The Society of the South in the Early Republic in two minutes
- Eli Whitney's gin (1793) made short-staple cotton profitable inland. Britain bought the biggest share, the crop passed a million bales by 1840, and cotton became more than half of U.S. exports.
- Worn-out soil pushed planters toward fresh land in Alabama, Mississippi and beyond. The United States took that land from the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee by treaty and force.
- Congress banned importing enslaved people from abroad on January 1, 1808. Traders then sold people from Virginia and Maryland to the Deep South in a Second Middle Passage that broke up families.
- Most white Southern families owned no enslaved people. Planters were a small minority, yet about half of enslaved people lived on their land. Yeoman farmers raised corn, hogs and a few bales.
- The South built few factories and large cities. Planters put their money into land and enslaved people, and railroads mostly carried cotton to ports.
- After Nat Turner's revolt (1831) and Virginia's refusal in 1832 to adopt gradual emancipation, Southern leaders shifted from calling slavery a necessary evil to a positive good, as Calhoun did in 1837.
- On the exam: expect causation (why slavery expanded and was defended), links among Northern mills, Southern cotton and slavery, and comparison with Northern society, leading to Texas and the Wilmot Proviso.
Topic 4.13 key terms
- Economic diversification
Building an economy on many kinds of work instead of one crop. The Courier wanted mills and food crops. The South stayed with cotton and bought most of its manufactured goods from the North and Britain.
- Staple crop
A crop grown in bulk for sale in distant markets, not mainly to feed the grower's family. The South's staples were cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar. Cotton grew biggest.
- Bale
A pressed, rope-bound bundle of ginned cotton, the unit in which the crop was counted, shipped and sold. In the 1830s and 1840s a bale weighed roughly 400 pounds.
- Cotton gin
Machine patented by Eli Whitney in 1794 that pulled short-staple cotton fiber through a grate and left the seeds behind, cleaning far more cotton than hand-picking. It made upland cotton profitable across the interior South and increased the demand for enslaved labor.
- Short-staple cotton
Upland cotton, named for its short fibers, which cling tightly to the seeds. It grew almost anywhere inland with about 200 frost-free days, but was too slow to clean by hand until the gin. It became the South's great cash crop.
- King Cotton
Slogan for the claim that cotton gave the South power over the world economy: it was the nation's biggest export, and Britain's mills could not do without it. The phrase caught on in the 1850s.
- Cotton factor
A merchant in a port city such as New Orleans or Charleston who sold a planter's crop on commission, advanced credit against the next harvest and bought the planter's supplies.
- Soil exhaustion
Fertility lost when the same crop grows on the same land year after year. Tobacco and cotton drained the soil of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, and it took decades to recover.
- Explain: why planters left the East
Cause: cotton wears out the soil → Effect: planters move southwest, and take enslaved people with them.
- Indian removal
The federal policy, made law by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, of pressing Native nations east of the Mississippi to give up their homelands for land in the West.
- Domestic slave trade
The buying and selling of enslaved people inside the United States. After Congress ended the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, it moved about a million people from the Upper South to the Deep South, most of them by sale.
- Explain: cotton and slavery moved west
Causes: worn-out soil in the East, rich new soil in the Southwest, rivers to Mobile and New Orleans, land taken from Native nations by treaty → Development: the cotton frontier → Effect: the domestic slave trade.
- Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves (1807)
Federal law, signed March 2, 1807, that banned bringing enslaved people into the United States from abroad starting January 1, 1808, the first day the Constitution allowed. Some smuggling continued, but slavery inside the country did not end, so the domestic slave trade grew.
- Second Middle Passage
Historians' name for the forced movement of more than a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South before 1860, most of them sold. It echoes the first Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing from Africa.
- Coffle
A line of enslaved people chained or roped together and driven on foot, often for hundreds of miles, to a market or a plantation far from home. Traders marched coffles from the Chesapeake to the Deep South.
- Planter
A large slaveholder. Historians usually mean twenty or more enslaved people (some textbooks say a hundred). Under four in 100 white Southern families, they held most of the region's wealth and dominated its politics.
- Slave codes
State laws that controlled enslaved people's movement, gatherings and learning, tightened after slave revolts. They let any white person stop and question an enslaved person.
- Poor whites
A planters' label, and an insult, for white families on the worst land, in the hills and pine barrens. Many farmed for themselves and owned no one; mountain families were among them.
- Code of honor
The rule among Southern gentlemen that an insult had to be answered, by a duel if need be. A man's reputation was worth risking his life for.
- Regional identity
A people's sense of belonging to a place that differs from the rest of the country. Relying on staple crops for export helped make the South's economy, and its outlook, different from the industrializing North's.
- Necessary evil
The view, common among Southern leaders around 1800–1820, that slavery was wrong but could not safely be ended.
- Peculiar institution
Southerners’ polite name for slavery. ‘Peculiar’ meant special to their region, not odd.
- Gag rule
A House rule, 1836–1844: antislavery petitions were tabled without debate. Opponents said it broke the First Amendment right to petition.
- Positive good
Calhoun’s 1837 claim that slavery benefited both enslaved people and enslavers. It replaced the older ‘necessary evil’ defense with the argument that slavery was good.
- Paternalism
Slaveholders’ claim that they cared for enslaved people as a father cares for children. Enslaved people’s own accounts contradict it.
- Sectionalism
Putting your own region’s interests ahead of the nation’s. The 1845 church splits were an early sign.
- Annexation of Texas
Texas broke away from Mexico in 1836 and joined the United States in 1845 as a slave state. Cotton planters had already brought enslaved people into its eastern half. Mexico never accepted its independence, and war followed in 1846.
- Mexican Cession
Land Mexico gave the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: over half a million square miles, including California and most of the Southwest. Whether slavery could spread there drove the sectional crisis of the 1850s.
- Wilmot Proviso
In August 1846, Pennsylvania Rep. David Wilmot proposed banning slavery in any land taken from Mexico. The House passed it, but the Senate never did. It split Congress by section, not by party.
- Explain: why slavery became 'a positive good'
Cause: cotton paid best on new land, so the crop moved southwest, and enslaved people were sold and marched with it. Development: people became the South's biggest investment, and planters held most of its wealth and power. Effect: a region tied to one crop defended the institution behind it.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Cotton, Cotton, Cotton
1827 · 1840s
Key terms: Economic diversification, Staple crop, Bale
Georgia Courier
That we have cultivated cotton, cotton, cotton, and bought every thing else, has long enough been our opprobrium.
Opprobrium means disgrace. A Georgia newspaper was embarrassed by cotton. It told Southerners to build mills and grow their own food. Outside, the wagons kept rolling.
The South kept planting. By the late 1830s, four of every five bales Britain imported came from Southern fields.
Every bale carried marks: whose plantation, how many pounds, which port.
The marks left one thing out. Most of this cotton was planted, picked and pressed by enslaved people.
Most white Southern families owned no enslaved people.
Most white Southern families owned no enslaved people. Yet by 1837 the South’s leaders were calling slavery “a positive good.” Why?
To find out, follow the land.
The Sticky Seed
1793–1840
Key terms: Cotton gin, Short-staple cotton, King Cotton, Cotton factor, Staple crop
To follow the land, start somewhere else: Manchester, England.
Its mills had machines that spun thread by the mile, and looms to weave it into cloth. All they lacked was someone to grow the cotton.
Silky Sea Island cotton grew only on the Georgia and Carolina coast. Upland cotton grew almost anywhere inland. But picking its clinging seeds out by hand took all day.
Eli Whitney's 1793 gin pulled cotton through a grate too narrow for seeds. Now upland cotton paid. Whitney got the patent. Planters built their own copies.
Upland cotton needs a long season, about two hundred days without frost. Look how much of the South that is.
In 1800 the South grew about seventy thousand bales. By 1840, well over a million.
The biggest share sailed for Liverpool. Much of the rest went to France and New England. Cloth and credit came back.
By the late 1830s, cotton was more than half the value of all U.S. exports. Southerners would later call that power King Cotton.
Southern businessmen put their money where the profits were: cotton, land and enslaved people. Rice, sugar and tobacco still mattered. Cotton outweighed all of them together.
There was a catch. Cotton, like tobacco, wore out the soil.
Alabama Fever
1814–1840
Key terms: Soil exhaustion, Explain: why planters left the East, Indian removal, Domestic slave trade, Explain: cotton and slavery moved west
Planters grew the same crops on the same fields, year after year. The soil gave out. Rain cut gullies into the bare clay.
Virginia's Edmund Ruffin tried to rescue his soil with fossil seashells. Most planters found it easier to move.
In 1845 a South Carolina manufacturer asked a question.
William Gregg
…follow the footsteps of our forefathers, and still further exhaust our soil by the exclusive cultivation of cotton?
Then: what would stop planters moving southwest with their capital? By capital, Gregg meant people.
Out west lay fresh land, and buyers packed the federal land sales. Back in North Carolina, a young lawyer reported the damage.
James Graham
The Alabama Feaver rages here with great violence and has carried off vast numbers of our Citizens.
He meant they'd moved.
Planters came with the people they enslaved, walking behind the wagons. Alabama's population more than quadrupled in twenty years.
None of this land was empty. It belonged to the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee nations. Treaty by treaty, from Fort Jackson in 1814 to New Echota in 1835, the United States took it.
Here is the South from 1800 to 1840, on one table. Each sheet is one kind of evidence.
Booker T. Washington, born enslaved, explained the Black Belt's name.
Booker T. Washington
The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers.
Worn-out land pushed. Rich land pulled. Rivers carried the bales, and treaties took the land. What the new fields needed next was people.
Sold South
1808–1848
Key terms: Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves (1807), Domestic slave trade, Second Middle Passage, Coffle
On January 1, 1808, the first day the Constitution allowed, Congress banned bringing enslaved people in from abroad. The new cotton fields would be filled mostly from inside the country.
Enslavers on tired land in Virginia and Maryland could sell people to the Deep South for high prices. Historians call what followed the Second Middle Passage.
Traders bought people in Richmond, Alexandria and Baltimore, and sold them in Natchez and New Orleans.
The biggest firm, Franklin and Armfield, worked from Alexandria, then part of the District of Columbia. In the mid-1830s it sent a thousand to fifteen hundred people south every year.
Ships carried people south by sea. The law required a list, so some of their names survive.
Others walked. In Maryland, around 1805, a Georgia trader bought Charles Ball and marched him south.
Charles Ball
A strong iron collar was closely fitted by means of a padlock round each of our necks.
Charles Ball
A chain of iron, about a hundred feet in length, was passed through the hasp of each padlock…
Charles Ball
I asked if I could not be allowed to go to see my wife and children… but was told that I would be able to get another wife in Georgia.
At the end of the road stood markets like the Forks of the Road, outside Natchez. Traders dressed people in new clothes for the sale.
Every sale left someone behind. Charles Ball escaped and walked home to Maryland. Very few of the people sold south ever did.
Who the South Was
1830s–1840s
Key terms: Planter, Slave codes, Poor whites, Code of honor, Regional identity
Kentucky pork and corn, for plantations that planted cotton first.
Enslaved men loaded the boats, many of them hired out by their owners.
A farm family with three bales. Most white Southerners lived like this.
Up on the bluff, the planters, and the factors who sold their cotton.
In 1850, about two white Southern families in three owned no one. Fewer than four in a hundred were planters. Yet about half of all enslaved people lived on their land.
Most were yeoman farmers: corn and hogs first, a few bales for cash. They owned their land. The men voted. Many distrusted planters.
Why back slavery, if you owned no one? Many hoped to buy land and people someday. Many ginned and sold through a planter, or were his kin.
Men who owned no one rode the slave patrols. And the law put every white man above every Black person. Those are reasons, not excuses.
In the mountains, where cotton wouldn't grow, few owned anyone, and many resented planters.
About 215,000 free Black people lived in the South in 1840, and new laws kept cutting back their rights.
Gentlemen lived by a code of honor. In 1827 two men dueled here, missed twice and shook hands. Then their friends started shooting. Two men died.
The South built few factories and few big cities. Richmond's Tredegar ironworks used enslaved workers too. Many Southern railroads simply carried cotton to a port.
Joseph Holt Ingraham
To sell cotton in order to buy negroes—to make more cotton to buy more negroes, "ad infinitum," is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thorough-going cotton planter; his whole soul is wrapped up in the pursuit.
The money went into more land and more people. The South's leaders bet the whole region on King Cotton.
A Positive Good
1820–1845
Key terms: Necessary evil, Peculiar institution, Gag rule, Positive good, Paternalism, Sectionalism
Many Southern leaders once called slavery a necessary evil: a wrong they said was too dangerous to end.
Thomas Jefferson
we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.
Not every defender sounded alike. Florida slaveholder Zephaniah Kingsley wrote in 1829:
Zephaniah Kingsley
The idea of slavery, when associated with cruelty and injustice, is revolting to every philanthropic mind…
He argued for free people of color’s rights. When Florida’s laws turned on them, he moved his family to Haiti.
In August 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, led a revolt in Southampton County, Virginia. Rebels killed fifty-five white people. White militias and mobs then killed dozens of Black people without trial.
That winter, Jefferson’s grandson asked Virginia’s legislature to end slavery gradually, and to send the freed people away. After two weeks of debate, the House voted that acting now was “inexpedient.”
Professor Thomas Dew answered in print: no such plan could work. Soon, other leaders said much more.
Southern leaders shut the argument out. In 1835 a Charleston crowd burned abolitionist pamphlets. In 1836 the House gagged every antislavery petition.
In 1837, John C. Calhoun told the Senate:
John C. Calhoun
I hold that… the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.
His claim, plainly: slavery civilized the enslaved, cared for them, and was good for both races. Frederick Douglass, enslaved in Maryland, answered in 1845:
Frederick Douglass
It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.
By 1845, the country’s biggest Protestant churches had split over slavery. Southern Methodists and Baptists formed their own.
West of the River
1845–1848
Key terms: Annexation of Texas, Mexican Cession, Wilmot Proviso, Explain: why slavery became 'a positive good'
By 1848 cotton had crossed the Sabine into Texas. A war with Mexico had just added a vast new West.
In 1846 Congressman David Wilmot tried to ban slavery from all of it. Whether slavery would follow cotton west was the question that split the country.
Because by 1848 nearly everything the South had rested on cotton, and cotton rested on slavery.
So why did the South's leaders call slavery a positive good? Because by 1848 nearly everything the South had rested on cotton, and cotton rested on slavery.
A Georgia paper once begged the South to grow something else. The South bet everything on cotton, and on the people it forced to grow it.