U.S. Slavery

Slaves: Destination and Origins
The map shows the distribution of slaves in the United States in 1860. Study the patterns carefully.

Examine maps of the slave trade from West Africa to the Western Hemisphere from 1701-1810 and 1811-1870 (Source: Alan Thomas, et. al., Third World Atlas, p. 28).

For more information about U.S. slavery, visit the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A few of the maps from this Center are available here.

Population Loss Due to the Atlantic Slave Trade [Read: the importance of prisoners in colonial USA.]

                                               from western Africa,
                 from all of Africa       north of the equator 
                 arriving        leaving       percentage   estimated 
                 overseas         Africa                        total 
Before 1600       290,000        370,000         60           220,000 
1601-1700       1,490,000      1,870,000         60         1,120,000 
1701-1810       5,150,000      6,130,000         60         3,680,000 
After 1810      2,780,000      3,270,000         33         1,090,000 
Total           9,710,000     11,640,000         --         6,110,000 
Source: Britannica Online

The South was not a uniform region. The plantation belt, which included the most fertile soils in the low country along the coastal plain, was integrated into the world economy with its cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar.

This region contained the majority of slaves and here planters dominated the economy and politics. A large number of whites lived in the upcountry, where small farmers owned a few or no slaves and farmers were largely self-sufficient. Because slavery and planters did not interfere with the yeoman self-sufficiency, the latent class conflicts between planters and mountain people did not surface.

Yet many small farmers (nearly half in both Mississippi and South Carolina) owned a slave or two, and even in the mountains, slavery was firmly entrenched among a small but influential local elite: a few large-scale farmers, professionals, and merchants.

With secession and the Civil War, large numbers of upcountry people, such as those in western Virginia (which became a separate state) and eastern Tennessee, identified with the North.

The US slave population tripled after the slave trade was abolished in 1808; elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, the slave population declined without the importation of new slaves from Africa.

In 1860, the average wealth of a slaveowner was 14 times that of an average non-slaveowner in the South; and 5 times that of an average Northerner (Kolchin, 1999, p. 166). Kolchin argues that only "race" mattered in US slavery whereas in Russia, serfdom was defined along class lines within the same ethnic group. Nine slave museums tell the story of USA slavery: where are they?

Slaves and Free Blacks
The South had 3.9 million black slaves and 262,000 free Negroes in 1860. The white population of the 11 Confederate states was 5 million. 7 percent of the total population in the South owned nearly 3 million slaves in 1860. Only 3,000 planters owned 100 or more slaves. Two million whites owned a few slaves, but 6 million whites owned no slaves. Regardless of whether they owned slaves or not, whites were frequently united with the interest of large slave owners. They were the overseers, drivers, and dealers of slaves. Others were hirers of slave labor and others were merchants and professionals who identified with the planter class

Mississippi In 1860, the state had 353,899 whites and 473,404 blacks, of which less than 1,000 were free. From 1840 the Cotton Kingdom spread across the state. In the Black Belt, the most fertile soils of the state, plantations were designed to raise a profitable cotton crop and not to entertain visitors, as they did in Natchez, New Orleans, and Charleston. From Memphis to the Gulf the cotton counties had black populations over 60%, while poor whites dominated the population in the poor lands of the northeast and southeast.

South Carolina In 1860, South Carolina had 412,320 blacks and 291,300 whites and nearly 10,000 free blacks. By the mid-18th century the slaves on rice plantations provided their masters with the highest per capita income in the American colonies. Many of the Africans who were brought to the South Carolina lowcountry came from rice-producing areas of Africa. African methods of planting, hoeing, winnowing, and threshing rice were used as late as 1865.

How does the US achieve justice for past injustice? Read about the law suits for reparations of slavery: article1 and article 2. Slaves performed $40 million worth of unpaid labor between 1790-1860, then reparations would be around $1.4 trillion today.

Explore the Underground Railroad, the world of the slaves that tried to escape slavery, on the National Geographic Society web site.

Slaves and others, including white abolitionists, made and displayed quilts with distinctive designs to send hidden (to whites) messages to run away slaves. The Monkey Wrench pattern, on the left, alerted escapees to gather up tools and prepare to flee; the Drunkard Path design, on the right, warned escapees not to follow a straight route

Sources:

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1963-1877. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: Altheneum, 1983 (originally published in 1935).
Charles Joyner. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984.

Also read:

Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Veerso, 1991.
Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. 1999.
Anne Farrow, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. Ballantine Books, 2005.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 25 February 1997; last revised on 13 February 2006.