Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (87 page)

By the eve of the Revolution white North American colonists possessed 460,000 African American slaves, about a fifth of the total population. Most were held in the South. In 1770 the largest colony, Virginia, had about 188,000 black slaves, slightly more than 40 percent of the colony’s total population of 447,000. In 1770 South Carolina had the highest proportion of African American slaves to whites, 60 percent, or 75,000, of the total population of 124,000. In these Southern colonies slavery lay at the heart of the economy. The master-slave relationship supplied the standard for all other social relationships.

As it had been from the beginning in the seventeenth century, the South’s economy was based on the production and sale of staple crops—exotic agricultural goods that commanded special significance in international markets. Each of the South’s dominant slaveholding areas—the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry of South Carolina—had developed its own peculiar primary staple crop adapted to its climate and landscape, tobacco in the case of the Chesapeake and rice and indigo in the case of South Carolina.

Although both staples lent themselves to the development of plantation slave labor, they created different kinds of plantations and different
systems of slavery. Because of the nature of tobacco production, the plantations in the Chesapeake tended to be much smaller with many fewer slaves than those in South Carolina. On the eve of the Revolution less than 30 percent of the slaves in the Chesapeake area lived on plantations with twenty or more slaves. Indeed, over one-third of the slaves in the Chesapeake resided on small plantations with fewer than ten slaves. Because tobacco exhausted the soil rather rapidly, the small plantations and their labor forces in Virginia had to keep pushing westward in search of fresh lands, creating instability in the lives of both slaves and masters.

Tobacco, moreover, was not always associated with slave labor, and many non-slaveholding white families in the Chesapeake continued to grow it throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. Consequently, slaves in the Chesapeake lived in a world surrounded by whites. No Virginia county contained a majority of blacks. Even in those Virginia counties with the largest numbers of slaves, at least a quarter of the households owned no slaves at all.
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Slavery in the Lowcountry was different. Over 80 percent of the slaves in South Carolina lived on substantial plantations possessing twenty or more slaves. Only a tiny proportion—7 percent—lived on small plantations with fewer than ten slaves. Unlike tobacco, rice cultivation required sizeable plantations; two-thirds of those in South Carolina exceeded five hundred acres. Rice was more laborious to produce than tobacco. One observer of the Lowcountry in 1775 noted that “the labour required for [rice] is only fit for slaves, and I think the hardest work I have seen them engaged in.”
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Unlike tobacco, rice did not exhaust the soil, and the need alternately to flood and drain the rice fields with tidewater meant that Lowcountry plantations necessarily remained close to estuaries. Consequently, the slaves and their descendants in South Carolina had a greater chance to remain on the same plantation for longer periods than was the case in Virginia. And they had fewer whites around them than in the Chesapeake. By 1790 eleven of the eighteen rural parishes of the Carolina Lowcountry were more than 80 percent black.

There were other differences. The Chesapeake plantations were much more diversified than those in Carolina, many of them growing wheat and other foodstuffs in addition to tobacco. In fact, in the decades leading
up to the Revolution more and more of the Virginia plantations, like Washington’s Mount Vernon, began to replace tobacco with wheat. The spread of wheat production changed the nature of the skills the Chesapeake slaves needed. They had to learn to plow and take care of oxen and horses, which in turn required the growing of hay and other fodder and the manuring of land.

By the late eighteenth century the wheat-producing plantations in Virginia and Maryland had become highly organized operations with the slaves involved in a variety of specialized tasks. Growing wheat in place of tobacco, the planters began calling themselves “farmers,” with their slaves becoming farm workers instead of plantation hands. Because the more diversified agriculture required less labor, many of the Chesapeake farmers began hiring out their slaves. This practice in turn suggested to some in the Upper South that slavery might eventually be replaced by wage labor.
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The Chesapeake slaves also engaged in many more diverse crafts than their counterparts in the Deep South. The British traveler Isaac Weld noted that the leading Chesapeake planters “have nearly everything they can want on their own estates. Amongst their slaves are found tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, turners, wheelwrights, weavers, tanners, etc.”
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While the Virginia slaves tended to supply many of the needs of their plantations, the situation was different in the Deep South. Rice was a more lucrative crop than tobacco; throughout the eighteenth century the profits from rice had accounted for one-half to two-thirds of the annual value of South Carolina’s exports.
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As a consequence, few South Carolina plantations were willing to sacrifice rice production in order to diversify and produce other goods, including provisions. In 1774 the manager of two Lowcountry plantations warned the owner against planting corn to supply food for the plantations. “If more corn is to be raised there than common, there must of consequence less Rice be planted, and the latter is the most profitable Grain.” Instead, the manager urged that corn be purchased from the backcountry.
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Perhaps the most important distinction between the slave populations of the two regions was the different ways the two societies produced their slaves. On the eve of the Revolution over 90 percent of Virginia’s slaves were American born and had assimilated much of Anglo-American culture, including the English language. To supply itself with slaves Virginia had come to rely on the fertility of the large number of its native-born female slaves, who had come to equal the males in number; by the time of the Revolution Virginia had stopped importing slaves and never again resumed importing them.

By contrast, only 65 percent of South Carolina’s slaves were native born; over a third had been born in Africa. In the several decades following the Revolution South Carolina continued to import slaves, bringing in as many as seventy thousand, some from the West Indies, most of them from Africa. Indeed, South Carolina imported more slaves than any other colony on the North American mainland. Since most of the slaves brought into South Carolina from Africa were male adults, the natural growth of the slave population in the colony and state was retarded—the presence of a large number of native-born female slaves being the key to natural growth.

By the time the international slave trade was legally prohibited in 1808, South Carolina had imported about twice as many slaves as Virginia, even though its slave population of two hundred thousand was only half that of Virginia’s. South Carolina’s greater reliance on importation gave its slave society and culture an African tone and character that did not exist to the same degree in the Chesapeake. Most of the slaves in the Carolina Lowcountry carved out a distinctive culture for themselves, including not only their own African-English hybrid language, Gullah, but their own styles of personal display, including the wearing of beards and jewelry. Actually, everywhere in America the black slaves worked out their own syncretic forms for their African American culture—in their music, religion, funerals, humor, and entertainments. Whites had an especially hard time making sense of the dancing, singing, and rejoicing that took place at black funerals; they tended to dismiss these practices as “festive accompaniments” without realizing they were a ritual celebration of the deceased’s journey back “home” to Africa.
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The nature of the staple also gave the Lowcountry Carolina slaves greater autonomy than their counterparts in the Chesapeake. Since producing rice did not require close supervision, the white planters came to rely on a task system of labor. Giving the slaves tasks to complete allowed the slaves who worked quickly opportunities for free time to grow their own crops or to produce goods for themselves or for sale. In 1796 the South Carolina legislature attempted to regulate this practice of the slaves selling and buying their own goods and thus implicitly legitimated it.
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Slaves in Virginia had no such free time and had much more difficulty earning extra money for themselves. Since tobacco needed considerable care and attention, producing it required a very different system of labor management. White planters in the Chesapeake relied on gang labor for the production of tobacco—using small units of closely supervised laborers who worked from sunup to sundown with no incentive to work quickly. Consequently, Chesapeake slaves developed all sorts of resourceful methods of malingering and shirking the work, frustrating their masters to no end.

Washington concluded that his slaves worked four times as fast when he was directly supervising them than when he was absent. Try as he might, he was never able to get his slaves to work efficiently, which was one of the initial reasons he came to oppose the institution. He realized that the slaves had no incentive to work hard and develop “a
good
name” for themselves. This he thought was slavery’s greatest single flaw as a system of labor. He believed that people strove to do well in life in order to win the respect of others. But slaves had no opportunity to win respect or earn good reputations; hence their presumed lack of ambition. He often wondered what they might accomplish if they were free men.
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Although masters and slaves often developed close and sometimes even affectionate relationships, especially in the Chesapeake area, no one ever forgot that the entire system rested on violence and brute force. Masters in South Carolina sometimes branded their slaves and punished them with a ferocity that outsiders found appalling. Four hundred lashes washed down with salt and water was considered “but Slite punishment” compared to the ingenious cruelties some planters could think up to inflict on their disobedient slaves, including, as one observer noted, putting a slave “on the picket with his Left Hand tied to his left toe behind him and Right hand to the post and his Right foot on the pickets till it worked through his foot.”
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Although master-slave relations were more brutal and more impersonal in the Lowcountry than in the Chesapeake, everywhere the slave system bred a pervasive sense of hierarchy. “Societies of men could not subsist unless there were a subordination of one to another,” declared a Virginia lawyer in 1772. “That in this subordination the department of slaves must be filled by some, or there would be a defect in the scale of order.”
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More than anything else, that sense of hierarchy separated the Southern states from those of the North.

O
F COURSE, THERE WERE ALWAYS MASTERS
who took advantage of this subordination, especially with their female slaves. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, the incidence of whites having slave concubines was often casually accepted and even treated with amusement. This was largely because whites and slaves tended to live farther apart from one another, and thus miscegenation was not as widespread as it was in the Chesapeake. In Virginia, where whites and slaves lived more closely together, such racial mixing became more common with increasing numbers of mulattos.
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The Virginian Thomas Jefferson certainly lived among many mulattos. His father-in-law, John Wayles, had six children with a mulatto slave, Betty Hemings. When Jefferson married Wayles’s daughter, Martha, these enslaved children, including the quadroon Sally Hemings, passed to Jefferson. Although the evidence is now overwhelming that Jefferson was sexually involved with Sally Hemings, that may be less important than the fact that miscegenation was part of his family and going on all around him at Monticello.
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That alone may help explain Jefferson’s deep fear of racial mixing.

Jefferson was in most respects a typical slaveholder. Although he always condemned slavery, he did own one of the largest slave populations in Virginia. Upon the division of his father-in-law’s estate in 1774 he became, in fact, the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County. Thereafter the number of his slaves remained around two hundred—with increases through births offset by periodic sales to pay off debts. Jefferson was known to be a good master, reluctant to break up families or to sell slaves except for delinquency or at their own request. Nevertheless, between 1784 and 1794 he disposed of 161 people by sale or gift. It is true that
Jefferson was averse to separating young children from their parents; but once slave boys or girls reached the age of ten or twelve and their working lives began, they were no longer children in Jefferson’s mind.

Monticello was a working plantation, and Jefferson was eager to make it pay. His slaves may have been members of his “family,” but they were units of production as well. Everywhere on his plantation he sought to eliminate pockets of idleness. If a slave was too old or too sick to work in the fields, he or she was put to tending the vegetable gardens or to cooking in the quarters. When one of his former head men named Nace became ill, Jefferson ordered that he be “entirely kept from labour until he recovers”; nevertheless, Nace was to spend his days indoors shelling corn or making shoes or baskets. Jefferson was willing to prescribe lighter work for women who were pregnant or raising infant children because they were actually breeding more property; thus, said Jefferson, “a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” This was one of the times, he said, when “providence has made our interest and our duties coincide perfectly.”
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