Although Jefferson understood as keenly as Madison and Washington the moral degradation of slavery, he wrote more than they did on the character and the qualities of blacks, to their disadvantage. He loved liberty, anguished about slavery, but believed blacks intellectually, spiritually, and physically inferior to whites.13 After the Revolution, he hoped for a total emancipation and the abolition of the slave trade; yet, like Washington and Madison, he doubted that the two races could ever live peaceably side by side. The answer to the problem, he thought, was in the colonization of blacks in Africa or in some other far place.14 Jefferson made his opposition to slavery public in a message to Congress on December 2, 1808, when he spoke of the impending end of the slave trade as preventing “those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.”15 He worked hard to see the passage of a strong act to implement the proscription put into the Constitution.
The passage of the famous act of 1807 probably could not have occurred without Jefferson’s energetic leadership. But by that time, 400,000 slaves had been transported to North America. They, along with their descendants, might be kept as slaves for as long as they lived. Even with the virtual end of the transatlantic traffic, the institution had become firmly entrenched in the South with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the insatiable demand for cotton of Britain’s textile industry. By 1820, cotton was grown extensively in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. White settlers pushed Indians out of their ancestral territories, and as production soared in the black belt—the rich, dark-soiled heartland of the expanding cotton kingdom—many small farmers became large landholders and slaveholders.
The ideology of Jeffersonian republicanism created problems for the institution of slavery. Pitted against the ideal of God-given human rights was the rationalization that slaves were not morally fit for freedom. The new nation could not make up its mind about the extension of slavery. Its policies veered in fits and starts away from sanctioning it to disapprobation and back to approval again. The Northwest Ordinance had prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories in 1787; the Missouri Compromise in 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state but prohibited slavery north of 36 degrees and 30 minutes forever; the compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state but allowed Utah and New Mexico to enter the Union with slavery if their constitutions so determined; the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 undermined the Missouri Compromise by permitting the people of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether they would come into the Union as slave or free states.
If economic greed caused slavery to spread, the theory of racial inferiority justified it. As the slave population grew in the South, whites enforced slavery with increasing rigor. Slave codes often forbade slaves to own anything in their own right or dispose in any way of the product of their industry; no slave was to be admitted as a witness in either criminal or civil matters, for or against a white person; in many jurisdictions it was not a crime to kill a slave; husbands and wives, parents and children were often separated at the auction block; floggings were common.16
Even at the height of the power of the slave system, blacks were not a caste in the sense of the Untouchables of India or the Eta of Japan, who worked only at certain stigmatized jobs as their fathers and ancestors had for generations. Some blacks were free, even in the South, and worked at jobs that required education and a high degree of skill. Even among the slaves, some were entrusted with important responsibilities within the households of white planters. Far from being untouchable, thousands served as the nurses and confidantes of white children, and tens of thousands more were mistresses to white owners. Unlike low castes elsewhere, they knew the possibilities of freedom. They also knew a religion that, in the Old Testament, called not for acceptance of but resistance to injustice.
There were many ways to resist: doing a poor job; feigning illness; self-mutilation; killing overseers and masters in the woods or poisoning them; self-starvation; running away; and even slave revolts in the face of impossible odds. Whenever a major revolt took place, the noose of slavery was tightened. The names of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner, the three most famous leaders of slave revolts, seized white Southerners with fear. Prosser, a slave, led the first of these nineteenth-century revolts in 1800, when a thousand slaves met six miles outside Richmond, armed with clubs, swords, and other crude weapons, to march on the city. Vesey, a free man who worked as a carpenter in Charleston, plotted his revolt for years, but although perhaps as many as nine thousand slaves were involved, it was easily beaten down before it started in July 1822. Nat Turner selected the Fourth of July as his day of revolution, but illness postponed the action until August 21. Within twenty-four hours sixty whites were killed, after which the blacks were overtaken and captured by state and federal troops.17
Following each rebellion, there was a flurry of action by whites to intimidate slaves, free blacks, and white sympathizers. In 1845, a Kentucky man was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment for having brought to freedom three runaway slaves. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law laid heavy fines and imprisonment on anyone who harbored or concealed a fugitive slave. But the most significant sanction for slavery came in the Supreme Court’s decision in 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sanford.
In that year, when a quarter of a million immigrants arrived in the United States and when Carl Schurz, not yet a citizen, was almost elected lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that since blacks were not citizens they did not have the right to sue in court and a citizen-master could take his slave property wherever he liked, even to states that did not recognize slavery, without giving up total control. Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who had been taken by his master to live in free Illinois, could not sue for his freedom after returning to Missouri because he had never been released from slavery by his master. Frederick Douglass saw in the Supreme Court’s harsh decision the possibility that it would become “one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the complete overthrow of the slave system.”18 The Civil War was only four years away.
The ambiguities of the caste system were most apparent with respect to free blacks, even before the Civil War. At the end of the Revolution, when free African-Americans constituted less than 4 percent of the black population in the South, the laws against them were relatively mild. But as Southerners became more fearful of slave revolts, one southern state after another disenfranchised free blacks, barred them from military service, and prohibited them from testifying against white persons. They were subject to search without a warrant and to trial without jury for all but capital crimes; they were not permitted to assemble and were forbidden to carry arms; they were kept from professions and many trades by high license fees and physical intimidation; some states required them to register and carry freedom papers; and, of course, they could not marry out of their caste. They lived in constant danger of being kidnapped or being forced back into slavery by the courts. As historian John Hope Franklin has written, “one slip or ignorance of the law would send them back into the ranks of slaves.”19
That the vast majority of them were essentially outside of the civic culture was clear from laws regulating their freedom of movement. By 1835, most southern and many northern states had restricted or prohibited free immigration by blacks; the right of assembly had been taken away from almost all free Negroes in the South. Blacks generally could own land (except in Georgia up until 1818), but in 1826 Congress denied them preemption rights on public lands.20 Even in the North, some states did not allow free African-Americans to testify in cases involving white persons, and their children either attended segregated schools or were not permitted into public schools.
Both northern and southern states began to disenfranchise free blacks at