Page 293 - American Stories, A History of the United States

11.1 Read the Document Henry Watson, A Slave Tells of His Sale at Auction (1848)

11.2

11.3

LEWIS MILLER, SLAVE SALE, VIRGINIA, PRObAbLY 1853 Slave auctions, such as the one depicted in
Lewis Miller’s sketchbook, were a routine occurrence across the Southern United States.

4 million. The cotton-growing areas of the South were becoming more dependent on
slavery, while agriculture in the Upper South was moving away from the institution.
Yet slavery remained important to the economy of the Upper South through the slave
trade. To understand southern thought and behavior, it is necessary to bear in mind
this major regional difference between a slave plantation society and a farming and
slave-trading region.

The internal Slave Trade

Tobacco, the original plantation crop of the colonial period, remained the principal
slave-cultivated commodity of the upper tier of southern states. But markets were
often depressed, and profitable tobacco cultivation was hard to sustain for long in one
place because the crop depleted the soil. As slave prices rose (because of high demand
in the Lower South) and demand for slaves in the Upper South fell, the “internal”
slave trade took off. Economic historians have concluded that the most important
crop the tobacco kingdom produced was not the “stinking weed” but human beings
cultivated for the auction block. The most profitable business for slaveholders in Vir-
ginia, Kentucky, Maryland, and the Carolinas was selling “surplus” slaves from the
Upper South to the Deep South, where staple crop production was more profitable.
This interstate slave trade sent 600,000–700,000 slaves in a southwesterly direction
between 1815 and 1860 (see Figure 11.1). A slave child born in the Upper South in
the 1820s had a 30-percent chance of being “sold downriver” by 1860. Such sales not
only split families, but made it unlikely that the slaves sold would ever see friends or
family again.
The slave trade provided crucial capital in a period of transition and innovation in
the Upper South. Nevertheless, the declining importance of slave labor in that region
meant the peculiar institution had a weaker hold on public loyalty there than in the cot-
ton states. More rapid urban and industrial development than elsewhere in the South
accompanied this diversification of agriculture. As a result, Virginians, Maryland-
ers, and Kentuckians were divided on whether their future lay with the Deep South’s

260