By the early 1700s, slavery had caught on in a big way throughout the Southern colonies. In places like South Carolina, slavery became essential to the economy, and slaves soon outnumbered whites in that colony. The Declaration of Independence declared no slave free, and the Constitution mostly avoided the issue, except for the purposes of levying taxes, determining representation in Congress (for purposes of such enumeration, slaves were deemed three-fifths of a human being), and specifying that the slave trade (that is, importation) was to end within 20 years.
The irony was most bitter. The sweet land of liberty persisted in maintaining an institution that the rest of the world’s nations were quickly abandoning. The British Parliament outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and all slavery in 1833. The emerging nations of South America made slavery illegal, and Spain and Portugal officially abolished slave trading in 1840. But America remained a slave nation, and this fact was tearing the country apart.
Against the American Grain
From the beginning, a great many Americans were opposed to slavery. The first organized opposition came from the Quakers, who issued a statement against the institution as early as 1724.
During the colonial periods, slave markets were active in the North as well as the South. However, the agricultural economy of the northern colonies was built upon small farms rather than vast plantations. Although many people in the North were passionately opposed to slavery on moral grounds, it is also true that the region lacked the economic motives for it. Therefore, an increasing number of colonists regarded slavery as unnecessary and undesirable; following independence, various states outlawed slavery. Rhode Island, traditionally a seat of tolerance, abolished the institution as early as 1774. Another bright spot existed in this early era: The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 excluded slavery from the vast Northwest Territory.
Cotton Gin
Just six years after passage of the Northwest Ordinance, however, a New Englander working as a tutor in Georgia invented a brilliantly simple machine that revolutionized the cotton industry; in so doing, he ensured the continuance of slavery. Eli Whitney (1765-1825), fascinated by operations on the large Southern plantations, saw that planters were vexed by a problem with the short-staple cotton raised in the lower South. The plants’ seeds required extensive handwork to remove. Even done by slaves, the labor was so time-consuming that profits were sharply curtailed. By April 1793, Whitney had fashioned a machine that used a toothed cylinder to separate the cottonseed from the cotton fiber. Each “cotton gin” could turn out 50 pounds of cleaned cotton a day—far more than what manual labor could produce.
With cotton production suddenly becoming extremely profitable, farmers all over the South turned to it, and “King Cotton” soon displaced tobacco, rice, and indigo as the primary Southern export crop. With increased production also came a greatly increased demand for slave labor to pick the cotton.
Underground Railroad
As an earlier generation had been fascinated by inventions like the cotton gin, so now Americans were enthralled by another innovation, railroads, which began appearing in the United States during the late 1820s. If the railroad seemed a technological miracle, abolitionists (those who wanted to abolish slavery) were aware that they needed a spiritual and moral miracle. By 1830, the highly organized abolitionists developed a network they called the Underground Railroad.
The system was a loose network of individuals—whites and free blacks, called “conductors”—and safe houses (“stations”) dedicated to nothing less than the secret delivery—and deliverance—of slaves (“passengers”) from slave states to free ones. In the years prior to the Civil War, 50,000 to 100,000 slaves found freedom via the Underground Railroad.
Southern slaveholders did not suffer the Underground Railroad gladly. “Conductors” were menaced, assaulted, and even killed. Fugitive slaves, once retaken, were often severely punished as an example to others. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1842 (Prigg v. Pennsylvania) that states were not required to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law of 179 3 (which provided for the return of slaves who escaped to free states), opposition to the Underground Railroad became rabid.
Nat Turner’s Rebellion
Resistance to slavery was not always nonviolent, and the fear of slave rebellion was never far from the thoughts of Southern slave holders. Nat Turner was a slave on the South-hampton County, Virginia, plantation of Joseph Travis. A fiery lay preacher, Turner gathered about him a band of rebellious fellow slaves, and just before dawn on August 22, 1831, lie and his followers killed every white member of the Travis household. The band then swept through the countryside, killing every white they encountered during the next 24 hours—perhaps 60 whites in all. Reaction, in turn, was swift and terrible. Turner and 50 of his band were apprehended and quickly tried. Twenty were summarily hanged. The enflamed white avengers went beyond this measure, however, indulging in their own rampage of killing and torture, directed indiscriminately at whatever blacks they happened to run across.
Although slave rebellions were hardly new in 1831, in an atmosphere of organized opposition to slavery, Nat Turner’s Rebellion created unprecedented panic in the South and hardened Southern antagonism to abolitionist efforts.
The Liberator and the Narrative
The year that saw Nat Turner’s Rebellion also witnessed the emergence of a new newspaper in the North. William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) was a genteel New England abolitionist—a native of Newburyport, Massachusetts—who became coeditor of a moderate periodical called The Genius of Universal Emancipation. But the injustice of slavery soon ignited a fiercer fire in Garrison’s belly, and on January 1, 1831, he published the first issue of The Liberator. This was a radical and eloquent abolitionist periodical that declared slaver, an abomination in the sight of God and that demanded the immediate emancipation of all slaves, without compromise. The Liberator galvanized the abolitionist movement, Three years after the first number was printed, Garrison presided over the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Using The Liberator and the society, Garrison embarked on a massive campaign of what he called “moral suasion.” He believed that slaver), would be abolished when a majority of white Americans experienced a “revolution in conscience.”
Garrison grew increasingly strident in his views, and by the late 1830s, some abolitionists broke with him. In 1842, he made his most radical stand, declaring that Northerners should disavow all allegiance to the Union because the Constitution protected slavery. A pacifist, Garrison nevertheless hailed John Brown’s bloody 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry for the purpose of stealing guns to arm slaves for a general uprising.
If The Liberator was the most powerful white voice in support of abolition, a gripping account of slavery and liberation by an escaped Maryland slave named Frederick Douglass was the most compelling African-American voice. Published in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was widely read and discussed. Not only did the
