Many of the history museums I have visited in the South tend to gloss over or skip that whole “slavery” and “Civil War” thing. But the Old Slave Mart Museum in downtown Charleston tackles it head-on.
For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and am traveling around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I have visited. :)
A total of 13 British colonies were established by Royal Charter in American territory. They were tightly controlled by the British government. Under the mercantile colonial system, colonies were viewed as simply ways of siphoning wealth from foreign territories and sending it back to the homeland. Many of the colonial charters spelled out how trade was to be conducted in the colonies, with England having special privileges (including, in some cases, the right that all colonial trade had to be with, or at least go through, England). A series of laws known as the Navigation Acts formalized these restrictions, limiting the amount of manufacturing that the colonists could do (forbidding them outright from making their own iron cooking pots, for example), and essentially turning the colonies into a source of raw materials for British industry and a captive market for the finished products.
Almost from the beginning, however, the Thirteen American Colonies were differentiated from North to South. In the Southern colonies, the warm wet climate and rich soil was best-suited for large-scale agriculture, and most of the population was involved with the “plantation” system in which cash crops like tobacco, sugar or indigo were grown on large farms and then shipped to England. In the Northern colonies, however, where large-scale plantations were not practical, most of the population either lived on small single-family subsistence farms, or were involved in the industrial trades (iron-working, leather-making, printing, etc) or with commercial shipping or fishing.
They were two very different economies, and they led to two very different cultures. In the North, most commercial shops were small and the owners usually did much of the work themselves. To help them, many proprietors took on “indentured servants”: these were people from Europe (usually England) who agreed to work in the tradesman’s shop for a set period (around seven years) in exchange for having their passage to America paid for by the proprietor. Later, as immigration proved too low to meet the demand for labor, workshops began to take in young boys as “apprentices”, who would be housed and fed by the proprietor in exchange for learning the trade on the job, until the apprentice was ready to set up a shop of his own.
In the South, an entirely different social structure appeared. Here, it was most economical to have large plantation farms that could be worked with great numbers of the cheapest unskilled labor possible. In the first years of the American colonies, much of this cheap labor came from beggars, criminals, and other “undesirables” who were rounded up in London and sent to the colonies in lieu of a jail sentence. In 1619, however, a new source of cheap labor opened up when a Dutch trader sold a cargo of 20 African chattel slaves to a plantation owner in Jamestown VA. By the time of the American Revolution in 1775, the import of enslaved people from Africa had been legalized in all 13 colonies, though by far the heaviest concentration was in the Southern plantation states. (A significant number of African-Americans in the North were freemen, and some 5,000 of them served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.)
By the end of the 18th century, however, just after the United States won its independence from Britain, the plantation economy faced a crisis. The large tobacco, sugar, and indigo plantations were losing productivity as the soil became exhausted, and new global sources of these products (especially in the Caribbean) were cutting into American exports and weakening the South’s economy. Just in time, a new product appeared: cotton. England was beginning its Industrial Revolution and would soon become the textile capitol of the world, as mechanized looms and spinning jennies churned out finished cloth at a stupendous rate. To feed their insatiable demand for raw materials, the British imported cotton from all over the world—and this was a crop that was suitable for slave labor on the Southern plantations.
But it was an invention in 1793 that changed the Southern cotton industry and inadvertently set the country on the path that eventually led to Civil War. Although cotton was a profitable plantation crop, it was very labor-intensive: before the cotton could be spun, the large seeds had to be painstakingly cleaned out of the fibers by hand.
In 1793, a young man named Eli Whitney had just graduated from Yale and taken a job in South Carolina to work as a tutor for several plantation owners. In casual conversations, they mentioned the difficulty of separating cotton seeds from the fibers, and Whitney had a flash of insight. Later, the story would be told that he had gotten the basic idea for his seed-separating machine by the memory of watching a cat trying to attack a caged chicken: the cat’s claws pulled the feathers through the wire cage, leaving the chicken behind.
Over the next few weeks, tinkering in his spare time, Eli Whitney invented his “cotton gin”. Although its social effect would be huge, the machine itself was simple: the operator would pour freshly-picked cotton balls into a hopper and turn a handle. This would rotate a wire drum covered with hooks that passed between the teeth of a metal comb. The teeth of the comb were wide enough for the hooks to pass through, but too narrow for the cotton seeds. So as the drum turned, the cotton fibers would be caught by the hooks and pulled through the comb, while the seeds would be stripped off by the comb’s teeth and fall away. A second drum, spinning more rapidly and covered with brushes, would then rub the seed-free cotton fibers off the first drum and collect them inside. The seeds would drop out of one side of the machine, and the clean cotton fibers would pile out the other side. The cotton seeds could now be gathered and pressed to make oil, meal, and animal feed, while the clean cotton fibers could be sold to the English textile mills.
Using a cotton gin, a slave labor force could now more than triple its output. It transformed the Southern economy. In 1830, the US had produced 750,000 bales of cotton: by 1850, when Eli Whitney’s invention had become widespread across the South, production soared to 2,850,000 bales.
As the cotton economy grew, so too did the need for enslaved people to run it. From 1800 to 1850, the number of slaves in the South increased by 500%, and by 1860 the Southern plantation states were producing two-thirds of the world’s entire cotton crop. The cotton plantations became fabulously wealthy, the English market seemed limitless, and “King Cotton” reigned supreme. The entire Southern economy was utterly dependent upon cotton and the slave labor which produced it. And that led to political discord.
In the North, while slavery was legal, it never became a large part of the economy, and there was always some tension over the institution. When Thomas Jefferson wrote his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, one of the grievances he charged King George with was allowing the slave trade in the colonies. The Southern colonies, who were completely dependent economically upon their enslaved labor, objected to this, fearing that it would lead to restrictions on slave-keeping, and the Continental Congress struck out this portion of Jefferson’s draft. (Ironically, Jefferson himself was a plantation slave-owner, as were many of the Founding Fathers.)
When the US Constitution was being debated in 1788, the subject of slavery came up again. Since the number of political delegates each state had in the House of Representatives was dependent upon its population, the Southern states argued that its huge numbers of slaves should be counted towards its population, while the Northern states countered that under the Southern states’ own laws their enslaved people were “property” and not residents. Eventually the argument was settled with the “Three-Fifths Compromise”, in which it was agreed to count 60% of the slave numbers as “population”. (The words “slave” and “slavery” do not appear anywhere in the Constitution—it instead refers euphemistically to “servants” and “servitude”.)
At about this time, a new political movement appeared in the US—the “abolitionists”. Based mostly in the North and made up at first of religious groups, they held the then-radical idea that African-Americans were people, that slavery as an institution was wrong and un-Christian, and that enslaved people should be freed and made equal citizens with full rights to vote and hold property.
At first the Southern slave states looked upon the abolitionists as just a kooky lunatic fringe—but as the movement grew and began to gain political power, they viewed them as a deadly threat to the whole slavery-based “Southern way of life”. Southern states passed a number of “slave codes” which made it illegal for any African-American slave to be taught how to read and write or to possess a weapon. These repressive laws won sympathy for the abolitionist viewpoint, and escaped or freed slaves like Frederick Douglass became celebrities in the North.
By 1804, every Northern state had already abolished slavery within its borders. In 1808 Congress formally banned the African slave trade—it now became illegal to import enslaved people from overseas. Those slaves already inside the US, however, were unaffected by this law, and the population of enslaved people, concentrated mostly in the South, continued to grow. By 1860 there were at least 4 million African-American slaves in the US, making up about one-third of the South’s entire population and constituting the majority of people in many areas.
The abolitionist movement meanwhile also continued to grow. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that depicted the life of a slave in a Southern plantation. It became one of the highest-selling books ever printed in the US to that time. (According to legend, when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe years later, he is reported to have said to her, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this big war.”) Abolitionist newspapers began to appear throughout the North and, with great risk, in some of the South.
No longer confined to religious groups, the abolitionists also began to frame their argument in economic terms: the economic ideology in the “Yankee-trader” North was free-market capitalism, of which “free labor” that could be bought for market wage rates (and which could use those wages to purchase commodities) was a crucial pillar. Slavery was, they argued, economically inefficient and was holding back the development of the American economy.
With words, came action. An entire illegal network known as the “Underground Railroad” appeared, dedicated solely to helping escaped slaves from the South reach freedom in Canada. Estimates of the number of “railroad passengers” range from 40,000 to over 100,000.
The Old Slave Mart Museum is located in the building that served as the Ryan Mart, one of the largest of the 40 or so slave auctions that were located in antebellum Charleston. Alas, there is no photography permitted inside the building, so here are just a couple photos.