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Slavery

When the North American continent was first colonized by Europeans, the land was vast, the work was harsh, and there was a severe shortage of labor. Men and women were needed to work the land. White bond servants, paying their passage across the ocean from Europe through indentured labor, eased but did not solve the problem. Early in the seventeenth century, a Dutch ship loaded with African slaves introduced a solution—and a new problem—to the New World. Slaves were most economical on large farms where labor-intensive cash crops, such as tobacco, could be grown.

By the end of the American Revolution, slavery had proven unprofitable in the North and was dying out. Even in the South the institution was becoming less useful to farmers as tobacco prices fluctuated and began to drop. However, in 1793 Northerner Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin; this device made it possible for textile mills to use the type of cotton most easily grown in the South.

Cotton replaced tobacco as the South’s main cash crop and slavery became profitable again. Although most Southerners owned no slaves at all, by 1860 the South’s “peculiar institution” was inextricably tied to the region’s economy.

Torn between the economic benefits of slavery and the moral and constitutional issues it raised, white Southerners grew more and more defensive of the institution. They argued that black people, like children, were incapable of caring for themselves and that slavery was a benevolent institution that kept them fed, clothed, and occupied. Most Northerners did not doubt that black people were inferior to whites, but they did doubt the benevolence of slavery. The voices of Northern abolitionists, such as Boston editor and publisher William Lloyd Garrison, became increasingly violent. Educated blacks such as escaped-slave Frederick Douglass wrote eloquent and heartfelt attacks on the institution.

The Underground Railroad was organized to help slaves escape north to freedom. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, refuted the Southern myth that blacks were happy as slaves.

In reality, treatment of slaves ranged from mild and paternalistic to cruel and sadistic. Husbands, wives, and children were frequently sold away from one another and punishment by whipping was not unusual. The United States Supreme Court in the 1857 Dred Scott Decision ruled that slaves were subhuman property with no rights of citizenship.  They had no legal means of protesting the way they were treated. Southerners feared open rebellion but this was rare. However, slaves would pretend illness, organize slowdowns, sabotage farm machinery, and sometimes commit arson or murder. Running away, usually for short periods of time, was common.

—Sources: Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War edited by Patricia L. Faust (Harper Perennial, 1991), Encyclopedia of the Civil War edited by John S. Bowman (Dorset Press, 1992), and The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton (Bonanza Books, 1982).

Eyewitness to Slavery

During an interview conducted in 1940 about slave life, these two ex-slaves demonstrated a song they knew from the Civil War era. The song lyrics (about waking up Sally) are less important than the strong rhythms, which offered a beat to work by. 

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"My first name, what my mother named me, is Mitchell, Mitchell Watkins. That’s what my mother and father named me and I was raised in—born in Africa and come to the United States and stayed. That was in slavery times. They sold the colored people and they brought me from Africa. I was a child...treated me just like he treated his children in everything—not one thing, everything. We ate together, we slept together."

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"And I remember when she used to plow. I plowed, I plowed often myself. (Is that right?) I can probably lay off a corn row as good as any man. (Is that right?) Course I can. (Well then, good for you.) Pick cotton, I used to pick a lot of...I lived here, since I been here [illegible] picked my five hundred pounds of cotton."

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"If my master wanted to send me, he never said...You couldn’t get a horse and ride, you’d walk, you know it, you’d walk. You’d be barefooted and cold. Well, that didn’t make no difference. You wasn’t no more than a dog to some of them in them days. You wasn’t treated as good as they treat dogs now. But still, I don’t like to talk about it. Because it makes, makes people feel bad, you know. If I thought—had any idea—that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away. Because you’re nothing but a dog. Time to cut tobacco—if they want you to cut all night long out in the field, you cut. And if they want you to hang all night long, you hang, hang tobacco. It didn’t matter about you’re tired. Being tired, you’re afraid to say you’re tired."

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"Tend to the children. Just like, you know, you’d bring a whole lot of children, you know, and put them down, you know, in one house. Well, then somebody’d have to look over them, you know, and tend to them that way—just a house full of little children. And if one act bad, you know, they’d whip him, they’d whip him too—and the old woman. And if the old woman didn’t tend to the children, they’d whip, they’d whip her too, you know, to make her tend to the children if she wasn’t doing nothing."

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"I washed and ironed. Some days I’d wash a hundred pieces. Every morning I’d have five beds to make up, five fires to make, and the children to dress and churning to do. And after that, well then, I’d have some parts of the day, but I had all that to do everyday."

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Excerpts of tape-recorded interviews with ex-slaves conducted in the 1940s. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.