by Freedom- The Overthrow of the Slave Empires (retail) (epub)
What then happened to that money is another, equally revealing, aspect of this complex story. Huge chunks of compensation subsequently found their way into investments in a wide range of public and private properties: in industries, housing, schools, universities, public facilities and in landed property. It thus became part of the physical fabric of modern Britain.
Twenty million pounds was the price paid by the British people, and accepted by slave owners as a fair sum for ending British slavery. It was an act of emancipation that was later to inspire others. Both the French and the Dutch compensated their slave holders for emancipation. Danish slave owners petitioned for the same, but only Venezuela of all American slave societies paid slave owners for freeing locally embedded slaves.[7] Throughout the prolonged debates about what form emancipation should take, there was no serious suggestion that the slaves themselves should be compensated for their bondage. This was to nurture a grievance that festered until the present day. If compensation was to be paid – why not to the slaves? And if not at the point of emancipation, why not later – why not now? Here was the seedbed of recent and continuing demands for reparations.
What lies at the heart of the entire debate is the property-status of the slave. The millions of Africans and their descendants scattered across the Americas had been imported as items of trade. They were listed in ships’ logs and plantation ledgers alongside the beast of the field, each with an economic function and each with a value. It was a peculiarity of the British emancipation process that they were finally freed still with a price on their heads. British emancipation was that country’s final – and titanic – act of slave trading. The British bought the freedom of almost 800,000 people by levying duties on popular consumption.
Would freedom have come without compensation? Perhaps not – not then. More pertinent – and yet generally marginalised in the entire discussion – would freedom have been achieved without the slaves’ own efforts? The persistent defiance that had always been an ingrained feature of slave life was transformed in the early nineteenth century into something much more potent and decisive in the British colonies. The voice of enslaved Christians demanding freedom became a mighty force in destabilising colonial slavery. What ultimately brought down the entire system, however, was the regularity and severity of slave revolt – and the grotesque brutality of suppression. At the simplest level, slavery was ended by a piece of parliamentary legislation. But that legislation was itself made possible by the major social changes both in Britain and in her Caribbean colonies. Abolition became an immensely popular political force in Britain – but that popularity was shaped and guided by events in the slave quarters, thousands of miles away.
The freedom which finally settled on the islands after 1838 was flawed, and left the former slaves struggling to make their way, but freedom is what slaves had struggled for since time out of mind. For the time being, it seemed enough. Elsewhere in the Americas there were armies of slaves (many more, indeed, than the British freed) who continued to be locked in miserable slavery, and their struggles for freedom were to continue for many years.
7
The Fall of US Slavery
WHEN THE BRITISH emancipated their slaves, the USA was home to more than two million slaves. But had not the republic been founded with resounding exclamations about human rights? American independence appeared to have been an ideal moment to bring slavery to an end. Thomas Jefferson’s ringing phrase ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ seemed at first glance to sound the death knell for slavery. These lofty ideals, however, were drafted by a Virginian slave owner. At their height, Jefferson’s slave holdings stood at about three hundred people, many on his magnificent property at Monticello. To modern eyes, Jefferson and George Washington were in a curiously contradictory position: proclaiming freedom, denouncing British tyranny, yet securing their own wellbeing through the enslaved labours of Africans and their descendants. Those two American heroes personified a political tension that was to characterise American society and politics for the next eighty years.
The American republic came into being arguing about slavery. The Constitutional Convention had frequent discussions about slavery and the slave trade, but finally left matters relating to slavery to individual states – and that laid the foundations for the divide between North and South. The political decision to define the enslaved as three-fifths of a person enhanced the power of the southern states, while the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (prohibiting the expansion of slavery into the West) meant that slavery would be permanently rooted in the South. What shaped the story of slavery in the early years of the republic, however, was not so much political discussion but rather the revolutionary impact of cotton.[1]
Slaves had already been basic to the economic development of both Virginia (tobacco) and Carolina (rice), and although slaves were scattered throughout the former American colonies, northerners possessed only a small percentage of the nation’s slaves, and gradually shed their attachment to slavery. It was abolished by Vermont in 1777, and thereafter in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey – though with various conditions attached to local emancipations. Three-quarters of the new republic’s enslaved people lived in the ‘Upper South’, but that changed rapidly in the early nineteenth century. In 1790 the USA was home to 697,897 slaves, but on the eve of the Civil War that had increased to almost 4 million, almost 2.5 million of whom lived in the Deep South. Most slaves now resided in the rapidly expanding states strung out along the vast Mississippi. And there, they worked in cotton.[2]
More slaves lived in the USA in 1850 than in all other contemporary slave societies combined, and unlike earlier slave communities in the Americas, the North American slave population was now growing solely by natural increase. The voracious southern demand for slave labour was satisfied by a major internal US slave trade. Almost one million slaves were uprooted from their families and communities in the Old South and marched, or sailed, south and west towards the cotton plantations of the New South. Twice as many slaves were taken to the cotton frontier than had originally crossed the Atlantic to North America. Like its oceanic forebear, this domestic trade involved a massive destruction of slave families, and left deep personal and social scars on survivors (at both ends of the trade). One slave marriage in five was wrecked, and one slave child in three was parted from parents. Like their ancestors sailing away from Africa, slaves who were moved to the South effectively vanished. The emotional distress and human misery spawned by this internal US slave trade is impossible to quantify, but the heartache was to remain a refrain in African-American life from that day to this. For decades after the end of slavery, it echoed in heart-breaking advertisements – some well into the twentieth century – placed by parents and children, searching for their loved one, lost to the slave traders before 1860. Lev Hall wrote to a Greensboro newspaper in April 1902: ‘I am a colored man and was sold away from your county in 1839 . . . I left a mother, two brothers and two sisters.’ Ann Waley was 101 when she wrote to the Mayor of Baltimore in 1911 asking for help finding some of “her people”, white or black, before she died’.[3]
Slave ownership spread widely among southern whites and, by 1850, more than a third of a million Americans owned slaves, though most owned only a handful. By 1860 the great majority of them were employed in cotton. Slaves had been cultivating cotton for many years in the Caribbean and Brazil. The Bahamas and Barbados, for example, were especially important for the British cotton industry before 1800, yielding 8 million pounds of cotton by the late eighteenth century. All this was swept aside by the new US industry, launched by the adoption of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1793), which encouraged the widespread cultivation of short-staple cotton. The cotton industry of Lancashire (then of Massachusetts and Germany) began to devour cotton from the US South in ever-increasing vo
lumes.
In 1790 the US produced 1.5 million pounds of cotton: by 1825 that had grown to 167.5 million pounds. At mid-century, it was producing 2.5 million bales of cotton – each weighing 181 kg. At the outbreak of the Civil War, cotton exports were worth more than all other US exports combined. These figures for US cotton production paralleled the imports of cotton into Liverpool, and the export of cotton goods from the mills of Lancashire. Not long before, Liverpool had been the centre of Britain’s Atlantic slave trade; now it was the entrepôt for slave-grown cotton and manufactured cotton goods. Eventually, the US slave South provided between 70 and 80 per cent of the British demand for cotton.
The expansion of the US cotton industry was astonishing. Between 1786 and 1810 the US provided only 0.16 per cent of the world’s cotton: that increased to 50 per cent between 1806 and 1810, rising to 80 per cent between 1836 and 1860. Had the South been a separate nation in 1860, its prosperity would have ranked it above France, Germany and Denmark, and it would have been surpassed only by England.[4] The South was especially successful and modern in the way it managed its slave labour force. In both cotton and the thriving new sugar industry in Louisiana, planters introduced innovative ways of producing and packaging their products, and in managing their enslaved labour force. In the cotton fields of the US South, slave labour was marshalled by a discipline that would have been envied by the factory owners of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Lancashire. Moreover, cotton and sugar were not the only US industries worked by slaves. They continued to work in tobacco in the Chesapeake region and in rice in South Carolina and Georgia.
The wealthiest planters advertised their success in a manner similar to many other barons of the railway age: lavish mansions, extensive and elaborate gardens and parklands, eye-catching personal and domestic consumption, and a social life that captured the attention (and envy) of outsiders. While the lifestyle of the cotton barons could stand comparison with their northern industrial peers, the most striking contrast was with the wretchedness of their enslaved labourers, and the threadbare fabric of both rural and urban life in the South. For all the success of cotton and sugar, the southern economy lagged well behind the North – and was falling further away, fast, by mid-century. Unlike the rapidly urbanising North, the South remained an overwhelmingly rural society – and that was due largely to the South’s dependence on slavery.
In Cuba, Brazil and the USA, the attacks on slavery did not originate in a belief that slavery had had its day, or that the system no longer yielded profit for those involved (excepting the slaves, of course). The South may have been lagging behind the North in terms of heavy industry, but, at mid-century, American slavery was as robust, profitable and successful as ever. Of course, it was only one element in the remarkable growth of the wider US economy. Canals, railways, river transport (especially steamboats for the cotton industry) plus improvements in oceanic transport all encouraged the large-scale and quicker movement of people and goods. The growth of banking (with occasional blips) was also critical. These changes affected all corners of US business, and the slave South was a beneficiary of this modernising economy. Northern banks, for example, were happy to finance slavery, and there was no clear division between the slave South and the nonslave North. The economies of both regions were intimately connected. Despite the northern states having turned their back on slavery within their own borders, they continued to do good business with the slave South. Put crudely, slavery was economically profitable, whatever the mounting ethical and religious doubts contemporaries might have about it.[5] At mid-century, cotton dominated the nation’s major export market, and slave labourers formed a large (and growing) corner of the US labour market, while the financial and commercial networks spawned by slavery spread far beyond the Mason-Dixon line. In 1850, slavery was more important, more pervasive and more fundamental to the American economy than ever before.
Trade, finance, banking and slave-grown commodities held both South and North together in a complex web of economic interdependence.[6] Yet despite these economic ties, slavery remained a deeply divisive political and social issue, not least because of the increasingly strident American abolition movement, rooted in the towns and cities of the North. In the 1850s, abolition sentiment spread like a bush fire across the North. There were conflicting forces at work within the USA – a buoyant slave economy and rising abolitionism – which were eventually to tear the Union apart.
Understandably, the North had its own divisions. For a start, there was white racial hostility, which periodically erupted in northern cities. New immigrants from Europe, many working in new heavy industries as day labourers, did not take kindly to the arrival of freed slaves from the South. Nor did they warm to existing black communities, which were attacked by white mobs in a number of cities in the 1820s. Black survivors were traumatised and some considered migrating to Canada. Such events temporarily stifled abolition, but all that changed after 1831 with the rapid expansion of a new kind of idealistic abolition movement.
The real obstacle facing abolition was the entrenched power and hostility of the South. The economic links between North and South could not disguise the fact that the South was different, and southerners were developing a growing resentment about the challenges from outsiders. The beating heart of that southern difference was slavery.
Slavery was much more than the economic foundation of the South: it shaped and directed southern culture at all levels. Southern politics became an expression of slave interests, while the religion of southern whites became the scriptural voice of slavery. In effect, slavery defined the South and shaped its inhabitants (both free and enslaved). Southern culture also held the North in its gravitational pull: opposite and different. The South, of course, had its own regional and occupational fissures and divides. In places, there were even doubts about slavery itself. But such divisions disappeared when southerners confronted the North. The central issue was clear. The South was slavery, the North was anti-slavery.
The South was emboldened by its citizens’ own widespread commitment to slavery. Even non-slave-owning whites (poorer by a degree than slave owners) were themselves wedded to slavery, and most aspired to become slave owners. Moreover, as far as we can tell, most of them feared the rise of black equality and political power. While the USA as a whole experienced the rise of widespread democracy, whites in the South regarded black freedom as a threat, fearing that it would not only bring economic ruin but also destroy the very culture of the South. As the voice of northern abolitionists became more strident, the South became more resistant, isolationist – and racist. A laager-like mentality developed: at ease and at one in the company of fellow southerners (even those of vastly superior wealth) but doggedly opposed and hostile to the siren calls for black freedom that echoed from the North.[7]
The outlook from the slave quarters was utterly different and depressing. For all they knew, their bondage might never end, for them and for their offspring. What alternatives did life offer? Escape – to a hostile wilderness? The risks of fleeing to the North, Canada or Mexico? Rebellion – and likely suffer the well-known agonies of vicious revenge? For all that, there were some glimmers of hope, and slaves continued to challenge the system as best they could. Slaves in the USA – like slaves everywhere – did not meekly bend their backs to the demands made of them. Slave resistance, in all its forms, taxed slave owners everywhere.
Conspiracies and plots, for example, abounded, though it is true that slave masters were far too ready to fear the worst. Theirs was a fevered world outlook, distorted by worries and exaggerated by their suspicions about their enslaved labour force. Unusual slave gatherings, overheard whispers, rumours passed on by other slaves, all blended into a disquieting vision: of slave owners fearing slave plots where none existed. Sometimes, however, their fears were real enough. Slaves ran away, reacted violently and frequently posed threats. Violent outbursts litter the records; on Long Island in 1708, in New York in 1712 and 1741, and two years earlier in South Car
olina. Each outburst was answered with extreme vengeance. Even conspiracies that were nipped in the bud were often followed by the killing of suspects, and by the tightening of local slave laws. Louisiana was especially troubled in the wake of the Haitian revolt. The Pointe Coupée slave conspiracy in 1795 ended with the execution of twenty-three slaves, their heads staked along the Mississippi road to Pointe Coupée.[8] The slave Gabriel Prosser (‘The American Toussaint’) attempted to organise an insurrection in Virginia in 1800 but was betrayed, and this was followed by an all-too-familiar mass execution, this time of twenty-seven slaves. One of his men escaped and planned another uprising in 1802, but that too was uncovered, the leaders executed and others mutilated.[9]
The pattern was repeated from one place to another. A revolt in Louisiana in 1811 attracted an estimated 250 insurgents: about 100 of them died and their heads were displayed along the road to New Orleans. In 1816, slaves being shipped from Virginia to the South turned to shipboard violence – with large numbers of casualties. More serious still perhaps was the revolt in South Carolina, in 1822, when Denmark Vesey, a literate and devout ex-slave, used his command of the Bible to rally slave support for an ambitious plan to seize control of Charleston and its ships (though recent suggestions are of exaggerated alarm and fears on the part of the authorities). It too was betrayed, and Vesey and thirty-four others were hanged, and others deported. The South Carolina legislature then sought to ban the teaching of literacy to slaves and to outlaw slaves from worshipping independently. However real or overblown, the Vesey plot underlined the slave owners’ deep-seated concerns.[10]