The Institution of Slavery
By TNteam • Jan 14th, 2008 • Category: AcademicsWhat can you say about the institution of slavery?
“Slavery has been of signal importance in American history. During the antebellum period, it undergirded the nation’s economy, increasingly dominated its politics, and finally led to civil war between North and South. After that war, the legacy of slavery continued to shape much of American history, from the struggle over Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s to the struggle over civil rights a century later.
Forced labor emerged in the American colonies, as it did elsewhere in the New World, to meet a pervasive labor shortage that resulted when settlers sought commercial exploitation of agricultural staples (primarily tobacco in the Upper South and rice in the Lower South) in areas of low population density. Although twenty Africans were sold to settlers in Virginia as early as 1619, throughout most of the seventeenth century white indentured servants were far more numerous in the English mainland colonies than African slaves. Only after 1680, when the flow of indentured migrants from Europe diminished, did European servitude increasingly give way to African slavery. By the middle of the eighteenth century, slavery existed in all thirteen colonies and formed the heart of the agricultural labor system in the southern colonies.
In the years following the American Revolution, slavery, which had never been so prevalent or economically important in the North as in the South, became the South’s “peculiar institution.” Between 1774 and 1804 all the northern states undertook to abolish slavery. In some states emancipation was immediate, but more often—as in New York and New Jersey—it was gradual, freeing slaves born after passage of the state’s emancipation act when they reached a given age (usually in their twenties). But despite widespread questioning of its morality and a proliferation of private manumissions in the Upper South during the revolutionary era, bondage actually expanded in the southern states. The spread of cotton production following the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 sharply increased the demand for slave labor and made possible the emergence of a vast new slave empire as southerners moved west. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the United States contained about half a million slaves, North and South; on the eve of the Civil War the country held almost 4 million slaves, confined entirely to the South.
Southern slavery was highly diverse. Slaveholdings varied according to size, location, and crops produced. Slavery in cities differed substantially from that in the countryside. Masters exhibited varying temperaments and used diverse methods to run their farms and plantations. Slaves served as skilled craftsmen, preachers, nurses, drivers, and mill workers, as well as field hands and house servants…”
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