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Slavery in Antebellum Georgia
Cotton and the Growth of Slavery
As was the case for rice production, cotton planters relied upon the labor power of enslaved African and African American people. Accordingly, the slave population of Georgia increased dramatically during the early decades of the nineteenth century. In 1790, just before the explosion in cotton production, some 29,264 slaves resided in the state. In 1793 the Georgia Assembly passed a law prohibiting the importation of slaves. The law did not go into effect until 1798, when the state constitution also went into effect, but the measure was widely ignored by planters, who urgently sought to increase their enslaved workforce. By 1800 the slave population in Georgia had more than doubled, to 59,699; by 1810 the number of slaves had grown to 105,218. The 48,000 African slaves imported into Georgia during this era accounted for much of the initial surge in the slave population. When Congress banned the African slave trade in 1808, however, Georgia's slave population did not decline. Instead, the number of slaves imported from the Chesapeake's stagnant plantation economy as well as the number of children born to Georgia slave mothers continued to outpace the number of slaves who died or were transported from Georgia. In 1820 the slave population stood at 149,656; in 1840 the slave population had increased to 280,944; and in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War (1861-65), some 462,198 slaves constituted
Slaveholders Although slavery played a dominant economic and political role in Georgia, most white Georgians did not own slaves. In 1860 less than one-third of Georgia's adult white male population of 132,317 were slaveholders. The percentage of free families holding slaves was somewhat higher (37 percent) but still well short of a majority. Moreover, only 6,363 of Georgia's 41,084 slaveholders owned twenty or more slaves. The planter elite, who made up just 15 percent of the state's slaveholder population, were far outnumbered by the 20,077 slaveholders who owned fewer than six slaves. In other words, only half of Georgia's slaveholders owned more than a handful of slaves, and Georgia's planters constituted less than 5 percent of the state's adult white male population. These statistics,
As it turned out, slaveholders expected and largely realized harmonious relations with the rest of the white population. During election season wealthy planters courted nonslaveholding voters by inviting them to celebrations that mixed speechmaking with abundant supplies of food and drink. On such occasions slaveholders shook hands with yeomen and tenant farmers as if they were equals. Nonslaveholding whites, for their part, frequently relied upon nearby slaveholders to gin their cotton and to assist them in bringing their crop to market. These political and economic interactions were further reinforced by the common racial bond among white Georgia men. Sharing the prejudice that slaveholders harbored against African Americans, nonslaveholding whites believed that the abolition of slavery would destroy their own economic prospects and bring catastrophe to the state as a whole. Propping up the institution of slavery was a judicial system that denied African Americans the legal rights enjoyed by white Americans. Since the colonial era, children born of slave mothers were deemed chattel slaves, doomed to "follow the condition of the mother" irrespective of the father's status. Georgia law supported slavery in that the state restricted the right of slaveholders to free individual slaves, a measure that was strengthened over the antebellum era. Other statutes made the circulation of abolitionist material a capital offense and outlawed slave literacy and unsupervised assembly. Although the law technically prohibited whites from abusing or killing slaves, it was extremely rare for whites to be prosecuted and convicted for these crimes. The legal prohibition against slave testimony about whites denied slaves the ability to provide evidence of their victimization. On the other hand, Georgia courts recognized slave confessions and, depending on the circumstances of the case, slave testimony against other slaves. The relative scarcity of legal cases concerning slave defendants suggests that most slaveholders
Over the antebellum era whites continued to employ violence against the slave population, but increasingly they justified their mastery in moral terms. As early as 1790, Georgia congressman James Jackson claimed that slavery benefited both whites and African Americans. The expanding presence of evangelical Christian churches in the early nineteenth century provided Georgia slaveholders with religious justifications for human bondage. White efforts to Christianize the slave quarters enabled masters to frame their power in moral terms. They viewed the Christian slave mission as evidence of their own good intentions. The religious instruction offered by whites, moreover, reinforced slaveholders' authority by reminding slaves of scriptural admonishments that slaves should "give single-minded obedience" to their "earthly masters with fear and trembling, as if to Christ." This melding of religion and slavery did not protect slaves from exploitation and cruelty at the hands of their owners, but it magnified the role played by slavery in the identity of the planter elite. In 1785, just before the genesis of the cotton plantation system, a Georgia merchant had claimed that slavery was "to the Trade of the Country, as the Soul [is] to the Body." Seventy-five years later Georgia politician Alexander Stephens noted that slavery had become a moral as well as an economic foundation for white plantation culture. The "corner-stone" of the South, Stephens claimed in 1861, just after the Lower South had seceded, consisted of the "great physical, philosophical, and moral truth," which is "that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition." Slaves
The urban environment of Savannah also created considerable opportunities for slaves to live away from their owners' watchful eyes. Slave entrepreneurs assembled in markets and sold their wares to black and white customers, an economy that enabled some slaves to amass their own wealth. A number of slave artisans in Savannah were "hired out" by their masters, meaning that they worked and sometimes lived away from their masters. Savannah's taverns and brothels also served as meeting places in which African Americans socialized without owners' supervision. This cultural autonomy, however, was never complete or secure. The rice plantations were literally killing fields. On one Savannah River rice plantation, mortality annually averaged 10 percent of the slave population between 1833 and 1861. During cholera epidemics on some Lowcountry plantations, more than half the slave population died in a matter of months. Infant mortality in the Lowcountry slave quarters also greatly exceeded the rates experienced by white Americans during this era. In addition to the threat of disease, slaveholders frequently shattered family and community ties by selling away slaves. More than 2 million southern slaves were sold in the domestic slave trade of the antebellum era. Away from the Lowcountry, health patterns were much less grim, but slaves tended to experience greater degrees of white supervision. Three-quarters of Georgia's slave population resided on cotton plantations in the Black Belt. These slaves typically experienced some degree of slave community but also were surrounded by far greater numbers of whites. Some one-fifth of the state's slave population was owned by slaveholders with fewer than ten slaves. These slaves doubtless faced greater obstacles in forming relationships outside their owners' purview. Whatever their location, slaves in Georgia resisted their masters with strategies that included overt violence against whites, flight, the destruction of white property, and deliberately inefficient work practices. Slaves in Georgia experienced hideous cruelties, but white slaveholders never succeeded in extinguishing the slaves' human capacity to covet freedom. Secession, the Civil War, and the End of Slavery By the late 1820s white slaveholders in Georgia—like their counterparts across the South—increasingly feared that antislavery forces were working to liberate the slave population. In the months following Abraham Lincoln's election as president of the United States in 1860, Georgia's planter politicians debated and ultimately paved the way for the state's secession from the Union on January 19, 1861. Statesmen like Senator Robert Toombs argued that secession was a necessary response to a longstanding abolitionist campaign to "disturb our security, our tranquillity—to excite discontent between the different classes of our people, and to excite our slaves to insurrection." Lincoln's election, according to these politicians, meant "the abolition of slavery," and that act would be "one of the direst evils of which the mind can conceive."
Suggested Reading Jonathan M. Bryant, How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, 1850-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Anthony Gene Carey, Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997). William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). Mart A. Stewart, "What Nature Suffers to Groe": Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). Betty Wood, Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Jeffrey Robert Young, Georgia State University Published 10/20/2003 |
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