Racialized Slavery Change in the Early-19th Century

¶ … racialized slavery change in the early-19th century south? How and/or why were non-Slave holders invested in slavery? On what grounds did antebellum southerners defend slavery?

Slavery was not always a racialized category in the Americas. Many Americans emigrated to the U.S. As indentured servants: these were whites who worked without pay in exchange for learning a trade or their passage overseas. However, gradually, the plantation economy of the south fostered a system in which African-Americans toiled in bondage. It was simply more economically sustainable to employ slaves to harvest cash crops like tobacco and cotton, particularly after the invention of the cotton gin. 'Whiteness' became associated with privilege and power, and even poorer whites in the south were above African-American slaves in terms of their social status. Slavery was thus always an ideological as well as an economic and political issue.

Of course, the economics of slavery cannot be overlooked. Southern plantation owners were loath to let go of slaves that had cost them tremendous amounts of money and providing restitution to slave owners in the wake of emancipation would have proven very costly. It was also integral to the southern way of life, in contrast to the industrialization which dominated the north. Although the northern states had allowed slavery during the early years of the republic, eventually the lack of practical necessity for the institution (which had mainly consisted of house slaves and hired hands on small farms in New England) resulted in northern states slowly outlawing slavery.

Not only slaves and slave-owners passionately debated the issue of slavery. Slavery was of ideological importance to religious leaders like William Lloyd Garrison because of its moral implications. Garrison openly demanded that America honor the words of the Declaration of Independence that "all men were created equal" (Garrison 300). However, Garrison noted that prejudice was not confined to the south: "I found contempt more bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn and apathy more frozen than among slave owners themselves" in New England (Garrison 300). Because they had so few dealings with black slaves, some white northerners simply ignored the problem. Also, whiteness was an important signifier of privilege in all of America, not simply amongst Southerners.

Further complicating the question of what constituted a slave or a freed person was the question of women's rights. During this time period, women could not vote, although many women such as the Grimke sisters were passionate abolitionists. One of the few figures to highlight the oppression of both groups was Sojourner Truth, an African-American public speaker. "At a time when many Americans thought of slaves as male and women as white, Truth embodied a fact that still bears repeating" (Painter 320). Black women were dually disenfranchised because of their race and their gender. They were denied the protections and social privileges of white men but they were also denied the protections given to white women. "That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, lifted over ditches, and to have the best places everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place" (Truth 308). The fact that black women such as Truth did not even officially 'exist' in the slavery debate highlights the ideological nature of slavery which was often detached from any personal economic significance for the speaker or the real, lived existences of slaves.

A great divide would eventually be created between persons who demanded the liberation of both blacks and white women, and those who supported emancipation even if was only accorded to African-American males. Initially the supporters of women's and black rights were largely united. Like slaves, women often quoted the Declaration of Independence in support of their rights, such as at the Seneca Falls Convention's Declaration of Women's Rights. Like slaves, married women "were compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming all intents and purposes, her master" (Declaration of Women's Rights 306). The idea that no one had a right to 'mastery' over another human being underlined the philosophies of both of these enfranchisement movements, although their mutual interests did not always necessarily coincide. Religion was also highly influential in both movements. The temperance movement, women's rights, African-American rights all stressed the need for human beings to make moral choices, a product of the new form of religious revivalism which, in contrast to the predestination, emphasized in self-determination. "Unregenerate persons were no longer to be disciplined by immutable authority and through fixed social relationships. They were free and redeemable moral agents, accountable for their actions, capable of accepting or rejecting God's promise" (Johnson 310).