American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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The gross cotton output, in which the upland crop greatly and increasingly
outweighed that of the sea-island staple, rapidly advanced from about
forty-eight million pounds in 1801 to about eighty million in 1806; then it
was kept stationary by the embargo and the war of 1812, until the return
of peace and open trade sent it up by leaps and bounds again. The price
dropped abruptly from an average of forty-four cents in the New York market
in 1801 to nineteen cents in 1802, but there was no further decline until
the beginning of the war with Great Britain.[35]

[Footnote 35: M.B. Hammond, _The Cotton Industry_, table following p. 357.]

Cotton's absorption of the people's energies already tended to become
excessive. In 1790 South Carolina had sent abroad a surplus of corn from
the back country measuring well over a hundred thousand bushels. But by
1804 corn brought in brigs was being advertised in Savannah to meet the
local deficit;[36] and in the spring of 1807 there seems to have been a
dearth of grain in the Piedmont itself. At that time an editorial in the
_Augusta Chronicle_ ran as follows: "A correspondent would recommend to the
planters of Georgia, now the season is opening, to raise more corn and less
cotton ... The dear bought experience of the present season should teach us
to be more provident for the future." [37] Under the conditions of the time
this excess at the expense of grain was likely to correct itself at once,
for men and their draught animals must eat to work, and in the prevailing
lack of transportation facilities food could not be brought from a
distance at a price within reach. The systematic basis of industry was the
production, whether by planters or farmers, of such food as was locally
needed and such supplies of cloth together with such other outfit as it was
economical to make at home, and the devotion of all further efforts to the
making of cotton.

[Footnote 36: Savannah _Museum_, April n, 1804.]

[Footnote 37: Reprinted in the _Farmer's Gazette_ (Sparta, Ga.), April 11,
1807.]

Coincident with the rise of cotton culture in the Atlantic states was that
of sugar in the delta lands of southeastern Louisiana. In this triangular
district, whose apex is the junction of the Red and Mississippi rivers, the
country is even more amphibious than the rice coast. Everywhere in fact the
soil is too waterlogged for tillage except close along the Father of Waters
himself and his present or aforetime outlets. Settlement must, therefore,
take the form of strings of plantations and farms on these elevated
riparian strips, with the homesteads fronting the streams and the fields
stretching a few hundred or at most a few thousand yards to the rear; and
every new establishment required its own levee against the flood. So long
as there were great areas of unrestricted flood-plain above Vicksburg to
impound the freshets and lower their crests, the levees below required no
great height or strength; but the tasks of reclamation were at best arduous
enough to make rapid expansion depend upon the spur of great expectations.

The original colony of the French, whose descendants called themselves
Creoles, was clustered about the town of New Orleans. A short distance up
stream the river banks in the parishes of St. Charles and St. John the
Baptist were settled at an early period by German immigrants; thence the
settlements were extended after the middle of the eighteenth century, first
by French exiles from Acadia, next by Creole planters, and finally by
Anglo-Americans who took their locations mostly above Baton Rouge. As to
the westerly bayous, the initial settlers were in general Acadian small
farmers. Negro slaves were gradually introduced into all these districts,
though the Creoles, who were the most vigorous of the Latin elements, were
the chief importers of them. Their numbers at the close of the colonial
period equalled those of the whites, and more than a tenth of them had been
emancipated.

The people in the later eighteenth century were drawing their livelihoods
variously from hunting, fishing, cattle raising and Indian trading, from
the growing of grain and vegetables for sale to the boatmen and townsmen,
and from the production of indigo on a somewhat narrow margin of profit as
the principal export crop. Attempts at sugar production had been made in
1725 and again in 1762, but the occurrence of winter frosts before the cane
was fully ripe discouraged the enterprise; and in most years no more cane
was raised than would meet the local demand for sirup and rum. In the
closing decades of the century, however, worm pests devoured the indigo
leaves with such thoroughness as to make harvesting futile; and thereby the
planters were driven to seek an alternative staple. Projects of cotton were
baffled by the lack of a gin, and recourse was once more had to sugar. A
Spaniard named Solis had built a small mill below New Orleans in 1791 and
was making sugar with indifferent success when, in 1794-1795, Etienne de
Bore, a prominent Creole whose estate lay just above the town, bought a
supply of seed cane from Solis, planted a large field with it, engaged a
professional sugar maker, and installed grinding and boiling apparatus
against the time of harvest. The day set for the test brought a throng of
onlookers whose joy broke forth at the sight of crystals in the cooling
fluid--for the good fortune of Bore, who received some $12,000 for his crop
of 1796, was an earnest of general prosperity.

Other men of enterprise followed the resort to sugar when opportunity
permitted them to get seed cane, mills and cauldrons. In spite of a dearth
of both capital and labor and in spite of wartime restrictions on maritime
commerce, the sugar estates within nine years reached the number of
eighty-one, a good many of which were doubtless the property of San
Domingan refugees who were now pouring into the province with whatever
slaves and other movables they had been able to snatch from the black
revolution. Some of these had fled first to Cuba and after a sojourn there,
during which they found the Spanish government oppressive, removed afresh
to Louisiana. As late as 1809 the year's immigration from the two islands
was reported by the mayor of New Orleans to the governor of Louisiana at
2,731 whites and 3,102 free persons of color, together with 3,226 slaves
warranted as the property of the free immigrants.[38] The volume of the
San Domingan influx from first to last was great enough to double the
French-speaking population. The newcomers settled mainly in the New Orleans
neighborhood, the whites among them promptly merging themselves with the
original Creole population. By reason of their previous familiarity with
sugar culture they gave additional stimulus to that industry.

[Footnote 38: _Moniteur de la Louisiane_ (New Orleans), Jan. 27 and Mch.
24, 1810.]

Meanwhile the purchase of Louisiana by the United States in 1803 had
transformed the political destinies of the community and considerably
changed its economic prospects. After prohibiting in 1804 the importation
into the territory of any slaves who had been brought from Africa since
1798, Congress passed a new act in 1805 which, though probably intended to
continue the prohibition, was interpreted by the attorney-general to permit
the inhabitants to bring in any slaves whatever from any place within the
United States.[39] This news was published with delight by the New Orleans
newspapers at the end of February, 1806;[40] and from that time until the
end of the following year their columns bristled with advertisements of
slaves from African cargoes "just arrived from Charleston." Of these the
following, issued by the firm of Kenner and Henderson, June 24, 1806, is
an example: "The subscribers offer for sale 74 prime slaves of the Fantee
nation on board the schooner _Reliance_, I. Potter master, from Charleston,
now lying opposite this city. The sales will commence on the 25th. inst.
at 9 o'clock A.M., and will continue from day to day until the whole is
sold.[41] Good endorsed notes will be taken in payment, payable the 1st.
of January, 1807. Also [for sale] the above mentioned schooner _Reliance_,
burthen about 60 tons, completely fitted for an African voyage."

[Footnote 39: W.E.B. DuBois, _Suppression of the African Slave Trade_, pp.
87-90. The acts of 1804 and 1805 are printed in B.P. Poore, _Charters and
Constitutions_ (Washington, 1877), I, 691-697.]

[Footnote 40: _Louisiana Gazette_, Feb. 28, 1806.]

[Footnote 41: _Louisiana Gazette_, July 4, 1806.]

Upon the prohibition of the African trade at large in 1808, the slave
demand of the sugar parishes was diverted to the Atlantic plantation states
where it served to advertise the Louisiana boom. Wade Hampton of South
Carolina responded in 1811 by carrying a large force of his slaves to
establish a sugar estate of his own at the head of Bayou Lafourche, and a
few others followed his example. The radical difference of the industrial
methods in sugar from those in the other staples, however, together with
the predominance of the French language, the Catholic religion and a
Creole social regime in the district most favorable for sugar, made
Anglo-Americans chary of the enterprise; and the revival of cotton prices
after 1815 strengthened the tendency of migrating planters to stay within
the cotton latitudes. Many of those who settled about Baton Rouge and on
the Red River with cotton as their initial concern shifted to sugar at the
end of the 'twenties, however, in response to the tariff of 1828 which
heightened sugar prices at a time when the cotton market was depressed.
This was in response, also, to the introduction of ribbon cane which
matured earlier than the previously used Malabar and Otaheite varieties and
could accordingly be grown in a somewhat higher latitude.

The territorial spread was mainly responsible for the sudden advance of the
number of sugar estates from 308 operating in 1827, estimated as employing
21,000 able-bodied slaves and having a gross value of $34,000,000, to 691
plantations in 1830,[42] with some 36,000 working slaves and a gross value
of $50,000,000. At this time the output was at the rate of about 75,000
hogsheads containing 1,000 pounds of sugar each, together with some forty
or fifty gallons of molasses per hogshead as a by-product. Louisiana was at
this time supplying about half of the whole country's consumption of sugar
and bade fair to meet the whole demand ere long.[43] The reduction of
protective tariff rates, coming simultaneously with a rise of cotton
prices, then checked the spread of the sugar industry, and the substitution
of steam engines for horse power in grinding the cane caused some
consolidation of estates. In 1842 accordingly, when the slaves numbered
50,740 and the sugar crop filled 140,000 hogsheads, the plantations were
but 668.[44] The raising of the tariff anew in that year increased the
plantations to 762 in 1845 and they reached their maximum number of 1,536
in 1849, when more than half of their mills were driven by steam[45] and
their slaves numbered probably somewhat more than a hundred thousand of
all ages.[46] Thereafter the recovery of the cotton market from the severe
depression of the early 'forties caused a strong advance in slave prices
which again checked the sugar spread, while the introduction of vacuum pans
and other improvements in apparatus[47] promoted further consolidations.
The number of estates accordingly diminished to 1,298 in 1859, on 987 of
which the mills were steam driven, and on 52 of which the extraction and
evaporation of the sugar was done by one sort or another of the newly
invented devices. The gross number of slaves in the sugar parishes was
nearly doubled between 1830 and 1850, but in the final ante-bellum decade
it advanced only at about the rate of natural increase.[48] The sugar
output advanced to 200,000 hogsheads in 1844 and to 450,000 in 1853. Bad
seasons then reduced it to 74,000 in 1856; and the previous maximum was not
equaled in the remaining ante-bellum years.[49] The liability of the
crop to damage from drought and early frost, and to destruction from the
outpouring of the Mississippi through crevasses in the levees, explains the
fluctuations in the yield. Outside of Louisiana the industry took no grip
except on the Brazos River in Texas, where in 1858 thirty-seven plantations
produced about six thousand hogsheads.[50]

[Footnote 42: _DeBow's Review_, I, 55.]

[Footnote 43: V. Debouchel, _Histoire de la Louisiane_ (New Orleans, 1851),
pp. 151 ff.]

[Footnote 44: E.J. Forstall, _Agricultural Productions of Louisiana_ (New
Orleans, 1845).]

[Footnote 45: P.A. Champonier, _Statement of the Sugar Crop Made in
Louisiana_ (New Orleans, annual, 1848-1859).]

[Footnote 46: DeBow, in the _Compendium of the Seventh Census_, p. 94,
estimated the sugar plantation slaves at 150,000; but this is clearly an
overestimate.]

[Footnote 47: Some of these are described by Judah P. Benjamin in _DeBow's
Review_, II, 322-345.]

[Footnote 48: _I. e_. from 150,000 to 180,000.]

[Footnote 49: The crop of 1853, indeed, was not exceeded until near the
close of the nineteenth century.]

[Footnote 50: P.A. Champonier, _Statement of the Sugar Crop ... in
1858-1859_, p. 40.]

In Louisiana in the banner year 1853, with perfect weather and no
crevasses, each of some 50,000 able-bodied field hands cultivated, besides
the incidental food crops, about five acres of cane on the average and
produced about nine hogsheads of sugar and three hundred gallons of
molasses per head. On certain specially favored estates, indeed, the
product reached as much as fifteen hogsheads per hand[51]. In the total of
1407 fully equipped plantations 103 made less than one hundred hogsheads
each, while forty produced a thousand hogsheads or more. That year's
output, however, was nearly twice the size of the average crop in the
period. A dozen or more proprietors owned two or more estates each, some of
which were on the largest scale, while at the other extreme several dozen
farmers who had no mills of their own sent cane from their few acres to be
worked up in the spare time of some obliging neighbor's mill. In general
the bulk of the crop was made on plantations with cane fields ranging from
rather more than a hundred to somewhat less than a thousand acres, and with
each acre producing in an ordinary year somewhat more than a hogshead of
sugar.

[Footnote 51: _DeBow's Review_, XIV, 199, 200.]

Until about 1850 the sugar district as well as the cotton belt was calling
for labor from whatever source it might be had; but whereas the uplands had
work for people of both races and all conditions, the demand of the delta
lands, to which the sugar crop was confined, was almost wholly for negro
slaves. The only notable increase in the rural white population of the
district came through the fecundity of the small-farming Acadians who had
little to do with sugar culture.

CHAPTER X

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

The flow of population into the distant interior followed the lines of
least resistance and greatest opportunity. In the earlier decades these lay
chiefly in the Virginia latitudes. The Indians there were yielding, the
mountains afforded passes thither, and the climate permitted the familiar
tobacco industry. The Shenandoah Valley had been occupied mainly by
Scotch-Irish and German small farmers from Pennsylvania; but the glowing
reports, which the long hunters brought and the land speculators spread
from beyond the further mountains, made Virginians to the manner born
resolve to compete with the men of the backwoods for a share of the
Kentucky lands. During and after the war for independence they threaded
the gorges, some with slaves but most without. Here and there one found a
mountain glade so fertile that he made it his permanent home, while his
fellows pushed on to the greater promised land. Some of these emerging upon
a country of low and uniform hills, closely packed and rounded like the
backs of well-fed pigs crowding to the trough, staked out their claims, set
up their cabins, deadened their trees, and planted wheat. Others went on
to the gently rolling country about Lexington, let the luxuriant native
bluegrass wean them from thoughts of tobacco, and became breeders of horses
for evermore. A few, settling on the southerly edge of the bluegrass,
mainly in and about Garrard County, raised hemp on a plantation scale. The
rest, resisting all these allurements, pressed on still further to the
pennyroyal country where tobacco would have no rival. While thousands made
the whole journey overland, still more made use of the Ohio River for
the later stages. The adjutant at Fort Harmar counted in seven months of
1786-1787, 177 boats descending the Ohio, carrying 2,689 persons, 1,333
horses, 766 cattle, 102 wagons and one phaeton, while still others passed
by night uncounted.[1] The family establishments in Kentucky were always
on a smaller scale, on an average, than those in Virginia. Yet the people
migrating to the more fertile districts tended to maintain and even to
heighten the spirit of gentility and the pride of type which they carried
as part of their heritage. The laws erected by the community were favorable
to the slaveholding regime; but after the first decades of the migration
period, the superior attractions of the more southerly latitudes for
plantation industry checked Kentucky's receipt of slaves.

[Footnote 1: _Massachusetts Centinel_ (Boston), July 21, 1787.]

The wilderness between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, meanwhile, was
attracting Virginia and Carolina emigrants as well as those from the
northerly states. The soil there was excellent, and some districts were
suited to tobacco culture. The Ordinance of 1787, however, though it was
not strictly enforced, made slaveholdings north of the Ohio negligible from
any but an antiquarian point of view.

The settlement of Tennessee was parallel, though subsequent, to that of the
Shenandoah and Kentucky. The eastern intramontane valley, broad and fertile
but unsuited to the staple crops, gave homes to thousands of small farmers,
while the Nashville basin drew planters of both tobacco and cotton, and the
counties along the western and southern borders of the state made cotton
their one staple. The scale of slaveholdings in middle and western
Tennessee, while superior to that in Kentucky, was never so great as those
which prevailed in Virginia and the lower South.

Missouri, whose adaptation to the southern staples was much poorer, came
to be colonized in due time partly by planters from Kentucky but mostly
by farmers from many quarters, including after the first decades a large
number of Germans, some of whom entered through the eastern ports and
others through New Orleans.

This great central region as a whole acquired an agricultural regime
blending the features of the two national extremes. The staples were
prominent but never quite paramount. Corn and wheat, cattle and hogs were
produced regularly nearly everywhere, not on a mere home consumption basis,
but for sale in the cotton belt and abroad. This diversification caused
the region to wane in the esteem of the migrating planters as soon as the
Alabama-Mississippi country was opened for settlement.

Preliminaries of the movement into the Gulf region had begun as early as
1768, when a resident of Pensacola noted that a group of Virginians had
been prospecting thereabouts with such favorable results that five of them
had applied for a large grant of lands, pledging themselves to bring in a
hundred slaves and a large number of cattle.[2] In 1777 William Bartram met
a group of migrants journeying from Georgia to settle on the lower course
of the Alabama River;[3] and in 1785 a citizen of Augusta wrote that "a
vast number" of the upland settlers were removing toward the Mississippi in
consequence of the relinquishment of Natchez by the Spaniards.[4] But these
were merely forerunners. Alabama in particular, which comprises for the
most part the basin draining into Mobile Bay, could have no safe market
for its produce until Spain was dispossessed of the outlet. The taking
of Mobile by the United States as an episode of the war of 1812, and the
simultaneous breaking of the Indian strength, removed the obstacles. The
influx then rose to immense proportions. The roads and rivers became
thronged, and the federal agents began to sell homesteads on a scale which
made the "land office business" proverbial.[5]

[Footnote 2: Boston, Mass, _Chronicle_, Aug. 1-7, 1768.]

[Footnote 3: William Bartram, _Travels_ (London, 1792), p. 441.]

[Footnote 4: _South Carolina Gazette_, May 26, 1785.]

[Footnote 5: C.F. Emerick, "The Credit System and the Public Domain,"
in the Vanderbilt University _Southern History Publications_, no. 3
(Nashville, Tenn., 1899).]

The Alabama-Mississippi population rose from 40,000 in round numbers in
1810 to 200,000 in 1820, 445,000 in 1830, 965,000 in 1840, 1,377,000 in
1850, and 1,660,000 in 1860, while the proportion of slaves advanced from
forty to forty-seven per cent. In the same period the tide flowed on into
the cotton lands of Arkansas and Louisiana and eventually into Texas.
Florida alone of the newer southern areas was left in relative neglect
by reason of the barrenness of her soil. The states and territories from
Alabama and Tennessee westward increased their proportion of the whole
country's cotton output from one-sixteenth in 1811 to one-third in 1820,
one-half before 1830, nearly two-thirds in 1840, and quite three-fourths in
1860; and all this was in spite of continued and substantial enlargements
of the eastern output.

In the western cotton belt the lands most highly esteemed in the
ante-bellum period lay in two main areas, both of which had soils far more
fertile and lasting than any in the interior of the Atlantic states. One of
these formed a crescent across south-central Alabama, with its western horn
reaching up the Tombigbee River into northeastern Mississippi. Its soil of
loose black loam was partly forested, partly open, and densely matted with
grass and weeds except where limestone cropped out on the hill crests and
where prodigious cane brakes choked the valleys. The area was locally
known as the prairies or the black belt.[6] The process of opening it for
settlement was begun by Andrew Jackson's defeat of the Creeks in 1814 but
was not completed until some twenty years afterward. The other and greater
tract extended along both sides of the Mississippi River from northern
Tennessee and Arkansas to the mouth of the Red River. It comprised the
broad alluvial bottoms, together with occasional hill districts of rich
loam, especially notable among the latter of which were those lying about
Natchez and Vicksburg. The southern end of this area was made available
first, and the hills preceded the delta in popularity for cotton culture.
It was not until the middle thirties that the broadest expanse of the
bottoms, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, began to receive its great influx.
The rest of the western cotton belt had soils varying through much the same
range as those of Georgia and the Carolinas. Except in the bottoms, where
the planters themselves did most of the pioneering, the choicer lands of
the whole district were entered by a pellmell throng of great planters,
lesser planters and small farmers, with the farmers usually a little in
the lead and the planters ready to buy them out of specially rich lands.
Farmers refusing to sell might by their own thrift shortly rise into the
planter class; or if they sold their homesteads at high prices they might
buy slaves with the proceeds and remove to become planters in still newer
districts.

[Footnote 6: This use of the term "black belt" is not to be confused with
the other and more general application of it to such areas in the South at
large as have a majority of negroes in their population.]

The process was that which had already been exemplified abundantly in the
eastern cotton belt. A family arriving perhaps in the early spring with a
few implements and a small supply of food and seed, would build in a few
days a cabin of rough logs with an earthen floor and a roof of bark or of
riven clapboards. To clear a field they would girdle the larger trees and
clear away the underbrush. Corn planted in April would furnish roasting
ears in three months and ripe grain in six weeks more. Game was plenty;
lightwood was a substitute for candles; and housewifely skill furnished
homespun garments. Shelter, food and clothing and possibly a small cotton
crop or other surplus were thus had the first year. Some rested with this;
but the more thrifty would soon replace their cabins with hewn log or frame
houses, plant kitchen gardens and watermelon patches, set out orchards and
increase the cotton acreage. The further earnings of a year or two would
supply window glass, table ware, coffee, tea and sugar, a stock of poultry,
a few hogs and even perhaps a slave or two. The pioneer hardships decreased
and the homely comforts grew with every passing year of thrift. But the
orchard yield of stuff for the still, and the cotton field's furnishing
the wherewithal to buy more slaves, brought temptations. Distilleries and
slaves, a contemporary said, were blessings or curses according as they
were used or abused; for drunkenness and idleness were the gates of the
road to retrogression.[7]