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.THE OLD SOUTH AND THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION:THE CENTRAL THEME IN ACTIONThe institution of slavery, the peculiar institution, as it came to becalled, was neither peculiar nor Southern in 1619, when the first slavesarrived at Jamestown to be sold off a  Dutch man of warre to local to-bacco farmers.It was simply a medieval answer to a labor shortage thatwas more pronounced in the lush, semi-tropical, Southern, Britishmainland colonies than in the rocky, non-productive soils of the North.But slavery soon spread to all 13 British colonies in North America,plantations being as common in the old Dutch areas of the Hudson Val-ley and the truck gardens of New Jersey as the tobacco farms of Virginiaand Maryland, and the later rice, cotton, and indigo plantations of SouthCarolina and Georgia.The first black slaves were probably not chattels at all, but indentures.Just like the white immigrants from England and northern Europe, they owed a sponsor a sum for their transportation to the New World, thatamount to be worked off in a term of years.Indeed, until a decade or twobefore 1700, there were no slave laws on the books anywhere in BritishNorth America.But gradually the terms of indenture were lessened forwhites and lengthened for blacks until, for the latter, it came to 99 years.By 1714, the year the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, died in Britain,black codes in every colony defined slavery as a racial matter handeddown from mother to child.Thus the off-spring from miscegenation,generally between white males and black women, expanded the laborforce and could be disposed of as deemed convenient.By the time of the American Revolution, slavery north of Marylandwas a stagnant institution, while that south of Pennsylvania was en-trenched and growing.Thomas Jefferson hoped to stigmatize KingGeorge III in the Declaration of Independence for imprinting slavery onAmerica as part of the British Navigation Acts that forced colonies topurchase certain enumerated items and sell their produce to the motherINTRODUCTION " 5country.But the hypocrisy of it all the colonies never sent a slave shipout of port with its cargo unloaded or unsold, as they had with tea, forexample caused this clause to be stricken.However, a reference to theking s ministers, like the colonial governor of Virginia, John Murray,the Earl of Dunmore (Lord Dunmore to his American subjects), en-couraging slave rebellion against their patriot masters ( domestic insur-rections, Jefferson called them) was kept.During and after the Revolution, the Northern states began to freetheir slaves, influenced by the natural rights philosophy of freedom andindependence.But the black codes remained on the books as early state-ments of racial discrimination.Indeed, special laws had to be passed toprevent Yankee slaveholders from selling their slaves out of state to theOld South instead of freeing them.Many Southerners, motivated by thesame philosophy of revolution, freed their slaves by individual action(George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe), but Thomas Jef-ferson, like most Southerners, did not.The social separation of racialslavery was too much of an impediment, with slaves outnumberingwhites in many districts, as they did.Actually, the Old South needed more and more slaves to raise thelabor-intensive staple crops of Sea Island cotton, hemp, indigo, and rice.Since the British had liberated thousands of American slaves during thewar, these needed to be replaced, too.When the Constitutional Con-vention met, the Old South insisted that the international slave trade re-main legal until 1 January 1808.On that date the trade was outlawed.The slave states of Virginia and Maryland were among the leaders of theban, realizing that their numerous chattels now had a heightened value,as the Old South began to expand westward in the Great Migration.The westward movement of the plantation system was made possi-ble by the domestic slave trade, centered in Washington, D.C., in theUpper South and New Orleans in the Lower South.The active domes-tic market in slaves revealed one of the oddities of slavery in the OldSouth, when compared to all the slave systems active in the WesternHemisphere over the centuries.In the 19th century, the Old Souththrived on its own reproduction without resort to the international slavetrade so necessary in Latin America.Some historians posit that the rea-son for this was that the Old South had the kindest form of slavery ifthere is such a thing one that allowed a semblance of normal familylife.6 " INTRODUCTIONShortly after the Constitutional Convention, an invention that madethe Old South and slavery part of a viable economic entity, the cottongin, was perfected [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]