As cotton gins spread across the South, any thoughts of abolishing slavery in the region disappeared. Instead, cotton and slavery expanded into the interior of many southern states as well as into the lower Mississippi valley. Cotton was not the only crop produced in the South—in Louisiana, planters made their fortunes on sugar and in South Carolina on rice—but it quickly became the most important. In 1790 southern farms and plantations produced about 3,000 bales of cotton, each weighing about 300 pounds. By 1820, with the aid of the cotton gin, the South produced more than 330,000 bales annually (Table 8.2). For southern blacks, increased production meant increased burdens. Because seeds could be separated from raw cotton with much greater efficiency, farmers could plant vastly larger quantities of the crop. On small farms, the work was still performed primarily by family members, neighbors, or hired hands. But planters could purchase additional slaves, particularly as cotton prices rose in the early nineteenth century.

Source: Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. 2 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958).

The dramatic increase in the amount of cotton planted and harvested each year was paralleled by a jump in the size of the slave population. Thus even as northern states began to abolish the institution and the international slave trade ended (in 1808), southern planters significantly increased the number of slaves they held. Some smuggled in women and men from Africa and the Caribbean. Most planters, however, depended on enslaved women to bear more children, increasing the size of their labor force through natural reproduction. In addition, planters in the Deep South—from Georgia and the Carolinas west to Louisiana—began buying slaves from farmers in Maryland and Virginia, where cotton and slavery were less profitable.

In 1790 there were fewer than 700,000 slaves in the United States. By 1820 there were nearly 1.5 million. Still, because of the increased competition for field hands to plant, maintain, and harvest the cotton crop, the price of slaves increased, roughly doubling between 1795 and 1805. The dramatic growth of slave markets in Charleston and New Orleans was one measure of the continued importance of the slave trade as cotton lands moved west.

In the early nineteenth century, most white southerners believed that there was enough land to go around. And the rising price of cotton allowed small farmers to imagine they would someday be planters. Some southern Indians also placed their hopes in cotton. Cherokee and Creek Indians cultivated the crop, even purchasing black slaves to increase production. Some Indian villages now welcomed ministers to their communities, hoping that embracing Protestantism and “American” culture might allow them to retain their current lands. Yet other native residents foresaw the increased pressure for land that cotton cultivation produced and organized to defend themselves from whites invading their territory. Regardless of the policies adopted by Indians, cotton and slavery expanded rapidly into Cherokee- and Creek-controlled lands in the interior of Georgia and South Carolina. And the admission of the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama between 1812 and 1819 marked the rapid spread of southern agriculture farther westward.

Enslaved men and women played critical roles in the South’s geographical expansion. Without their labor, neither cotton nor sugar could have become mainstays of the South’s economy. Because clearing new cotton fields and planting and harvesting sugarcane involved heavy labor, most planters selected young slave men and women to move west, breaking apart families in the process. Some slaves resisted their removal to new plantations. If forced to go, they could still use their role in the labor process to limit owners’ control. Slaves worked slowly, broke tools, and feigned illness or injury. Enslaved women and men hid out temporarily as a respite from brutal work regimes or harsh punishments. Others ran to areas controlled by Indians, hoping for better treatment, or to regions where slavery was no longer legal.

Still, given the power and resources wielded by whites, most slaves had to find ways to improve their lives within the system of bondage. The end of the international slave trade helped blacks in this regard since planters then had to depend more on natural reproduction to increase their labor supply. To ensure that slaves lived longer and healthier lives, planters were forced to provide sturdier housing, better clothing, and increased food allotments. Some slaves gained leverage to fish, hunt, or maintain small gardens in order to improve their diet. With the birth of more children, southern blacks also developed more extensive kinship networks, ensuring that family members could care for children if their parents were compelled to move west. Enslavement was still brutal, but slaves made small gains that improved their chances of survival.

Southern slaves also established their own religious ceremonies, often held in the woods or swamps at night. African Americans were swept up as well in the religious revivals that burned across the southern frontier beginning in the 1790s. Itinerant preachers, or circuit riders, held camp meetings that tapped into deep emotional wells of spirituality. Baptist and Methodist clergy drew free and enslaved blacks as well as white frontier families to their gatherings. They encouraged physical displays of spiritual rebirth, from trembling and quaking to calling out and dancing, offering release from the oppressive burdens of daily life for poor whites and blacks alike.

Evangelical religion, combined with revolutionary ideals promoted in the United States and Haiti, proved a potent mix, and planters rarely lost sight of the potential dangers this posed to the system of bondage. Outright rebellions occurred only rarely, yet the successful revolt of blacks in Haiti reminded slaves and owners alike that uprisings were possible. In 1800 Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith in Richmond, Virginia, plotted such a rebellion. His supporters rallied around the demand for “Death or Liberty.” Gabriel’s plan to kill all whites except those who opposed slavery failed when informants betrayed him to local authorities. Nonetheless, news of the plot traveled across the South and terrified white residents, reminding them that the promise of new frontiers could not be separated from the dangers embedded in the nation’s oppressive racial history.