Before the 1790's Slavery seemed to be a dying institution. Most Northern states had set emancipation in motion. The philosophy of the American Revolution - the idea that all men were created equal, with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - also motivated planters to free their slaves. The crucial importance to the act of freeing slaves in the Chesapeake was the decline of tobacco. Years of over-planting had left the land worn out. Farmers produced less tobacco and turned instead to more profitable grains. Their need for large numbers of slave decreased. Rather than assume the cost of caring for their slaves, many farmers freed them instead.
The introduction of cotton, increased the demand for slaves south of the Chesapeake. This caused a hurried change in attitude. Before the turn of the 19th century, there was little cotton production in the South. Eli Whitney's cotton gin changed that, and with it also the history of Black America. The cotton gin made the production of the cotton profitable. Before the invention of the cotton gin it took a slave a day to clean a pound of the short-staple cotton. With the gin, by contrast, the slave could clean up to 50 pounds a day.
After the invention of the cotton gin, the yield of raw cotton doubled each decade after 1800. Demand was fueled by other inventions of the Industrial Revolution, such as machines to spin and weave the cotton and the steamboat to transport it. By mid-century America was growing three-quarters of the world's supply of cotton, most of it shipped to England or New England where it was manufactured into cloth. During this time tobacco fell in value, rice exports stayed steady and sugar began to thrive. At mid-century the South provided three-fifths of America's exports, most of it cotton. It was not long before cotton became the principal cash crop of the South and of the nation. In 1790 the South produced only 3,135 bales of cotton. On the eve of the Civil War, production peaked at 4.8 million bales. Cotton gave slavery a new lease on life, slaves who were of no use in the Upper South were not set free but sold to the Lower South. That meant that a good many slaves were born in Virginia, Maryland or South Carolina, were likely to die in Mississippi, Alabama or Louisiana. The sale and transportation of Black people within the United States became big business.
What slaves hated most about slavery was not the hard work to which they were subjected, but their lack of control over their lives, their lack of freedom ("Slavery in the United States," Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia.) No state law recognized marriage among slaves, masters rather than parents had legal authority over slave children, and the possibility of forced separation, through sale, hung over every family. These separations were especially frequent in the slave-exporting states of the upper South. http://innercity.orgholt/chron_1790_1829.html
Masters could split a family apart for profit. He could sell a husband or a wife, a son or a daughter. In 1858, a slave named Abream Scriven was sold by master, and wrote to his wife: "Give me love to my father and mother and tell them good bye for me, and if we shall no meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven." (page 130) Another man wrote to his wife, sold away from him with their children: "Send me some of the children's hair in a separate paper with their names on the paper... I had rather anything to had happened to me most than ever to have been parted from you and the children... Laura I do love you the same..." (page 133)
Slavery is a human tragedy and the very work conjures up images of pain and suffering, oppression and sin. More than 500,000 black African were kidnapped, sold like livestock and and forced to perform backbreaking work. Families were torn apart and young children and removed from their homes. Husbands and wives were separated. Slaves were forced to endure beating, rape, castration, maiming and murder. There is no legal recourse because slaves were not human beings. They were private property. The nation was impasse. The end of slavery came through the death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians during the Civil War.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1019
Works Cited
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History Of The United States, Vol 1, New York: The New P, 2003
http://innercity.orgholt/chron_1790_1829.html
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1019
http://answersinhistory.wordpress.com (photo)
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