THE CAUSES OF THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE.
The prohibition of the foreign slave trade by the States and the
Federal Government is the first thing to be considered in connection
with the development of the internal slave trade. Although before 1808
all the States had passed laws to prohibit the introduction of slaves
from without the United States, yet each State had the power to reopen
the trade at will. South Carolina, perhaps, thinking it might be for
the interest of the State, opened the foreign trade in 1803.[59] During
the four years following so many slaves were imported that the market
in the United States became overstocked and many of the negroes were
sent to the West Indies for sale.[60] Had the States retained the
power to import, it is not probable that the domestic trade would ever
have assumed any great importance. It is not likely that the people of
the South and West would have paid high prices for the negroes from the
border States when they could have been had from abroad for so much
less.
The great profits, too, which induced men to carry on the domestic
trade would have been wanting. Assuming this, then, the consequent low
price of slaves in the border slave States, added to the disinclination
of many in these States to make merchandise of the negro, might have
led, as the negroes increased and became a burden upon their masters,
to gradual emancipation.
In 1807, however, when Congress exercised its constitutional right and
prohibited the importation of slaves from without the United States
after January 1, 1808, the right of the individual States to import
slaves from foreign countries was lost.
It is interesting to note that only a few years before the passage of
the Federal non-importation-slave act the vast territory of Louisiana
had been purchased from France. The acquisition of this territory
had a wonderful influence upon the development and continuance of the
internal slave trade.
Of much less influence, and we might even say, of comparative
insignificance, was the Florida cession of 1819. In a very short
time this fertile region of the Louisiana purchase began to attract
great numbers of immigrants who, it seems, often brought their slaves
with them. But there were many who still had to be supplied.[61] To
meet this demand' recourse was had, principally, to the exhausted
plantations of Virginia and Maryland.[62]
Tobacco, which had been a great agricultural staple in these States,
had worn out the land. The price of tobacco, too, from about 1818
was very low and continued so until about 1840.[63] At the same time
new States such as Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, the Carolinas and
Georgia, had become great tobacco States. Such quantities came to
be raised as to make the culture very unprofitable in Virginia and
Maryland.[64] The condition with respect to this section could be no
better illustrated than by a quotation from a speech of Thomas Marshall
in the Virginia House of Delegates, January 20, 1832:
"Mr. Taylor, of Carolina," he says, "had understood that 60,000
hogsheads of tobacco were exported from Virginia, when the whole
population did not exceed 150,000. Had the fertility of the country
by possibility remained undiminished, Virginia ought in 1810 to have
exported 240,000 hogsheads, or their equivalent in other produce,
and at present nearly double that. Thus the agricultural exports of
Virginia in 1810 would, at the estimated prices of the Custom House at
that time, have been seventeen millions of dollars and now at least
thirty-four, while it is known that they are not of late years greater
than from three to five millions....
"The fact that the whole agricultural products of the State at present,
do not exceed in value the exports eighty or ninety years ago, when it
contained not a sixth of the population, and when not a third of the
surface of that State (at present Virginia) was at all occupied, is,
however, a striking proof of the decline of its agriculture. What is
now the productive value of an estate of land and negroes in Virginia?
We state as the result of extensive inquiry, embracing the last
fifteen, years, that a very great proportion of the larger plantations,
with from fifty to one hundred slaves, actually bring their proprietors
in debt at the end of a short term of years, notwithstanding what would
once in Virginia have been deemed very sheer economy, that much the
larger part of the considerable landholders are content, if they barely
meet their plantation expenses without a loss of capital; and that of
those who make any profit, it will be none but rare instances, average
more than one and a half per cent. on the capital invested. The case
is not materially varied with the smaller proprietors. Mr. Randolph,
of Roanoke, whose sayings have so generally the raciness and the truth
of proverbs, has repeatedly said in Congress, that the time was coming
when the masters would run away from the slaves and be advertised by
them in the public papers."[65]
It seems that agriculture had taken a new start about 1816, probably
owing to the fact that tobacco was very high, being from 8 to 15 cents
per pound,[66] for Colonel Mercer in the Virginia Constitutional
Convention of 1829 said that in 1817 the lands of Virginia were valued
at $206,000,000 and that negroes averaged $300 each, while by 1829
lands had decreased in value to $80,000,000 or $90,000,000 and negroes
to $150 each.[67] But while agriculture was in such a discouraging
condition in the worn out States, Louisiana and other States of the
Southwest were being opened up and were looked on as the land of
promise. Immigrants to that favored section wrote glowing accounts of
the fertility of the country and of the delightful climate. An emigrant
from Maryland writes from Louisiana in 1817:
"Do not the climate, the soil and productions of this country furnish
allurements to the application of your negroes on our lands? In your
States a planter, with ten negroes, with difficulty supports a family
genteelly; here well managed, they would be a fortune to him. With you
the seasons are so irregular your crops often fail; here the crops are
certain, and want of the necessaries of life, never for a moment causes
the heart to ache--abundance spreads the table of the poor man and
contentment smiles on every countenance."[68]
In marked contrast to the unprofitableness of slave labor in the older
slave States was their immense profit when employed on the fresh
lands of the Southwest. Some planters in this section had plantations
thousands of acres in extent.[69] To cultivate them great numbers of
slaves were required. If the crop were cotton one negro was needed for
every three acres and these would yield cotton to the value of $240
to $260. The master realized upon each negro employed at least $200
annually.[70] The income of some of these plantations was immense. It
was not uncommon for a planter in Mississippi and Louisiana to have an
income of $30,000, and some of them even $80,000 to $120,000 (1820).[71]
The enormous profits caused slaves to be very high in this section
and in great demand. There were only two possible sources of
supply:--first, the illicit traffic already spoken of; second, the
domestic slave trade. A good negro from twenty to thirty years of age
would command from $800 to $1,200.[72] Indeed, it is stated that at
one time during this early period they sold for as much as $2,000.[73]
This fact in connection with the fact that in 1817 the average price
of a negro in Virginia was only $300, and the depreciation by 1829
to $150, gives us the reason for the rise of the domestic slave
trade. It was over and again stated in the Virginia Legislature of
1832 that the value of negroes in Virginia was regulated not by their
profitableness at home but by the Southwestern demand.[74] The great
difference in the price of slaves in the buying States and the selling
States was an inducement to a certain class of men to engage in the
business of buying them up and carrying them South. The profits were
from one-third to one-half on an average after expenses were paid.[75]
Slave traders soon got rich. Williams, a Washington dealer, boasted in
1850 that he made $30,000 in a few months.[76] It is said the firm of
Franklin & Armfield, of Alexandria, made $33,000 in 1829.[77] In 1834
Armfield, of this same firm, was reputed to be worth nearly $500,000
which he had accumulated in the business.[78] Ingraham tells of a man
who had amassed more than a million dollars in this traffic.[79] More
instances might be given but this is enough to show that the traffic
was profitable.
The cultivation of rice[80] and sugar, especially sugar, used up slaves
rapidly. As a consequence slaves were in demand in the rice and sugar
sections, not only because of the expansion of these industries, but
to take the place of those that died. In 1829 the statement was made
in a report of the Agricultural Society of Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
that the annual loss of life on well conducted sugar plantations was
two and one-half per cent. more than the annual increase. In 1830, the
Hon. J.L. Johnson in a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury gave
evidence of a thorough study of the subject and arrived at the same
conclusion.[81]
We come now to consider the one thing, the prime factor, which brought
about the wonderful agricultural prosperity of the Southwest--_cotton_.
Sugar and rice could only be grown in certain limited sections. Rice
principally in South Carolina and sugar in Louisiana; but the cotton
field came to cover the larger part of nine great States.
Until toward the end of the eighteenth century the production of
cotton in this country was very small. In 1793, however, Eli Whitney
invented his machine for separating the seed from the cotton. This
soon revolutionized the industry. While the cotton crop of the United
States in 1793 was only 5,000,000 pounds, by 1808 it had increased to
80,000,000, and remained about the same or rather declined during the
war of 1812, but the very year peace was established its production
went up to 100,000,000 pounds, and the year following (1816) to
125,000,000. By 1834 it had grown to 460,000,000.[82] During the whole
of this period, with slight fluctuations, cotton continued high, but
after 1835 it began to decline and reached low-water mark at the
average price of 5-3/4 cents per pound in 1845, which was scarcely
the cost of production.[83] However, the crop of 1839 according to
the census reports was 790,479,275 pounds, nearly double the crop
of the five years previous. During the next decade though the price
went up after 1845[84] the crop increased less than 200,000,000
pounds being only 987,637,200 in 1849, but during the following ten
years it more than doubled, being 2,397,238,140 pounds in 1859.[85]
Of this enormous crop the four States of Mississippi, Alabama,
Louisiana and Georgia produced more than two-thirds, while Virginia
contributed about 1,400.[86] But Virginia and North Carolina in
1801 had produced more than two-fifths of the cotton raised in the
country. In 1826 when, according to the official reports they reached
their greatest production, Virginia grew 25,000,000 pounds and North
Carolina 18,000,000, or nearly five times as much as in 1801, yet this
proportion had fallen to about one-seventh. Eight years afterward
Virginia's crop had fallen to 10,000,000 pounds and North Carolina's to
9,500,000,[87] and their production continued to decline.[88] Hammond
says that "the higher cost of raising cotton in the more northern
latitudes, and the uncertainty of the plant reaching maturity before
the arrival of the frosts, prevented the rapid growth of cotton culture
in these States after 1830 which took place elsewhere, especially as
the continual decline in the price of the staple only emphasized the
disadvantages under which the planters of these States labored."[89]
But while decline was noticeable in the Northern States, the States
at the Southwest were going ahead by leaps and bounds. The same year
(1843) Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, from which no cotton had
been reported in 1801, produced together 232,000,000 pounds, while
South Carolina increased its crops from 2,000,000 to 65,500,000 and
Georgia from 10,000,000 to 75,000,000 pounds during the same time.[90]
As the cotton field extended of course the demand for labor increased
and that labor was necessarily negro slave labor, for it was thought
that the white man could not endure work under a tropical sun, while
the organism of the negro was especially adapted to it.[91] As a
consequence negroes were secured from every possible source.
In short, negroes and cotton soon came to be inseparably associated.
The amount of cotton that could be raised depended upon the number of
negroes to be secured to work it. The value of a negro was measured by
his usefulness in the cotton field.[92] De Bow estimated that in 1850
out of the 2,500,000 slaves in the Southern States about 1,800,000[93]
of them, or nearly three-fourths were engaged in the cotton industry,
leaving for all other purposes only about 700,000, or about the same
number as there was in the whole United States in 1790, at which time
the production of cotton was only 1,500,000 pounds.[94] Thus it
is seen that while cotton demanded all the increase of slaves from
whatever source from that time forward all other things merely held
their own. However, if we subtract the number engaged in the sugar
industry, which was 150,000[95] in 1850 for the reason that it was a
new crop developed during the early part of the century,[96] it is
noticed that other things lost. From this we conclude it was only
natural that the surplus slave population of the older slave States
where it was useless was to be drained off to the cotton States. Some
of the Southern papers, notably the "Richmond Enquirer," over and again
called attention to the relation of cotton and negroes. In 1859 it says:
"The price of cotton it is well known pretty much regulates the price
of slaves in the South, and a bale of cotton and a 'likely nigger' are
about well balanced in the scale of pecuniary appreciation."[97]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 59: McCord: S.C. Statutes at Large, Vol. VII., p. 449.]
[Footnote 60: Annals of Congress, 16 Cong., 2 Sess., p. 77.]
[Footnote 61: (Ingraham): The Southwest, Vol. II., p. 223.]
[Footnote 62: Alexander: Transatlantic Sketches, p. 250. Basil Hall:
Travels in N. Am., Vol. II., p. 217.]
[Footnote 63: Hunt's: Merchants' Magazine, Vol. VI., p. 473.]
[Footnote 64: Speech of Thomas Marshall in Va., H. Del., 1832. Richmond
Enquirer, Feb. 2, 1832.]
[Footnote 65: Richmond Enquirer, Feb. 2, 1832.]
[Footnote 66: Hunt's: Merchants' Magazine, VI., p. 473.]
[Footnote 67: Proceedings and Debate of the Va. St. Con. Con., 1829-30,
p. 178.]
[Footnote 68: Niles' Reg., Sept. 13, 1817; for another such letter see
Ibid., October 18, 1817.]
[Footnote 69: Smedes: Memorials of a Southern Planter, p. 47.]
[Footnote 70: Christian Scutz: Travels on an Inland Voyage, Vol. II.,
p. 186.
David Blowe: Geographical, Commercial and Agricultural View of U.S., p.
618.]
[Footnote 71: David Blowe: Geographical, Commercial and Agricultural
View of U.S. of Am., p. 643. (1820?)]
[Footnote 72: Ibid., p. 618.]
[Footnote 73: Claiborne: Miss. as a Province, Territory and State, Vol.
I., p. 144.]
[Footnote 74: Mr. Gholson in Va. Leg. Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 24, 1832.
Mr. Goode, ibid., Jan. 19, 1832.]
[Footnote 75: (Ingraham): The Southwest, Vol. 4, p. 234.
Vigne: Six Months in Am., p. 117.
Alexander: Transatlantic Sketches, p. 230.]
[Footnote 76: Liberator, Sept. 6, 1850.]
[Footnote 77: Mary Tremain: Slavery in D.C., p. 50.]
[Footnote 78: Abdy: Journal of a Residence and Tour in the U.S., Vol.
II., p. 180.]
[Footnote 79: (Ingraham): The Southwest. Vol. II., p. 245.]
[Footnote 80: Basil Hall: Travels in North America, 218-223.]
[Footnote 81: Stearns: Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin, 174-5.]
[Footnote 82: Woodbury's Report: 24th Cong., 1st Sess. Ex. Doc. 146, p.
7.]
[Footnote 83: De Bow's Review: Vol. XXIII., p. 475.]
[Footnote 84: Hammond: Cotton Ind., Ap. 1.]
[Footnote 85: Census of 1890. Statistics of Agri., p. 42.]
[Footnote 86: Ibid.]
[Footnote 87: Woodbury's Report, p. 13.]
[Footnote 88: Census, 1890. Statistics of Agri., p. 42.]
[Footnote 89: Hammond: The Cotton Industry, p. 49.]
[Footnote 90: Woodbury's Report, p. 13.]
[Footnote 91: Van Enrie: Negroes and Negro Slavery, p. 171.
Parkinson: Tour in America, Vol. II., p. 421.]
[Footnote 92: Olmsted: Cotton Kingdom. Vol. I., 15-16. Ibid.: Seaboard
Slave States, p. 278.]
[Footnote 93: De Bow: Compendium, 7th Census, p. 94.]
[Footnote 94: Woodbury's Report, p. 7.]
[Footnote 95: De Bow: Compendium, 7th Census, p. 94.]
[Footnote 96: Ibid.: Industrial Resources, Vol. III., p. 275.]
[Footnote 97: Richmond Enquirer, July 29, 1859.]