Political and Economic Arguments

The regional divisions over slavery that had organized the development of the Constitution were exacerbated in 1803 when Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) acquired France's American land holdings from Napoleon in exchange for 80 million francs (about 3 cents per acre). The 1803 Louisiana Purchase increased the young nation's size by 530 million acres, and included land that would become the southern midwest region of the United States. As much as the Louisiana purchase opened up millions of acres to white Americans seeking to embody the spirit of the American yeoman, it also positioned the politics of the rest of the nineteenth century as a set of political debates over how America would develop economically and over the role of slavery in "the West." Slavery came to be the centerpiece for a larger struggle between mechanization, wage labor, and the deskilling of northern trade artisans versus the agrarian lifestyle, seasonal economic cycles, and plantation slavery of the South.

By the end of the Revolutionary War slavery had become an impractical solution for northern agricultural labor. Northern farms were rarely large enough to support more than a few hired hands, and regardless of their race, northern agricultural laborers rarely outnumbered their employers. In the South, slave laws addressed the need to transform plantations into zones of absolute white authority that gave overseers the right to use violence in order to maximize output of African American laborers. What historians describe as the "market revolution" had fixated northern economic life on manufacturing productivity rather than agricultural products. Northern farms became important parts of family sustenance and less intricately linked to overall economic trends, except to supply raw goods to local markets. In the North, African Americans left farms to enter growing urban areas. The intense surveillance needed to ensure that enslaved people would not escape to freedom was impossible in growing towns, making slavery infinitely more difficult in the industrializing North. Ultimately, then, for northerners the South's slave labor system became linked with southerners' general backwardness and unwillingness to engage in modern progress.

It was once fashionable to argue that southern plantation owners were pre-modern aristocrats who envisioned their vast lands and hundreds of laborers as similar to noble lords commanding serfs in feudal Europe. Their support of slavery was understood as an anti-capitalist position rooted in preserving an economic system that perpetuated an aristocratic lifestyle. However, recent historical investigation has revealed that southern planters profited from the global market revolution as the growing textile industry in the United States and Britain skyrocketed demand for cotton. Nonetheless, economic inertia was a key component of the South's support of slavery. Though few white southerners profited from slavery, political power in the South was unilaterally controlled by large plantation owners. Southern states were reluctant to enact universal suffrage until the middle of the nineteenth century, restricting the franchise to land owners with a personal stake in limiting wage labor and industrialization. Ironically, North and South were unified in their agreement that slavery symbolized the economic and political differences between the two regions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carsel, Wilfred. "The Slaveholders' Indictment of Northern Wage Slavery." Journal of Southern History vol. 6, no. 4 (1940): 504-520.

Phillips, Christopher. Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Wright, Gavin. "Slavery and American Agricultural History." Agricultural History vol. 774 (2003): 527-552.

                                        Kwame A. Holmes