n., pl. -ies.

1. The state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household.
2. 1. The practice of owning slaves.
   2. A mode of production in which slaves constitute the principal work force.
3. The condition of being subject or addicted to a specified influence.
4. A condition of hard work and subjection: wage slavery.

noun

A state of subjugation to an owner or master: bondage, enslavement, helotry, serfdom, servileness, servility, servitude, thrall, thralldom, villeinage, yoke. See over/under.

n

Definition: bondage
Antonyms: emancipation, freedom, liberty

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Was the most divisive constitutional issue in pre–Civil War America. The problem stemmed from a federal republic that was in Abraham Lincoln's words, “half slave and half free.” Slavery led to the Supreme Court's most infamous decision—Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)—a case characterized as a “self‐inflicted wound” by Charles Evans Hughes. This case became a political issue in 1858 and 1860, helping to elect Lincoln president in the latter year. But Dred Scott was not the only controversial slavery case to come before the high court. A full understanding of Supreme Court jurisprudence on slavery begins with an examination of the Constitution and its slavery‐related clauses.

Constitutional Structure and Slavery

The word slavery did not appear in the Constitution until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished human bondage in 1865. Nevertheless, the Constitution explicitly protected slavery in five clauses. The three‐fifths clause (Art. I, sec. 2) gave slave states representation in Congress based on 60 percent of their slaves; the same clause and the capitation tax clause (Art. I, sec. 9) limited the potential taxation of slaves; the migration and importation clause (Art. I, sec. 9) prohibited Congress from ending the African slave trade before 1808; amendment provisions (Art. V) gave added protection to the slave trade by prohibiting any amendment of the migration and importation clause before 1808; finally, the fugitives from labor clause (Art. IV, sec. 2) provided for the return of fugitive slaves (see Constitutional Amending Process). Other clauses strengthened slavery by guaranteeing that federal troops would be used to suppress slave rebellions, prohibiting taxes on exports (which would have allowed for the indirect taxation of slaves), and giving the slave states extra votes in the electoral college under the three‐fifths clause. The requirement that three‐fourths of the states assent to any constitutional amendment guaranteed that the South could always block any proposed amendments. With good reason William Lloyd Garrison, America's most celebrated abolitionist, believed the Constitution's many compromises over slavery created a “covenant with death” and “an agreement with Hell.”9

Under generally accepted nineteenth‐century interpretations of the Constitution, the national government had no power to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed. During the ratification struggle (1787–1789), South Carolina's Charles Cotesworth Pinckney articulated this understanding of the limitations on the national government. Pinckney, who had been one of the most forceful proslavery advocates at the Philadelphia Convention, told the South Carolina legislature “we have a security that the general government can never emancipate them [slaves], for no such authority is granted, and it is admitted on all hands, that the general government has no powers but what are expressly granted by the constitution; and that all rights not expressed were reserved by the several states.”

Major Supreme Court cases involving slavery arose over five areas where slavery came under federal jurisdiction: (1) the African slave trade, (2) interstate commerce and slaves, (3) the return of fugitive slaves, (4) slavery in the federal territories, and (5) the interstate transit or sojourn of slaves through or in free states. In addition to these issues, slavery came before the Supreme Court in a number of cases as a result of the normal civil and criminal litigation that arose in the District of Columbia, which was a slaveholding jurisdiction. Though those cases are of little importance to the Court's slavery jurisprudence, they reaffirmed the proslavery leanings of the Marshall and Taney courts.

From 1790 to 1861 (with the exception of a few years in the early 1830s), the majority of Supreme Court justices were Southerners. In addition, most of the Northerners on the Court were Democrats who voted with their proslavery southern colleagues. Most prominent among these Northerners—known as “doughfaces” because they were shaped by southern interests—were Justices Henry Baldwin (Pa.), Robert Grier (Pa.), Samuel Nelson (N.Y.) and Levi Woodbury (N.H.). Except for early cases involving the slave trade, all important slavery‐related cases came before a Court headed by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a Southerner who, by the end of his long career on the bench, became fanatically proslavery. The Court's decisions from 1837 until the Civil War reflected Taney's passionate support for slavery and the South.

African Slave Trade and the Supreme Court

At the time of the Revolution, the African slave trade was viewed as an abomination, even by many who favored the continued existence of slavery itself. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson condemned George III for maintaining the African slave trade. His abhorrence for the slave trade, a view shared by many other slave owners, did not prevent the author of the Declaration of Independence from continuing to own a large number of slaves throughout his life. Jefferson illustrates well the possibility of supporting slavery while opposing the slave trade.

Similarly, at the Constitutional Convention slaveowners like James Madison and George Mason attacked the slave trade without opposing slavery itself. A majority of the Convention delegates favored giving Congress the power to end the African slave trade immediately. However, delegates from South Carolina persuaded the Convention to allow the trade to continue for at least twenty years. In 1807 Congress passed legislation ending the trade the following year and in 1818 adopted tougher legislation against traders.

After 1808 the federal courts heard numerous cases involving the importation of slaves from Africa. Out of these cases the Supreme Court defined two quite different jurisprudential theories. In The Antelope (1825), Chief Justice John Marshall asserted that the African slave trade was “contrary to the law of nature” but that it was “consistent with the law of nations” and “cannot in itself be piracy” (pp. 120, 122). The Court recognized the right of foreigners to engage in the slave trade, if their own nations allowed them to do so. Thus Marshall wrote: “If it be neither repugnant to the law of nations, nor piracy, it is almost superfluous to say in this Court, that the right of bringing in for adjudication in time of peace, even where the vessel belongs to a nation which has prohibited the trade, cannot exist” (pp. 122–123). This allowed the Court to uphold prosecutions against American traders while also protecting the property rights in enslaved Africans owned by nationals where the trade was legal. The Antelope was a Spanish vessel seized on the high seas by pirates. By the time the ship was captured by an American revenue cutter and taken to Savannah, the Antelope held more than 280 slaves taken from numerous ships owned by citizens of various countries, including Spain and the United States. The Court ruled that some of the slaves on this ship were to be given to the Spanish government because they were lawfully owned by a Spanish subject at the time the ship was captured in American waters. The rest of the Africans, however, were to be turned over to the United States government as the fruit of the illegal trade. Cases between 1820 and 1860 illustrate how the Court dealt with the trade. In United States v. Gooding (1827), the Court, continuing its opposition to the African trade, upheld an interpretation of the 1818 act that allowed prosecution of secret owners of vessels illegally participating in the trade.

United States v. The Amistad (1841) involved a Spanish ship that had drifted into American waters after a mutiny of slaves left most of the crew dead. All of the mutinous slaves had been recently imported from Africa in violation of Spanish law. The case became a major abolitionist cause célèbre, with former president John Quincy Adams and the future Connecticut senator Roger S. Baldwin arguing before the Supreme Court on behalf of the slaves. The Court rejected attempts by the United States government to prosecute the Africans for murder or to allow their extradition to Spain for either criminal trials or enslavement. The Supreme Court ruled that because the African trade was illegal under Spanish law, all of the Africans were legally free and should be returned to Africa. Somewhat gratuitously, the Court also held that the United States government was under no obligation to pay for their passage back to Africa. Eventually private funds enabled the Africans to return to their homeland.

In Ex parte Gordon (1861), the Supreme Court sustained the conviction and death sentence of an American slave trader. In a series of cases known as The Slavers (1864), the Court upheld condemnation proceedings against vessels outfitted in the United States for slave trading activities. The Court consistently condemned the trade as a violation of natural law and morality. But in all slave trading cases, the Court enforced concepts of international law. Thus Justice Joseph Story noted in a circuit court opinion, La Jeune Eugenie (1822), “I am bound to consider the trade an offence against the universal law of society, and in all cases, where it is not protected by a foreign government, to deal with it as an offence carrying with it the penalty of confiscation” (p. 847). The Constitution prohibited any federal interference with African slave trade before 1808. In that year a federal ban went into effect. Although in the 1850s some proslavery advocates demanded reopening the slave trade, even most Southerners rejected the idea. In 1861 the Confederate Constitution banned the African trade in that new nation.

Slavery and Interstate Commerce

After the adoption of the Constitution, the nation reached an unstated political consensus on the question of slavery and interstate commerce. Although most lawyers would have conceded that after 1808 Congress had the power to regulate the interstate slave trade, the consensus held that such regulation would be impossible to get through Congress and would threaten the Union. Arguments of counsel and the opinions of the justices in commerce clause cases, such as Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), New York v. Miln (1837), The License Cases (1847), and the Passenger Cases (1849), recognized the special status of slaves in the general regulation of commerce. Indeed, slavery directly or indirectly influenced almost every antebellum Commerce Clause case.

Groves v. Slaughter (1841) was the only major slavery case to come before the Supreme Court that directly raised commerce clause issues. The Mississippi Constitution of 1832 prohibited the importation of slaves for sale. This was not an antislavery provision, but an attempt to reduce the flow of capital out of the state. In violation of this provision, Slaughter, a slave trader, sold slaves in Mississippi and received notes signed by Groves and others. Groves later defaulted on the notes, arguing that the sales of slaves in Mississippi were void. The Court ruled that the notes were not void because Mississippi's constitutional prohibition on the importation of slaves was not self‐executing. Thus, absent legislation implementing the prohibition, the Mississippi constitutional clause was inoperative. In separate concurrences northern and southern justices agreed that a state might legally ban the importation of slaves. This principle supported northerners who wanted to keep slaves out of their states and the southerners who wanted to make sure that the federal courts could not interfere with slavery on the local level.

Slavery and Extraterritoriality: Fugitive Slaves

The jurisprudence surrounding fugitive slaves was the most divisive constitutional issue in antebellum America. The Supreme Court heard four major cases involving fugitive slaves: Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), Jones v. Van Zandt (1847), Ableman v. Booth (1859), and Kentucky v. Dennison (1861). While settling legal issues, none of these cases satisfactorily dealt with the moral and political questions raised when human beings escaped to freedom. These cases only exacerbated the sectional crisis. Ultimately, these issues were decided not by constitutional arguments and ballots, but by war.

Late in the Constitutional Convention Pierce Butler of South Carolina proposed that the Constitution “require fugitive slaves and servants to be delivered up like criminals.” Pennsylvania's James Wilson complained that this would oblige “the Executive of the State to do it, at the public expense.” Connecticut's Roger Sherman added, perhaps sarcastically, that there was “no more propriety in the public seizing and surrendering a slave or servant, than a horse.” In the face of this opposition, Butler withdrew his proposal. The next day, without any further debate or a recorded vote, the Convention accepted what became the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution. In the first Supreme Court case interpreting the clause, Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), Justice Story erroneously characterized the clause as “a fundamental article without the adoption of which the Union could not have been formed” (p. 611).

The wording of this clause and its juxtaposition with the other clauses of Article IV suggest that the Convention did not anticipate any federal enforcement of the law. However, in 1793 Congress passed the first fugitive slave law, which spelled out procedures for the return of runaway slaves. The law allowed masters or their agents to capture runaways and bring them to any magistrate, state or federal, to request a certificate of removal. Armed with such a certificate, the claimant was then free to take the runaway slave out of the state where he or she was found and back to the claimant's state.

At the time this law was passed, all the New England states and Pennsylvania had either abolished slavery outright or were in the process of eliminating it through gradual emancipation. In 1799 and 1804 New York and New Jersey joined this first emancipation. These changes in northern law and public policy meant that in half the nation a racially based presumption of enslavement no longer existed. With its arbitrary procedures and resultant lax evidentiary standards for the return of fugitive slaves, the 1793 law presented a grave threat to the many free blacks in the North. To prevent the kidnapping of free blacks, many northern states passed personal liberty laws, which placed burdens on claimants beyond what the federal law required. These laws were a good faith effort by the northern states to protect free blacks from enslavement through kidnapping or mistaken identity and to provide some procedures by which state officials could also aid in the rendition of actual fugitives. Before the 1830s the northern states generally tried to balance their desire to protect the freedom of their free black population with their desire to comply with the obligations of the Constitution to return runaway slaves.

While the lower federal courts and some state courts enforced the federal law of 1793, its constitutionality was not tested in the Supreme Court until Prigg v. Pennsylvania. The facts of the case and Story's opinion reveal the constitutional difficulties raised by fugitive slave rendition. Justice Story upheld the 1793 law and struck down state laws that interfered with the rendition process. Story urged state officials to continue to enforce the 1793 law but concluded that they could not be required to do so. In 1837 Edward Prigg, a professional slave catcher, seized Margaret Morgan, a runaway slave living in Pennsylvania. Prigg applied to a justice of the peace for certificates of removal under the federal law of 1793 and Pennsylvania's 1826 personal liberty law, which had higher evidentiary requirements than the federal law. The magistrate refused Prigg's request. Without any legal authority Prigg then removed to Maryland Morgan and her children, including one born in Pennsylvania. Prigg was later convicted of kidnapping under the 1826 law and he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue was the constitutionality of both the federal law of 1793 and the Pennsylvania law of 1826.

Speaking for the Court, Story held that: (1) the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 was constitutional; (2) Pennsylvania's personal liberty law of 1826 (and by extension all similar laws) unconstitutionally added new requirements to the rendition process; (3) the United States Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause implied a common‐law right of recaption, and so any slaveowner or his agent could remove a fugitive slave without complying with the federal law of 1793, if such a capture could be done without a breach of the peace; and (4) all state judges and other officials should enforce the federal law, but that the national government could not require them to do so.

Chief Justice Taney concurred with the result in Prigg but objected to Story's assertion that state judges did not have to enforce the federal law. Taney correctly predicted that the states would use Story's opinion to undermine the effectiveness of the 1793 law.

It is not clear that Taney's criticisms of Story's opinion were fair or well founded. Story's opinion in fact allowed laws that aided the rendition process, which the Court accepted in Moore v. Illinois (1852). Nevertheless, Taney's impassioned misstatement of Story's opinion was apparently read more frequently than the majority opinion, thus ironically enhancing its antislavery potential. The result was that in the 1840s a number of state jurists refused to hear cases involving fugitive slaves, claiming that the Supreme Court's decision precluded them from taking jurisdiction. Some states adopted legislation that actually prohibited state officials from participating in fugitive slave cases. In 1843, for example, in response to the attempted removal of a fugitive slave named George Latimer, Massachusetts passed the “Latimer Law,” which prohibited any sheriff or other civil officer from arresting an alleged fugitive slave, prohibited the use of public facilities including jails to incarcerate fugitives, and prohibited any state judge from hearing a case under the law of 1793 (see State Sovereignty and States' Rights).

Further stimulating northern opposition to fugitive slave rendition was the Supreme Court's harsh interpretation of the 1793 statute in Jones v. Van Zandt (1847). This was a civil suit for the value of slaves who had escaped from Kentucky to Ohio, where Van Zandt offered them a ride in his wagon. His attorneys, Salmon P. Chase and William H. Seward, unsuccessfully argued that in Ohio all people were presumed free, and thus he had no reason to know he was transporting runaway slaves. Chase's printed brief thrust its author into the national spotlight, and he soon became known as the “Attorney General for Fugitive Slaves.”

In response to the “Latimer Law” and other personal liberty laws, as well as the rise of an antislavery bar led by men like Chase, the South demanded a new and more stringent fugitive slave law. This was achieved in 1850. The new Fugitive Slave Act authorized the appointment of a federal commissioner in every county of the United States. The commissioners could issue certificates of removal for fugitive slaves and were empowered to call on federal marshals, the military, and “bystanders, or posse comitatus” to enforce the law. People interfering in the enforcement of the law could be jailed for up to six months and fined up to one thousand dollars. Procedures under the law failed to provide even a semblance of due process to its victims. Alleged fugitives could be remanded on minimal evidence, or mere affidavit; seized blacks were not allowed to testify on their own behalf, and no jury trial was allowed to determine the status of the alleged fugitive. Worst of all federal commissioners received a fee of ten dollars if they found on behalf of the claimant, but only five dollars if they decided the alleged fugitive was in fact a free person. Congress justified this differential on the ground that the commissioner would have to do more paperwork if he found in favor of the claimant, but, for many northerners, this seemed like a blatant attempt at bribery.

The Fugitive Slave Act quickly became imbedded in American culture, in part through Harriet Beecher Stowe's instant best seller, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). About half the novel focused on the plight of the slave Eliza and her son, who escaped across the Ohio River to freedom. This book struck a responsive chord with northerners. Equally important was the open hostility to the law throughout the North and the sporadic instances of violent opposition to it. Most seizures ended in the peaceful return of the alleged fugitive. But riots and rescues in Boston, Massachusetts (1851, 1854); Christiana, Pennsylvania (1851); Syracuse, New York (1851); Racine, Wisconsin (1854); Oberlin, Ohio (1858); Ottawa, Illinois (1859); and Iberia, Ohio (1860) made national headlines, as alleged fugitive slaves sometimes avoided the clutches of federal officers, while an occasional slaveowner or local policeman lost his life.

Most cases under the 1850 law never reached the Supreme Court. The trials of abolitionists and rescuers were usually decided in the district and circuit courts. The most dramatic lower federal case, United States v. Hanway (1851), stemmed out of the Christiana riot, in which a fugitive slave killed his former owner and then escaped to Canada. In response more than forty men were indicted for treason. Supreme Court Justice Robert Grier, on circuit at the time, ruled that opposition to the fugitive slave law did not constitute treason. Although he was a proslavery doughface who despised abolitionists, Grier did not believe their actions constituted levying war on the national government.

Ableman v. Booth (1859) stemmed from the 1854 Racine rescue. After being arrested by a federal marshal for helping rescue a fugitive slave who had been seized, Sherman Booth, a prominent Republican editor, obtained a writ of habeas corpus from a state judge to secure his release from federal custody. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional and refused to send a record of the case to the Supreme Court. Speaking for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Taney wrote a powerful opinion upholding federal judicial power at the expense of the states. Taney found that every state was pledged “to support this Constitution” and that “no power is more clearly conferred than the power of this court to decide ultimately and finally, all cases arising under” the federal “Constitution and laws” (p. 525). (See Judicial Power and Jurisdiction.) Ableman is still cited for the proposition that the federal government “should be supreme, and strong enough to execute its laws by its own tribunals, without interruption from a State or from State authorities” and that “the supremacy thus conferred on this Government could not peacefully be maintained unless it was clothed with judicial power, equally paramount in authority to carry it into execution” (p. 517). Ironically, the Supreme Court used this century‐old proslavery decision in the 1950s to bolster its affirmation of desegregation decrees.

Kentucky v. Dennison (1861), decided after secession had begun, was the Court's last major decision on slavery. Willis Lago, a free black living in Ohio, had helped a Kentucky slave escape to Ohio. Kentucky asked the governor of Ohio to extradite Lago so that he could stand trial for helping a slave escape. Governor Dennison, like his predecessor Salmon P. Chase, refused to order the extradition. Thus, Kentucky asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Chief Justice Taney faced a difficult dilemma. If he ordered Dennison to extradite Lago, he would be setting a precedent that the federal government could force state officials to act. With the Confederacy already formed, and civil war on the horizon, Taney did not want to give authority to the federal government to compel the actions of a state governor. Thus, in an opinion reminiscent of Marshall's in Marbury v. Madison (1803), Taney castigated Dennison for his refusal to act, but ultimately refused to issue a mandamus against Dennison. Taney ruled that interstate extradition was a matter of gubernatorial discretion, to be performed out of comity and good citizenship. This precedent remained good law until 1987.

Slaves in Transit and Slavery in the Territories

In two monumental acts, the Northwest Ordinance (1787) and the Missouri Compromise (1820), Congress prohibited slavery in most of the territories owned by the United States. These acts led to some of the most important, controversial, and complicated cases that ever reached the Supreme Court.

Even before the Constitution was written, the United States Congress, acting under the old Articles of Confederation, regulated slavery in the western territories. Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance (1787) prohibited slavery north and west of the Ohio River. Eventually the free states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota would be carved out of this territory. The meaning of the slavery prohibition came before the Supreme Court in LaGrange v. Chouteau (1830), Menard v. Aspasia (1831), and Strader v. Graham (1851). Each case involved the status of slaves that had lived or worked in the old Northwest; in each case the court dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction. In Strader the Court held that the slavery prohibition ceased to be in force when the territories became states (see Territories and New States). Thus it was up to each state to determine for itself the status of persons within its jurisdiction, and this was not subject to review by the Supreme Court. Strader left it for each state, and an issue of interstate comity, to decide if a slave gained freedom through residence or sojourn in a free state.

Dred Scott Case. Along with Marbury v. Madison (1803), Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) is the most famous nineteenth‐century U.S. Supreme Court case. Besides Marbury, it is the only antebellum case in which the Supreme Court held a federal law unconstitutional.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted the state of Missouri into the Union as a slave state and prohibited slavery in the territory north of the new state, which was called the Missouri territory. As the slave of army surgeon Dr. John Emerson, Scott lived on a military base in the free state of Illinois and at Fort Snelling, in what was then the Missouri territory and later became Minnesota. After Dr. Emerson died, Scott sued for his freedom, and in 1850 a state court in St. Louis declared him free, under the principle that he had become free in Fort Snelling, and once free, he remained free, despite his return to the state of Missouri. This decision followed Missouri precedents dating from 1824. In Scott v. Emerson (1852), the Missouri Supreme Court, reflecting the growing proslavery ideology of the South, reversed this long‐standing rule. The Missouri court declared:

Times are not as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made. Since then not only individuals but States have been possessed of a dark and fell spirit in relation to slavery, whose gratification is sought in the pursuit of measures, whose inevitable consequence must be the overthrow and destruction of our government. Under such circumstances it does not behoove the State of Missouri to show the least countenance to any measure which might gratify this spirit. (p. 586)

By this time Scott was technically under the control of John F. A. Sanford, a New Yorker who was the executor of Dr. Emerson's estate. This allowed Scott to sue Sanford in federal court under diversity jurisdiction. In the United States district court, Sanford argued, in a plea in abatement, that Scott could not be a citizen of the United States for diversity purposes because he was a Negro. District Judge Robert W. Wells denied this plea, ruling that if Scott was free, then he was a citizen, for purposes of diversity jurisdiction, and could sue. If he was not free, then of course whether he could sue or not became moot (see Mootness). Wells then held a trial on the merits of the case, and ruled that Scott's status was legitimately determined by the Missouri Supreme Court, and he was in fact a slave. At this point, Scott's attorneys appealed to the United States Supreme Court. By the time the case reached Chief Justice Taney's court, the question of slavery in the territories had become the central political issue of the decade. Taney's decision must be seen in the context of this background.

From 1820 until 1850 the issue of slavery in the territories had been governed by the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in almost all of the West. However, with the acquisition of new lands in the Mexican War, and the acceptance throughout the South of a “positive good” view of slavery, Southerners were no longer content to see slavery shut out of the western territories. In 1854 Congress repealed the Missouri Compromise, by opening Kansas and Nebraska to slavery in 1854, under a theory of popular sovereignty. Under the theory of popular sovereignty, the settlers of a territory would decide for themselves whether to admit slavery or not. Rather than democratizing the West; popular sovereignty led to a mini–civil war known as “Bleeding Kansas,” in which free state and slave state settlers fought for control of the territorial government. Meanwhile, in the North the newly organized Republican party gained enormous support by campaigning against the spread of slavery into the territories. In the 1856 presidential election this party, which was less than two years old, carried all but five northern states.

Taney's Decision. The avidly proslavery Chief Justice Taney used Dred Scott to decide pressing political issues in favor of the South. Taney's two most controversial points dealt with the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise and the rights of free blacks under the federal Constitution.

By strained logic Taney argued that the territories clause of Article IV of the Constitution only applied to the territories owned by the United States in 1787 and did not apply to territories acquired after that date. This led him to conclude that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. In addition, Taney argued that freeing slaves in the territories constituted a taking of property without due process, which violated the Fifth Amendment. This was the Supreme Court's first use of the concept of substantive due process. Thus, under Taney's theory of the Constitution Dred Scott had not been entitled to freedom, even while he lived in Minnesota. More importantly, Taney's theory meant that all congressional limitation on slavery in federal jurisdictions was unconstitutional. This was a direct assault on Northerners who had been working to make the territories free.

Taney compounded this attack on northern attitudes with a stunning and gratuitous denial of the rights of free blacks in the United States. Although unnecessary for the outcome of the case, Taney examined whether Scott had standing to sue in federal court, even if he were free. Taney asked: “Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities guaranteed by that instrument to the citizens?” Rigorously applying a jurisprudence of original intent, Taney answered his own question with a resounding no. Taney concluded that even those free blacks living in the North with full state citizenship could never be citizens of the United States. Taney argued that blacks

are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [1787] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privilege but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. (pp. 404–405)

In an analysis that was historically incorrect and shocking to the North, Taney asserted that at the time the Constitution was adopted blacks were universally considered “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his [white people's] benefit” (p. 407). Taney gave examples of colonial laws discriminating against blacks, which were “still in force when the Revolution began” (p. 409), to show that blacks were not citizens in those states. He then cited sources from “the States where slavery had worn out, or measures taken for its speedy abolition,” to prove that from the Revolution onward blacks were degraded and unequal throughout New England (p. 413). He argued that these precedents illustrated “the entire repudiation of the African Race” (p. 415). What Taney ignored, of course, was that at the time of the Revolution free blacks in fact voted in a number of states, including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and were clearly constituent members of the society that adopted the Constitution.

Finally, Taney discussed how Scott's status was affected by his residence in Illinois. Here he relied on Strader v. Graham, where the Court had ruled that each state had a right to decide for itself the status of persons under its jurisdiction. Thus, if Scott had sued in Illinois, that state could have freed him. But Scott sued in Missouri, whose supreme court had refused to free Scott based on his residence in Illinois, a ruling binding on Federal courts.

Curtis's Dissent. All nine justices wrote opinions in Dred Scott. Six concurred with Taney, including two northern doughfaces, Robert Grier and Samuel Nelson. Justices John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts dissented. Curtis refuted Taney at almost every point. Curtis asserted that United States citizenship preceded the Constitution, and that under the Articles of Confederation state citizenship qualified one for national citizenship. Curtis noted that free blacks were citizens of at least five states before 1787 and thus they were also citizens of the United States at the time the Constitution was adopted. In answer to Taney's argument that Congress could not regulate slavery in the territories, Curtis noted that everyone, including Taney, admitted “Congress has some power to institute temporary Governments over the territory” (p. 609). Curtis believed this power came from the territories clause of Article IV, because that was a “reasonable interpretation of the language of the Constitution” (p. 610) and made much greater sense than Taney's unpersuasive attempt to show that the clause only applied to the federal territories existing in 1787. Curtis demonstrated that if Congress has a power, it is a broad power, and not the narrow and constricted one that Taney found. Curtis reasoned that the words “needful regulation” in the territories clause was a grant of such power. Could a “needful regulation” reach slavery? Curtis noted that

while no other clause of the Constitution can be shown, which requires the insertion of an exception respecting slavery, and while the practical construction for a period of upwards of fifty years forbids such an exception, it would, in my opinion violate every sound rule of interpretation to force that exception into the Constitution upon the strength of abstract political reasoning which we are bound to believe the people of the United States thought insufficient to induce them to limit the power of Congress, because what they have said contains no such limitation. (p. 623)

Political Reaction to Dred Scott. Curtis's dissent heartened Northerners like Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, who wrote that Taney's decision was an “atrocious,” “wicked,” “abominable,” “false,” opinion. It was a “collection of false statements and shallow sophistries,” a “detestable hypocrisy” and a “mean and skulking cowardice.” The Chicago Tribune expressed the reaction of many Northerners: “We scarcely know how to express our detestation of its inhuman dicta, or to fathom the wicked consequences which may flow from it.”

The Dred Scott case gave Taney an opportunity to try to settle the issue of slavery, once and for all, in favor of the South. Taney hoped that his magisterial decision would end the controversy over slavery in the territories and in the process destroy the new Republican party, which so threatened slavery. Yet his decision had just the opposite effect, in part because, as historian Don Fehrenbacher has written in his The Dred Scott Case (1978): “Taney's opinion, carefully read, proves to be a work of unmitigated partisanship, polemical in spirit though judicial in its language, and more like an ultimatum than a formula for sectional accommodation. Peace on Taney's terms resembled the peace implicit in a demand for unconditional surrender.” The decision was, as the political scientist Harry Jaffa has written, “nothing less than a summons to the Republicans to disband” (p. 3).

Instead of disbanding, Republicans successfully made Taney and the decision the focus of their 1858 and 1860 campaigns. In his “House Divided” speech (1858), Abraham Lincoln argued that Taney's opinion was part of a proslavery conspiracy to nationalize slavery and a prelude to future proslavery jurisprudence. He warned of “another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits.” He told the voters in Illinois, and by extension the entire North, that “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their state free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.” Lincoln feared such a decision because of language in a concurring opinion in Dred Scott by Justice Samuel Nelson, a New York doughface, and because of a slave case that was then making its way through the New York courts.

Justice Nelson noted that “except as restrained by the Federal Constitution” the states had “complete and absolute power over the subject of slavery.” Nelson may have only been referring to the Fugitive Slave Clause's limitation on the states. But Republicans, such as Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio and Abraham Lincoln, saw a darker side to Nelson's opinion, especially because Nelson concluded by observing:

A question has been alluded to … namely: the right of the master with his slave of transit into or through a free State, on business or commercial pursuits, or in the exercise of a federal right, or the discharge of a federal duty, being a citizen of the United States, which is not before us. This question depends upon different considerations and principles from the one in hand, and turns upon the rights and privileges secured to a common citizen of the republic, under the Constitution of the United States. When that question arises, we shall be prepared to decide it. (p. 468)

In the Illinois senate race of 1858 Abraham Lincoln condemned the “wicked consequences” of the Dred Scott decision and expressed the fear that the Supreme Court might soon force slavery on the North through what he called “the next Dred Scott Case.” He noted that “in what cases” the states were restrained was “left an open question.” Lincoln warned the North that the “next Dred Scott Case” would legalize slavery throughout the nation.

Lincoln's fears were far from paranoid. In 1852 the New York Supreme Court ruled that eight slaves were properly liberated when their owner brought them into New York while changing ships for a voyage to New Orleans. After the Dred Scott decision the New York Court of Appeals, that state's highest court, upheld this result in Lemmon v. The People (1860). Had that case gone to the Supreme Court it is likely that Taney and his proslavery colleagues would have ruled that New York did not have the power to free slaves in transit. The election of Lincoln, secession, and the Civil War, mooted that issue.

Summary

From 1790 to 1861 the Supreme Court's slavery jurisprudence reflected American politics. In the end the Court tried to solve the American dilemma over slavery with decisions that entirely protected slavery and thoroughly repudiated the dominant ideology of the North. Such a solution was bound to fail. The solution of the Taney Court was consistent with the makeup of that court. Dominated by southerners and northern Democrats, the Court supported slavery at almost every turn. Slaveowners and the institution of slavery almost always won before the high court. The only exceptions to this general rule involved the African slave trade, Kentucky v. Dennison, which turned on critical political issues, and a few minor cases, which were decided on strictly technical grounds. Blacks seeking freedom could find no sympathy on the nation's highest court until the chief justice from Maryland died and was succeeded by the abolitionist Salmon P. Chase. Less than two years after this change on the Court, slavery itself disappeared, and the Court was left with the difficult task of building a new jurisprudence, based on concepts of freedom and racial equality. Saddled with formidable proslavery precedents, the postwar Court was not as successful in protecting freedom as the prewar Court had been in protecting slavery.

See also Commerce Power; Fugitive Slaves.

Bibliography

• Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Anti‐Slavery and the Judicial Process (1975).
• Paul Finkelman, Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Northern State Courts: Antislavery Use of a Proslavery Decision, Civil War History 25 (1979): 5–35.
• Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (1981).
• Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant with Death, in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, edited by Richard Beeman, etal. (1987), pp. 188–225.
• Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875 (1982).
• Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (1974).
• William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (1977).
• William M. Wiecek, Slavery and Abolition before the United States Supreme Court, 1820–1860, Journal of American History 65 (1978): 34–59

— Paul Finkelman

The condition in which the life, liberty, and fortune of an individual is held within the absolute power of another. The English word derives from Slav, because Slavs were frequently slaves in the Dark Ages. The first challenges to slaveholding arose in ancient Greece, and Aristotle produces a somewhat embarrassed justification of slavery, arguing that some people are slaves by nature. As has often been remarked, the movement for American independence produced the Declaration of Independence with its claim ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness’. But the Declaration was written by the Virginian slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, who never freed his own slaves. First the slave trade and then slavery was abolished in the British Empire and in America during the nineteenth century through a combination of principled argument, political advantage, and the Union victory in the American Civil War (1861-5). Slavery is still found in a number of countries, notably Myanmar (Burma).

For more information on slavery, visit Britannica.com.

Slavery (in the French West Indies). Slaves of African origin were imported in small numbers into the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe from the very beginning of their occupation by France in 1635, but slavery did not establish itself as the dominant mode of production in France's West Indian colonies until the last quarter of the 17th c. In Martinique blacks outnumbered whites by 15, 000 to 6, 500 in 1700; the slave population rose to 35, 000 by 1719 and had doubled again by 1736. The slave population of Guadeloupe increased somewhat more slowly, but it was the colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), acquired from Spain in 1697, that saw the largest number of slave imports from Africa. From around 2, 000 in 1681, the colony's slave population rose to 117, 000 in 1730 and to 480, 000 in 1791, by which time there were 83, 000 slaves in Martinique and 90, 000 in Guadeloupe. With smaller numbers of slaves in lesser or newly acquired colonies such as French Guiana and Tobago, the total slave population of France's West Indian colonies stood at around 650, 000 on the eve of the Revolution. Exports from slave colonies—principally sugar, but also cotton, coffee, and spices—amounted to 217.5 million livres (£9 million), compared with British West Indian exports of £5 million, produced by 480, 000 slaves. The contribution of slavery and the slave trade (la traite) to the economy of the ancien régime was such that in 1763 France preferred to cede the bulk of its mainland colonies in the New World in order to retain the sugar colony of Martinique. The prosperity of Nantes, Le Havre, and Bordeaux was in large part dependent on la traite and West Indian trade.

Relations between masters and slaves were theoretically regulated by the Code Noir of 1685 which, amongst other measures, provided for the instruction of slaves in the Catholic faith, sought to limit sexual relations between whites and blacks, and specified punishments for a wide range of slave offences. The Code was, however, unable to prevent the growth of a large population of mixed race, many of whom were manumitted by their white fathers and/or owners, creating an intermediate group, the gens de couleur libres or affranchis, who, often slave-owners themselves, posed a growing threat to white social, economic, and finally political power. In addition, slavery was continually resisted by the slaves themselves, especially in Saint-Domingue, through a combination of flight (marronnage), sabotage, poisoning, and outright violence. The outbreak of revolution in France unleashed a complex series of events which, in Saint-Domingue, led to the slaves, under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, gaining freedom by their own efforts by the time the Convention formally abolished slavery on 16 Pluviôse An II (4 February 1794). In Guadeloupe the abolition decree was imposed and implemented by the remarkable Victor Hugues, but in Martinique slaveholders chose to surrender their island to Britain in order to preserve the institution on which their power and wealth depended.

Slavery was restored in the French colonies by Napoleonic decree in May 1802, provoking desperate but unsuccessful resistance in Guadeloupe led by Louis Delgrès and, in Saint-Domingue, full-scale guerrilla warfare against a French expeditionary force, which culminated in the colony's becoming independent as Haiti in 1804. France followed Britain in abolishing the slave trade in 1815, but the trade continued clandestinely until 1831 and, despite increasing competition from French-grown sugar-beet, slave-produced sugar from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana continued to be profitable. There were major slave uprisings in Martinique in 1831 and 1834, and opposition to slavery in France was organized by the Société de Morale Chrétienne (founded 1821) and the Société Française pour l'Abolition de l'Esclavage (founded 1834). The diffusion of abolitionist ideas in the 1840s owed much to the propaganda efforts of Victor Schoelcher, author of L'Abolition de l'esclavage (1840) and Abolition immédiate de l'esclavage (1842), and abolition was one of the first measures decreed by the Second Republic when it came to power in 1848. Slavery was finally abolished by the Provisional Government on 27 April 1848, but before news of the decree reached the French West Indies the slaves of Martinique and Guadeloupe rose up against their masters and effectively liberated themselves. Slavery has been treated in a number of French and French West Indian novels, notably Le Quatrième Siècle (1965) by Édouard Glissant and La Mulâtresse Solitude (1972) by André Schwarz-Bart.

[Richard Burton]

Bibliography

• C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1980)
• A. Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude (1985)
• R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848 (1988)

[Ge]

A form of social stratification in which some individuals are literally owned by others as their property.

What does it mean to dehumanize a human being? To ponder this question is to approach some definition of slavery, one of the most extreme forms of dehumanization. We know enough about life in the antebellum South to know that slaves resisted dehumanization, that they created a folk culture, a family structure, and a spiritual life that blunted the dehumanizing force of slavery. What was it, then, that made slavery slavery?

The problem of slavery, and not just in the American South, was that it defined slaves as outsiders within the very societies of which they were a part. In America this meant that although the slaves got married and formed families, their families were not legally sanctioned and were therefore liable to be torn apart at the will of the master. Put differently, the slave family had no social standing. From youth to old age, from sunup to sundown, slaves spent the bulk of their waking lives at work, for slavery in America was nothing if not a system of labor exploitation. Yet the slaves had no right whatsoever to claim the fruits of their labor. This was "social death," and to the extent that humans are social beings, slavery was a profoundly dehumanizing experience.

What it means to be socially dead, an outsider, varies depending on how a society defines social life. Over the course of slavery's two and a half centuries of life in what became the United States, Americans developed a very specific understanding of social life. In so doing, they were specifying the definition of slavery in America. They saw membership in society in terms of rights, thereby defining the slaves as rightless.

To be sure, social death did not extinguish the slaves' cultural life. The slaves sometimes accumulated small amounts of property, for example, but they had no right to their property independent of the master's will. They bought and sold merchandise, they hired out their labor, but their contracts had no legal standing. In their sacred songs, their profane folktales, and in their explicit complaints, the slaves articulated their dissatisfaction with slavery. But they had no right to publish, to speak, or to assemble. They had no standing in the public sphere, just as their private lives had no legal protection. Thus the distinction between public and private—a central attribute of American society beginning in the eighteenth century—did not apply to the slaves. In all of these ways American slavery dehumanized its victims by depriving them of social standing, without which we cannot be fully human.

Origins of American Slavery

Slavery was largely incompatible with the organic societies of medieval Europe. After the collapse of ancient slavery human bondage persisted on the margins of medieval Europe, first on the islands of the eastern Mediterranean and later in the coastal areas of southern Europe. But western slavery did not revive until the feudal economies declined, opening up opportunities for European merchants and adventurers who were freed from the constraints that prevailed elsewhere. Over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries Europe's consciousness of itself expanded to the point where no "Europeans" were considered "outsiders," and as such available for enslavement. This was a far cry from conditions in Africa, where a much more local conception of social membership made Africans subject to enslavement by other Africans. Thus, during those same centuries, entrepreneurs—first from Spain and Portugal and later from Holland and England—took to the seas and plugged themselves into Africa's highly developed system of slavery, transforming it into a vast Atlantic slave trade.

Finally, the collapse of an organically unified conception of European society, reflected in the Protestant Reformation's destruction of the "one true church," paved the way for the critical liberal distinction between the public and private spheres of life. Modern slavery flourished in this setting, for the slaveholders ironically required the freedom of civil society to establish the slave societies of the Atlantic world. Thus did the slave societies of the Americas grow up alongside, and as part of, the development of liberal capitalism. This is what distinguished "modern" slavery from its predecessors in antiquity.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade was in some ways an extension of a much older Mediterranean slave trade. Over the course of the late Middle Ages slave-based sugar plantations spread from Turkey to the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, and westward to coastal regions of southern France and Spain before breaking out into the Atlantic and spreading southward to the Azores, Madeira, and São Tomé. To some extent this line of expansion followed the source of slaves, for by the time sugar was being planted on the islands of the Mediterranean, Arab traders were transporting sub-Saharan Africans across the desert to sell them as slave laborers in southern and eastern Europe. Thus as Europe expanded it grew increasingly dependent on the continued willingness of Africans to enslave one another.

When the Spanish and the Portuguese first encountered West Africans the Europeans were too weak to establish plantations on the African mainland. But by establishing slavery on the island off the African coast—Madiera, the Azores, and São Tomé—the Europeans created the network of connections with Africans that later allowed them to expand their operations into a vast transatlantic slave trade. Thwarted on the African mainland the Europeans turned westward, leaping across the Atlantic to establish sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Over the course of several hundred years, European and colonial slavers purchased approximately thirteen million slaves from their African captors. Perhaps eleven million of those Africans survived the Atlantic crossing to be put to work on the farms and plantations of the New World.

Slavery and the slave trade grew as the economy of western Europe expanded and developed. It peaked in the eighteenth century, when a "consumer revolution" centered in England and North America created unprecedented demand for the commodities produced by slaves, especially sugar. Indeed, the history of slavery in the Americas can be written in terms of the rise and fall of a series of sugar economies, first in Brazil, and then on a succession of Caribbean islands beginning with Jamaica and ending, in the nineteenth century, with Cuba. By the time the British got around the establishing permanent settlements on the North American mainland, the Atlantic slave trade that fed the booming sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean was fully operational. If the English colonists in Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere chose to develop slave economies of their own, the means to do so were readily at hand.

From "societies with Slaves" to "slave Societies"

In 1776 slavery was legal in every one of the thirteen colonies that declared its independence from Great Britain. Most of the leading ministers in Puritan Massachusetts had been slave owners. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century a significant percentage of the population of New York City was enslaved, and in 1712 several dozen of that city's slaves openly rebelled. By then there were substantial numbers of slaves in Newport, Rhode Island, which was rapidly becoming a center for the North American slave trade. To the south, African slaves first arrived in the Chesapeake region of Virginia and Maryland in 1619. Slaves appeared in the Carolinas a generation or two later. The ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth century America was not unusual, however: slaves had been present in human societies throughout history, and colonial America was no exception.

What made the colonies—and ultimately the American South—exceptional was the fact that the Chesapeake and lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia became full-scale slave societies rather than merely societies with slaves. Slave societies are rare things in human history, and so its emergence in North America is one of the most important historical developments of the eighteenth century. Slave society, not slavery, is what distinguished the northern colonies from the southern colonies and explains why slavery was abolished in the northern states but persisted in the South. Thus the emergence of slave society, rather than the emergence of slavery itself, is the first major turning point in the history of American slavery.

In the Chesapeake slave society developed fairly slowly. For most of the seventeenth century African slaves in Maryland and Virginia numbered in the hundreds. When English settlers first discovered the profitable potential of large-scale tobacco production, their first source of labor was indentured servants, most of them from Great Britain. Thus, tobacco planting was an established business when, in the late seventeenth century, the English economy improved and the supply of indentured servants dried up. It was only then that Chesapeake planters turned to African slaves in large numbers. Between 1680 and 1720 the Chesapeake was transformed from a society with slaves to a slave society. In those same years, a slave society based on rice planting was constructed in the Carolina lowcountry.

By 1750 the economy and society of both the Chesapeake and the lowcountry were based on slavery. But the two regions differed in significant ways. Tobacco plantations were relatively small; they could be run efficiently with twenty or thirty slaves. Rice plantations were most efficient with fifty slaves or more, whereas the sugar plantations of the Caribbean—and later Louisiana—required so much initial capital that they were most efficient when they had a hundred slaves or more. Because tobacco required some care to cultivate, slaves were organized in gangs that were directly supervised either by the master, an overseer, or a slave driver. Rice planting, by contrast, demanded certain skills but it did not require direct supervision. So in the Carolina lowcountry, slave labor was organized under a "task" system, with individual slaves assigned a certain task every day and left largely on their own to complete it.

Because of these distinctions, slave life in the eighteenth-century lowcountry differed in important ways from slave life in the Chesapeake. Large rice plantations made it easier for slaves to form families of their own. On the other hand, high death rates in the lowcountry destabilized the families that did form. Smaller farms meant that tobacco slaves were much more likely to marry "away" from their home plantations, with all the disruptions and difficulties that such marriages inevitably entailed. On the other hand, Chesapeake slave families were less disrupted by disease and death than were the slave families of the Carolina lowcountry.

Because sugar cane was such a labor-intensive crop, sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean were death traps for slaves; they required constant infusions of new laborers imported from Africa. But sugar could not grow in Virginia or Carolina; and the relative health of slaves working the crops grown there made a family life among slaves possible. As a result, the slave population of the North American colonies developed the ability to reproduce itself naturally over the course of the eighteenth century. In the tobacco regions the slaves achieved a fairly robust rate of population growth, whereas the rice slaves did little more than reproduce their numbers. As a result, the expansion of the rice economy required substantial imports of African slaves throughout the eighteenth century, whereas in the Chesapeake the slave population was largely native-born after 1750. The high density of blacks, combined with sustained African immigration, created a distinctive culture in the coastal lowcountry, a culture marked by its own "gullah" dialect and the persistence of significant African traditions. In Virginia and Maryland, by contrast, a largely native-born population and smaller plantations led to an English-speaking slave community that was more assimilated to the culture of the English settlers.

Although the rice plantations grew more technologically sophisticated, and therefore more productive, over the course of the eighteenth century, the rice culture itself was largely restricted to the lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia. The tobacco culture of the Chesapeake proved more adaptable. In the upper South, planters shifted readily to wheat production when the tobacco economy faltered. But more important, the tobacco pattern spread at the end of the century into the inland regions of the lower South, where it facilitated the expansion of short-staple Cotton. Thus the form slave society took in the colonial Chesapeake—relatively small plantations, a gang labor system, relatively high birth rates, and a native-born slave population—became the model upon which the cotton economy of the nineteenth century depended. Before that happened, however, the American Revolution had dramatically altered the history of slavery in the United States.

Slavery and the American Revolution

The American Revolution had a profound but ambiguous effect on the history of slavery in the United States. It established the terms of a ferocious debate, without precedent in history, over the morality of slavery itself. It resulted in the creation of the first sizable communities of free blacks in the United States. It made slavery into a sectional institution by abolishing or restricting it in the North while protecting it in the South. And by defining a "citizen" of the new nation as the bearer of certain basic rights, it definitively established the status of American slaves as rightless.

As soon as the conflict between the colonies and Great Britain erupted, the English began to encourage southern slaves to rebel against their masters. Thousands of slaves took advantage of the British offer, thereby transforming the war for independence into a civil war in the southern colonies. As a result, southern slaveholders came to associate their struggle for freedom from Great Britain with the struggle to preserve slavery. The slaves, meanwhile, began to define freedom as the acquisition of rights.

Some of the revolutionary changes had important social consequences. For example, the revolutionary commitment to fundamental human equality inspired the abolition of slavery in every northern state between 1776 and 1804. In the upper South the same ideology, combined with the relative weakness of the slave economy, prompted a wave of Manumissions (formal emancipations) in Virginia and Maryland. Northern abolition and southern manumissions together produced the first major communities of free blacks in the United States.

There were important legal changes as well. Slave codes across the South were revised to reflect the liberal humanist injunction against cruelty: some of the most barbaric punishments of slaves were eliminated and the wanton murder of a slave was made illegal for the first time. The new Constitution gave Congress the power to ban, by a simple majority vote, the entire nation from participating in the Atlantic slave trade after 1808. In addition the first U.S. Congress reenacted a Northwest Ordinance, first passed by the Continental Congress, substantially restricting the western expansion of slavery in the northern states. All of these developments reflected the sudden and dramatic emergence of an antislavery sentiment that was new to the world.

But the Revolution did not abolish slavery everywhere, and in important ways it reinforced the slave societies of the South even as it eliminated the last societies with slaves in the North. Humanizing the slave codes made slavery less barbaric, for example, but also more tolerable. More important, the new Constitution recognized and protected slavery without ever actually using the word "slave." It included a fugitive slave clause and two "three-fifths" clauses that gave the southern states a discount on their tax liabilities and enhanced representation in the House of Representatives. Finally, the same liberal ideology that provided so many Americans with a novel argument against slavery became the basis for an equally novel proslavery argument. The rights of property in slaves, the claim that slaves were happy, that they were not treated with cruelty, that they were less productive than free laborers: all of these sentiments drew on the same principles of politics and political economy that inspired the Revolution. They became the mainstays of a developing proslavery ideology.

The Westward Expansion of the Slave Economy

Beginning in the 1790s, a previously moribund slavery came roaring back to life. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented a machine that made the cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable. Almost immediately the cotton economy began a relentless expansion that continued for more than half a century and eventually provided the catalyst for the Civil War.

The Cotton boom commenced with the migration of slaveholders from the upper South down the Piedmont plateau into South Carolina and Georgia. By 1800 slave-holders were spilling across the Appalachians planting tobacco in Kentucky and Tennessee and cotton in Georgia and Alabama. The population of Alabama and Mississippi, 40,000 in 1810, leaped to 200,000 in 1820 and kept growing until it reached over 1.6 million by 1860. By then cotton and slavery had crossed the Mississippi River into Louisiana, parts of Missouri, and Texas. In those same years slave plantations in Kentucky and Tennessee expanded their production of tobacco and to a lesser extent, hemp. And in southern Louisiana the rise of the cotton kingdom was paralleled by the rise in huge, heavily capitalized sugar plantations.

But rice, tobacco, and sugar could not match the dynamism and scope of short-staple cotton. Indeed, cotton quickly established itself as the nation's leading export, in both tons and dollars. Although its growth was erratic—slowing in the 1820s and again in the early 1840s—it never stopped. And far from stagnating, the cotton economy was never more vibrant than it was in the 1850s. Thus on the eve of the Civil War many white Southerners were persuaded that "Cotton is King" and could never be dethroned.

The consequences of slavery's expansion were not confined to economic history, however. For both free and enslaved Southerners, the cotton boom had powerful effects on social and cultural life. Among the slaveholders, the cotton boom bred an aggressively expansionist ethos that influenced everything from family life to national politics. Wives and mothers complained about the men who were prepared to pull up stakes and move westward in search of new opportunities. Sons were urged to leave their towns and families to start up new plantations further west. And slaveholding presidents, including Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk, carried these expansionist convictions with them to Washington, D.C., provoking wars and international confrontations all for the sake of facilitating slavery's expansion. But it was the slaves whose lives, families, and communities were most profoundly disrupted by the rise of the cotton kingdom.

The Deterioration of Slave Life

In the second half of the eighteenth century the lives of most slaves improved. Infant mortality rates among slaves declined; the average height of adult slaves rose, indicating an adequate level of nutrition. With that the slaves reached a healthy rate of natural population growth, the ratio of men to women evened out, and it was possible for most slaves to form families of their own. In addition, the American Revolution had inspired many masters in the upper South to free their slaves, and for the vast majority who remained in bondage the laws of slavery became somewhat less severe. After 1800, however, this progress came to a halt, and in some ways reversed itself.

In the nineteenth century the conditions of slave life deteriorated. Beginning in the 1790s the state legislatures made it harder and harder for masters to manumit (free) their slaves, further choking the already narrow chances the slaves had of gaining their freedom. After 1830 most southern states passed laws making it a crime to teach a slave to read, adding legally enforced illiteracy to the attributes of enslavement. The health of the slaves declined as well. The number of low-birth-weight infants increased, and the average height of the slaves fell—both of them indications of deteriorating levels of nutrition. With the rise of the sugar plantations of Louisiana, a new and particularly ferocious form of slavery established a foothold in the Old South. Sugar plantations had a well-deserved reputation for almost literally working the slaves to death. They averaged a stunning population decline of about 14 percent each decade. But sugar planting was so profitable that it could survive and prosper anyway, thanks to an internal slave trade that provided Louisiana planters with a steady supply of replacement laborers.

The growth of the internal slave trade in the antebellum South made the systematic destruction of African American families a defining element of the slave system. In colonial times, when new slaves were imported through the Atlantic slave trade, the internal trade was small. But with the expansion of the cotton economy after 1790 and the closing of the Atlantic trade in 1808, a robust market in slaves developed. At first Virginia and Maryland but later South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee exported their slaves to the newer slave states further west and south. Eventually even Alabama and Mississippi became net exporters of slaves. Between 1790 and 1860 nearly a million slaves were exported from one part of the South to another, making it one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Between one third and one half of these slaves did not migrate with their masters but were sold through the interstate slave trade.

Slaveholders protested that they sold family members apart from one another only when absolutely necessary. But "necessity" was a flexible concept in the Old South. When the cotton economy was booming and slave prices were high, for example, it became more "necessary" to sell slaves. Furthermore, the ages of the slaves put up for sale suggest that husbands were regularly sold away from wives and children were regularly sold away from parents. The paradox was appalling: cotton cultivation was healthy enough to sustain a natural growth of the slave population through the creation of slave families, but the expansion of the cotton economy broke up those families by the tens of thousands. The forced sale of a close relative became a nearly universal experience for the slaves of the Old South.

The Plantation Regime

Since the late eighteenth century, Americans both North and South accepted that slave labor was less efficient than free labor. Even the slave owners agreed that a slave lacked the incentives to diligent labor that motivated the free worker. Slaves could not be promoted for hard work or fired for poor work. They did not get raises. Harder work did not bring more food, better clothing, a finer home. The slaves could not accumulate savings hoping to buy farms of their own; they could not work with the aim of winning their ultimate freedom; nor could they work to insure that their children's lives would be easier than theirs. Lacking the normal incentives of free labor, the slaves were universally dismissed as lackluster and inefficient workers.

And yet the slave economy grew at impressive, even spectacular rates in the nineteenth century. The returns on investment in slave plantations were comparable to the returns on businesses in the North. Despite the ups and downs of the market for slave-produced commodities, slavery was by and large a profitable system in the Old South. This was no accident. The slaveholders organized their farms and plantations to be as productive as possible. They constructed a managerial hierarchy to oversee the daily labor of the slaves. They employed the latest techniques in crop rotation and manuring. They planted corn and raised livestock that complemented the cash crops, thus keeping the slaves both busy and adequately nourished.

Any free farmer could have done as much, but the slaveholders had advantages that counteracted the weaknesses of their labor system. They put otherwise "unproductive" slaves to work. Slave children went to work at an earlier age than free children, for example. And elderly slaves too old for fieldwork were put in charge of minding very small children and preparing the meals for all the slaves. These and other economies of scale turned a labor system that was in theory unproductive and inefficient into what was, in practice, one of the great economic successes of the nineteenth century.

On a well managed plantation the slaves were kept busy year round, fixing tools and repairing buildings during the winter season, tending to the corn when the cotton was taken care of, slaughtering the hogs after the last of the cotton was ginned. Since most slaves lived on units with twenty or more slaves, most were introduced to some form of systematic management. Slave "drivers" acted as foremen to oversee the gangs in the fields. On larger plantations overseers were hired to manage day to day operations. The larger the plantation the more common it was for particular slaves to specialize in various forms of skilled labor. The "well managed plantation," the slaveholders agreed, took into consideration not simply the amount of cotton produced, but the overall productivity of the farm's operations.

Yet the fact remained that the slaves lacked the incentive to care very much or work very hard to maximize the master's profits. As a result, much of the management of slaves was aimed at forcing them to do what they did not really care about. This was the underlying tension of the master-slave relationship. It was the reason almost all masters resorted to physical punishment. In the final analysis, the efficiency of southern slavery, and the resentment of the slaves, was driven by the whip.

Slave Culture

Slaves responded to the hardships and disruptions of their lives through the medium of a distinctive culture whose roots were in part African and in part American but whose basic outlines were shaped by the experience of slavery itself.

Slave culture developed in several distinct stages. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as the slave population stabilized and the majority of slaves became native-born, a variety of African dialects gave way to English as the language through which most American slaves communicated with one another. A native-born slave population in turn depended on the existence of slave families.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a growing number of slaves converted to evangelical Christianity and by 1860 Protestantism was the dominant religion of enslaved African Americans.

Despite the fact that most slaves eventually spoke English and practiced Christianity, elements of West African culture persisted. In some parts of the South, such as lowcountry South Carolina and southern Louisiana, the African influence could be strong. The mystical practices of voodoo common among Louisiana slaves, for example, were only one example of African cultural practices that survived in the Old South. More generally, slaves continued to put their faith in the conjurers and potions that were a part of the mystical life of West Africans. Other African cultural traces could be found in the slaves' funeral practices, their marriage ceremonies, and in the way they treated the sick and the dying. Slave music evinced a rhythmic complexity more common to West Africa than to western Europe. And slave dancing, which masters commonly dismissed as mere wild gyrations, were more often a legacy of African traditions such as the "ring shout."

Even the fact that the slaves spoke English, formed families, and practiced Christianity did not mean that they had simply absorbed the culture of their masters. In important ways the slaves used their language to construct a folk culture of rituals, music, and storytelling that reflected the continuing influence of African traditions and that remained very much the culture of slaves rather than masters. The slaves reckoned kinship more broadly and more flexibly than did their masters, providing some measure of emotional protection from the disruptions of family life. Nor was slave Christianity a mere carbon copy of the religion of the masters. Slaves did not distinguish the sacred from the profane as sharply as their owners did; they empathized more with the Moses of the Old Testament, who led his people out of bondage, than with the New Testament Epistles of St. Paul, which exhorted slaves to obey their masters.

For the masters, however, slave culture was as important for what it lacked as for what it contained. Try as they might, the slaveholders could not overcome the structural constraints of a labor system that gave the slaves no reason to respond to the bourgeois injunctions to diligence, thrift, and sobriety. Slave culture was distinguished less by the persistence of African traditions than by its distance from the culture of the masters.

The Culture of the Masters

Years ago, a pioneering historian of the Old South wrote that slavery was "less a business than a life; it made fewer fortunes than it made men." Maybe so. But slavery made more than its share of fortunes: in 1860 a