una más fuerte.
4. La felicidad de los gobernados no es en ningún sentido su objeto.
5. La mejora temporal o el bienestar eterno de los gobernados no es en ningún sentido su objeto.
El objeto de la misma ha sido claramente expresado en una frase por el juez Ruffin : "El fin es el beneficio del amo, su seguridad y la seguridad pública".
La esclavitud, entonces, es despotismo absoluto, en su forma más cruda.
En el siglo XIX, los defensores de la esclavitud solían defender la institución como un "mal necesario". En aquella época, se temía que la emancipación de los esclavos negros tuviera consecuencias sociales y económicas más dañinas que la continuación de la esclavitud. El 22 de abril de 1820, Thomas Jefferson , uno de los Padres Fundadores de los Estados Unidos , escribió en una carta a John Holmes que con la esclavitud,
Tenemos al lobo agarrado por la oreja y no podemos sujetarlo ni dejarlo ir con seguridad. La justicia está en una balanza y la autoconservación en la otra. [71]
El escritor y viajero francés Alexis de Tocqueville , en su influyente Democracia en América (1835), expresó su oposición a la esclavitud al tiempo que observaba sus efectos en la sociedad estadounidense. Consideraba que una sociedad multirracial sin esclavitud era insostenible, ya que creía que el prejuicio contra los negros aumentaba a medida que se les concedían más derechos (por ejemplo, en los estados del Norte). Creía que las actitudes de los sureños blancos y la concentración de la población negra en el Sur estaban llevando a las poblaciones blanca y negra a un estado de equilibrio y eran un peligro para ambas razas. Debido a las diferencias raciales entre amo y esclavo, creía que este último no podía emanciparse. [72]
En una carta a su esposa fechada el 27 de diciembre de 1856, en reacción a un mensaje del presidente Franklin Pierce , Robert E. Lee escribió:
Creo que hay pocos en esta época ilustrada que no reconozcan que la esclavitud como institución es un mal moral y político. Es inútil extenderse en sus desventajas. Creo que es un mal mayor para los blancos que para la raza de color. Si bien mis sentimientos están fuertemente en favor de estos últimos, mis simpatías están más profundamente comprometidas con los primeros. Los negros están inconmensurablemente mejor aquí que en África, moral, física y socialmente. La dolorosa disciplina a la que están siendo sometidos es necesaria para su posterior instrucción como raza y los preparará, espero, para cosas mejores. La Providencia misericordiosa sabe y ordena cuánto tiempo puede ser necesaria su servidumbre. [73] [74]
Sin embargo, a medida que la agitación del movimiento abolicionista aumentó y el área desarrollada para las plantaciones se expandió, las apologías de la esclavitud se hicieron más débiles en el Sur. Los líderes describieron entonces la esclavitud como un esquema beneficioso de gestión laboral. John C. Calhoun , en un famoso discurso en el Senado en 1837, declaró que la esclavitud era "en lugar de un mal, un bien: un bien positivo". Calhoun apoyó su punto de vista con el siguiente razonamiento: en toda sociedad civilizada una parte de la comunidad debe vivir del trabajo de otra; el aprendizaje, la ciencia y las artes se basan en el ocio; el esclavo africano, tratado amablemente por su amo y su ama y cuidado en su vejez, está en mejor situación que los trabajadores libres de Europa; y bajo el sistema esclavista se evitan los conflictos entre el capital y el trabajo. Las ventajas de la esclavitud a este respecto, concluyó, "se volverán cada vez más manifiestas, si no se ven perturbadas por la interferencia externa, a medida que el país avance en riqueza y número". [79]
El oficial del ejército, plantador y ejecutivo ferroviario de Carolina del Sur, James Gadsden, calificó la esclavitud como "una bendición social" y a los abolicionistas como "la mayor maldición de la nación". [81] Gadsden estaba a favor de la secesión de Carolina del Sur en 1850 y fue un líder en los esfuerzos por dividir California en dos estados, uno esclavista y otro libre .
Otros escritores sureños que también comenzaron a retratar la esclavitud como algo positivo fueron James Henry Hammond y George Fitzhugh . Presentaron varios argumentos para defender la práctica de la esclavitud en el Sur. [82] Hammond, como Calhoun, creía que la esclavitud era necesaria para construir el resto de la sociedad. En un discurso ante el Senado el 4 de marzo de 1858, Hammond desarrolló su "Teoría del alféizar de lodo", defendiendo su visión sobre la esclavitud al afirmar: "Esa clase debe ser la que tenéis, o no tendríais esa otra clase que lidera el progreso, la civilización y el refinamiento. Constituye el mismo alféizar de lodo de la sociedad y del gobierno político; y es lo mismo que intentar construir una casa en el aire que construir una u otra, excepto sobre este alféizar de lodo". Hammond creía que en cada clase un grupo debe cumplir con todos los deberes serviles, porque sin ellos los líderes de la sociedad no podrían progresar. [82] Argumentó que los trabajadores contratados del Norte también eran esclavos: "La diferencia ... es que nuestros esclavos son contratados de por vida y bien compensados; no hay hambre, ni mendicidad, ni falta de empleo", mientras que los del Norte tenían que buscar empleo. [82]
George Fitzhugh utilizó suposiciones sobre la superioridad blanca para justificar la esclavitud, escribiendo que "el negro no es más que un niño adulto y debe ser gobernado como un niño". En La ley universal de la esclavitud , Fitzhugh sostiene que la esclavitud proporciona todo lo necesario para la vida y que el esclavo es incapaz de sobrevivir en un mundo libre porque es perezoso y no puede competir con la inteligente raza blanca europea. Afirma que "los esclavos negros del Sur son las personas más felices y, en cierto sentido, las más libres del mundo". [83] Sin el Sur, "él (el esclavo) se convertiría en una carga insufrible para la sociedad" y "la sociedad tiene derecho a evitarlo, y solo puede hacerlo sometiéndolo a la esclavitud doméstica". [83]
El 21 de marzo de 1861, Alexander Stephens , vicepresidente de la Confederación, pronunció su discurso fundamental . Explicó las diferencias entre la Constitución de los Estados Confederados y la Constitución de los Estados Unidos , expuso la causa de la Guerra Civil estadounidense, tal como la veía, y defendió la esclavitud: [84]
La nueva Constitución [confederada] ha puesto fin para siempre a todas las cuestiones conmovedoras relacionadas con nuestras instituciones peculiares –la esclavitud africana tal como existe entre nosotros–, el estatus apropiado del negro en nuestra forma de civilización. Esta fue la causa inmediata de la ruptura reciente y la revolución actual. Jefferson, en su pronóstico, había previsto esto como la "roca sobre la que se partiría la antigua Unión". Tenía razón. Lo que para él era una conjetura, ahora es un hecho realizado. Pero si comprendió plenamente la gran verdad sobre la que se sostenía y se sostiene esa roca, es dudoso. Las ideas predominantes que sostenían él y la mayoría de los estadistas principales en el momento de la formación de la antigua Constitución eran que la esclavitud de los africanos violaba las leyes de la naturaleza; que era incorrecta en principio, social, moral y políticamente. Era un mal con el que no sabían bien cómo lidiar; pero la opinión general de los hombres de esa época era que, de una manera u otra, por orden de la Providencia, la institución se desvanecería y desaparecería ... Esas ideas, sin embargo, eran fundamentalmente erróneas. Se basaban en la premisa de la igualdad de las razas, lo cual era un error. Era una base sólida y la idea de un gobierno construido sobre ella... cuando "llegó la tormenta y sopló el viento, cayó".
Nuestro nuevo gobierno [confederado] se basa exactamente en ideas opuestas; sus cimientos están puestos, su piedra angular descansa sobre la gran verdad de que el negro no es igual al hombre blanco; que la esclavitud, la subordinación a la raza superior, es su condición natural y moral. [84]
Esta visión de la "raza negra" estaba respaldada por la pseudociencia . [85] El investigador principal fue el Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright , un sureño e inventor de las enfermedades mentales de la drapetomanía (el deseo de un esclavo de escapar) y la disestesia aethiopica ("picardía"), ambas curadas, según él, mediante azotes. La Asociación Médica de Luisiana creó un comité, del que era presidente, para investigar "las enfermedades y peculiaridades físicas de la raza negra". Su informe, entregado por primera vez a la Asociación Médica en un discurso, se publicó en su revista en 1851, [86] y luego se reimprimió en parte en la DeBow's Review, de amplia circulación . [87]
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La cuestión de si la esclavitud debía limitarse a los estados del Sur que ya la tenían o si debía permitirse en los nuevos estados creados a partir de las tierras de la Compra de Luisiana y la Cesión Mexicana fue un tema importante en las décadas de 1840 y 1850. Se abordó en el Compromiso de 1850 y durante el período del Kansas Sangrante .
También son relativamente conocidas las propuestas, incluido el Manifiesto de Ostende , de anexar Cuba como estado esclavista , así como la invasión de Cuba financiada con fondos privados por Narciso López . También se habló de convertir en estados esclavistas a México, Nicaragua (véase el caso Walker y la Guerra del Filibusterismo ) y otras tierras alrededor del llamado Círculo Dorado . Menos conocido hoy, aunque bien conocido en su momento, es que los sureños proesclavistas:
Ninguna de estas ideas llegó muy lejos, pero alarmaron a los norteños y contribuyeron a la creciente polarización del país.
La esclavitud es un volcán cuyos fuegos no pueden apagarse ni sus estragos controlarse. Ya sentimos sus convulsiones y, si nos quedamos sentados mirando ociosamente sus llamas, que se elevan cada vez más, nuestra feliz república quedará sepultada en ruinas bajo sus abrumadoras energías.
A partir de la Revolución y en las dos primeras décadas de la posguerra, todos los estados del Norte abolieron la esclavitud. Estas fueron las primeras leyes abolicionistas en el mundo atlántico . [95] [96] Sin embargo, la abolición de la esclavitud no significó necesariamente que los esclavos existentes se volvieran libres. En algunos estados se les obligó a permanecer con sus antiguos dueños como sirvientes contratados : libres solo de nombre, aunque no podían ser vendidos y, por lo tanto, las familias no podían dividirse, y sus hijos nacían libres. El fin de la esclavitud no llegó en Nueva York hasta el 4 de julio de 1827, cuando se celebró (el 5 de julio) con un gran desfile. [97] Sin embargo, en el censo de 1830 , el único estado sin esclavos era Vermont. En el censo de 1840 , todavía había esclavos en New Hampshire (1), Rhode Island (5), Connecticut (17), Nueva York (4), Pensilvania (64), Ohio (3), Indiana (3), Illinois (331), Iowa (16) y Wisconsin (11). No había ninguno en estos estados en el censo de 1850. [ 98]
La mayoría de los estados del norte aprobaron leyes para la abolición gradual, primero liberando a los niños nacidos de madres esclavas (y exigiéndoles que cumplieran largos contratos de servidumbre con los dueños de sus madres, a menudo hasta los 20 años como adultos jóvenes). En 1845, la Corte Suprema de Nueva Jersey recibió largos argumentos a favor de "la liberación de cuatro mil personas de la esclavitud". [99] Los últimos esclavos de Pensilvania fueron liberados en 1847, los de Connecticut en 1848, y aunque ni New Hampshire ni New Jersey tenían esclavos en el censo de 1850 , y New Jersey solo uno y New Hampshire ninguno en el censo de 1860 , la esclavitud nunca fue prohibida en ninguno de los dos estados hasta la ratificación de la 13.ª Enmienda en 1865 [100] (y New Jersey fue uno de los últimos estados en ratificarla).
Ninguno de los estados del Sur abolió la esclavitud antes de 1865, pero no era inusual que los propietarios de esclavos individuales en el Sur liberaran a numerosos esclavos, a menudo citando ideales revolucionarios, en sus testamentos. Los predicadores metodistas , cuáqueros y bautistas viajaron por el Sur, apelando a los propietarios de esclavos para que manumitieran a sus esclavos, y hubo "sociedades de manumisión" en algunos estados del Sur. Para 1810, el número y la proporción de negros libres en la población de los Estados Unidos había aumentado drásticamente. La mayoría de los negros libres vivían en el Norte, pero incluso en el Alto Sur, la proporción de negros libres pasó de menos del uno por ciento de todos los negros a más del diez por ciento, incluso cuando el número total de esclavos estaba aumentando a través de las importaciones. [101]
Los esclavos africanos llegaron a la Colonia de la Bahía de Massachusetts en la década de 1630, y la esclavitud fue sancionada legalmente por los puritanos en 1641. [102] Los residentes de Massachusetts participaron en el comercio de esclavos y se aprobaron leyes que regulaban el movimiento y el matrimonio entre esclavos. [102] En 1700, Samuel Sewall , abolicionista puritano y juez asociado del Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Massachusetts , escribió The Selling of Joseph , en el que condenó la esclavitud y el comercio de esclavos y refutó muchas de las justificaciones típicas de la época para la esclavitud. [103] [104] La influencia puritana en la esclavitud todavía era fuerte en la época de la Revolución estadounidense y hasta la Guerra Civil. De los primeros siete presidentes de Estados Unidos, los dos que no poseían esclavos, John Adams y su hijo John Quincy Adams , provenían de la Nueva Inglaterra puritana. Eran lo suficientemente ricos como para poseer esclavos, pero eligieron no hacerlo porque creían que era moralmente incorrecto hacerlo. En 1765, el líder colonial Samuel Adams y su esposa recibieron una esclava como regalo. La liberaron de inmediato. Justo después de la Revolución, en 1787, el Territorio del Noroeste (que se convirtió en los estados de Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin y parte de Minnesota) se abrió a la colonización. Los dos hombres responsables de establecer este territorio fueron Manasseh Cutler y Rufus Putnam . Procedían de la Nueva Inglaterra puritana e insistieron en que este nuevo territorio, que duplicaba el tamaño de los Estados Unidos, iba a ser "suelo libre", sin esclavitud. Esto iba a resultar crucial en las décadas siguientes. Si esos estados se hubieran convertido en estados esclavistas y sus votos electorales hubieran ido al principal oponente de Abraham Lincoln , Lincoln no habría sido elegido presidente. [51] [52] [53]
En las décadas previas a la Guerra Civil, los abolicionistas, como Theodore Parker , Ralph Waldo Emerson , Henry David Thoreau y Frederick Douglass , utilizaron repetidamente la herencia puritana del país para reforzar su causa. El periódico antiesclavista más radical, The Liberator , invocó a los puritanos y los valores puritanos más de mil veces. Parker, al instar a los congresistas de Nueva Inglaterra a apoyar la abolición de la esclavitud, escribió que "El hijo del puritano ... es enviado al Congreso para defender la Verdad y el Derecho ..." [106] [107]
Los norteños predominaron en el movimiento hacia el oeste, hacia el territorio del Medio Oeste , después de la Revolución Americana; a medida que los estados se organizaban, votaron para prohibir la esclavitud en sus constituciones cuando alcanzaron la categoría de estado: Ohio en 1803, Indiana en 1816 e Illinois en 1818. Lo que se desarrolló fue un bloque norteño de estados libres unidos en una zona geográfica contigua que, en general, compartía una cultura antiesclavista. Las excepciones fueron las áreas a lo largo del río Ohio colonizadas por sureños: las partes meridionales de Indiana, Ohio e Illinois. Los residentes de esas áreas, en general, compartían la cultura y las actitudes sureñas. Además, estas áreas se dedicaron a la agricultura durante más tiempo que las partes norteñas de estos estados en proceso de industrialización, y algunos agricultores utilizaban mano de obra esclava. En Illinois, por ejemplo, si bien el comercio de esclavos estaba prohibido, era legal traer esclavos de Kentucky a Illinois y utilizarlos allí, siempre que los esclavos salieran de Illinois un día al año (estaban "de visita"). La emancipación de los esclavos en el Norte condujo al crecimiento de la población de negros libres del Norte, de varios cientos en la década de 1770 a casi 50.000 en 1810. [108]
Durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX, el abolicionismo, un movimiento para terminar con la esclavitud, creció en fuerza; la mayoría de las sociedades abolicionistas y sus partidarios estaban en el Norte. Trabajaron para crear conciencia sobre los males de la esclavitud y para generar apoyo para la abolición. Después de 1830, el abolicionista y editor de periódicos William Lloyd Garrison promovió la emancipación, caracterizando la posesión de esclavos como un pecado personal. Exigió que los dueños de esclavos se arrepintieran e iniciaran el proceso de emancipación. Su posición aumentó la actitud defensiva por parte de algunos sureños, que notaron la larga historia de la esclavitud en muchas culturas. Algunos abolicionistas, como John Brown , favorecieron el uso de la fuerza armada para fomentar levantamientos entre los esclavos, como intentó hacer en Harper's Ferry . La mayoría de los abolicionistas intentaron generar apoyo público para cambiar las leyes y desafiar las leyes esclavistas. Los abolicionistas fueron activos en el circuito de conferencias en el Norte y, a menudo, presentaron a esclavos fugitivos en sus presentaciones. El escritor y orador Frederick Douglass se convirtió en un importante líder abolicionista después de escapar de la esclavitud. La novela de Harriet Beecher Stowe, La cabaña del tío Tom (1852), fue un éxito de ventas internacional y, junto con la obra complementaria de no ficción A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin , despertó el sentimiento popular contra la esclavitud. [109] También provocó la publicación de numerosas novelas anti-Tom por parte de los sureños en los años previos a la Guerra Civil estadounidense.
Esta lucha se desarrolló en medio de un fuerte apoyo a la esclavitud por parte de los sureños blancos, que se beneficiaban enormemente del sistema de trabajo esclavo. Pero la esclavitud estaba entrelazada con la economía nacional; por ejemplo, las industrias bancarias, navieras, de seguros y manufactureras de la ciudad de Nueva York tenían fuertes intereses económicos en la esclavitud, al igual que industrias similares en otras grandes ciudades portuarias del Norte. Las fábricas textiles del Norte en Nueva York y Nueva Inglaterra procesaban el algodón sureño y fabricaban ropa para vestir a los esclavos. En 1822, la mitad de las exportaciones de la ciudad de Nueva York estaban relacionadas con el algodón. [110]
Los propietarios de esclavos comenzaron a referirse a la esclavitud como la "institución peculiar" para diferenciarla de otros ejemplos de trabajo forzado . La justificaban como menos cruel que el trabajo libre del Norte.
Los principales organismos organizados para abogar por la abolición y las reformas antiesclavistas en el norte fueron la Sociedad Abolicionista de Pensilvania y la Sociedad de Manumisión de Nueva York . Antes de la década de 1830, los grupos antiesclavistas pedían una emancipación gradual. [111] A finales de la década de 1820, bajo el impulso de evangélicos religiosos como Beriah Green , surgió la sensación de que poseer esclavos era un pecado y el propietario tenía que liberarse inmediatamente de este grave pecado mediante la emancipación inmediata. [112]
Según la Constitución, el Congreso no podía prohibir la importación de esclavos que se permitía en Carolina del Sur hasta 1808. Sin embargo, el tercer Congreso lo reguló en la Ley de Comercio de Esclavos de 1794 , que prohibía la construcción y el equipamiento de barcos estadounidenses para el comercio. Las leyes posteriores de 1800 y 1803 buscaron desalentar el comercio prohibiendo la inversión estadounidense en el comercio y el empleo estadounidense en los barcos en el comercio, así como prohibiendo la importación a los estados que habían abolido la esclavitud, que todos los estados excepto Carolina del Sur habían hecho en 1807. [114] [115] La Ley final de prohibición de la importación de esclavos se adoptó en 1807 y entró en vigor en 1808. Sin embargo, la importación ilegal de esclavos africanos (contrabando) era común. [4] El comercio de esclavos cubanos entre 1796 y 1807 estuvo dominado por los barcos esclavistas estadounidenses. A pesar de la Ley de 1794, los propietarios de barcos esclavistas de Rhode Island encontraron formas de seguir abasteciendo a los estados esclavistas. Se estima que en 1806 la flota total de barcos negreros de Estados Unidos era casi el 75% del tamaño de la británica. [116] : 63, 65
Después de que Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos prohibieran el comercio internacional de esclavos en 1807, las actividades británicas de supresión del comercio de esclavos comenzaron en 1808 mediante esfuerzos diplomáticos y la formación del Escuadrón de África Occidental de la Marina Real en 1809. Estados Unidos negó a la Marina Real el derecho a detener y registrar los barcos estadounidenses sospechosos de ser barcos de esclavos, por lo que no solo los barcos estadounidenses no se vieron obstaculizados por las patrullas británicas, sino que los esclavistas de otros países enarbolaban la bandera estadounidense para tratar de evitar ser detenidos. La cooperación entre Estados Unidos y Gran Bretaña no fue posible durante la Guerra de 1812 ni en el período de malas relaciones de los años siguientes. En 1820, la Marina de los Estados Unidos envió el USS Cyane bajo el mando del capitán Edward Trenchard para patrullar las costas de esclavos de África Occidental. Cyane se apoderó de cuatro barcos de esclavos estadounidenses en su primer año en la base. Trenchard desarrolló un buen nivel de cooperación con la Marina Real. Cuatro buques de guerra estadounidenses adicionales fueron enviados a la costa africana en 1820 y 1821. Un total de 11 barcos de esclavos estadounidenses fueron capturados por la Marina de los EE. UU. durante este período. Luego, la actividad de aplicación de la ley estadounidense se redujo. Todavía no había un acuerdo entre los Estados Unidos y Gran Bretaña sobre un derecho mutuo a abordar a los presuntos traficantes de esclavos que navegaban bajo la bandera del otro. Los intentos de alcanzar tal acuerdo se estancaron en 1821 y 1824 en el Senado de los Estados Unidos . Una presencia de la Marina de los EE. UU., aunque esporádica, dio como resultado que los esclavistas estadounidenses navegaran bajo la bandera española, pero aún así como un comercio extenso. El Tratado Webster-Ashburton de 1842 estableció un nivel mínimo garantizado de actividad de patrullaje por parte de la Marina de los EE. UU. y la Marina Real, y formalizó el nivel de cooperación que había existido en 1820. Sus efectos, sin embargo, fueron mínimos [b] mientras que las oportunidades para una mayor cooperación no se aprovecharon. El comercio transatlántico de esclavos en Estados Unidos no fue reprimido de manera efectiva hasta 1861, durante la presidencia de Lincoln, cuando se firmó un tratado con Gran Bretaña cuyas disposiciones incluían permitir a la Marina Real abordar, registrar y arrestar a los esclavistas que operaban bajo la bandera estadounidense. [116] : 399–400, 449, 1144, 1149 [117]
Durante la Guerra de 1812 , los comandantes de la flota de bloqueo de la Marina Real Británica recibieron instrucciones de ofrecer libertad a los esclavos estadounidenses desertores, como lo había hecho la Corona durante la Guerra de la Independencia. Miles de esclavos fugitivos se unieron a la Corona con sus familias. [118] Se reclutaron hombres en el Cuerpo de Marines Coloniales en la isla Tangier ocupada , en la bahía de Chesapeake . Muchos esclavos estadounidenses liberados fueron reclutados directamente en regimientos antillanos existentes o en unidades del ejército británico recién creadas . Más tarde, los británicos reasentaron a unos pocos miles de esclavos liberados en Nueva Escocia. Sus descendientes, junto con los descendientes de los negros reasentados allí después de la Revolución, han establecido el Museo del Patrimonio Leal Negro. [119]
Los propietarios de esclavos, principalmente en el Sur, sufrieron una considerable "pérdida de propiedad" ya que miles de esclavos escaparon a las líneas o barcos británicos en busca de libertad, a pesar de las dificultades. [119] La complacencia de los plantadores sobre la "satisfacción" de los esclavos se sorprendió al ver que los esclavos arriesgarían tanto para ser libres. [119] Después, cuando algunos esclavos liberados se habían establecido en Bermudas , los propietarios de esclavos como el Mayor Pierce Butler de Carolina del Sur intentaron persuadirlos de que regresaran a los Estados Unidos, sin éxito.
Los estadounidenses protestaron porque el hecho de que Gran Bretaña no devolviera a todos los esclavos violaba el Tratado de Gante . Tras un arbitraje por parte del zar de Rusia , los británicos pagaron 1.204.960 dólares en concepto de daños y perjuicios (unos 32,4 millones de dólares en dinero actual) a Washington, que reembolsó el dinero a los propietarios de esclavos. [120]
Según Herbert Aptheker, "hubo pocas fases de la vida y la historia del Sur anteriores a la guerra que no estuvieran de algún modo influenciadas por el miedo a la acción militante concertada de los esclavos o por el estallido real de ésta". [121]
Los historiadores del siglo XX identificaron entre 250 y 311 levantamientos de esclavos en la historia de Estados Unidos y de las colonias. [122] Entre los que ocurrieron después de 1776 se incluyen:
En 1831, Nat Turner , un esclavo alfabetizado que afirmaba tener visiones espirituales , organizó una rebelión de esclavos en el condado de Southampton, Virginia ; a veces se la llamó la Insurrección de Southampton. Turner y sus seguidores mataron a casi sesenta habitantes blancos, en su mayoría mujeres y niños. Muchos de los hombres de la zona asistían a un evento religioso en Carolina del Norte. [127] Finalmente, Turner fue capturado con otros 17 rebeldes, que fueron sometidos por la milicia. [127] Turner y sus seguidores fueron ahorcados , y el cuerpo de Turner fue desollado . En un frenesí de miedo y represalias, la milicia mató a más de 100 esclavos que no habían participado en la rebelión. Los plantadores azotaron a cientos de esclavos inocentes para asegurarse de que la resistencia fuera sofocada. [127]
Esta rebelión llevó a Virginia y a otros estados esclavistas a aprobar más restricciones para los esclavos y las personas de color libres, controlando su movimiento y exigiendo una mayor supervisión blanca de las reuniones. En 1835, Carolina del Norte retiró el derecho al voto a las personas de color libres, y estas perdieron su derecho al voto.
Se conocen cuatro motines en barcos involucrados en el comercio costero de esclavos: Decatur (1826), Governor Strong (1826), Lafayette (1829) y Creole (1841). [128]
Aunque Virginia, Maryland y Delaware eran estados esclavistas, estos dos últimos ya contaban con una elevada proporción de negros libres cuando estalló la guerra. Tras la Revolución, las tres legislaturas facilitaron la manumisión , permitiéndola mediante escritura o testamento. Los ministros cuáqueros y metodistas, en particular, instaron a los propietarios de esclavos a liberar a sus esclavos. El número y la proporción de esclavos liberados en estos estados aumentaron drásticamente hasta 1810. Más de la mitad del número de negros libres en los Estados Unidos se concentraba en el Alto Sur. La proporción de negros libres entre la población negra en el Alto Sur aumentó de menos del 1 por ciento en 1792 a más del 10 por ciento en 1810. [101] En Delaware, casi el 75 por ciento de los negros eran libres en 1810. [129]
En Estados Unidos en su conjunto, el número de negros libres alcanzó 186.446, o el 13,5 por ciento de toda la población negra en 1810. [130] Después de ese período, pocos esclavos fueron liberados, ya que el desarrollo de plantaciones de algodón de fibra corta en el sur profundo impulsó la demanda interna de esclavos en el comercio doméstico de esclavos y los altos precios que se pagaban por ellos. [131]
Carolina del Sur hizo más difícil la manumisión, requiriendo la aprobación legislativa de cada una de ellas. [ cita requerida ] Alabama prohibió a los negros libres entrar al estado a partir de 1834; las personas libres de color que cruzaran la frontera estatal estaban sujetas a la esclavitud. [132] Los negros libres en Arkansas después de 1843 tuvieron que comprar un bono de buena conducta de $500, y ninguna persona negra no esclavizada tenía permitido legalmente mudarse al estado. [133]
Las mujeres ejercían su derecho a poseer y controlar la propiedad humana sin la interferencia o el permiso de sus maridos, y eran participantes activas en el comercio de esclavos. [134] Por ejemplo, en Carolina del Sur, el 40% de los contratos de compraventa de esclavos desde el siglo XVIII hasta la actualidad incluían una compradora o vendedora femenina. [135] Las mujeres también gobernaban a sus esclavos de una manera similar a los hombres, participando en los mismos niveles de disciplina física. Al igual que los hombres, presentaban demandas contra aquellos que ponían en peligro su propiedad sobre sus esclavos. [136]
A pesar de la existencia de una línea divisoria racial en los Estados Unidos desde hacía mucho tiempo, algunos afroamericanos eran dueños de esclavos, algunos en las ciudades y otros como propietarios de plantaciones en el campo. [137] La posesión de esclavos significaba riqueza y un mayor estatus social. [137] Sin embargo, los dueños de esclavos negros eran poco comunes, ya que "de los dos millones y medio de afroamericanos que vivían en los Estados Unidos en 1850, la gran mayoría [eran] esclavizados". [137]
Después de 1800, algunos de los cheroquis y otras cuatro tribus civilizadas del sudeste comenzaron a comprar y utilizar esclavos negros como mano de obra. Continuaron con esta práctica después de su traslado al Territorio Indio en la década de 1830, cuando se llevaron consigo a unos 15.000 negros esclavizados. [138]
La naturaleza de la esclavitud en la sociedad Cherokee a menudo reflejaba la de la sociedad esclavista blanca. La ley prohibía los matrimonios mixtos entre cherokees y afroamericanos esclavizados, pero los hombres cherokee se unían con mujeres esclavizadas, lo que daba como resultado hijos de raza mixta. [139] [140] Los cherokees que ayudaban a los esclavos eran castigados con cien latigazos en la espalda. En la sociedad Cherokee, a las personas de ascendencia africana se les prohibía ocupar cargos públicos incluso si también eran racial y culturalmente cherokees. También se les prohibía portar armas y poseer propiedades. Los cherokees prohibían que se enseñara a los afroamericanos a leer y escribir. [141] [142]
Por el contrario, los seminolas acogieron en su nación a los afroamericanos que habían escapado de la esclavitud ( seminolas negros ). Históricamente, los seminolas negros vivían principalmente en bandas distintas cerca de los seminolas nativos americanos. Algunos fueron retenidos como esclavos por líderes seminolas particulares. La práctica seminola en Florida había reconocido la esclavitud, aunque no el modelo de esclavitud de bienes muebles común en otros lugares. De hecho, era más como la dependencia feudal y los impuestos. [143] [144] [145] La relación entre los negros seminolas y los nativos cambió después de su reubicación en la década de 1830 a un territorio controlado por los creek que tenían un sistema de esclavitud de bienes muebles. La presión pro esclavitud de los creek y los seminolas pro creek y las incursiones esclavistas llevaron a muchos seminolas negros a escapar a México. [146] [147] [148] [149] [150]
La Constitución de los Estados Unidos , adoptada en 1787, impidió al Congreso prohibir por completo la importación de esclavos hasta 1808, aunque el Congreso reguló la trata en la Ley de Comercio de Esclavos de 1794 y en leyes posteriores en 1800 y 1803. [114] [151] Durante y después de la Revolución, los estados aprobaron individualmente leyes contra la importación de esclavos. Por el contrario, los estados de Georgia y Carolina del Sur reabrieron su comercio debido a la demanda de sus plantadores de las tierras altas, que estaban desarrollando nuevas plantaciones de algodón: Georgia desde 1800 hasta el 31 de diciembre de 1807, y Carolina del Sur desde 1804. En ese período, los comerciantes de Charleston importaron alrededor de 75.000 esclavos, más de los que se trajeron a Carolina del Sur en los 75 años anteriores a la Revolución. [152] Aproximadamente 30.000 fueron importados a Georgia.
El 1 de enero de 1808, cuando el Congreso prohibió más importaciones , Carolina del Sur era el único estado que aún permitía la importación de esclavos. El comercio interno se volvió extremadamente rentable a medida que la demanda aumentó con la expansión del cultivo de algodón y caña de azúcar en el sur profundo. La esclavitud en los Estados Unidos se volvió, más o menos, autosuficiente por el aumento natural entre los esclavos actuales y sus descendientes. Maryland y Virginia se veían a sí mismos como productores de esclavos, y veían que "producir esclavos" se parecía a la cría de animales. Los trabajadores, incluidos muchos niños, fueron reubicados a la fuerza del sur superior al sur inferior.
A pesar de la prohibición, las importaciones de esclavos continuaron a través de contrabandistas que los llevaban a Carolina del Sur, pasando por encima de la Patrulla de Comercio de Esclavos Africanos de la Marina de los EE. UU., y por tierra desde Texas y Florida, ambos lugares bajo control español. [153] El Congreso aumentó el castigo asociado con la importación de esclavos, clasificándolo en 1820 como un acto de piratería, y los contrabandistas estaban sujetos a duras penas, incluida la muerte si eran atrapados. Después de eso, "es poco probable que más de 10.000 [esclavos] fueran desembarcados con éxito en los Estados Unidos". [154] Pero, cierto contrabando de esclavos a los Estados Unidos continuó hasta poco antes del comienzo de la Guerra Civil.
In the early part of the 19th century, other organizations were founded to take action on the future of black Americans. Some advocated removing free black people from the United States to places where they would enjoy greater freedom; some endorsed colonization in Africa, while others advocated emigration, usually to Haiti. During the 1820s and 1830s, the American Colonization Society (ACS) was the primary organization to implement the "return" of black Americans to Africa.[155] The ACS was made up mostly of Quakers and slaveholders, and they found uneasy common ground in support of what was incorrectly called "repatriation". By this time, however, most black Americans were native-born and did not want to emigrate, saying they were no more African than white Americans were British. Rather, they wanted full rights in the United States, where their families had lived and worked for generations.
In 1822, the ACS and affiliated state societies established what would become the colony of Liberia, in West Africa.[156] The ACS assisted thousands of freedmen and free blacks (with legislated limits) to emigrate there from the United States. Many white people considered this preferable to emancipation in the United States. Henry Clay, one of the founders and a prominent slaveholder politician from Kentucky, said that blacks faced:
...unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them off.[157]
Deportation would also be a way to prevent reprisals against former slaveholders and white people in general, as had occurred in the 1804 Haiti massacre, which had contributed to a consuming fear amongst whites of retributive black violence, a phobia dubbed Haitianism.
The U.S. Constitution barred the federal government from prohibiting the importation of slaves for twenty years. Various states passed bans on the international slave trade during that period; by 1808, the only state still allowing the importation of African slaves was South Carolina. After 1808, legal importation of slaves ceased, although there was smuggling via Spanish Florida and the disputed Gulf Coast to the west.[158]: 48–49 [159]: 138 This route all but ended after Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821 (but see slave ships Wanderer and Clotilda).
The replacement for the importation of slaves from abroad was increased domestic production. Virginia and Maryland had little new agricultural development, and their need for slaves was mostly for replacements for decedents. Normal reproduction more than supplied these: Virginia and Maryland had surpluses of slaves. Their tobacco farms were "worn out"[160] and the climate was not suitable for cotton or sugar cane. The surplus was even greater because slaves were encouraged to reproduce (though they could not marry). The pro-slavery Virginian Thomas Roderick Dew wrote in 1832 that Virginia was a "negro-raising state"; i.e. Virginia "produced" slaves.[161] According to him, in 1832 Virginia exported "upwards of 6,000 slaves" per year, "a source of wealth to Virginia".[162]: 198 A newspaper from 1836 gives the figure as 40,000, earning for Virginia an estimated $24,000,000 per year.[163][162]: 201 Demand for slaves was the strongest in what was then the southwest of the country: Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and, later, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Here there was abundant land suitable for plantation agriculture, which young men with some capital established. This was expansion of the white, monied population: younger men seeking their fortune.
The most valuable crop that could be grown on a plantation in that climate was cotton. That crop was labor-intensive, and the least-costly laborers were slaves. Demand for slaves exceeded the supply in the southwest; therefore slaves, never cheap if they were productive, went for a higher price. As portrayed in Uncle Tom's Cabin (the "original" cabin was in Maryland),[164] "selling South" was greatly feared. A recently (2018) publicized example of the practice of "selling South" is the 1838 sale by Jesuits of 272 slaves from Maryland, to plantations in Louisiana, to benefit Georgetown University, which has been described as "ow[ing] its existence" to this transaction.[165][166][167]
The growing international demand for cotton led many plantation owners further west in search of suitable land. In addition, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 enabled profitable processing of short-staple cotton, which could readily be grown in the uplands. The invention revolutionized the cotton industry by increasing fifty-fold the quantity of cotton that could be processed in a day. At the end of the War of 1812, fewer than 300,000 bales of cotton were produced nationally. By 1820, the amount of cotton produced had increased to 600,000 bales, and by 1850 it had reached 4,000,000. There was an explosive growth of cotton cultivation throughout the Deep South and greatly increased demand for slave labor to support it.[168] As a result, manumissions decreased dramatically in the South.[169]
Most of the slaves sold from the Upper South were from Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, where changes in agriculture decreased the need for their labor and the demand for slaves. Before 1810, primary destinations for the slaves who were sold were Kentucky and Tennessee, but, after 1810, the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas received the most slaves. This is where cotton became "king".[170] Meanwhile, the Upper South states of Kentucky and Tennessee joined the slave-exporting states.
By 1815, the domestic slave trade had become a major economic activity in the United States; it lasted until the 1860s.[171] Between 1830 and 1840, nearly 250,000 slaves were taken across state lines.[171] In the 1850s, more than 193,000 enslaved persons were transported, and historians estimate nearly one million in total took part in the forced migration of this new "Middle Passage". By 1860, the slave population in the United States had reached four million.[171] Of the 1,515,605 free families in the fifteen slave states in 1860, nearly 400,000 held slaves (roughly one in four, or 25%),[172] amounting to 8% of all American families.[173]
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The historian Ira Berlin called this forced migration of slaves the "Second Middle Passage" because it reproduced many of the same horrors as the Middle Passage (the name given to the transportation of slaves from Africa to North America). These sales of slaves broke up many families and caused much hardship. Characterizing it as the "central event" in the life of a slave between the American Revolution and the Civil War, Berlin wrote that, whether slaves were directly uprooted or lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people, both slave and free".[174] Individuals lost their connection to families and clans. Added to the earlier colonists combining slaves from different tribes, many ethnic Africans lost their knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa. Most were descended from families that had been in the United States for many generations.[171]
The firm of Franklin and Armfield was a leader in this trade. In the 1840s, almost 300,000 slaves were transported, with Alabama and Mississippi receiving 100,000 each. During each decade between 1810 and 1860, at least 100,000 slaves were moved from their state of origin. In the final decade before the Civil War, 250,000 were transported. Michael Tadman wrote in Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (1989) that 60–70% of inter-regional migrations were the result of the sale of slaves. In 1820, a slave child in the Upper South had a 30 percent chance of being sold South by 1860.[175] The death rate for the slaves on their way to their new destination across the American South was less than that suffered by captives shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, but mortality nevertheless was higher than the normal death rate.
Slave traders transported two-thirds of the slaves who moved West.[176] Only a minority moved with their families and existing master. Slave traders had little interest in purchasing or transporting intact slave families; in the early years, planters demanded only the young male slaves needed for heavy labor. Later, in the interest of creating a "self-reproducing labor force", planters purchased nearly equal numbers of men and women. Berlin wrote:
The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the South outside the plantation itself, and probably the most advanced in its employment of modern transportation, finance, and publicity. The slave trade industry developed its own unique language, with terms such as "prime hands, bucks, breeding wenches, and "fancy girls" coming into common use.[177]
The expansion of the interstate slave trade contributed to the "economic revival of once depressed seaboard states" as demand accelerated the value of slaves who were subject to sale.[178] Some traders moved their "chattels" by sea, with Norfolk to New Orleans being the most common route, but most slaves were forced to walk overland. Others were shipped downriver from such markets as Louisville on the Ohio River, and Natchez on the Mississippi. Traders created regular migration routes served by a network of slave pens, yards and warehouses needed as temporary housing for the slaves. In addition, other vendors provided clothes, food and supplies for slaves. As the trek advanced, some slaves were sold and new ones purchased. Berlin concluded, "In all, the slave trade, with its hubs and regional centers, its spurs and circuits, reached into every cranny of southern society. Few southerners, black or white, were untouched."[179]
Once the trip ended, slaves faced a life on the frontier significantly different from most labor in the Upper South. Clearing trees and starting crops on virgin fields was harsh and backbreaking work. A combination of inadequate nutrition, bad water and exhaustion from both the journey and the work weakened the newly arrived slaves and produced casualties. New plantations were located at rivers' edges for ease of transportation and travel. Mosquitoes and other environmental challenges spread disease, which took the lives of many slaves. They had acquired only limited immunities to lowland diseases in their previous homes. The death rate was so high that, in the first few years of hewing a plantation out of the wilderness, some planters preferred whenever possible to use rented slaves rather than their own.[180]
The harsh conditions on the frontier increased slave resistance and led owners and overseers to rely on violence for control. Many of the slaves were new to cotton fields and unaccustomed to the "sunrise-to-sunset gang labor" required by their new life. Slaves were driven much harder than when they had been in growing tobacco or wheat back East. Slaves had less time and opportunity to improve the quality of their lives by raising their own livestock or tending vegetable gardens, for either their own consumption or trade, as they could in the East.[181]
In Louisiana, French colonists had established sugar cane plantations and exported sugar as the chief commodity crop. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Americans entered the state and joined the sugar cultivation. Between 1810 and 1830, planters bought slaves from the North and the number of slaves increased from fewer than 10,000 to more than 42,000. Planters preferred young males, who represented two-thirds of the slave purchases. Dealing with sugar cane was even more physically demanding than growing cotton. The largely young, unmarried male slave force made the reliance on violence by the owners "especially savage".[182]
New Orleans became nationally important as a slave market and port, as slaves were shipped from there upriver by steamboat to plantations on the Mississippi River; it also sold slaves who had been shipped downriver from markets such as Louisville. By 1840, the New Orleans slave market was the largest in North America. It became the wealthiest and the fourth-largest city in the nation, based chiefly on the slave trade and associated businesses.[66] The trading season was from September to May, after the harvest.[183]
The notion that slave traders were social outcasts of low reputation, even in the South, was initially promulgated by defensive southerners and later by figures like historian Ulrich B. Phillips.[184] Historian Frederic Bancroft, author of Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931) found — to the contrary of Phillips's position — that many traders were esteemed members of their communities.[185] Contemporary researcher Steven Deyle argues that the "trader's position in society was not unproblematic and owners who dealt with the trader felt the need to satisfy themselves that they acted honorably," while Michael Tadman contends that "'trader as outcast' operated at the level of propaganda" whereas white slave owners almost universally professed a belief that slaves were not human like them, and thus dismissed the consequences of slave trading as beneath consideration.[184] Similarly, historian Charles Dew read hundreds of letters to slave traders and found virtually zero narrative evidence for guilt, shame, or contrition about the slave trade: "If you begin with the absolute belief in white supremacy—unquestioned white superiority/unquestioned black inferiority—everything falls neatly into place: the African is inferior racial 'stock,' living in sin and ignorance and barbarism and heathenism on the 'Dark Continent' until enslaved...Slavery thus miraculously becomes a form of 'uplift' for this supposedly benighted and brutish race of people. And once notions of white supremacy and black inferiority are in place in the American South, they are passed on from one generation to the next with all the certainty and inevitability of a genetic trait."[186]
In the 1828 presidential election, candidate Andrew Jackson was strongly criticized by opponents as a slave trader who transacted in slaves in defiance of modern standards or morality.[187]
The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, time, and place, but in general it was brutal, especially on plantations. Whippings and rape were routine. The power relationships of slavery corrupted many whites that had authority over slaves, with children showing their own cruelty. Masters and overseers resorted to physical punishments to impose their wills. Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer of the slave.[191] Treatment was usually harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders, conditions permitting abuses.
William Wells Brown, who escaped to freedom, reported that on one plantation, slave men were required to pick eighty pounds per day of cotton, while women were required to pick seventy pounds; if any slave failed in his or her quota, they were subject to whip lashes for each pound they were short. The whipping post stood next to the cotton scales.[192] A New York man who attended a slave auction in the mid-19th century reported that at least three-quarters of the male slaves he saw at sale had scars on their backs from whipping.[193] By contrast, small slave-owning families had closer relationships between the owners and slaves; this sometimes resulted in a more humane environment but was not a given.[194]
Historian Lawrence M. Friedman wrote: "Ten Southern codes made it a crime to mistreat a slave. ... Under the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825 (art. 192), if a master was "convicted of cruel treatment", the judge could order the sale of the mistreated slave, presumably to a better master.[195] Masters and overseers were seldom prosecuted under these laws. No slave could give testimony in the courts.
According to Adalberto Aguirre's research, 1,161 slaves were executed in the United States between the 1790s and 1850s.[196] Quick executions of innocent slaves as well as suspects typically followed any attempted slave rebellions, as white militias overreacted with widespread killings that expressed their fears of rebellions, or suspected rebellions.
Although most slaves had lives that were very restricted in terms of their movements and agency, exceptions existed to virtually every generalization; for instance, there were also slaves who had considerable freedom in their daily lives: slaves allowed to rent out their labor and who might live independently of their master in cities, slaves who employed white workers, and slave doctors who treated upper-class white patients.[197] After 1820, in response to the inability to import new slaves from Africa and in part to abolitionist criticism, some slaveholders improved the living conditions of their slaves, to encourage them to be productive and to try to prevent escapes.[198] It was part of a paternalistic approach in the antebellum era that was encouraged by ministers trying to use Christianity to improve the treatment of slaves. Slaveholders published articles in Southern agricultural journals to share best practices in treatment and management of slaves; they intended to show that their system was better than the living conditions of northern industrial workers.
Medical care for slaves was limited in terms of the medical knowledge available to anyone. It was generally provided by other slaves or by slaveholders' family members, although sometimes "plantation physicians", like J. Marion Sims, were called by the owners to protect their investment by treating sick slaves. Many slaves possessed medical skills needed to tend to each other, and used folk remedies brought from Africa. They also developed new remedies based on American plants and herbs.[199]
An estimated nine percent of slaves were disabled due to a physical, sensory, psychological, neurological, or developmental condition. However, slaves were often described as disabled if they were unable to work or bear a child, and were often subjected to harsh treatment as a result.[200]
According to Andrew Fede, an owner could be held criminally liable for killing a slave only if the slave he killed was "completely submissive and under the master's absolute control".[201] For example, in 1791 the North Carolina General Assembly defined the willful killing of a slave as criminal murder, unless done in resisting or under moderate correction (that is, corporal punishment).[202]
While slaves' living conditions were poor by modern standards, Robert Fogel argued that all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the 19th century were subject to hardship.[203] Unlike free individuals, however, enslaved people were far more likely to be underfed, physically punished, sexually abused, or killed, with no recourse, legal or otherwise, against those who perpetrated these crimes against them.
In a very grim fashion, the commodification of the human body was legal in the case of African slaves as they were not legally seen as fully human. The most popular means of commodifying slave tissues was through medical experimentation. Slaves were routinely used as medical specimens forced to take part in experimental surgeries, amputations, disease research, and developing medical techniques.[204] In many cases, slave cadavers were used in demonstrations and dissection tables,[205] oftentimes resulting in their tissues being sold for profit. For the reason of slave punishment, decoration, or self-expression, the skin of slaves was in many instances allowed to be made into leather for furniture, accessories, and clothing,[206] a famous example of which being that of wealthy clientele sending cadaver skin to tanners and shoemakers under the guise of animal leather.[207] Slave hair could be shaved and used for stuffing in pillows and furniture. In some instances, the inner body tissue of slaves (fat, bones, etc.) could be made into soap, trophies, and other commodities.[208]
Because of the power relationships at work, slave women in the United States were at high risk for rape and sexual abuse.[209][210] Their children were repeatedly taken away from them and sold as farm animals; usually they never saw each other again. Many slaves fought back against sexual attacks, and some died resisting. Others carried psychological and physical scars from the attacks.[211] Sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern culture that treated black women as property or chattel.[210] Southern culture strongly policed against sexual relations between white women and black men on the purported grounds of racial purity but, by the late 18th century, the many mixed-race slaves and slave children showed that white men had often taken advantage of slave women.[210] Wealthy planter widowers, notably such as John Wayles and his son-in-law Thomas Jefferson, took slave women as concubines; each had six children with his partner: Elizabeth Hemings and her daughter Sally Hemings (the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife), respectively. Both Mary Chesnut and Fanny Kemble, wives of planters, wrote about this issue in the antebellum South in the decades before the Civil War. Sometimes planters used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their children or other relatives.[212] While publicly opposed to race mixing, in his Notes on the State of Virginia published in 1785, Jefferson wrote: "The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life".[213] Historians estimate that 58% of enslaved women in the U.S. aged 15–30 years were sexually assaulted by their slave owners and other white men.[214] As a result of centuries of slavery and such relationships, DNA studies have shown that the vast majority of African Americans also have historic European ancestry, generally through paternal lines.[215][216]
Portrayals of black men as hypersexual and savage, along with ideals of protecting white women, were predominant during this time[217] and masked the experiences of sexual violence faced by black male slaves, especially by white women. Subject not only to rape and sexual exploitation, slaves faced sexual violence in many forms. A black man could be forced by his slaveowner to rape another slave or even a free black woman.[218] Forced pairings with other slaves, including forced breeding, which neither slave might desire, were common.[218] Despite explicit bans on homosexuality and sodomy, it was not uncommon for male slaves and children to be sexually harassed and assaulted by their masters in secret.[219] Through sexual and reproductive abuse slaveowners could further enforce their control over their slaves.
The prohibition on the importation of slaves into the United States after 1808 limited the supply of slaves in the United States. This came at a time when the invention of the cotton gin enabled the expansion of cultivation in the uplands of short-staple cotton, leading to clearing lands cultivating cotton through large areas of the Deep South, especially the Black Belt. The demand for labor in the area increased sharply and led to an expansion of the internal slave market. At the same time, the Upper South had an excess number of slaves because of a shift to mixed-crops agriculture, which was less labor-intensive than tobacco. To add to the supply of slaves, slaveholders looked at the fertility of slave women as part of their productivity, and intermittently forced the women to have large numbers of children. During this time period, the terms "breeders", "breeding slaves", "child bearing women", "breeding period", and "too old to breed" became familiar.[220]
As it became popular on many plantations to breed slaves for strength, fertility, or extra labor, there grew many documented instances of "breeding farms" in the United States. Slaves were forced to conceive and birth as many new slaves as possible. The largest farms were located in Virginia and Maryland.[221] Because the industry of slave breeding came from a desire for larger than natural population growth of slaves, slaveowners often turned towards systematic practices for creating more slaves. Female slaves "were subjected to repeated rape or forced sex and became pregnant again and again",[222] even by incest. In horrific accounts of former slaves, some stated that hoods or bags were placed over their heads to prevent them from knowing who they were forced to have sex with. Journalist William Spivey wrote, "It could be someone they know, perhaps a niece, aunt, sister, or their own mother. The breeders only wanted a child that could be sold."[223]
In the United States in the early 19th century, owners of female slaves could freely and legally use them as sexual objects. This follows free use of female slaves on slaving vessels by the crews.[224]: 83
The slaveholder has it in his power, to violate the chastity of his slaves. And not a few are beastly enough to exercise such power. Hence it happens that, in some families, it is difficult to distinguish the free children from the slaves. It is sometimes the case, that the largest part of the master's own children are born, not of his wife, but of the wives and daughters of his slaves, whom he has basely prostituted as well as enslaved.[225]: 38
"This vice, this bane of society, has already become so common, that it is scarcely esteemed a disgrace."[226]
"Fancy" was a code word that indicated that the girl or young woman was suitable for or trained for sexual use.[228]: 56 In some cases, children were also abused in this manner. The sale of a 13-year-old "nearly a fancy" is documented.[229] Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., bought his wife when she was 13.[230]: 191
Furthermore, enslaved women who were old enough to bear children were encouraged to procreate, which raised their value as slaves, since their children would eventually provide labor or be sold, enriching the owners. Enslaved women were sometimes medically treated to enable or encourage their fertility.[231] The variations in skin color found in the United States make it obvious how often black women were impregnated by whites.[232] For example, in the 1850 Census, 75.4% of "free negros" in Florida were described as mulattos, of mixed race.[233] Nevertheless, it is only very recently, with DNA studies, that any sort of reliable number can be provided, and the research has only begun. Light-skinned girls, who contrasted with the darker field workers, were preferred.[229][234]
As Caroline Randall Williams was quoted in The New York Times: "You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument." "I have rape-colored skin", she added.[235]
The sexual use of black slaves by either slave owners or by those who could purchase the temporary services of a slave took various forms. A slaveowner, or his teenage son, could go to the slave quarters area of the plantation and do what he wanted, with minimal privacy if any. It was common for a "house" female (housekeeper, maid, cook, laundress, or nanny) to be raped by one or more members of the household. Houses of prostitution throughout the slave states were largely staffed by female slaves providing sexual services, to their owners' profit. There were a small number of free black females engaged in prostitution, or concubinage, especially in New Orleans.[228]: 41
Slave owners who engaged in sexual activity with female slaves "were often the elite of the community. They had little need to worry about public scorn." These relationships "appear to have been tolerated and in some cases even quietly accepted". "Southern women ... do not trouble themselves about it".[236] Franklin and Armfield, who were definitely the elite of the community, joked frequently in their letters about the black women and girls that they were raping. It never occurred to them that there was anything wrong in what they were doing.[237]
Light-skinned young girls were sold openly for sexual use; their price was much higher than that of a field hand.[228]: 38, 55 [238] Special markets for the fancy girl trade existed in New Orleans[228]: 55 and Lexington, Kentucky.[239][240] Historian Philip Shaw describes an occasion when Abraham Lincoln and Allen Gentry witnessed such sales in New Orleans in 1828:
Gentry vividly remembered a day in New Orleans when he and the nineteen-year-old Lincoln came upon a slave market. Pausing to watch, Gentry recalled looking down at Lincoln's hands and seeing that he "doubled his fists tightly; his knuckles went white". Men wearing black coats and white hats buy field hands, "black and ugly", for $500 to 800. And then the real horror begins: "When the sale of "fancy girls" began, Lincoln, "unable to stand it any longer", muttered to Gentry "Allen that's a disgrace. If I ever get a lick at that thing I'll hit it hard."[241]
Those girls who were "considered educated and refined, were purchased by the wealthiest clients, usually plantation owners, to become personal sexual companions". "There was a great demand in New Orleans for 'fancy girls'."[242]
The issue that did come up frequently was the threat of sexual intercourse between black males and white females. Just as the black women were perceived as having "a trace of Africa, that supposedly incited passion and sexual wantonness",[228]: 39 the men were perceived as savages, unable to control their lust, given an opportunity.[243]
Another approach to the question was offered by Quaker and Florida planter Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr. He advocated, and personally practiced, deliberate racial mixing through marriage, as part of his proposed solution to the slavery issue: racial integration, called "amalgamation" at the time. In an 1829 Treatise, he stated that mixed-race people were healthier and often more beautiful, that interracial sex was hygienic, and slavery made it convenient.[230]: 190 Because of these views, tolerated in Spanish Florida, he found it impossible to remain long in Territorial Florida, and moved with his slaves and multiple wives to a plantation, Mayorasgo de Koka, in Haiti (now in the Dominican Republic). There were many others who less flagrantly practiced interracial, common-law marriages with slaves (see Partus sequitur ventrem).
To help regulate the relationship between slave and owner, including legal support for keeping the slave as property, states established slave codes, most based on laws existing since the colonial era. The code for the District of Columbia defined a slave as "a human being, who is by law deprived of his or her liberty for life, and is the property of another".[244]
While each state had its own slave code, many concepts were shared throughout the slave states.[245] According to the slave codes, some of which were passed in reaction to slave rebellions, teaching a slave to read or write was illegal. This prohibition was unique to American slavery, believed to reduce slaves forming aspirations that could lead to escape or rebellion.[246] Informal education occurred when white children taught slave companions what they were learning; in other cases, adult slaves learned from free artisan workers, especially if located in cities, where there was more freedom of movement.
In Alabama, slaves were not allowed to leave their master's premises without written consent or passes. This was a common requirement in other states as well, and locally run patrols (known to slaves as pater rollers) often checked the passes of slaves who appeared to be away from their plantations. In Alabama slaves were prohibited from trading goods among themselves. In Virginia, a slave was not permitted to drink in public within one mile of his master or during public gatherings. Slaves were not permitted to carry firearms in any of the slave states.
Slaves were generally prohibited by law from associating in groups, with the exception of worship services (a reason why the Black Church is such a notable institution in black communities today). Following Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, which raised white fears throughout the South, some states also prohibited or restricted religious gatherings of slaves, or required that they be officiated by white men. Planters feared that group meetings would facilitate communication among slaves that could lead to rebellion.[247] Slaves held private, secret "brush meetings" in the woods.
In Ohio, an emancipated slave was prohibited from returning to the state in which he or she had been enslaved. Other Northern states discouraged the settling of free blacks within their boundaries. Fearing the influence of free blacks, Virginia and other Southern states passed laws to require blacks who had been freed to leave the state within a year (or sometimes less time) unless granted a stay by an act of the legislature.
Africans brought their religions with them from Africa, including Islam,[248] Catholicism,[249] and traditional religions.
Prior to the American Revolution, masters and revivalists spread Christianity to slave communities, including Catholicism in Spanish Florida and California, and in French and Spanish Louisiana, and Protestantism in English colonies, supported by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In the First Great Awakening of the mid-18th century, Baptists and Methodists from New England preached a message against slavery, encouraged masters to free their slaves, converted both slaves and free blacks, and gave them active roles in new congregations.[250] The first independent black congregations were started in the South before the Revolution, in South Carolina and Georgia. Believing that, "slavery was contrary to the ethics of Jesus", Christian congregations and church clergy, especially in the North, played a role in the Underground Railroad, especially Wesleyan Methodists, Quakers and Congregationalists.[251][252]
Over the decades and with the growth of slavery throughout the South, some Baptist and Methodist ministers gradually changed their messages to accommodate the institution. After 1830, white Southerners argued for the compatibility of Christianity and slavery, with a multitude of both Old and New Testament citations.[253] They promoted Christianity as encouraging better treatment of slaves and argued for a paternalistic approach. In the 1840s and 1850s, the issue of accepting slavery split the nation's largest religious denominations (the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches) into separate Northern and Southern organizations (see Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Southern Baptist Convention, and Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America).[254] Schisms occurred, such as that between the Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church.[255]
Southern slaves generally attended their masters' white churches, where they often outnumbered the white congregants. They were usually permitted to sit only in the back or in the balcony. They listened to white preachers, who emphasized the obligation of slaves to keep in their place, and acknowledged the slave's identity as both person and property.[253] Preachers taught the master's responsibility and the concept of appropriate paternal treatment, using Christianity to improve conditions for slaves, and to treat them "justly and fairly" (Col. 4:1). This included masters having self-control, not disciplining under anger, not threatening, and ultimately fostering Christianity among their slaves by example.[253]
Slaves also created their own religious observances, meeting alone without the supervision of their white masters or ministers. The larger plantations with groups of slaves numbering 20, or more, tended to be centers of nighttime meetings of one or several plantation slave populations.[253] These congregations revolved around a singular preacher, often illiterate with limited knowledge of theology, who was marked by his personal piety and ability to foster a spiritual environment. African Americans developed a theology related to Biblical stories having the most meaning for them, including the hope for deliverance from slavery by their own Exodus. One lasting influence of these secret congregations is the African American spiritual.[256]
In a feature unique to American slavery, legislatures across the South enacted new laws to curtail the already limited rights of African Americans. For example, Virginia prohibited blacks, free or slave, from practicing preaching, prohibited them from owning firearms, and forbade anyone to teach slaves or free blacks how to read.[127] It specified heavy penalties for both student and teacher if slaves were taught, including whippings or jail.[257]
[E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes.[258]
Slave owners saw literacy as a threat to the institution of slavery and their financial investment in it; as a North Carolina statute passed in 1830-1831 stated, "Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion."[259][260] Literacy enabled the enslaved to read the writings of abolitionists, which discussed the abolition of slavery and described the slave revolution in Haiti of 1791–1804 and the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. It also allowed slaves to learn that thousands of enslaved individuals had escaped, often with the assistance of the Underground Railroad. Literacy also was believed to make the enslaved unhappy at best, insolent and sullen at worst. As put by prominent Washington lawyer Elias B. Caldwell in 1822:
The more you improve the condition of these people, the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them, in their present state. You give them a higher relish for those privilegies which they can never attain, and turn what we intend for a blessing [slavery] into a curse. No, if they must remain in their present situation, keep them in the lowest state of degradation and ignorance. The nearer you bring them to the condition of brutes, the better chance do you give them of possessing their apathy.[261]
Unlike in the South, slave owners in Utah were required to send their slaves to school.[262] Black slaves did not have to spend as much time in school as Indian slaves.[263]
With the development of slave and free states after the American Revolution, and far-flung commercial and military activities, new situations arose in which slaves might be taken by masters into free states. Most free states not only prohibited slavery, but ruled that slaves brought and kept there illegally could be freed. Such cases were sometimes known as transit cases.[265] Dred Scott and his wife Harriet Scott each sued for freedom in St. Louis after the death of their master, based on their having been held in a free territory (the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase from which slavery was excluded under the terms of the Missouri Compromise). (Later the two cases were combined under Dred Scott's name.) Scott filed suit for freedom in 1846 and went through two state trials, the first denying and the second granting freedom to the couple (and, by extension, their two daughters, who had also been held illegally in free territories). For 28 years, Missouri state precedent had generally respected laws of neighboring free states and territories, ruling for freedom in such transit cases where slaves had been held illegally in free territory. But in the Dred Scott case, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against the slaves.[266]
After Scott and his team appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, in a sweeping decision, denied Scott his freedom. The 1857 decision, decided 7–2, held that a slave did not become free when taken into a free state; Congress could not bar slavery from a territory; and people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants, could never be citizens and thus had no status to bring suit in a U.S. court. A state could not bar slaveowners from bringing slaves into that state. Many Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, considered the decision unjust and evidence that the Slave Power had seized control of the Supreme Court. Anti-slavery groups were enraged and slave owners encouraged, escalating the tensions that led to civil war.[267]
In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, as part of the Compromise of 1850, which required law enforcement and citizens of free states to cooperate in the capture and return of slaves. This met with considerable overt and covert resistance in free states and cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Refugees from slavery continued to flee the South across the Ohio River and other parts of the Mason–Dixon line dividing North from South, to the North and Canada via the Underground Railroad. Some white Northerners helped hide former slaves from their former owners or helped them reach freedom in Canada.[268]
As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress abolished the slave trade (though not the ownership of slaves) in the District of Columbia; fearing this would happen, Alexandria, regional slave trading center and port, successfully sought its removal from the District of Columbia and devolution to Virginia. After 1854, Republicans argued that the "Slave Power", especially the pro-slavery Democratic Party in the South, controlled two of the three branches of the Federal government.[269]
The abolitionists, realizing that the total elimination of slavery was unrealistic as an immediate goal, worked to prevent the expansion of slavery into the western territories that eventually would become new states. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Bleeding Kansas period dealt with whether new states would be slave or free, or how that was to be decided. Both sides were anxious about effects of these decisions on the balance of power in the Senate.
After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, border fighting broke out in the Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a slave or free state was left to the inhabitants. Migrants from both free and slave states moved into the territory to prepare for the vote on slavery. Abolitionist John Brown, the most famous of the anti-slavery immigrants, was active in the fighting in "Bleeding Kansas", but so too were many white Southerners (many from adjacent Missouri) who opposed abolition.
Abraham Lincoln's and the Republicans' political platform in 1860 was to stop slavery's expansion. Historian James M. McPherson says that in his famous "House Divided" speech in 1858, Lincoln said American republicanism can be purified by restricting the further expansion of slavery as the first step to putting it on the road to 'ultimate extinction.' Southerners took Lincoln at his word. When he won the presidency, they left the Union to escape the 'ultimate extinction' of slavery."[270]
The divisions became fully exposed with the 1860 presidential election. The electorate split four ways. The Southern Democrats endorsed slavery, while the Republican Party denounced it. The Northern Democrats said democracy required the people to decide on slavery locally, state by state and territory by territory. The Constitutional Union Party said the survival of the Union was at stake and everything else should be compromised.[271]
Lincoln, the Republican, won with a plurality of popular votes and a majority of electoral votes. Lincoln, however, did not appear on the ballots of ten southern slave states. Many slave owners in the South feared that the real intent of the Republicans was the abolition of slavery in states where it already existed, and that the sudden emancipation of four million slaves would be disastrous for the slave owners and for the economy that drew its greatest profits from the labor of people who were not paid. The slave owners feared that ending the balance could lead to the domination of the federal government by the northern free states. This led seven southern states to secede from the Union. When the Confederate Army attacked a U.S. Army installation at Fort Sumter, the American Civil War began and four additional slave states seceded. Northern leaders had viewed the slavery interests as a threat politically, but with secession, they viewed the prospect of a new Southern nation, the Confederate States of America, with control over the Mississippi River and parts of the West, as politically unacceptable. Most of all, they could not accept this repudiation of American nationalism.[272]
The consequent American Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of chattel slavery in America. Not long after the war broke out, through a legal maneuver by Union General Benjamin F. Butler, a lawyer by profession, slaves who fled to Union lines were considered "contraband of war". General Butler ruled that they were not subject to return to Confederate owners as they had been before the war. "Lincoln and his Cabinet discussed the issue on May 30 and decided to support Butler's stance".[273] Soon word spread, and many slaves sought refuge in Union territory, desiring to be declared "contraband". Many of the "contrabands" joined the Union Army as workers or troops, forming entire regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops. Others went to refugee camps such as the Grand Contraband Camp near Fort Monroe or fled to northern cities. General Butler's interpretation was reinforced when Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which declared that any property used by the Confederate military, including slaves, could be confiscated by Union forces.
At the beginning of the war, some Union commanders thought they were supposed to return escaped slaves to their masters. By 1862, when it became clear that this would be a long war, the question of what to do about slavery became more general. The Southern economy and military effort depended on slave labor. It began to seem unreasonable to protect slavery while blockading Southern commerce and destroying Southern production. As Congressman George W. Julian of Indiana put it in an 1862 speech in Congress, the slaves "cannot be neutral. As laborers, if not as soldiers, they will be allies of the rebels, or of the Union."[274] Julian and his fellow Radical Republicans put pressure on Lincoln to rapidly emancipate the slaves, whereas moderate Republicans came to accept gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization.[275] Copperheads, the border states and War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the border states and War Democrats eventually accepted it as part of total war needed to save the Union.
The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. In a single stroke it changed the legal status, as recognized by the U.S. government, of three million slaves in designated areas of the Confederacy from "slave" to "free". It had the practical effect that as soon as a slave escaped the control of his or her owner, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the slave's proclaimed freedom became actual. Plantation owners, realizing that emancipation would destroy their economic system, sometimes moved their slaves as far as possible out of reach of the Union army. By June 1865, the Union Army controlled all of the Confederacy and had liberated all of the designated slaves.[276]
In 1861, Lincoln expressed the fear that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss of the border states. He believed that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game."[277] At first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Generals John C. Frémont (in Missouri) and David Hunter (in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida) to keep the loyalty of the border states and the War Democrats.
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On July 22, 1862, Lincoln told his cabinet of his plan to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Secretary of State William H. Seward advised Lincoln to wait for a victory before issuing the proclamation, as to do otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat".[278] On September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam provided this opportunity, and on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which provided that enslaved people in the states in rebellion against the United States on January 1, 1863, "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free".[279] On September 24 and 25, the War Governors' Conference added support for the proclamation.[280] Lincoln issued his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In his letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln explained his belief that
If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong ... And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling ... I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.[281]
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation promised freedom for slaves in the Confederate states and authorized the enlistment of African Americans in the Union Army. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in the border states, which were the slaveholding states that that remained in the Union. As a practical matter, the proclamation freed only those slaves who escaped to Union lines. But the proclamation made the abolition of slavery an official war goal and was implemented as the Union took territory from the Confederacy. According to the Census of 1860, this policy would free nearly four million slaves, or over 12 percent of the total population of the United States.
Because the Emancipation Proclamation was issued under the president's war powers, it might not have continued in force after the war ended. Therefore, Lincoln played a leading role in getting the constitutionally required two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment,[282] which made emancipation universal and permanent.
Enslaved African Americans had not waited for Lincoln before escaping and seeking freedom behind Union lines. From the early years of the war, hundreds of thousands of African Americans escaped to Union lines, especially in Union-controlled areas such as Norfolk and the Hampton Roads region in 1862 Virginia, Tennessee from 1862 on, and the line of Sherman's march. So many African Americans fled to Union lines that commanders created camps and schools for them, where both adults and children learned to read and write. The American Missionary Association entered the war effort by sending teachers south to such contraband camps, for instance, establishing schools in Norfolk and on nearby plantations.
In addition, nearly 200,000 African-American men served with distinction in the Union forces as soldiers and sailors; most were escaped slaves. The Confederacy was outraged by armed black soldiers and refused to treat them as prisoners of war. They murdered many, as at the Fort Pillow massacre, and re-enslaved others.[283]
On February 24, 1863, the Arizona Organic Act abolished slavery in the newly formed Arizona Territory. Tennessee and all of the border states (except Kentucky and Delaware) abolished slavery by early 1865. Thousands of slaves were freed by the operation of the Emancipation Proclamation as Union armies marched across the South. Emancipation came to the remaining Southern slaves after the surrender of all the Confederate troops in spring 1865.
In spite of the South's shortage of manpower, until 1865, most Southern leaders opposed arming slaves as soldiers. However, a few Confederates discussed arming slaves. Finally, in early 1865, General Robert E. Lee said that black soldiers were essential, and legislation was passed. The first black units were in training when the war ended in April.[284]
Booker T. Washington remembered Emancipation Day in early 1863, when he was a boy of nine in Virginia:[285]
As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom. ... Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper – the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.
The war ended on June 22, 1865, and following that surrender, the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced throughout remaining regions of the South that had not yet freed the slaves. Slavery officially continued for a couple of months in other locations.[286] Federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to enforce the emancipation. The commemoration of that event, Juneteenth National Independence Day, has been declared a national holiday in 2021.[287]
The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery except as punishment for a crime, had been passed by the Senate in April 1864, and by the House of Representatives in January 1865.[288]
The amendment did not take effect until it was ratified by three-fourths of the states, which occurred on December 6, 1865, when Georgia ratified it. On that date, the last 40,000–45,000 enslaved Americans in the remaining two slave states of Kentucky and Delaware, as well as the 200 or so perpetual apprentices in New Jersey left from the very gradual emancipation process begun in 1804, were freed.[289] The last Americans known to have been born into legal slavery died in the 1970s.
Journalist Douglas A. Blackmon reported in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Slavery By Another Name that many black persons were virtually enslaved under convict leasing programs, which started after the Civil War. Most Southern states had no prisons; they leased convicts to businesses and farms for their labor, and the lessee paid for food and board. Incentives for abuse were present.
The continued involuntary servitude took various forms, but the primary forms included convict leasing, peonage and sharecropping, with the latter eventually encompassing poor whites as well. By the 1930s, whites constituted most of the sharecroppers in the South. Mechanization of agriculture had reduced the need for farm labor, and many black people left the South in the Great Migration. Jurisdictions and states created fines and sentences for a wide variety of minor crimes and used these as an excuse to arrest and sentence black people. Under convict-leasing programs, African-American men, often guilty of petty crimes or even no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of the leaseholder. Sharecropping, as it was practiced during this period, often involved severe restrictions on the freedom of movement of sharecroppers, who could be whipped for leaving the plantation. Both sharecropping and convict leasing were legal and tolerated by both the North and South. However, peonage was an illicit form of forced labor. Its existence was ignored by authorities while thousands of African Americans and poor white Americans were subjugated and held in bondage until the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. With the exception of cases of peonage, beyond the period of Reconstruction, the federal government took almost no action to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment until December 1941, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt summoned his attorney general. Five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, at the request of the President, Attorney General Francis Biddle issued Circular No. 3591 to all federal prosecutors, instructing them to investigate actively and try any case of involuntary servitude or slavery. Several months later, convict leasing was officially abolished. But aspects have persisted in other forms. Historians argue that other systems of penal labor were all created in 1865, and convict leasing was simply the most oppressive form. Over time, a large civil rights movement arose to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans.[290]
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With emancipation a legal reality, white Southerners were concerned with both controlling the newly freed slaves and keeping them in the labor force at the lowest level. The system of convict leasing began during Reconstruction and was fully implemented in the 1880s, officially ending in the last state, Alabama, in 1928. It persisted in various forms until it was abolished in 1942 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, several months after the attack on Pearl Harbor involved the U.S. in the conflict. This system allowed private contractors to purchase the services of convicts from the state or local governments for a specific time period. African Americans, due to "vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory sentencing", made up the vast majority of the convicts leased.[294] Writer Douglas A. Blackmon writes of the system:
It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.[295]
The constitutional basis for convict leasing is that the Thirteenth Amendment, while abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude generally, expressly permits it as a punishment for crime.
Historian Mark Summers Wahlgren notes that the estimated literacy rate among formerly enslaved southern blacks at the time of emancipation was five to 10 percent, but had reached a baseline of 40 to 50 percent (and higher in cities) by the turn of the century, representing a "great advance".[296] As W. E. B. Du Bois noted, the black colleges were not perfect, but "in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South" and "wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of black people in the land".[297]
Northern philanthropists continued to support black education in the 20th century, for example of a major donor to Hampton Institute and Tuskegee was George Eastman, who also helped fund health programs at colleges and in communities.[298]
In the 21st century, various legislative bodies have issued public apologies for slavery in the United States.
A 2016 study, published in The Journal of Politics, finds that "[w]hites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks." The study contends that "contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South in part trace their origins to slavery's prevalence more than 150 years ago. "[299] The authors argue that their findings are consistent with the theory that "following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce existing racist norms and institutions to maintain control over the newly freed African American population. This amplified local differences in racially conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across generations."[299]
A 2017 study in the British Journal of Political Science argued that the British American colonies without slavery adopted better democratic institutions to attract migrant workers to their colonies.[300]
An article published in the Journal of Economic History in 2022 finds that former slave owners remained politically dominant long after the abolition of slavery. Using data from Texas, the authors find that "[i]n 1900, still around 50 percent of all state legislators came from a slave-owning background."[301]
Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in their 1974 book Time on the Cross, argued that the rate of return of slavery at the market price was close to ten percent, a number close to investment in other assets. The transition from indentured servants to slaves is cited to show that slaves offered greater profits to their owners. A qualified consensus among economic historians and economists is that "Slave agriculture was efficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of scale, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture considerably more efficient than nonslave southern farming",[303] and it is the near-universal consensus among economic historians and economists that slavery was not "a system irrationally kept in existence by plantation owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests".[304]
The relative price of slaves and indentured servants in the antebellum period did decrease. Indentured servants became more costly with the increase in the demand of skilled labor in England.[305] At the same time, slaves were mostly supplied from within the United States and thus language was not a barrier, and the cost of transporting slaves from one state to another was relatively low. However, as in Brazil and Europe, slavery at its end in the United States tended to be concentrated in the poorest regions of the United States,[306] with a qualified consensus among economists and economic historians concluding that the "modern period of the South's economic convergence to the level of the North only began in earnest when the institutional foundations of the southern regional labor market were undermined, largely by federal farm and labor legislation dating from the 1930s."[307]
In the decades preceding the Civil War, the black population of the United States experienced a rapid natural increase.[308] Unlike the trans-Saharan slave trade with Africa, the slave population transported by the Atlantic slave trade to the United States was sex-balanced.[309] The slave population multiplied nearly fourfold between 1810 and 1860, despite the passage of the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807 banning the international slave trade.[310] Thus, it is also the universal consensus among modern economic historians and economists that slavery in the United States was not "economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War".[311] In the 2010s, several historians, among them Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Walter Johnson and Calvin Schermerhorn, have posited that slavery was integral in the development of American capitalism.[312][313][314][315] Johnson wrote in River of Dark Dreams (2013): "The cords of credit and debt—of advance and obligation—that cinched the Atlantic economy together were anchored with the mutually defining values of land and slaves: without land and slaves, there was no credit, and without slaves, land itself was valueless. Promises made in the Mississippi Valley were backed by the value of slaves and fulfilled in their labor."[314] Other economic historians have rejected that thesis.[316][317][318][319][320]
A 2023 study estimates that prior to the onset of the US Civil War, the enslaved population produced 12.6% of US national product.[321]
Slavery had a long-lasting impact on wealth and racial inequality in the United States. Black families whose ancestors were freed before the start of the Civil War have substantially better socio-economic outcomes than families who were freed in the Civil War.[322]
Scholars disagree on how to quantify the efficiency of slavery. In Time on the Cross Fogel and Engerman equate efficiency to total factor productivity (TFP), the output per average unit of input on a farm. Using this measurement, Southern farms that enslaved black people using the gang system were 35% more efficient than Northern farms, which used free labor. Under the gang system, groups of slaves perform synchronized tasks under the constant vigilance of an overseer. Each group was like a part of a machine. If perceived to be working below his capacity, a slave could be punished. Fogel argues that this kind of negative enforcement was not frequent and that slaves and free laborers had a similar quality of life; however, there is controversy on this last point.[324] A critique of Fogel and Engerman's view was published by Paul A. David in 1976.[325]
In 1995, a random survey of 178 members of the Economic History Association sought to study the views of economists and economic historians on the debate. The study found that 72 percent of economists and 65 percent of economic historians would generally agree that "Slave agriculture was efficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of scale, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture considerably more efficient than nonslave southern farming." 48 percent of the economists agreed without provisos, while 24 percent agreed when provisos were included in the statement. On the other hand, 58 percent of economic historians and 42 percent of economists disagreed with Fogel and Engerman's "proposition that the material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers in the decades before the Civil War".[303]
The U.S. has a capitalist economy so the price of slaves was determined by the law of supply and demand. For example, following bans on the import of slaves after the UK's Slave Trade Act 1807 and the American 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, the prices for slaves increased. The markets for the products produced by slaves also affected the price of slaves (e.g. the price of slaves fell when the price of cotton fell in 1840). Anticipation of slavery's abolition also influenced prices. During the Civil War the price for slave men in New Orleans dropped from $1,381 in 1861 to $1,116 by 1862 (the city was captured by U.S. forces in the Spring of 1862).[326]
Controlling for inflation, prices of slaves rose dramatically in the six decades prior to the Civil War, reflecting demand due to commodity cotton, as well as use of slaves in shipping and manufacturing. Although the prices of slaves relative to indentured servants declined, both got more expensive. Cotton production was rising and relied on the use of slaves to yield high profits. Fogel and Engeman initially argued that if the Civil War had not happened, the slave prices would have increased even more, an average of more than fifty percent by 1890.[324]: 96
Prices reflected the characteristics of the slave; such factors as sex, age, nature, and height were all taken into account to determine the price of a slave. Over the life-cycle, the price of enslaved women was higher than their male counterparts up to puberty age, as they would likely bear children who their masters could sell as slaves and could be used as slave laborers. Men around the age of 25 were the most valued, as they were at the highest level of productivity and still had a considerable life-span.[citation needed] If slaves had a history of fights or escapes, their price was lowered reflecting what planters believed was risk of repeating such behavior. Slave traders and buyers would examine a slave's back for whipping scars; a large number of injuries would be seen as evidence of laziness or rebelliousness, rather than the previous master's brutality, and would lower the slave's price.[193] Taller male slaves were priced at a higher level, as height was viewed as a proxy for fitness and productivity.[324]
While slavery brought profits in the short run, discussion continues on the economic benefits of slavery in the long run. In 1995, a random anonymous survey of 178 members of the Economic History Association found that out of the forty propositions about American economic history that were surveyed, the group of propositions most disputed by economic historians and economists were those about the postbellum economy of the American South (along with the Great Depression). The only exception was the proposition initially put forward by historian Gavin Wright that the "modern period of the South's economic convergence to the level of the North only began in earnest when the institutional foundations of the southern regional labor market were undermined, largely by federal farm and labor legislation dating from the 1930s." 62 percent of economists (24 percent with and 38 percent without provisos) and 73 percent of historians (23 percent with and 50 percent without provisos) agreed with this statement.[328][307] Wright has also argued that the private investment of monetary resources in the cotton industry, among others, delayed development in the South of commercial and industrial institutions. There was little public investment in railroads or other infrastructure. Wright argues that agricultural technology was far more developed in the South, representing an economic advantage of the South over the North of the United States.[329]
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that "the colonies in which there were no slaves became more populous and more rich than those in which slavery flourished".[330] In 1857, in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, Hinton Rowan Helper made the same point.[331] Economists Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, in a pair of articles published in 2012 and 2013, found that, despite the American South initially having per capita income roughly double that of the North in 1774, incomes in the South had declined 27% by 1800 and continued to decline over the next four decades, while the economies in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states vastly expanded. By 1840, per capita income in the South was well behind the Northeast and the national average (Note: this is also true in the early 21st century).[332][333]
_Cotton_of_the_United_States_by_Yves_Henry_02.jpg/1280px-Le_coton_aux_%C3%89tats-Unis_(1903)_Cotton_of_the_United_States_by_Yves_Henry_02.jpg)
Lindert and Williamson argue that this antebellum period is an example of what economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson call "a reversal of fortune".[334] In his essay "The Real History of Slavery", economist Thomas Sowell reiterated and augmented the observation made by de Tocqueville by comparing slavery in the United States to slavery in Brazil. He notes that slave societies reflected similar economic trends in those and other parts of the world, suggesting that the trend Lindert and Williamson identify may have continued until the American Civil War:
Both in Brazil and in the United States – the countries with the two largest slave populations in the Western Hemisphere – the end of slavery found the regions in which slaves had been concentrated poorer than other regions of these same countries. For the United States, a case could be made that this was due to the Civil War, which did so much damage to the South, but no such explanation would apply to Brazil, which fought no Civil War over this issue. Moreover, even in the United States, the South lagged behind the North in many ways even before the Civil War. Although slavery in Europe died out before it was abolished in the Western Hemisphere, as late as 1776 slavery had not yet died out all across the continent when Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that it still existed in some eastern regions. But, even then, Eastern Europe was much poorer than Western Europe. The slavery of North Africa and the Middle East, over the centuries, took more slaves from sub-Saharan Africa than the Western Hemisphere did ... But these remained largely poor countries until the discovery and extraction of their vast oil deposits.[306]
Sowell also notes in Ethnic America: A History, citing historians Clement Eaton and Eugene Genovese, that three-quarters of Southern white families owned no slaves at all.[335] Most slaveholders lived on farms rather than plantations,[336] and few plantations were as large as the fictional ones depicted in Gone with the Wind.[337] In "The Real History of Slavery", Sowell also notes in comparison to slavery in the Arab world and the Middle East (where slaves were seldom used for productive purposes) and China (where the slaves consumed the entire output they created), Sowell observes that many commercial slaveowners in the antebellum South tended to be spendthrift and many lost their plantations due to creditor foreclosures, and in Britain, profits by British slave traders only amounted to two percent of British domestic investment at the height of the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century.[338][339] Sowell draws the following conclusion regarding the macroeconomic value of slavery:
In short, even though some individual slaveowners grew rich and some family fortunes were founded on the exploitation of slaves, that is very different from saying that the whole society, or even its non-slave population as a whole, was more economically advanced than it would have been in the absence of slavery. What this means is that, whether employed as domestic servants or producing crops or other goods, millions suffered exploitation and dehumanization for no higher purpose than the ... aggrandizement of slaveowners.[340]
Eric Hilt noted that, while some historians have suggested slavery was necessary for the Industrial Revolution (on the grounds that American slave plantations produced most of the raw cotton for the British textiles market and the British textiles market was the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution), it is not clear if this is actually true; there is no evidence that cotton could not have been mass-produced by yeoman farmers rather than slave plantations if the latter had not existed (as their existence tended to force yeoman farmers into subsistence farming) and there is some evidence that they certainly could have. The soil and climate of the American South were excellent for growing cotton, so it is not unreasonable to postulate that farms without slaves could have produced substantial amounts of cotton; even if they did not produce as much as the plantations did, it could still have been enough to serve the demand of British producers.[341] Similar arguments have been made by other historians.[342]
Scholar Adrienne Davis articulates how the economics of slavery also can be defined as a sexual economy, specifically focusing on how black women were expected to perform physical, sexual and reproductive labor to provide a consistent enslaved workforce and increase the profits of white slavers. Davis writes that black women were needed for their "sexual and reproductive labor to satisfy the economic, political, and personal interest of white men of the elite class"[343] articulating that black women's reproductive capacity was important in the maintenance of the system of slavery due to its ability to perpetuate an enslaved workforce. She is also drawing attention to black women's labor being needed to maintain the aristocracy of a white ruling class, due to the intimate nature of reproduction and its potential for producing more enslaved peoples.
Due to the institution of partus sequitur ventrem, black women's wombs became the site where slavery was developed and transferred,[344] meaning that black women were not only used for their physical labor, but for their sexual and reproductive labor as well.
"The rule that the children's status follows their mothers' was a foundational one for our economy. It converted enslaved women's reproductive capacity into market capital"[345]
This articulation by Davis illustrates how black women's reproductive capacity was commodified under slavery, and that an analysis of the economic structures of slavery requires an acknowledgment of how pivotal black women's sexuality was in maintaining slavery's economic power. Davis writes how black women performed labor under slavery, writing: "[black women were] male when convenient and horrifically female when needed".[346] The fluctuating expectations of black women's gendered labor under slavery disrupted the white normative roles that were assigned to white men and white women. This ungendering black women received under slavery contributed to the systemic dehumanization experienced by enslaved black women, as they were unable to receive the expectations or experiences of either gender within the white binary.
Davis's arguments address the fact that, under slavery, black women's sexuality became linked to the economic and public sphere, making their intimate lives into public institutions. Black women's physical labor was gendered as masculine under slavery when they were needed to yield more profit, but their reproductive capacities and sexual labor were equally as important in maintaining white power over black communities and perpetuating an enslaved workforce.[346]
About 600,000 slaves were transported to the United States, or five percent of the 12 million slaves taken from Africa. About 310,000 of these persons were imported into the Thirteen Colonies before 1776: 40 percent directly, and the rest from the Caribbean.
The great majority of enslaved Africans were transported to sugar plantations in the Caribbean and to Portuguese Brazil. As life expectancy was short, their numbers had to be continually replenished. Life expectancy was much higher in the United States, and the enslaved population was successful in reproduction, which was called "natural increase" by enslavers. The population of enslaved people in the United States grew to 4 million by the 1860 census. Historian J. David Hacker conducted research that estimated that the cumulative number of slaves in colonial America and the United States (1619–1865) was 10 million.[349]
For various reasons, the census did not always include all of the slaves, especially in the West. California was admitted as a free state and reported no slaves. However, there were many slaves that were brought to work in the mines during the California Gold Rush.[355] Some Californian communities openly tolerated slavery, such as San Bernardino, which was mostly made up of transplants from the neighboring slave territory of Utah.[356] New Mexico Territory never reported any slaves on the census, yet sued the government for compensation for 600 slaves that were freed when Congress outlawed slavery in the territory.[357] Utah was actively trying to hide its slave population from Congress[358][359] and did not report slaves in several communities.[360] Additionally, the census did not traditionally include Native Americans, and hence did not include Native American slaves or Native African slaves owned by Native Americans. There were hundreds of Native American slaves in California,[361] Utah[362] and New Mexico[357] that were never recorded in the census.
As of the 1860 census, one may compute the following statistics on slaveholding:[363]
The historian Peter Kolchin, writing in 1993, noted that until the latter decades of the 20th century, historians of slavery had primarily concerned themselves with the culture, practices and economics of the slaveholders, not with the slaves. This was in part due to the circumstance that most slaveholders were literate and left behind written records, whereas slaves were largely illiterate and not in a position to leave written records. Scholars differed as to whether slavery should be considered a benign or a "harshly exploitive" institution.[369]
Much of the history written prior to the 1950s had a distinctive racist slant to it.[369] By the 1970s and 1980s, historians were using archaeological records, black folklore and statistical data to develop a much more detailed and nuanced picture of slave life. Individuals were shown to have been resilient and somewhat autonomous in many of their activities, within the limits of their situation and despite its precariousness. Historians who wrote in this era include John Blassingame (Slave Community), Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll), Leslie Howard Owens (This Species of Property), and Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom).[370]
"Throughout the antebellum period, married women consistently asserted their rights to own and control human property without their husband's interference, and they exercised those rights as well." "White women were not anomalies at local slave auctions, either, and no group could testify more powerfully to white women's presence at and involvement in slave auctions than the enslaved people who were there.
South Carolina has bills of sale for property transactions from the 1700s to pretty recently. I looked at a sample of 3,000 bills of sale involving enslaved people being purchased or sold. Close to 40 percent of the bills of sale included either a female buyer or a female seller.
When we listen to what enslaved people had to say about white women and slave mastery, we find that articulated quite clearly their belief that slave-owning women governed their slaves in the same ways that white men did, sometimes they were more effective at slave management or they used more brutal methods of discipline than their husbands did...White southern women conducted transactions with slave traders...and they were not meek in their bargaining...slave-owning women brought legal suits against individuals, both male and female, who jeopardized their claims to human property, and others sued them in kind. They bought and sold slaves for profit, and, on rare occasions owned slave yards.
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{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)mishandle historical evidence and mischaracterize important events in ways that affect their major interpretations on the nature of slaveryAlan L. Olmstead; Paul W. Rhode (January 2018). "Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism". Explorations in Economic History. 67: 1–17. doi:10.1016/j.eeh.2017.12.002.
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