PART I
In the mid-1850s, a tourist circling the various Souths could informatively guess about whether a South might emerge. The trip was popular. Published travel accounts about it sold well, especially Frederick Law Olmsted’s. A historian, lacking Olmsted’s opportunity to interview the then-living, must rely largely on written records such as Olmsted’s.
More vivid remains also help reanimate bygone times. A latter-day sojourner can experience southern climates and topographies now exactly as Southerners felt geographic forces then. Many buildings on plantations and in cities have been restored to antebellum appearances. One can still ride old steamboats down the Mississippi, still stay overnight in plantation Big Houses, still stroll through old Charleston, old Natchez, old Savannah. If a historian spends a day, for example, moving from the exquisite gardens of the Louisiana plantation restoration, Rosedown, to the rich manuscripts at the Louisiana State University Library at Baton Rouge, to the haunting church graveyard at St. Francisville, physical and literary artifacts breathe life into each other. After many such days in many parts of the South, the lost world almost seems palpably to loom, daring a traveler from another century to find that South.
CHAPTER 1
Exotic cultures, like flamboyant lovers, may appear simple at first. Travelers, senses altered and assaulted, see only the obvious. For a fleeting moment, cultural identity seems clear. Only later do subtleties and confusions intrude.1
1
First impressions of the South in the mid-1850s were sharpest on a summer day in the most tropical South’s most enslaved, so-called black-belt regions. The very air there made southernness distinctive. Humidity pressed down, warning the speedy that they rushed toward exhaustion. Quiet strolls produced drenching sweat. In the fields, laborers moved indolently, glistening as they toiled. More fortunate citizens wandered about, listlessly hunting a breeze. Even omnipresent, oversized insects seemed to prefer a squashing underfoot to energetic hustle.
In early springtime first impressions were more delightful. Fugitives from packed-down slush on northern streets found a seeming blanket of snow on Deep South trees. The white blossoms of the dogwood created the illusion. Beneath the trees, blossoms of a dozen hues covered azalea bushes. That pungent scent came from purple wisteria, fragrant with the promise of seduction. Majestic live oaks presided, green even when shedding, dripping with mournful moss, as if both exalting and grieving over the persistence of the South.
Southerners lacked such fantasies. They were too rural a folk, too close to the earth. They were too afflicted by tropical caprice: by searing droughts, flooding rains, murderous epidemics. But in the glory of the spring, southern thoughts turned romantic amidst the buds and blossoms.
Or did slaves, more than tropical profusions, make southernness instantly distinctive? To a Yankee freshly arrived in a plantation area, the numbers of blacks seemed a fantasy. Slaves, appearing to outnumber white superiors, moved gracefully, as if to some internal beat. They also shuffled about, as if will-less puppets. They seemed at once cowed by and somehow free of those they called Massa.
Tinges of freedom seeped out in blacks’ churches. Nothing here smacked of prim upper-class white services. Nor did truly black religion resemble the charades at plantation churches, where white missionaries catechized drowsing slaves on Christ’s command that servants obey masters. A very different black evangelical service struck travelers as a “real African tornado.” Here black preachers conjured up a black Moses who would, in a life beyond life, lead his people to the promised land. As preachers offered freedom, not now but soon, shouts of “Hallelujah” erupted. All around pandemonium reigned: worshipers weeping, bodies twisted, men writhing on the floor, women raising their hands, wails louder, louder, louder.2
Slave religion, with its hint of spirits untamed, contrasted with slave auctions, a taming process no observer dared miss. At a sale, travelers found black males lining one wall, females the other, all faces shining as if newly polished. One young slave, when approached, pointed to “a new wife here in de lot. I wishy you buy her, master, if you gwine to buy me.” A mother with three children, one an infant at breast, had just been sold away from her husband. “My heart was a’most broke,” she sighed.
A dog stood on hind legs. He wolfed a scrap. Slaves, including the mother, laughed. The slave-dealer’s voice, smothering hilarity, put the woman and her three children up for sale. An assistant took “the baby from the woman’s breast,” holding it “aloft… to shew that it was a veritable sucking-baby.” The auctioneer talked up the “capital woman,” hard worker, “still young, and three children” too. He reluctantly accepted an opening $850 bid. He begged “an advance, if you please gentlemen…. Thank you, sir—$860….”3
The tourist knew such smashing of human ties was but part of slavery’s story. Intimacy between owners and slaves also captured attention. In the North, whites shrank from scarce blacks. In the black-belt South, white babies sucked black breasts. White and black lads raced across fields, hugging when they sprawled. On trains, black servants sat by white ladies. All munched candy from the same paper bag. Brown-skinned mulattoes indicated that blacks and whites sometimes more intimately connected. Those proud of being white, dressed curiously in black, enmeshed with slaves in an intoxicating land—might they furtively crave a sensuality they called stained?4
The best way to answer such questions and sort out first impressions was to visit a plantation. A major establishment had at least fifty slaves and a thousand acres. The lovely entrance avenue, lined with perfectly spaced live oak trees, ran past enough buildings to make up a respectable village. Church, school, blacksmith shop, stable, cotton gin, and corn mill created the air of a self-sufficient community. At the head of the avenue stood the patriarch’s white-columned house. The life-style within seemed as far from modernity as the Greek architecture without. “The planter,” exclaimed one traveler, “is a denomadized Arab;—he has fixed himself with horses and slaves in a fertile spot, where he guards his woman with Oriental care, exercises patriarchal sway, and is at once fierce, tender, and hospitable.”5
The hospitality pressed on an outsider could be more fierce than tender. The patriarch might ask his visitor for a first impression. An obvious response, that the place seemed a refuge from modernity, could set off a verbal explosion. One’s host’s words came in a torrent, almost too fast for the slurring drawl, while one slave led away the horse and another brought drinks.* Modernity, ran the diatribe, alias savage competition alias every man an enemy. Modernity—alias money-grubbing alias hustle-bustle alias no time for anything. Modernity—alias Anarchism alias Abolitionism alias unsexed female fanatics—Mark my words, Sir, if we leave this Union, your modern North will erupt in class war. The South, sir, stands for conservatism, hierarchy, and order.6
The scene, viewed from the verandah, looked orderly enough. Slaves labored in small gangs of fewer than twenty workers. A black slave foreman called a driver directed each gang. A white man called an overseer lolled in the shadows, ostensibly driving the drivers. All occasionally glanced up to see if Massa was watching.
The butler, deftly balancing drinks, stepped lively in a uniform a general might envy: clean livery, black boots, white ruffles. The planter signaled him over. Have you ever had a servant like this? the host asked. His father served my father. His son serves my son. He knows we’ll take care of him. We know he’ll serve us. Reciprocal duties. That’s the secret of cooperative community. You Northerners worship mammon alias selfishness alias individualism run amuck. Industrialists starve their “wage slaves.” We treasure our family servants.
The tirade brought to mind proslavery books read before coming to Dixie. Southern defenses swiftly turned into inflamed offenses—assaults on all aspects of free labor society. Polemics for slave labor, when perused back home, had been easy to dismiss. On a planter’s verandah the plantation mystique seemed more compelling.
The planter, marshaling evidence, nodded towards slave cabins, with vegetable gardens out front. Over there, boasted the squire, my fellows grow crops after hours and sell products to buy extras. The planter turned towards his butler, whom he called Pompey. Northerners think all men hate to be slaves. Would you prefer to be free? The answer, shot back as from a robot, had the air of echoing through the South under circumstances like these. O no Massa, me no want to be free, have good Massa, you never abuse niggers; no, me no want to be free.
How, one wondered, did Pompey’s statement square with slave sales, broken families, yonder lash? Once again, words drawled out, another speech bearing the sound of rote. Never sell ’em if I can help it. Hate to see families broken up. When black wives are sold away from husbands or children, we scorn the fiend who does it. We ostracize the monster, Sir. Does wonders. No man can stand condemnation from his peers.
The whip? Does slaves good to cuff ’em when they’re sassy. Does children good too to spank ’em when they’re nasty. Sure, occasionally some bullying overseer lays on too many licks. But some parents spank too hard too. Some husbands beat wives. Who would dream of abolishing spanking or marriage? Who besides unsexed fanatics?!
Fact is, we don’t need to whip often. Our people respond to kindness. Just last week, a free black asked to be re-enslaved. Northerners can’t fathom that. Yanks can’t comprehend why our wives stay alone with darkies either.
The reference to wives led the mind back to mulattoes. A discreet inquiry produced a suspicious glare and another answer which seemed repeated for the hundredth time. More of that than we like. I hate seein’ white blood polluted by black. But it’s them poor whites and overseers and Yankees come south that done it. Slavery keeps away more disgustin’ mixin’. Keeps white women pure. Free slaves and we’d have riot and amalgamation. Would be disgustin’, Sir, disgustin’. We’d have to flee.
Moving inside for dinner, one gasped at the affluence—dark polished furniture, marble mantles, intricately wrought chandeliers. The feast was abundant—quail from the woods, fish from the river, fragrant French wine. Was slavery, then, a profitable system?
Sometimes. Depends on the weather and market. I manage. I feed my people and help fill the world with cotton. Slavery solves the labor problem for us, Sir. Whites can’t stand our tropical sun. No white man shines my boots or works my fields. All whites are equal. All blacks are slaves. Everything here is in its place.
Is that, one speculated aloud, why nonslaveholders supported the system? Reckon. Black slavery perfects white equality. No white, no matter how depraved, wants black marrin’ white. No white, no matter how poor, wants to complete with poor blacks. All whites, no matter how wealthy, share with each other. I gin my neighbors’ cotton for them free. Can’t be no fussin where all blacks are slaves and all whites are equals.
Saying farewell, no Southerner could resist a final peroration. We’re a proud people, Sir. Can’t stand insults. Ain’t going to tolerate abolitionizing fanatics. Tell people up North to hush, Sir, hush. Mind their own business. Cause if they keep up their cant, going be blood, Sir, blood, blood flowing all across the land.
Riding away, thinking about a black-belt neighborhood, certain images predominated: a romantic land, agrarian, tropical, conservative, sensual yet repressed, cruel yet humane. Above all, dominated by masters possessed by a vision: of racial control, of benevolent hierarchy, of scrupulous order. They were provincial, suspicious, aggressively defensive. They would lay down their lives to ward off meddling outsiders. After a day in their neighborhood, how could anyone, ever, fail to see the South?
2
First impressions usually retain saving truth. If compelled to choose between a South massed behind a consolidated ruling class and a region where nonslaveholders verged on revolt against divided rulers, informed observers would have gone for the monolith. But slaveholders were too wise to settle for that simplicity. They wove their history around an understanding that theirs was a class and a section uncomfortably unperfected.
Travelers who journeyed most widely in the antebellum South best understood that apprehension. Cracks in the slaveholding class separated not planters from neighboring magnates but Alabama cotton nabobs from South Carolina rice squires, from Virginia tobacco barons, and from Missouri hemp titans. The deepest antagonisms between rich and poor occurred not between a black-belt aristocrat and a neighboring redneck but between planters living way south in areas black with slaves and nonslaveholders living close to the North in all-white neighborhoods. The largest southern question was whether the ruling class could overcome geographic barriers fracturing the class and isolating masters from the most disaffected nonmasters.
Such geographic obstacles hardly created “proslavery” versus “antislavery” Souths. Southerners differed over whether bondage should last decades or forever, over whether perpetuating slavery should be the highest or a somewhat lesser priority, over whether slavery could be terminated under the right conditions or whether no conditions could be right. A geographic formula summed up these differences. The further north the southern state, the cooler the clime, the fewer the slaves, and the lower the relative commitment to perpetuating bondage. Or to put it the other way, the further towards the tropics, the more torrid the weather, the more omnipresent the serviles, and the higher the likelihood that permanent slavery would seem more important than anything. Southern states’ northern and southern boundaries divided Dixie into three rough zones, three layers of states running from the Atlantic Ocean on the east past the Mississippi River to the west, piled atop each other like a crooked three-step ladder, and growing less fiery about perpetuating slavery with each step up.
The most southern layer of slave states, the so-called Deep or Lower South, usually bordered on the Gulf of Mexico. The Lower South ran from South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia on the east through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana to Texas on the west. Here, plantations were prevalent and cotton was often king. In the Lower South, Disunionists would triumph after Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860.
The most northern layer of slave states, the so-called Border South, bordered on northern, free labor states. The Border South ran from Delaware and Maryland on the east through Kentucky to Missouri on the west. Here, plantations were scarcer and cotton cultivation almost nonexistent. In the Border South, Unionists would overcome Disunionists even after Civil War began.
The middle layer of slave states, cutting between Border South and Lower South, was usually called, appropriately, the Middle South. This tier stretched from Virginia and North Carolina on the east through Tennessee to Arkansas on the west. Each Middle South state contained one part resembling more the Lower South, another part resembling more the Border South. Eastern Virginia and western Tennessee had many plantations. Western Virginia and eastern Tennessee had few. In the Middle South, Unionists would triumph after Lincoln was elected and Disunionists would prevail after Civil War began. Then western Virginia would secede from eastern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee’s Andrew Johnson would refuse to secede from the United States Senate. The Middle South was truly a land between.
Statistics in the federal census formed a guidebook to the various Souths.7 In 1850, more than 21% of Border South blacks but less than 2% of Lower South blacks were free. Forty-six percent of southern free blacks lived in the Border South, compared with 15% in the Lower South. On the other hand, but 12% of southern enslaved blacks lived in the Border South, compared with 55% in the Lower South. In 1850, slaves comprised 17% of the Border South’s population, compared with 30% in the Middle South and 47% in the Lower South. The average slaveholder in the Border South held 5 slaves, compared with 8 in the Middle South and 12 in the Lower South. Of the Border South’s white families, 22% held slaves, compared with 36% in the Middle South and 43% in the Lower South. Among slaveholders who owned 20 or more slaves in 1850, 6% lived in the Border South, 62% in the Lower South. Among ultra-wealthy titans with over 100 slaves, 1% lived in the Border South, 85% in the Lower South.
These discrepancies seemed permanent and growing. The less tropical the locale, the poorer the yield of cotton; and the cotton boom of the 1850s made raising the fleece seem the most profitable use of slaves. A more northern location in the South also meant closer proximity to Yankees; and increasing Yankee resentments in the 1850s made the fugitive slave problem seem more threatening.
While the geographic position of the most northern South often made slavery seem riskier and less profitable, the Appalachian Mountains, dominating much of the Border and Middle Souths, usually made plantations unthinkable. Mountains occupy some of northeastern Kentucky, most of western Virginia, and almost all of eastern Tennessee before curving and rising gently in the Deep South. Some Appalachian foothills blanket a fraction of western South Carolina; and here, significantly, nonslaveholder hostility to slaveholders sometimes surfaced. More and higher foothills dominate a larger fraction of northern Georgia and Alabama; and here, even more significant disloyalty to the Confederacy would be prevalent. The Deep South also contained extensive piney woods and wiregrass regions, forbidding to plantation agriculture, congenial to hard-scrabble yeomen. Nevertheless, a Lower South locale without extensive mountains and far from the North offered planters widespread opportunities.
Planters in the South’s most tropical areas did grasp their opportunities. In 1850 the Lower South grew 95 percent of Dixie’s cotton and almost all its sugar and rice. Tobacco, the most significant Middle and Border South slave-grown export crop, was raised primarily in a fraction of eastern Virginia, Eastern and Western Shore Maryland, and Bluegrass Kentucky. Everywhere else, Middle and Border South farmers demonstrated why their states were commonly lumped together as Upper South grain states to distinguish them from Lower South cotton states. The Lower South, with over two-thirds of the South’s most fertile lands and over half its slaves, produced less than a third of the section’s corn, less than a fourth of its oats, less than a tenth of its wheat.
Urban and manufacturing figures round out the mid-century statistical portrait. The Border South produced over half of Dixie’s industrial products. The Lower South produced less than a fifth. In 1850 the Border South’s Baltimore, St. Louis, and Louisville ranked first, third, and fourth in order of size among southern cities, with a combined population of almost 300,000. The Lower South’s three largest cities, New Orleans, Charleston, and Mobile, ranked second, fifth, and seventh in Dixie, with a combined population well short of 200,000. The three leading Border South cities, despite twice as many whites as Gulf counterparts, possessed only a fourth as many slaves. In cities and in the countryside, the Border South melted into a North-South twilight zone, more like Chicago than Charleston, more akin to midwestern grain farms than to southwestern cotton plantations.
3
In the mid-1850s, nothing more swiftly or more colorfully established an image of the various Souths than a steamboat trip down the Mississippi. The most revealing time to travel was in late winter. The best place to catch the steamer for New Orleans was in St. Louis. The best way to reach this mercantile center of the slaveholding Midwest was via train from the nonslaveholding Midwest’s hub, Chicago.
The initial view from the train was of a world hurrying after progress. Illinois prairies were thick with farms. Many farmers used up-to-speed reapers. Only many miles from Chicago were poor farmers equipped with only mules to be seen. Many more miles passed before undeveloped land was evident.
Crossing the Mississippi into slaveholding Missouri, development looked slower still, until one entered fast-growing, barely enslaved St. Louis.8 This urban mecca for white migrants contained twenty times as many whites as blacks. A leading newspaper, the St. Louis Democrat, lashed out at the so-called Slavepower. St. Louis conversations betrayed Chicago-style desires for more whites, more factories, more free soil, free labor, free men.
The opinion omnipresent in St. Louis was that a little slavery was giving Missouri too little democracy. Undemocratic attempts to consolidate black slavery, urged the St. Louis Democrat, had gone farthest in neighboring Kansas territory. A tiny minority of slaveholders from Missouri had allegedly seized the Kansas territorial legislature, passed tyrannical sedition laws, and turned “Bleeding Kansas” into a mecca of mobs. Missouri slaveholding roughnecks used such undemocratic tactics, so one heard in St. Louis, because in a fair democratic fight the minority would be routed. Nonslaveholders outnumbered slaveholding voters 6–1 in Missouri, 60–1 in Kansas. Nonslaveholding states already surrounded Missouri on two sides. Make Kansas territory the third nonslaveholding side and the Missouri minority would be cornered.
Missouri’s slaveholders, so the St. Louis Democrat maintained, hindered economic no less than democratic development. Missouri had too few black laborers because slaves could be more productively exploited in the more tropical Lower South. Yet the too few blacks repelled too many whites. Frontiersmen preferred midwestern states untainted by “niggers” and “nigger tyrants.” To attain as much democratic and capitalistic progress as neighboring Illinois, concluded the Democrat, Missouri nonslaveholders must pressure slaveholders to sell all slaves down river, where blacks belonged.
The view at the “levee,” heart of the St. Louis scene, illustrated the city’s largely nonslaveholding situation. For six and a half miles, the levee sprawled along the Mississippi, lapping up Missouri-Ohio-Illinois river traffic. This new entrepôt of the New West had been built in nonslaveholding Yankee haste. Old residences had been torn down. Shoddy warehouses had been thrown up. Wagons, drawn almost onto boats, were packed with tobacco, corn, wheat; groaning mules then dragged them up the towering limestone bluff. White laborers supplied most of the manpower. Blacks were manacled near the New Orleans steamboat, destined to labor further south.
While dealers prodded slaves onto the steamboat, more fortunate voyagers had time to examine the floating palace. The ship rested on a flat keel, with only the rear paddlewheel sunk into the current. Steamboats, so it was said, could run on heavy dew. Up front, the sooty chimney, towering twice as high as the three decks, puffed out pollution. Inside, saloons were gaudily handsome, with Brussels carpets, mirrors, intricate candelabras. It was as if a daft king had built his castle in a steel factory.9
In mid-February, when the steamboat glided away from St. Louis, few believed they were in a king’s domain. Foliage was shorn from trees. Grass was a stunted brown. The stream was awash with yellow topsoil, destined to enrich terrain down river.
Yet if the Mississippi was carrying Missouri slaves and Missouri topsoil naturally towards the tropics, Missouri slaveholders hardly seemed unnatural Southerners. Out west, according to planters aboard ship, along both Missouri and Kansas shores of the Missouri River, river-enriched terrain invited slave-holding. True, they were off to explore possibilities of higher profits further to the south. True, river bottom lands occupied a thin area of Missouri and Kansas. True, the nonslaveholding majority outside the Border South’s thin black belts might prefer all blacks diffused to tropical slave belts.
But for now, Missouri was their home, emphasized these slaveholders. They would live where they wanted, own what they wanted, do what they wanted without officious moralists, from Chicago or St. Louis or Boston, giving them instructions. They would move to the tropics or sell slaves in New Orleans or stay in Missouri, according to what they thought best. And they would fight to the death, in Kansas or Missouri or elsewhere, to keep busybodies north or south from running off with their property.
Such utterances indicated that St. Louis hardly spoke for Missouri. The word on board was that slaveholders usually won Missouri statewide elections. What remained unclear, not least to shipboard orators, was whether planters off to explore prospects further south would always come back up river. The further question was how many slaves might drain away and how many nonplantation regions become angry about minority domination before majorities would revoke the slaveholders’ mastery of Kansas—and of Missouri.
Still, as St. Louis, then Missouri, faded from view along the Mississippi, the Kansas battlefield had a way of seeming a far-off abstraction. Missourians on board, with their obsession with the subject, had a way of being single-minded bores. Outsiders saw that Kansas talk quickly bored other Southerners too. Was Kansas, then, of life-and-death importance only in the immediate geographic area? And if Southerners put life-and-death importance on only their local problems, how could different locales come together on a sustained crusade?
4
River amusements interested the steamboat crowd more than such abstract questions. The greatest entertainment was to race another steamboat down the Mississippi. The sport was unnerving, for river legends featured tales of steamboats swishing too fast and exploding apart. But rejecting yonder steamboat’s challenge meant unnaturally repressing the excitement of this fabled river. Adventure triumphed. Black hands jammed fat-pine into flaming furnaces. Swearing firemen tied down safety valves. Passengers scrambled onto barrels, cheering as ships shook and shot ahead.
In three days, the ship steamed into dingy Memphis, river outpost of western Tennessee, a prime Middle South plantation area. Here cotton was hauled aboard. Here more planters stepped down the gang-plank. Conversation swirled around bottomland and timberland, black-land and red-land, slaves and acres and cotton, cotton, cotton.
By breakfast time, two days out of Memphis, steaming beyond Mississippi’s Vicksburg, weather and terrain changed as dramatically as passengers. One shot past early spring into early summer. On the banks, forests were full of plum, peach, apple blossoms, untouched trees evidence of untouched soil. Only an occasional slave gang was to be seen. Lush river bottoms seemed to be daring men to come, risk, conquer.
At Natchez, jewel of Mississippi planters, rewards and costs of that challenge seemed beyond control. The town was a planter paradise. Elegant whitecolumned plantation houses were everywhere. Out of sight, the inelegant Natchez slave auction rang with bids. The Mississippi, having carried and deposited border soil, had yet to carry enough slaves down river.10
Steaming on, on past secret bayous and alligator-haunted swamps, one reached a lusher tropical region. In Baton Rouge, the steamboat stopped to pick up sugar. New passengers bragged about making 50% annually growing the sweet cane. They boasted they could make 100% with more bondsmen. They were off to New Orleans slave auctions to make their sweet business sweeter still.11
In New Orleans, the hunger for slaves became ever more apparent. Almost the entire lobby of the ironically named St. Louis Hotel was given over to Dixie’s most frenzied slave auction. Almost an entire page of New Orleans’s favorite newspaper was given over to legislative effort to reopen the African slave trade. The effort had lately failed by a single vote. An editorial assured readers that the vote would yet be overturned. The Border South, went the argument, did not have enough expendable slaves. Only Africa could supply enough labor to mine North America’s tropics.12
Interest in reopening the African slave trade paralleled enthusiasm for capturing South America. New Orleans banking and mercantile tycoons urged annexing the Caribbean, maybe the Amazon too. Here, at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Gulf, merchant capitalists envisioned New Orleans as commercial center of a republic stretching from Minnesota to Brazil. Today New Orleans imperialists would seize Cuba. Tomorrow they would snatch Nicaragua. Some year they would conquer Mexico. In New Orleans, Manifest Destiny was as southern as hominy and grits.
To the northern notion that Manifest Destiny, southern style, meant spreading despotism rather than democracy, Louisianians countered that black slavery spread white egalitarianism. Democracy and despotism were hardly incompatible, so Southwesterners claimed, where a color line separated white citizens from black serviles. Black inferiors actually increased whites’ feelings of equality, equality in the critical way: the possession of the better skin.
New Orleans imperialists scoffed at St. Louis notions that consolidating black slavery required constricting white republicanism. John C. Calhoun to the contrary, the South was in no permanent national minority. Southerners had triumphed through national majorities, as in opening Kansas for slaveholding, and would pile on future victories, as in Caribbean expansion. Locally, boasted Southwesterners, masters, together with would-be masters, were the Lower South majority. Lynch mobs? Don’t need them. Sedition laws? Down with the anachronism. We are the future of white men’s republicanism.
How different everything in this steaming, optimistic land seemed from the mood in wintry Missouri. St. Louis wished to deport slaves, to cure limping capitalism. New Orleans wished to import slaves, to expand runaway entrepreneurship. New Orleans dreamed of dominating the hemisphere. St. Louis would settle for becoming New Orleans’s northern middleman. Missouri River planters tried for 10% profits. Louisiana sugar growers would not settle for 50%. St. Louis citizens, mindful of the Border South’s thin black belts and 22% proportion of slaveholders, called slavery an invitation to minority rule. New Orleans leaders, thinking of the Lower South’s thick black belt and 43% proportion of slaveholders, called minority rule unnecessary. Missouri slaveholders, fearing free-soil encirclement, were attempting minority despotism in Kansas. Louisiana slaveholders, at the center of a hemispheric slaveholding circle, were confident about wielding local and national majorities.
Such contrasts, dismal to border slavery, overlooked border slaveholders’ determination to decide for themselves whether to move down river. But would human determination forever offset inhuman forces? Standing at New Orleans, facing upriver towards St. Louis, northern gales easing tropical heat, a steamboat passenger could almost feel wind, water, cash, cotton, ships, slaves drifting inexorably towards the tropics.
5
An outsider who wished to share Southerners’ sense of the world was wise to savor that moment. He was experiencing a master metaphor of the southern mind. The flow of slavery downward seemed as irreversible to a late antebellum slaveholder as sand in the hourglass. Eventually, it was widely feared in some quarters (and hoped in others), time would run out on slavery and plantations north of the Lower South.
Such predictions fed on the fact that a slave drain had recently moved the plantation South toward the tropics. Before the nineteenth century, North American plantations had been a Western Hemisphere anomaly in being based in relatively untropical spheres. New World colonists established scarce and expensive slaves where yield promised to be greatest; a more tropical location usually meant a more extravagant yield.
But North America’s tropics were too far north to yield South America’s tropical treasures. Coffee, later-day gem of steaming Brazil, failed to grow anywhere in cooler North America. Rice, the most important product grown in eighteenth-century North America’s most tropical areas, thrived only in confined South Carolina and Georgia coastal swamps. Sugar, jewel of most South American slavocracies, seemed to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North American colonists impossible to raise so far from the equator. Intensive sugar cultivation occurred in southernmost North America largely in the nineteenth century, almost entirely in southern Louisiana and Texas, and only with constant lobbying of the national government for tariff protection against more numerous and more southerly South American plantations.
North American plantation efforts had thus settled most extensively on tobacco, a foul but profitable weed easiest to raise northward, where tropical heat eased off. In 1790, some 60% of southern slaves lived in the Chesapeake Bay regions of Maryland and Virginia. Maryland had almost three times as many slaves as barely settled Georgia. Virginia had more than twice as many slaves as highly developed but rigidly confined coastal South Carolina. West of the South Carolina and Georgia coast, a black face was rare in the most tropical United States.
An invention and a law served to make slave location more tropical. At the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, Eli Whitney’s new cotton gin helped give Deep South settlers better profits in steamier habitats. In 1807, the American Congress banned the African slave trade, forcing new cotton planters to draw serviles from old slave regions.
The Chesapeake Bay world was glad to sell some slaves. The great cotton boom of the early nineteenth century followed on the heels of the great tobacco bust of the late eighteenth century. Low prices and low yields afflicting tobacco growers contrasted with higher prices and higher yields encouraging cotton growers. The resulting forced migration of black folk drove slavery’s base down where it apparently belonged: towards most tropical areas, away from Yankee hostility, far from mountaineers who cared little about the institution.
Between 1790 and 1860, Border and Middle Souths lost close to 750,000 slaves, almost the area’s entire natural increase. Maryland and Virginia’s share of southern slaves sank from 60% to 18%. The Lower South’s proportion shot from 21% to 55%. While 27.5% of Border South residents were slaves in 1790, only 16.7% were bondsmen in 1850.
If the southward sale of slaves continued—and in the 1850s the slave drain increased—the plantation South could shrivel over many decades into a handful of Deep South states. As the Upper South’s slaves drained away, the region’s inhabitants would be freer to suspect that slavery and democracy were alien, freer to feel a greater commitment to permanent Union than to permanent slavery, freer to side with Illinoisans rather than with South Carolinians. If half the South gradually became more than half-northern in commitment, an ever demographically blacker, ever geograpically shrinking North American slave empire was bound to feel holed up, hemmed in, at the northern majority’s mercy. With that image, the Mississippi River traveler had reached not the end of a journey but the beginning of doubt that a South existed.