This appeal to white racial solidarity disguised the fact that Southern yeomen may have had a great deal more to fear from slavery, so far as their economic futures were concerned, than they suspected. Slavery has become so fixed in the historical memory as a form of agricultural labor that it has been easy to miss how steadily, in the 1850s, black slaves were being slipped out of the “mud-sill” and into the South’s small industrial workforce. More than half of the workers in the new iron furnaces along the Cumberland river in Tennessee were slaves, and after 1845 most of the ironworkers in the Richmond iron furnaces in Virginia were slaves as well. The hemp factories of Kentucky, which had actually begun using slave labor as early as the 1820s, defended the decision to use slave operatives on the grounds that they were so much easier to exploit than free white workers: “They are more docile, more constant, and cheaper than freemen, who are often refractory and dissipated; who waste much time by frequenting public places, attending musters, elections, etc., which the operative slave is not permitted to frequent.” And, added Tennessee iron producer Samuel Morgan in 1852, they did not strike.71
Furthermore, when the great California gold rush of the late 1840s opened up for Americans the prospect of large-scale mining in the West, it was not forgotten by Southerners how successful slave-based gold mining had been in South America. By 1861, nonslaveholding whites in Texas were petitioning the state legislature to protest “being put in Competition With Negro Mechanicks who are rival to us in the obtaining of Contracts for the Construction of Houses Churches and other Buildings. … We say Negroes forever but Negroes in their Places (Viz: in Corn & Cotton Fields).” 72 With the right circumstances and a sufficient amount of time, slave labor could have easily become an industrial serfdom, made permanent by its identification through race, and nudging expensive white laborers out of the trades they had been assured were secure forever.
For slavery was neither a backward nor a dying system in the 1850s. It was aggressive, dynamic, and mobile, and by pandering to the racial prejudices of a white republic starved for labor, it was perfectly capable of expansion. In 1810, the Southern states had a slave population of just over 1 million; by 1860, in defiance of every expectation for what a system of organized violence could do to the survival of a people, the slave population stood at just under 4 million. No matter that to outside observers the South looked like anything but a market society, and no matter that slavery was based on the absurd and irrational prejudice of race; slavery’s greatest attractions were its cheapness, its capacity for violent exploitation, and its mobility. Southerners understood that slavery was precisely the element that would help them transcend the limitations of poor soils and single-crop dependency and emerge into the dazzling light of a modern economy. As it was, considered as a separate nation from the northern states, the South would rank as the fourth most prosperous nation in the world in 1860, surpassing France and Germany, and outdistanced in Europe only by Great Britain. 73
In the North, predicted South Carolina’s Leonidas Spratt, free laborers and employers must inevitably come to a confrontation, for the goal of the employer is always to screw down the wages, and the goal of the laborer is always to increase them. “We look with perfect certainty to see the breaking up of free society into its elements” in the North, announced Spratt, while in the South, compliant and docile slaves would take up the levers of industry and make them a perfect success. Slaves might not have the skill, intelligence, or incentives that free white laborers had, but technology made all of that irrelevant. “Improvements in machinery have superseded the necessity of more than mere manipulation upon the part of operatives,” and “of manipulation the negro is singularly capable.” Because the available supply of slaves was so much needed in agriculture, no one had realized what a resource slave labor could be in manufacturing; it was “only for reason of the exceeding profit of agriculture at the South that the negro has not been yoked to the harness of other pursuits and that he has not given still more astonishing evidences of efficiency in that institution which evokes his powers than even that afforded by the products of the South.” And when that happened, slavery “will evolve an energy of light and life that will enable it to advance over existing forms of society with a desolating and resistless power, and… stand from age to age impregnable.”74
“African slavery is no retrograde movement,” warned William Holcombe on the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger in 1861, “but an integral link in the grand, progressive evolution of human society.” If California had been turned over to Southerners, speculated Virginia governor Henry Wise, “every cornfield in Virginia and North Carolina, in Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky, would have been emptied of black laborers, and I doubt whether many slaves would have been left to work the cotton and sugar estates of the other Southern plantation.”75
But to expand, slavery would need protection and reassurance. Southerners would tolerate the annoyance of tariffs and the like, but they would not permit interference with or restriction upon slavery or its growth. And the federal Union in which the Southern states participated was a sufficiently rickety structure that any serious attack on slavery would be an excuse for Southerners to tear the whole structure of the Union down.
“AND I WILL BE HEARD”
The cultural differences and economic aggressiveness of the slave system and the political weakness of the
