Chapter Twenty Four: A Presentation of Slavery in North America
During the British colonization of North America, slavery existed up and down the Atlantic Coast. In the North, most slaves were artisans, house servants, and general laborers. A huge concentration of slaves existed in the cities. In fact, in the early 18th century, more than 40 percent of New York City households owned or rented slaves, second only to Charleston, South Carolina. Slaves were also used as agricultural workers, especially in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. Meanwhile, the South developed an agricultural economy dependent on cash crops and intense labor. Initially, slaves primarily grew indigo, rice, and tobacco on plantations. Long-staple cotton was cultivated on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. Slavery was so ingrained in southern culture that in 1720, nearly two-thirds of South Carolinians were slaves. Planters with 20 or more slaves dominated southern politics, most living in or near port cities. In the Appalachian Mountains, with much rockier soil, slaves were considered luxury items.
By the time the Constitutional Convention began in 1787, all thirteen states, except Georgia and South Carolina, either limited or banned the importation of African slaves into their domains. The SAC, however, re-legalized the slave trade in its borders. When all was said and done (through the 19th century), about six percent of the roughly twelve million slaves taken from Africa to the Americas landed in mainland British North America, with most of those imported from the British Caribbean instead of Africa itself. On the other hand, the vast majority of slaves exported from Africa were shipped off to sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil. As life expectancy was much shorter due to harsher conditions, their numbers had to be continually replenished. Unlike slaves in the tropics, the life expectancy of slaves was higher in continental North America and the slave population increased naturally. In 1790, the population grew so much that there were more than 750,000 slaves in North America.
Upon the outbreak of the American Revolution, many slaves seized the opportunity to escape the plantations and into cities or the woods. In South Carolina alone, nearly 25,000 slaves fled, migrated, or died during the war. Losses were high across the South, with others also fleeing the Mid-Atlantic and New England. In 1781, the British evacuated 20,000 freedmen from major coastal cities, transporting them to Canada, the British Caribbean, or Great Britain itself. As most patriotic states outlawed the importation of slaves, the northern states began moving to abolish slavery altogether. Between 1780 and 1804, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey all either outright abolished slavery or passed gradual emancipation acts. Vermont had abolished slavery before its admittance into the Union in 1791. Only Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and North Virginia still had slavery on their books by 1808.
The year 1787 was the tipping point for North America. Up until that point, slavery was largely unregulated on a nationwide and continent-wide scale. The only thing before the Conisituiaonl Convention that directly addressed slavery was The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which said that new states created from this territory would be admitted as gree states. The Articles of Confederation, published in 1781, did not mention slavery and left the power to regulate it to individual states. Predictably, after the Revolution, the former British colonists did not trust the idea of a strong central government to do things like abolish slavery. Because of this, each state only had one vote in Congress to prevent the government from getting too much power. This caused things to come to a head in 1787. During the constitutional Convention that summer, there were two massive debates.
The first debate was over the representation of states in Congress. The Virginia Plan, written by James Madison, called for representation based on population. This was supported by slave states to ensure as much representation of their interests as possible. In response, William Paterson wrote out the New Jersey Plan, calling for equal representation for all states in the Union. This was especially popular with the northern states. What resulted was a bicameral legislature with an Upper House (Senate) with equal representation and the Lower House (House of Representatives) with representation based on population.
Then came contention over how to count slaves. Southern states wanted their slaves counted to ensure as many votes in Congress as possible, while northern states considered slaves as property and opposed this. Originally, a compromise where slaves would count as three-fifths of a person was proposed, but was soon shot down. After more bickering, the delegates from Georgia and the Carolinas would walk out of the Convention. Virginia and Maryland tried to follow them out the door, only to be stopped by James Madison and George Washington. The issue of slavery pulled America apart in Philadelphia in a tug of war for power. At the time, it seemed like the end of the world. As time went on, though, people on both sides of the border began to think that perhaps this was a good thing, saving the continent from a much more violent conflict down the line.
Between large numbers of runaway slaves and decreasing prices of important crops, some southern masters were even starting to free their slaves and preparing for a bleak future. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 changed the game by allowing for mass production of short-staple cotton outside of coastal areas. This caused the spread of slavery through the Deep South and a revival in the upper country where it was beginning to die. When the USA abolished the slave trade in 1808, Charleston was by far the biggest destination for imported slaves, although there was quite a bit of smuggling via Spanish Florida. Even by the standards of the time, Virginia and Cumberland had little new agricultural developments as tobacco production had fallen below cotton production in monetary value and the climate was not valuable for either cotton or sugarcane. In general, slavery was on the upswing in the SoCon with no signs of slowing down in most portions of the land.