James Madison, who followed Jefferson as president, did not let his personal reservations about slavery cloud his understanding of the economic significance of the slave system. Responding to a critic of slavery, he declared his total agreement “as to the evil, moral, political, and economical,” of slavery. But he suggested that there could be “much improvement” in slave culture “particularly where slaves are held in small numbers, by good masters and managers.” He appealed to his critic to reconsider. After all, he argued, the risks of running a plantation were considerably smaller than those of a speculation on stocks or bonds: “look at the wrecks everywhere giving warning of the danger.” How else would the United States expand agriculturally? Madison asked: If into large landed property, where there are no slaves, “will you cultivate it yourself? Then beware of the difficulty of procuring faithful and complying laborers. Will you dispose of its leases? Ask those who have made the experiment what sort of tenants are to be found where an ownership of the soil is so attainable.”44
Until the early 1790s, cultivation of cotton had been overwhelmingly concentrated in the coastal regions. The invention of Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793 made it possible to shift production and processing much farther inland. By 1860, the slave population in the Southern states had grown to almost four million. U.S. exports of raw cotton grew from five hundred thousand pounds in 1793 to eighteen million pounds in 1800 and eighty-three million pounds by 1815.45 As Marx put it in Capital:
While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.... Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.46
Antebellum Society
The plantation system that developed in the South was different in several respects to slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America. These differences shaped the kind of resistance that developed among slaves. Unlike Brazil, for example, where slaves who successfully escaped their plantations could find uninhabited areas and establish communities of escaped slaves, this was less likely in the United States. In the South, slaves were a minority in most states. The majority of slaves also lived on plantations whose owners had twenty or fewer slaves, in contrast to the mass plantations of the Caribbean.47
The Southern society that the slave economy created was highly unequal and culturally backward. The South’s wealth, already highly concentrated among the planter class, became increasingly so in the half century before the Civil War. In 1800, one-third of white families in the region owned slaves; in 1860, only one-quarter did. In 1860, half of Southern slaveholders owned fewer than five Blacks, while 72 percent owned fewer than ten each and held approximately one-fourth of all slaves.48
Only a small minority of white families in the prime cotton-producing counties dominated staple output: the top 10 percent of farms there contributed over 68 percent of total cotton production. Of the farms in these counties 28 percent produced no cotton at all; half of them held no slaves.49 The wealth of the combined Southern states was greater than either France or Germany in 1860, and income for the wealthiest of the planter class—defined as owning fifty slaves or more—was more than sixty times the per capita income of the day.
Yet, only a few thousand families made up this planting elite, and over two-thirds of the white Southern population owned no slaves at all.50 And unlike the successful slave revolt of Saint Domingue, where Toussaint L’Ouverture successfully used splits among the slaveholding powers to his advantage, both the North and South were committed to slavery until the 1860s.
It is important to point out that the majority of the South’s population did not have any direct interest in slavery. Fully two-thirds of Southern whites didn’t own any slaves at all.51 Only 1,733 white families owned more than 100 slaves each before the outbreak of the Civil War.52 But instead of opposing slavery, the majority of whites accepted the racist ideology of the planter class, thus tying them to the slave masters. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, explained the reasons: “The hostility between the whites and Blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendancy over both the poor whites and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each.”53
Slavery not only oppressed Black slaves, it also ensured the subordination of the poor whites, Douglass argued:
The slaveholders...by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the Blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the Black slave himself.... Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages.... At present, the slaveholders blind them to this competition, by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves, as men—not against them as slaves. They appeal to their pride, often denouncing emancipation, as tending to place the white working man, on an equality with Negroes, and, by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that, by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave.54
What Douglass describes in the South was mirrored in the North among white workers. While slavery flourished in the South, the Northern economy was entering a period of rapid expansion. The emerging labor movement of the 1830s was blunted by nativism and racism. The bulk of “native” workers reacted violently to the mass migrations of Irish workers in the 1840s and 1850s. Historian Mike Davis described the reaction of native-born workers to Irish immigrants: “[The Irish] were met by the universal hostility of a native working class which rioted against them, evicted them from workplaces, refused them admission into trade unions, and tried to exclude them from the franchise.”55
Both native and immigrant labor competed for jobs, and accepted the argument that the emancipation of slaves would “flood” the labor market with four million Blacks. Free Blacks in the North (who numbered 250,000) were excluded from all the existing trade unions. The question of slavery was thus also crucial to the working class in the North. Marx put it succinctly: “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”56
The status of free Blacks in the North was largely determined by conditions in the South and the threat of enslavement loomed large, especially after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.57 But while the position of Blacks in the United States was determined by slavery, not all Blacks were affected equally. Even under slavery, a small Black elite that tied its interests with capitalism and set itself against those of the mass of slaves developed. According to scholar and civil rights activist Earl Ofari, “It has been estimated that in 1830 there were 3,777 Black slave masters in the United States.” 58 While many of these slave owners purchased slaves in order to emancipate them, others hired them out for profit. In Louisiana there arose a class of wealthy Black and mixed-race planters, which, although never as numerous or as influential as the white planters, owned slaves just the same.59 Historian Manning Marable explains:
Even before the Civil War, there were a number of southern Blacks who had access to property and considerable privileges. A group of over eight hundred free Blacks in New Orleans possessed property and private businesses worth nearly $2.5 million in 1836, plus titles to a total of 620 slaves. By 1860 New Orleans’s free Creole and Black elites were worth over $9 million. North Carolina free Blacks owned about one million dollars’ worth of personal property and real estate in 1860, and Virginia’s free Blacks controlled 60,000 acres of farm property.60
This