The mortality of American slavery

The final ratification of the United States Constitution on September 17, 1787 meant the protection of America’s slavery institution by virtue of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the language of which protected private property rights, one of the Age of Enlightenment’s fundamental rights of man. Several framers and founding fathers lamented slavery’s existence in the new nation, acknowledging the practice as, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, an "abominable crime," a "moral depravity," a "hideous blot," and a "fatal stain" that deformed "what nature had bestowed on us of her fairest gifts."
A number of the enlightened founders—among them Jefferson and George Washington, both of whom were slaveowners themselves—considered slavery contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty.
And yet, slavery was protected under the U.S. Constitution because slaves were property.
In all their wisdom, the founders and framers of the United States of America were at a loss on what exactly to do about the issue of African slavery.
Some, like Jefferson and Washington, clung to a hope that involuntary servitude would eventually fade away and cease to exist because of economics, changes in social attitudes, or both.
Unfortunately, patenting of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney of Massachusetts in 1793 changed everything from the economic outlook to the entire social order built around slavery, which then became more than just a socioeconomic practice. Rather, it evolved into a peculiar cultural institution.
Before 1793 early Americans—including plantation slaveowners like Jefferson and Washington—were embracing Enlightenment principles of essential liberty for all men created equal, and thus were also trending toward emancipation. Attitudes were already changing about African slavery.
Attitudes and economics nearly doomed slavery in early America. But economics ultimately sustained the institution, while radically changing attitudes ensured its perpetuation.
The cotton gin revolutionized the process of separating cotton fibers from seeds, a tedious task when done by hand and one that was making the cash crop of short staple cotton increasingly unprofitable and unpopular among planters. But the gin made the work easier, so more cotton could be picked and processed faster and in greater quantities. This allowed cotton plantations to meet the rising demand for cotton both in New England and in Europe.
Consequently, planters expanded their operations by purchasing more land and buying more slaves to work it. From that point on, slavery was reborn as an institution, stronger than it had ever been before. It would take a lot longer for economic or even social factors alone to phase it out as the founders had hoped.
Not only did Whitney’s patent change the economic climate and the fortunes of the American South, but the cotton gin also actually ended up changing its social culture.
Southern attitudes about slavery began to shift dramatically away from the Enlightenment views of Jefferson and Washington. Slaveholders, in particular, rationalized the use of servile labor as being right and just, because the institution was not only ideally suited for inferior races like the Africans, but it also protected them from certain destruction. The Enlightenment principle of universal liberty was being swiftly replaced by a more subjective and paternalistic notion that liberty and freedom were meant for the superior races, but not the inferior ones.
Southern slave owners also increasingly relied on what they believed to be a Biblical ordination of slavery. Because the Bible did not condemn the practice, but rather appeared to condone it, the South actually began defending the institution as moral.
As such, a social order was established around the slavery institution. Servitude was the lot of the bonded African; share-cropping, subsistence farming or hired labor the lot of the impoverished white or free black; modest farming, planting, skilled trades and mercantilism the lot of the middle class; and land ownership and large scale planting the lot of the upper class gentry.
As history happened, though, slavery came to an end in the South during the American Civil War, courtesy of the Emancipation Proclamation, and shortly thereafter nationwide with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.
One thought-provoking question, however, tends to weigh on the minds of some historians and many historical prognosticators: Would slavery have ended peacefully on its own without intervention? Such a question has stirred intense debate over the years, and continues to do so today.
In order to arrive at a reasonable answer, we need to look at all of the facts first. The lion’s share of farmland in the antebellum American South was owned by a minority of wealthy planters, whose cash was often quickly spent on more land and more slaves. The plantation gentry were generally cash poor for this reason.
Rather than rotate their crops and fields, planters found it easier and more cost effective just to purchase more land with the profits earned from the sale of the previous crop. More land also meant more of a particular cash crop, such as cotton or tobacco. In the planter’s mind, he was maximizing his profit potential by purchasing more land with which to plant his cash crop, and buying more slaves to work the new fields.
As such, planters tended to buy more land every season. Some plantations became enormous in size, encompassing thousands of acres of used fields and virgin farmland alike. Consequently, much of the American South was owned by a few.
However, there was only so much land available between the Atlantic shore and the Mississippi River. Until 1803, everything west of the Mississippi was owned or claimed by other foreign nations.
So, when Thomas Jefferson brokered the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, suddenly the prospect of plantation expansion took on a completely new life. The United States of America became the owner of millions of acres of virgin frontier territory west of the Mississippi River.
Unfortunately, only a small percentage of this new territory was really suited for plantation agriculture. The climate and the landscape of much of this new West were harsh and unforgiving. It was unsuitable for the signature cash crops of the South: short staple cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar cane primarily. Only Missouri, parts of Texas, California and Oregon had the kind of temperate climates appropriate for plantation cash crops.
In all likelihood, the bulk of Southern plantation slavery would have eventually run into a dead end without new land and expansion. Most of the United States territory acquired in the first half of the Nineteenth Century was unsuitable for Southern cash crops, so most planters would have been able to expand only so far before all suitable land was used up.
It is plausible that planters may have resigned themselves to crop rotation in order to maximize the use of the lands they already planted. But most successful planters tended to plant only one cash crop. As such, crop rotation would have been moot and without benefit to planters, whose only practical hope was expansion.
Statistics show that in the years leading up to the American Civil War, much of the land in the South was devoted to singular cash crops by region: Rice along the Carolina coasts; sugar cane along the Louisiana gulf coast; tobacco in the upper South; and cotton everywhere else.
The growth of food staples like corn and hogs also declined significantly during the cash crop boom years, rendering the South essentially food poor, but commodity rich. Because of the soaring demand for cotton and tobacco, most notably, there was little incentive for planters to diversify their planting to include even food staples. As such, crop rotation would have been of little benefit to much of the antebellum South.
Even the few planters who did grow more than one type of crop would have faced gradual and eventual soil depletion over time because the same crop would have been planted in the same place multiple times. Eventually and over time, the nutrient levels would have become depleted to such a degree that the soil would be rendered worthless to any substantive crop at all.
So, without expansion, even the most diversified plantation faced gradual and eventual extinction. The very nature of planting was to maximize crop yield by drawing as many nutrients from the soil in a given season as possible, leaving the field spent and depleted the following season. Expansion was a necessity to planting, and with only a finite amount of suitable land between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the planting of familiar cash crops also had a finite life to it.
Southern planters may have found other cash crops to grow in harsher climates, but as history showed, this never happened. Most planters were resistant to change: be it social, political, economic, cultural or even agricultural. Few, if any, really seemed interested or intent on changing from the cash crops of short staple cotton or tobacco to something else that might have grown better across the Great Plains, prairies and high deserts of the new West.
For instance, the Oregon Territory boasted hundreds of thousands of acres of prime timberland; but planters failed to take advantage of lumber’s growing commodity even in the South, where trees used for lumber were abundant. Tree farming certainly could have developed, even if it took several years for a tree to reach maturity; but with cotton and tobacco at the pinnacle of global demand, there was little interest in changing cash crops just for the sake of expansion into the new territories.
Consequently, the general unwillingness to change was poised to doom plantation culture as well.
Some prognosticators suggest that planters would simply have expanded their operations out of the United States, to such areas as Cuba or South America, in an effort to continue their plantation culture and extend the peculiar institution of slavery.
But history shows that this did not happen, either. Individual planters would have had to negotiate with foreign governments, and potentially without United States support or cooperation. In all likelihood, the vast majority of efforts to this end would have failed, and planters would once again be facing an inevitable end to their way of life.
The question then becomes, how much longer could slavery have existed in the South without land expansion? The answer would have depended upon the vitality and viability of the soil that had already been planted. Once crop yield began to significantly decline, the cash profits would also decrease significantly, leaving planters at a financial loss and with outstanding debt. Without a means to pay their creditors, planters would have been forced to liquidate their assets; namely property, and including slaves.
History shows that most planters, even the wealthy gentry, were often cash poor. They purchased land and slaves on credit, using the profits from cash crops to pay their mortgages.
A financial loss, therefore, was devastating to a planter, who then had to negotiate an extension of his debt with his creditors. Too many consecutive losses, though, would doom the planter.
An overabundance of poor, depleted soil was destined to spell doom for the plantation culture of the American South, because the results would have likely meant decline after decline in the quality and quantity of cash crops, leading to decrease after decrease in profits, eventually equaling chronic loss.
Considering that most banks and plantation financiers were located in the northeast United States, where antislavery sentiment was strongest, it is unlikely that creditors would have been particularly understanding or generous with their debtors after a series of major losses; or even a single one, for that matter.
Seizure of lands and other property, including slave chattel, would have been inevitable. If the financiers were antislavery minded (and in the Northeast the likelihood was great) then the human chattel might well have been freed upon seizure—with just compensation provided, of course, by an increasingly antislavery federal government—or sold to foreign interests that still practiced slavery, such as Cuba and South America. Thus, an end to the peculiar institution would have been forced.
Some suggest that because slavery had become an institution in the South—meaning a part of the cultural mind-set—upon which Southern whites depended greatly and in which they believed so deeply for economic and social stability, that it likely would have persisted through the Nineteenth Century and well into the next one.
However, without a substantial industry with which to use bonded labor, maintaining slavery just for the sake of keeping Africans in their place would have been an expensive fool’s errand.
Slaves were property and chattel, first and foremost. This means that they were “things” of market value and equal to monetary assets. If a planter could not pay his debts with his crops, then the creditor took the debt out of his property; including slaves. There would have been little incentive to keep slaves if a planter was faced with selling property in order to settle his debts. It is not realistic to expect planters to have held onto their slaves at all costs just for the sake of culture and social order.
While human chattel was as valuable as land, it was also just as expendable when push came to shove.
As such, I can see little reason to support the notion that slavery would have long persisted into the next century had it not been for the American Civil War. The very life of the soil that planters depended upon was finite and short-lived after a growing cycle, simply because of the intensity with which cash crops absorbed vital nutrients.
This may indeed be the reason why Southern planters were so insistent upon expansion into the new West as early as the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century.
The Missouri Compromise was enacted in 1820 to appease pro-slavery and antislavery expansion interests. So, even as early as the “Era of Good Feelings,” the American South was feeling the pinch of limited land and soil resources, and thus sought expansion west of the Mississippi River.
By the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded much of the American Southwest to the United States from Mexico, the situation of Southern expansion had become so desperate that the South perceived any attempt by the North to limit slavery in the new territories as an act of antagonism warranting secession and potentially even “causus belli.”
A series of compromises and Congressional acts followed suit in an effort to stave off the inevitable and unappealing conclusion of an intense sectional conflict. Unfortunately, these compromises succeeded only in making matters between North and South worse, widening the divide instead of bridging it.
After John Brown’s failed attempt to lead a slave revolt through Virginia and the rest of the South, the United States passed a point of no return toward division and war. Abolitionist fervor, having spread extensively throughout the North since the 1830s, condemned Brown’s execution and elevated him to martyred sainthood. The South, in response, now feared more than ever that a violent overthrow of its culture was not only brewing in the North, but wholly present, prevalent, endorsed and promoted.
Consequently, secession and armed conflict were no longer possible or even probable; they were imminent.
The rest is history, to borrow a phrase. Slavery was ended, in part, by bloodshed. But evidence points to conditions in the South that likely would have brought an end to the practice had America somehow avoided war.
If not for the issue of expansion, and the need for Southern planters to buy more land to continue their planting, the issue of slavery may not have elevated to a point of such contention as to equate to sectional hatred or to support war.
Evidence suggests that many in the North, despite widespread antislavery sentiment, were willing to leave slavery where it was. They just weren’t willing to see it spread, prosper and perpetuate in the new territories. This is probably because Northerners knew even then that plantation practices were contrary to sustainable farming and that soil life was thus limited. The notion being that without expansion, plantation agriculture was doomed to an economic death by virtue of its poor soil management and wasteful practices.
As planting went in the South, so, too, went the institution of slavery with it. Failure of the plantation system ultimately meant the failure and end of slave labor.
Since most slaves owned in the South worked on plantations, if the planting system succumbed, then the slavery institution would have collapsed right along with it.