Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (90 page)

But not all the South was Republican, at least not at first. During the 1790s parts of South Carolina had been strongly Federalist, especially the Lowcountry and the city of Charleston.
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By 1800 Charleston had emerged as the most European and the least entrepreneurial-minded city of the large port cities of the United States. In the eighteenth century it had been one of the five largest colonial cities in North America with a flourishing commerce controlled by South Carolinian merchant-planters. But by the early nineteenth century merchants from the North and from Europe had taken over the city’s countinghouses, and the Carolinian nabobs who had once been merchants became increasingly disdainful of all those who were engaged in trade.
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The swampy land of the Carolina Lowcountry tended to breed mosquitoes and malaria, which encouraged white families to abandon the area in the summer months. Consequently, many of the Lowcountry planters became absentee owners of their plantations, with hired white overseers managing the many black slaves. The early nineteenth century was the golden age for these sea island Carolina planters, who by 1810 owned over two hundred plantations, each with a hundred slaves or more. Although the Lowcountry had only one-fifth of the state’s population, it contained three-fourths of its wealth. Its slaveholding planting class built huge mansions, bought elegant furniture, drank and ate the best of everything, dressed in the latest London fashions, intermarried with one another, voted for Federalists, and made believe they were English aristocrats.

In the coastal areas of the Lowcountry, where water was readily available, rice remained the principal staple, but planters in the lowlands also began turning to cotton, the long staple sort that was ideal for lace or fine linens. Although the long-staple cotton was lucrative, it was hard to grow and flourished only in the coastal areas. Many Carolinians would have liked to grow the short-staple cotton, which was appropriate for coarse fabrics and potentially very profitable, but they did not yet know how to process it easily. Separating the seeds from the cotton fibers by hand was so time-consuming and labor-intensive that results were measured in ounces rather than pounds.

Although sooner or later someone would have found a way to mechanize the process, it was left to a Massachusetts-born Yale graduate with an acute mechanical aptitude, Eli Whitney, to acquire the financial backing of Catherine Littlefield Greene, widow of General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, and come up with his invention of a cotton gin in 1793. His machine solved the perennial problem of removing seeds from the short-staple cotton; it, said Whitney, “required the labor of one man to turn it and with which one man will clean ten times as much cotton as he can in any other way before now, and also cleanse it much better than in the usual mode.” Planters pirated Whitney’s design and built large gins (short for engine) to process huge amounts of cotton. By 1805, in a little over a decade, cotton production in the South had multiplied thirty-fold, from two million pounds to sixty million pounds a year.
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The cotton gin turned the Carolina Upcountry into the greatest cotton producing area in the country. Prior to the 1790s the region had been dominated by yeoman farmers with few slaves raising tobacco for a little cash. By 1815 the interior of the state was full of small slaveholding cotton-producing planters, all eager to become aristocratic gentry like those of the Lowcountry. Cotton-production needed slaves, and the numbers multiplied dramatically. In 1790 five-sixths of all of the state’s slaves had belonged to Lowcountry plantations; by 1820 most of the state’s slaves were working in the Upcountry.
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From Carolina and Georgia, cotton and slavery soon moved to the new territories of the Southwest. Planters in the Natchez region quickly abandoned indigo and tobacco for the much more lucrative cotton. As early as 1800 a traveling minister in Mississippi noted that cotton was “now the staple commodity in the territory.” Merchants
from New Orleans began furiously competing with one another to line up contracts with cotton-producing planters. Since everyone presumed that only slaves could work the cotton fields, any effort to limit slavery in the Southwest was met with fierce opposition. The planters declared that without slaves, “the farms in this District would be but little more value by 1810 to the present occupiers than an equal quantity of waste land.” In 1799 a Mississippi planter told his relatives back in Virginia to sell his property in Richmond and buy slaves. “I would take two Negros for it,” he said. “They would here sell for 1,000 or 1200 Dollars.” Everywhere in the Upper South increasing numbers of slaveholders either pulled up stakes and moved with their slaves to Mississippi or sold slaves at great profit to friends and relatives who were settling in the new territory. Between 1800 and 1810 the slave population of the Mississippi Territory increased from about thirty-five hundred to nearly seventeen thousand, with most of them producing cotton.
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In Orleans Territory sugar became the principal crop, especially following the slave rebellion and the collapse of the economy in Saint-Domingue. By 1802 seventy-five sugar plantations bordering the Mississippi River in lower Louisiana and staffed by slaves produced more than five million pounds of sugar annually; by 1810 sugar production had doubled. With rising sugar profits, the population of the area increased rapidly, with the number of slaves growing faster than the white population. In 1806 the
Louisiana Gazette
reminded slave-owners in the “middle and southern states” (identifying, as Washington had, the Upper South with the middle states) that the Orleans Territory offered “an outlet for the superabundance of their black population, and an extravagant price for what will shortly be to them, an incumbrance instead of an advantage.” Slaves were flooded into Louisiana, turning New Orleans into one of the major slave markets in America. By 1810 New Orleans had become the largest city south of Baltimore and the fifth largest in the nation. By 1812 Louisiana had become a state.
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I
N THE
S
OUTH AND
S
OUTHWEST
there was democracy of a sort: some legislative elections, usually full white manhood suffrage, much talk of equal rights, and many rhetorical denunciations of “aristocrats.” Beneath these democratic and egalitarian trappings, however, the politics
of these Southern and Southwestern areas continued to be remarkably traditional and hierarchical.

Virginia’s popular government, for example, bore little resemblance to the popular governments of New England. Not only was voting still confined to fifty-acre freeholders and done orally, but the wealthy Tidewater planters retained a disproportionate representation in the legislature. “The haughty and purse-proud landlords,” noted a Massachusetts visitor, “form an aristocracy over the dependent democracy.”
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While this was no doubt an exaggeration that only a frosty Yankee could make, it contained more than a grain of truth. Unlike in the Northern states, the only elected officials in Virginia were federal congressmen and state legislators; all the rest were either selected by the legislature or appointed by the governor or the county courts, which were self-perpetuating oligarchies that dominated local government. Thus popular democratic politics in Virginia and elsewhere in the South was severely limited, especially in contrast to the states of the North, where nearly all state and local offices had become elective and the turbulence of politics and the turnover of offices were much greater.

Like Virginia, the other Southern states and territories—Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi—continued to rely on mostly appointed local officials with the legislatures very much in control of government. Although the big slaveholding planters did not dominate all the political offices in these states, they set the tone for their societies; unlike in the North, where lawyers tended to dominate officeholding, many of the officeholders in these Southern and Southwestern states were themselves slaveholding farmers, with a vested interest in the institution of slavery.

That institution tended to create a different economy, society, politics, and culture than the North. While the North was coming to value labor as fit for all social ranks, much of the white population of the South was becoming more and more contemptuous of work and desirous of acquiring the leisure that slavery seemed to offer. Indeed, so great was the white cult of indolence that some Southerners began to worry about the discrepancy between an industrious North and a lethargic South. “Where there is Negro slavery,” one concerned Virginian told Madison, “there will be laziness, carelessness, and wastefulness,” not as much among the slaves as among the white masters. This Virginian even claimed that “our
intelligent Negroes are far superior in mind, morals and manners than those who are placed in authority over them.”
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Slavery and the Southern economy tended to breed deference. Not only did the wealthy slaveholding planters’ management of the overseas marketing of the staple crop, whether cotton or tobacco, help to reinforce a social hierarchy of patrons and clients, but ultimately, and more important, their patriarchal system of slavery sustained that hierarchy. The commercial institutions that were springing up in the North had no counterparts in the Southern states. The South contained fewer turnpikes, fewer canals, fewer banks, fewer corporations, and fewer issuers of paper money than the North. Slavery even perversely affected the tax system and other public policies in the South. The Southern legislatures taxed their citizens much less heavily and spent much less on education and social services than did the legislatures of the North. “Slavery,” as one historian has said, “had profoundly antidemocratic effects on American politics.” The Southern planters could not afford to allow non-slaveholding majorities in their states to burden their peculiar “species of property,” and they used their disproportionate representation in their state legislatures to protect themselves. For example, even though slaves made up only 16 percent of Kentucky’s population, the minority of slaveholders in the state were able to write into Kentucky’s 1792 constitution the nation’s first explicit protection of slavery, declaring that “the legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves without the consent of their owners.”
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In the early Republic North and South may have been both American and republican, both professing a similar rhetoric of liberty and popular government, but below the surface they were fast becoming different places—one coming to value common labor as the supreme human activity, the other continuing to think of labor in traditional terms as mean and despicable and fit only for slaves.

A
S THE SECTIONS
gradually grew apart, each began expressing increasing frustration with the other, aggravating an antagonism that had been present from the beginning of the Revolution. Northerners, especially New England Federalists, began to complain about what they saw
as unjustified Southern dominance of the federal government. They focused on the three-fifths clause of the Constitution that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the levying of direct taxes and for assessing representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Since the federal government had seldom directly taxed its citizens and was unlikely to do so very often, representation became the main issue people cared about.

In the Constitutional Convention of 1787 the aristocratic Gouverneur Morris had attacked the three-fifths clause as an unjust support for slavery, one that gave the slave states an incentive to import more slaves. But the Convention had overwhelmingly rejected Morris’s proposal that the slaves not be counted at all, with only New Jersey voting for it. Once that proposal was defeated, the most plausible alternative to the three-fifths clause was to count the slaves as five-fifths, that is, as full persons, which would have given the slaveholding South even more political strength. But that alternative, suggested by both James Madison and John Rutledge, went nowhere. Caught between not counting the slaves at all and counting them fully, the Convention wrote the three-fifths compromise into the Constitution.

In 1787–1788 most Northern Federalists like Rufus King accepted the three-fifths compromise as the necessary price to be paid to keep the South in the Union. But with the rise of the Republican opposition in the 1790s climaxing with the election of Jefferson and a Republican Congress in 1800, the Federalists began to change their minds. They realized only too well that the Jeffersonian Republican party was Southern based and was solidly dependent on Southern slaveholding leadership. The fact that Jefferson won the election of 1800 with 82 percent of the electoral vote of the slave states and only 27 percent of the Northern states reinforced the Federalists’ fear that the South was taking over the nation; indeed, the Federalists came to believe that their displacement from the national government was due almost entirely to the overrepresentation of the South in Congress and the Electoral College. Federalists like Timothy Pickering, the former secretary of state, began referring to Jefferson as the “Negro President” and began urging that the Constitution be amended to end this Southern dominance.
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Thus was born the idea of the “slave power” that was unfairly usurping control of the national government from the free states.
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The fact that
Pickering and other Federalists tended to lump the free middle states, especially Pennsylvania, in with the Southern states as part of the Negro-based Republican takeover of the government reduces somewhat the cogency of their argument. But that may be less important than the politics of the matter. The Federalists needed an issue to combat the victorious Republicans, and their principled stand against slavery was the most effective means of mobilizing opposition to the Republicans in the North—at least until Jefferson in 1807 tried his disastrous experiment with the embargo that cut off all overseas trade.