# 1301.11a - Slave Economics and Southern Free Society

**Channel:** Chad Tomaselli
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkm3cpzp05M
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/vkm3cpzp05M

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Southern Economy and Cotton Expansion
- 5:55 — Cotton Trade and Industrial Limits
- 7:52 — Free and Enslaved Southern Society
- 13:40 — Black Codes and Restricted Freedom

## Transcript

**[0:00]:** slavery was one of if not the defining characteristic of the early American period up to the Civil War and it's a system that we have not gone much into depth on we've talked about it in as it's related to politics and the Constitution and why the switch was made from indentured servitude to African Shadow slavery we haven't really deep dived on the actual system of slavery here in the US yet and that's what we're going to do here in these next several lectures the slave states at the end of the war of 1812 and 1815 were Maryland Delaware and South and the maps I have are from after that time period closer to the Civil War 1850s so the exact States you know if we if we're applying this to 1815 aren't correct that's not the point of the maps it's just to show various aspects of of the proliferation of slavery or the spread

**[0:53]:** of of slavery and how it worked the southern so we're going to look at this as we do everything we'll look at the big picture and we'll move downward we'll drill down so we're going to start with the Southern economy the Southern economy economy economy was largely agriculturally based and while there was agriculture in the north especially the old Northwest Territory Ohio Indiana Michigan Right the Great Lakes states slavery was essentially non-existent or if it did exist outside of the Northwest because it was banned there by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. it was extremely Limited New Jersey had slavery up until like 1804 somewhere around there and that's north of that Maryland Delaware line The South was self-sustaining in its food supply and its supply of domestic animals so they did not need to import any food they were in in regards to food and domestic animals nationally self-sufficient even though they're not their separate nation Southern Farmers largely focused on cash crops first tobacco and then cotton and cotton will

**[2:07]:** in the early 1800s supplant tobacco as the cash crop of the South but you can see here what the main cash crops were on the map the green being cotton the blue rice the tan or Ritz cracker Brown being right here the darker colors here being tobacco uh sugar cane down here in those swampier areas Louisiana and then these dots being hemp those are the enumerated Commodities or the cash crops but the biggest of these products not just by the amount of land that it was grown in but as far also as far as market share and and the amount of money they made off of it was cotton the large-scale expansion of cotton in the South was driven by worldwide demand especially in the peaceful years after the war of 1812 and the end of the wars between the British and the French in Europe now cotton initially was only grown on the coast

**[3:08]:** of South Carolina and Georgia the same place on this map as the blue because the Inland strain and there were two they were just like tobacco there's different strains and there's a coastal strain and an inland strain the coastal strain is what was shared the blue or you know that that area of of overlapping green but there was an inland strain away from the coast mostly uh that needed to grow in slightly drier areas so you could grow it in more places but the problem was is that the fibers were too sticky not like you would like spider web sticky but they were stickier they held on to the the bowl and the seed more tightly uh but the seeds were also quite big so the work to get the seeds out and to separate the cotton from the bowl wasn't worth the time the effort versus the money you would make off of it

**[3:59]:** but that is going to change because of an invention by Eli Whitney called the cotton gin uh Whitney invented the cotton gin to make the the process of of harvesting this Inland cotton uh easier he wanted to make the process easier so that there wouldn't be this big need for slave labor and eventually you could get rid of slavery because you didn't need it you had an invention to do that instead but instead of that excuse me it became a catalyst for the large-scale expansion of slavery the ease of harvesting that Inland strain led to a huge increase in Cotton plantations because realizing that you know the intended effect being well we have this machine we don't need slaves anymore it was now well we can grow a whole lot more cotton and process it faster and easier and we can still get the slaves to do it so that was a problem but you

**[5:00]:** can see this difference the exports of cotton in the U.S in 1815 it was 72 million pounds a year on the eve of the Civil War in 1859 it was 2 billion pounds a year with a b 2 billion and just real quick to understand the order of magnitude difference between a million and a billion I'll use seconds a million seconds is roughly 13 days so when you're 13 days old you've lived a million seconds a billion seconds is roughly 33 years that's the order of magnitude difference from 13 days not even two weeks to 33 years

**[5:50]:** so from 72 million pounds a year in 1815 to 2 billion pounds a year in 1859.

**[5:55]:** in this same time period 1 million slaves were sold or moved from the upper South to the Lower South because there was more of a demand in the Lower South where that cotton was being grown now the thing was the South did not process this cotton as they did not have many textile mills textile being t-e-x-t-i-l-e they're cotton once they harvested it was sent to the north and also Europe and actually most of their cotton went to Europe especially Britain the Southern economy was quite closely tied to Britain and and and in fact the Southern economy was more closely tied to Britain than it was to the north but much like the colonies under the British where they grew the raw stuff but weren't and under the British they weren't able to because of law process it into the finished good the South didn't have the facilities to do it so they sold the raw Goods to Britain and the North and and France and other countries for them to turn it into a

**[6:56]:** raw product there was industrialization in the South but at a much slower place the only real industrialization they had were textile mills they weren't a lot but there still were plenty of them and they were the largest form of industry in the south The South was a world leader in cloth production if you just took the South the amount of cloth they produced from their own textile mills would put them in the in the in the top in the entire world problem was the north was also in in that top 10 or whatever uh if not first or second and whereas the South would be much further down the north far outpaced the South and the amount of cloth so they're there but it's a very distant or significant difference between the two so there were textile mills but there weren't many of them compared to the North or Europe so we're going to shift

**[7:52]:** gears just a little bit right we looked at the economy in general now we're going to look at Society in general and we'll start with the free population the free peoples in the south the free peoples in the South were typically between 55 and 60 percent of the total population of the South

**[8:12]:** so the numbers I'm going to give you are from the total population this isn't just the free population it's the total population so keeping in mind when I give you these numbers somewhere between 45 at 40 and 45 percent of the population total is slaves so 55 to 60 percent were people who were free so and there's a couple different categories here slave owners is the first we'll look at 10 to 15 percent of Southerners own slaves most owned fewer than five

**[8:45]:** but large plantation owners could own anywhere between 20 and a hundred the large plantation owners were the very top one to five percent of the population the extremely wealthy I mean think of the extremely wealthy today that's sort of the same stratification slaves were usually between one and two thousand dollars then fluctuating by age skills year and many other things the low end would be around 20 000 today the high end around seventy thousand uh on the low end that would basically uh for uh uh for the for the extreme give you the 20 to 100 to give you an idea on the low end of that if you had 20 slaves that would be four hundred thousand dollars or 20 new you know basic Kias right your basic sedan your basic car on the high end a hundred new Mercedes seven million dollars so when you compare it to things today being a large-scale

**[9:53]:** plantation owner where you have a hundred slaves it's like owning a hundred Mercedes seven million dollars based off of those cars being 70k regardless this is the arena of the ultra wealthy so even even those who have one or two um you can see it's still a lot of money again even those small slave owners still have significant money or their slaves are their only significant asset the latter the second of those their only significant accent was far more common virtually all of the Southern the sorry the South's politicians were in these ranks with few exceptions if you were in politics especially on the national level you were probably wealthy and you were probably a slave owner it's hard to find people who were in that Stratosphere of political power who weren't slave owners and certainly if they weren't slave owners they were certainly for the system the second group here so next slide okay

**[10:53]:** um are the non-slave owning whites the non-slave owning whites this is 35 to 40 percent of the total population mostly small sustenance farmers they're much more numerous than the rich but much poorer much less influential think of today your retail workers your food service your basic office workers today right people who make enough money to get by or those who are in poverty the non-slave owning whites 35 to 40 percent of the population it's a map here before I flip shows the average number of slaves per slave holding so if you look at where those areas are dark green the average slave owner or the slave owner on average had more than 20 slaves and then the lighter color you go the smaller that average is so you may have someone let's use this big County here in South Carolina or rather you know what let's use Texas here's these two big counties you may

**[11:55]:** have somebody here who owns 100 slaves and then you know us four other people who own one that would drive that population or that average to be just over 20 but that's how averages work so it may be something like that or it could be a bunch of people who own like 22 23 right so the darker the green the higher so you see areas where this is most prevalent right here through the middle of Alabama Coastal Carolina's and Georgia up and down the Mississippi River down here into the to the delta Texas once it comes around right these swaths right here and I'll show you later on why why particularly in Alabama why this is the way it is one other free group to talk about these are what were called the free blacks these were about one percent of the total population and these included former slaves and those who were born free

**[12:55]:** they lived mainly in the upper South and in cities those cities primarily being Baltimore and Washington DC so all the way up here this map shows the concentration of free blacks where be the darker green is going to 2 000 or more Per County and then with more than a hundred here so there were free people of color living in these areas here but in much much smaller numbers because why in the world would you want to live in the concentrated areas of slavery like this people are going to move to where there's more opportunity for them because get you're not going to hired for a job because you're free so they're going to move up to cities where there are opportunities

**[13:40]:** most of uh the individuals in this group were the lower Urban classes working for low wages right

**[13:51]:** throughout both the North and the South there was a series of laws called Black Codes these were discriminatory laws meant to limit the rights of these freedmen and freed women in the South these are part of the general slave codes of the South and there's separate laws for the North uh these differ between the states and the regions but there's some commonalities here right every state every city every county is going to have their own version of this but there's a fairly Universal set of things here for example they denied most rights of citizenship including jobs where ideas might be transferred such as newspapers those who were free or had never been enslaved or forced to carry quote unquote Freedom papers to prove they weren't a runaway slave all but four states in general limited or denied voting rights for people of color even if they were wealthy we talked about this under the Constitution

**[14:51]:** the Voting Rights switched from wealth to race and gender uh fairly early on in the early 1800s wealthy Friedman were still taxed but they could not vote so they were free but their lives were extremely limited and that's just a taste of what those Black Codes were and again this was North and South but the in the South they were integrated as part of their slave codes I don't know the four states that did allow voting rights but if I had to guess it would probably be Pennsylvania might be one of them because of the Quaker Heritage and Massachusetts might be one of them because the Puritan uh some of the Puritan Heritage but Massachusetts rarely had slavery so those just knowing the history of those States those might might have been two of them but I don't know that for certain and I'm not going to ask you that so don't quote me on

**[15:47]:** it um so they were free these are the free groups this is the economy that they lived in what we're going to look at next is going into slavery itself