13. The Slave South, 1820

Introduction to Chapter 13

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The Slave South

1820–1860

SLAVE POT Enslaved African American potters made tens of thousands of ceramic pots to hold water and store food. The most renowned slave potter, Dave, worked in Edgefield District, South Carolina. At a time when teaching slaves to read or write was a crime, Dave often signed his work with a grand flourish.

National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, USA/Bridgeman Images.

CONTENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading and studying this chapter, you should be able to:

Identify the ways slavery, a plantation-based economy, and biracialism distinguished the antebellum South from the North.
Explain how a plantation was physically organized, and describe the roles of the plantation master and mistress. Define the ideology of paternalism and its role on the plantation.
Describe the lives led by slaves in the Old South and the elements that contributed to a semi-autonomous slave culture.
Explain why free blacks posed an ideological dilemma for white Southerners and why their freedom was precarious.
Identify the “plain folk” of the Old South.
Explain both how the South became increasingly democratic during the second quarter of the nineteenth century and how planters managed to retain their power.

NAT TURNER WAS BORN A SLAVE IN SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY, VIRGINIA, in October 1800. His parents noticed special marks on his body, which they said were signs that he was “intended for some great purpose.” His master said that he learned to read without being taught. As an adolescent, he adopted an austere lifestyle of Christian devotion and fasting. In his twenties, he received visits from the “Spirit,” the same spirit, he believed, that had spoken to the ancient prophets. In time, Nat Turner began to interpret these things to mean that God had appointed him an instrument of divine vengeance for the sin of slaveholding.

On the morning of August 22, 1831, he set out with six friends—Hark, Henry, Sam, Nelson, Will, and Jack—to punish slave owners. Turner struck the first blow, an ax to the head of his master, Joseph Travis. The rebels killed all of the white men, women, and children they encountered. By noon, they had visited eleven farms and slaughtered fifty-seven whites. Along the way, they had added fifty or sixty men to their army. Word spread quickly, and soon the militia and hundreds of local whites gathered. They quickly captured or killed all of the rebels except Turner, who hid out for about ten weeks before being captured in nearby woods. Within a week, he was tried, convicted, and executed. By then, forty-five slaves had stood trial, twenty had been convicted and hanged, and another ten had been banished from Virginia. Frenzied whites had killed another hundred or more blacks—insurgents and innocent bystanders—in their counterattack against the rebellion.

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White Virginians blamed the rebellion on outside agitators. In 1829, David Walker, a freeborn black man living in Boston, had published his An Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World, an invitation to slaves to rise up in bloody revolution, and copies had fallen into the hands of Virginia slaves. Moreover, on January 1, 1831, the Massachusetts abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had published the first issue of the Liberator, his fiery newspaper (see “Organizing against Slavery” in chapter 11).

In the months following the insurrection, the Virginia legislature reaffirmed the state’s determination to preserve slavery by passing laws that strengthened the institution and further restricted free blacks. A professor at the College of William and Mary, Thomas R. Dew, published a vigorous defense of slavery that became the bible of Southerners’ proslavery arguments. More than ever, the nation was divided along the Mason-Dixon line, the surveyors’ mark that in colonial times had established the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania but half a century later divided the free North and the slave South.

Horrid Massacre in Virginia No contemporary images of Nat Turner are known to exist. This woodcut simply imagines the rebellion as a nightmare in which black brutes took the lives of innocent whites. Although there was never another rebellion as large as Turner’s, images of black violence continued to haunt white imaginations.

Library of Congress, 3a33960.

Black slavery increasingly molded the South into a distinctive region. In the decades after 1820, Southerners, like Northerners, raced westward; but unlike Northerners who spread small farms, manufacturing, and free labor, Southerners spread slavery, cotton, and plantations. Geographic expansion meant that slavery became more vigorous and more profitable than ever, embraced more people, and increased the South’s political power. Antebellum Southerners sometimes found themselves at odds with one another—not only slaves and free people but also women and men; Indians, Africans, and Europeans; and aristocrats and common folk. Nevertheless, beneath this diversity, a distinctively southern society and culture were forming. The South became a slave society, and most white Southerners were proud of it.

CHRONOLOGY

1808	External slave trade outlawed.
1810s–1850s	Suffrage extended throughout South to all adult white males.
1820s–1830s	Southern legislatures enact slave codes. Southern legislatures restrict free blacks. Southern intellectuals fashion systematic defense of slavery.
1822	Denmark Vesey executed.
1829	An Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World published.
1830	Southern slaves number approximately two million.
1831	First issue of the Liberator published. Nat Turner leads slave rebellion.
1836	Arkansas admitted to Union as slave state.
1840	Cotton accounts for more than 60 percent of nation’s exports.
1845	Texas and Florida admitted to Union as slave states.
1860	Southern slaves number nearly four million, one-third of South’s population.