Jamelle Bouie has a big article in the New York Times Sunday Review on the Atlantic Slave Trade today, bit he also wrote a short piece on the domestic slave trade in the Opinion section. Here is the opening of the article:
A significant part of the slave system, the domestic trade relied on the sale of “surplus” slaves from the states of the Upper South down to New Orleans and beyond. Here’s what I wrote:
Slaveholders in Upper South states like Virginia and Maryland produced a “surplus” of enslaved labor, which they sold to traders. Those traders brought their captives to markets in Charleston and Savannah and New Orleans, where they would be sold to the highest bidder to labor and produce profit. Enslaved women were expected, as well, to produce new capital, in the form of children, for their enslavers.
In addition to this point, it is also worth saying why there was such a “surplus” to begin with.
The short answer is: tobacco.
Tobacco, for most of the colonial period, was the agricultural backbone of chattel slavery in the South. Virginia and Maryland were, for all intents and purposes, tobacco colonies, where planters used huge numbers of enslaved people to produce vast amounts of tobacco for European consumption. This extractive agriculture — practically unavoidable to commodities-driven slave cultivation — exhausts the soil in fairly short order. That’s why slaveholders were one of the engines of American expansion in the first decades of the republic. They needed more and more soil to cultivate tobacco, cotton and other commercial staples.
One consequence of this, for the oldest slave economies in North America, was that there were more slaves than were needed to cultivate the land. Here’s none other than Karl Marx giving a succinct description of the dynamic in an 1861 essay on “The North American Civil War”:
The cultivation of the Southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labor. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on the fertility of the soil than the investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labor, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raised slaves in order to export these slaves into the deep South.
Knowing all this, you can very easily see how the slave system grew in the decades before the Civil War. The advent of the cotton gin made it possible to grow huge amounts of cotton in a variety of different environments. As demand for cotton grew as a result of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, so too did the demand for enslaved labor in the South and, in turn, the demand for new land to cultivate.
Demand for the labor stimulated the slave-breeding economy of the Upper South, and demand for land drove Native dispossession. As the historian Joshua D. Rothman notes in “The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America,” “The extension of slavery, seen across the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century, both furthered and was nurtured by technological, economic, political, and ideological changes that ushered in the modern age.”
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