Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia, 1856, from The Illustrated London News (Library of Congress)
I’m glad I am not a social studies teacher in Florida, because the standards adopted by the state board of education cover 216 pages and touch on a dizzying variety of topics and do so in a very matter-of-fact way. I imagine the average student will feel like the little girl who began her report on a book about dolphins with, “This book told me more about dolphins than I really wanted to know.”
The bit about slaves learning useful skills is in there, and it’s quite true. Some enslaved people in some situations were sometimes able to learn skills (carpentry, shoemaking, gardening, cooking, etc.) that sometimes allowed them to benefit their own families and sometimes even to earn a little money.
That’s an interesting fact, but it pales in comparison to the essentially brutal and exploitative nature of American black slavery. If you are going to stipulate some details and not others, you will end up with a very distorted view of history.
The standards seem determined to portray African slavery in the 13 colonies and the new nation in a larger context in which forced labor was just another aspect of life. That’s true as far as it goes, but seems to fall far short of the American exceptionalism also advocated by Florida standards.
Students should be taught that slavery was a horrible system, that it was the underlying cause of a war that nearly destroyed the Union, and that we are still living with its after-effects today. The details can be negotiated, but the big picture needs to be presented clearly.
Is it possible that the United States could have abolished slavery in a gradual manner that would have prevented a war?
Slaves picking cotton on a plantation in Georgia, 1858.
One huge factor overwhelmed any progress towards gradual emancipation: cotton.
By 1860, the Southern states of the U.S. produced most of the cotton grown in the world. Of the 5.4 million bales of cotton produced in the U.S. in 1860, 1.6 million went to mills all over the country, most of them in New England. Some 3.8 million bales were sent abroad; the U.S. provided 77 percent of the cotton consumed by textile mills in Britain.
I can’t find a number for the value of U.S. cotton production, but plainly it was in the millions of dollars, much of which poured into the hands of the plantation owners who built those grand houses you saw in “Gone with the Wind.” Cotton profits stocked cellars with fine wines and libraries with old books from South Carolina to Texas. The upper South was less dependent on cotton but participated in the industry as well by selling surplus slaves to the booming plantations in the cotton belt.
Northern businessmen profited as well, both from the textile business and from the financing and shipping of exports.
Cotton was the world’s largest industrial enterprise, and it depended on slave labor.
Some people suggest that the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (in the West Indies and southern Africa) could have been a template for American compensated emancipation. The British government committed twenty million pounds (then worth about 100 million dollars) to buy the freedom of about 800,000 slaves. The U.S. had four million enslaved people in a more vibrant economy, so presumably the cost could have been on the order of half a billion dollars at least and possibly several times that much. The federal government at the time had total revenues of only thirty or forty million dollars a year. No such pot of gold was available.
The last serious discussion of emancipation in the South before the Civil War was in the Virginia legislature in 1832, in the wake of the Nat Turner slave uprising in 1831. There was serious interest in trying to get rid of slavery once and for all, but no one could figure out how to pay for it, and the issue was put off for another day.
Attitudes towards slavery hardened in subsequent years, with Southerners ever more committed to slavery and opposed to abolition.
It is commonplace today to suppose that slavery would have died out in due course. But experts are skeptical. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, in their “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” suggest:
“But in the southern United States, slavery continued with undiminished vigor. Indeed, in this region it became more and more deeply entrenched during the last three decades of the antebellum era. With servitude crumbling all around them, and with their peculiar institution under increasing attack from abolitionists in the North, southern politicians moved to strengthen the legal bulwarks of their system.”
” . . . There was little to encourage the view that southern slavery was on the brink of its own dissolution.”
Tragically, absent a rather unlikely and sudden change of heart on the part of thousands of slave owners, there was probably no peaceful and harmonious solution to the problem of American chattel slavery. It was a problem from hell.
