Bethel University Unit 5 Development of The West from 1820 & 1850 Questions Each question must be 300 or more words. Everything must be in own words. Complete section answers in total must be at least 1,000 words and you must include a minimum 3 scholarly sources. I.
How
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black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in
the history of the United States, at once a challenge to
racy
and always an important part of
social
Easily the
den move
civil
its
its
democ-
economic history and
development
most dramatic episode in American history was the sud-
to free four million black slaves in
an
effort to stop a great
war, to end forty years of bitter controversy, and to appease the
moral sense of civilization.
From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation
which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers
of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of
the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black
slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.
The black population at the time of the first census had risen to
three-quarters of a million,
and there were over
a million at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. Before 1830, the blacks had passed the
two million mark, helped by the increased importations just before
and the illicit smuggling up until 1820. By their own reproduction, the Negroes reached 3,638,808 in 1850, and before the Civil
War, stood at 4,441,830. They were 10% of the whole population of
the nation in 1700, 22% in 1750, 18.9% in 1800 and 1.1.6% in 1900.
These workers were not all black and not all Africans and not all
slaves. In i860, at least 90% were born in the United States, 13% were
visibly of white as well as Negro descent and actually more than onefourth were probably of white, Indian and Negro blood. In i860, 11%
of these dark folk were free workers.
In origin, the slaves represented everything African, although most
of them originated on or near the West Coast. Yet among them appeared the great Bantu tribes from Sierra Leone to South Africa; the
Sudanese, straight across the center of the continent, from the Atlantic
to the Valley of the Nile; the Nilotic Negroes and the black and
brown Hamites, allied with Egypt; the tribes of the great lakes; the
Pygmies and the Hottentots; and in addition to these, distinct traces
of both Berber and Arab blood. There is no doubt of the presence of
all these various elements in the mass of 10,000,000 or more Negroes
1808,
3
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4
transported from Africa to the various Americas, from the fifteenth
to the nineteenth centuries.
went through West Indian
tutelage, and thus finally appeared in the United States. They brought
with them their religion and rhythmic song, and some traces of their
art and tribal customs. And after a lapse of two and one-half centuries,
the Negroes became a settled working population, speaking English
or French, professing Christianity, and used principally in agricultural
toil. Moreover, they so mingled their blood with white and red America that today less than 25% of the Negro Americans are of unmixed
Most
of
them
that
came
to the continent
African descent.
So long as slavery was a matter of race and color, it made the conscience of the nation uneasy and continually affronted its ideals. The
men who wrote the Constitution sought by every evasion, and almost
by subterfuge, to keep recognition of slavery out of the basic form of
the new government. They founded their hopes on the prohibition of
the slave trade, being sure that without continual additions from
abroad, this tropical people would not long survive, and thus the problem of slavery would disappear in death. They miscalculated, or did
not foresee the changing economic world. It might be more profitable
in the West Indies to kill the slaves by overwork and import cheap
Africans; but in America without a slave trade, it paid to conserve
the slave and let him multiply. When, therefore, manifestly the Negroes were not dying out, there came quite naturally new excuses and
explanations.
It
was
a matter of social condition. Gradually these peo-
would be free; but freedom could only come to the bulk as the
freed were transplanted to their own land and country, since the living together of black and white in America was unthinkable. So again
the nation waited, and its conscience sank to sleep.
But in a rich and eager land, wealth and work multiplied. They
twisted new and intricate patterns around the earth. Slowly but
mightily these black workers were integrated into modern industry.
On free and fertile land Americans raised, not simply sugar as a cheap
sweetening, rice for food and tobacco as a new and tickling luxury;
but they began to grow a fiber that clothed the masses of a ragged
world. Cotton grew so swiftly that the 9,000 bales of cotton which the
new nation scarcely noticed in 1791 became 79,000 in 1800; and with
this increase, walked economic revolution in a dozen different lines.
ple
The
cotton crop reached one-half million bales in 1822, a million bales
in 1831, two million in 1840, three million in 1852, and in the year of
secession, stood at the then
Such facts and
which they were
enormous
others, coupled
related
as
total of five million bales.
with the increase of the slaves to
both cause and effect, meant a new
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5
more so because with increase in American cotton
and Negro slaves, came both by chance and ingenuity new miracles
for manufacturing, and particularly for the spinning and weaving of
world; and
all
the
cloth.
The
giant forces of water and of steam were harnessed to do the
world’s work, and the black workers of America bent at the bottom
of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry; and they not only
could not be spared, if this new economic organization was to expand,
but rather they became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire.
work
widening stretches of new, rich,
black soil in Florida, in Louisiana, in Mexico; even in Kansas. This
land, added to cheap labor, and labor easily regulated and distributed,
made profits so high that a whole system of culture arose in the South,
with a new leisure and social philosophy. Black labor became the
foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of
Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system,
of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale;
new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor
problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America.
Thus, the old difficulties and paradoxes appeared in new dress. It
became easy to say and easier to prove that these black men were not
men in the sense that white men were, and could never be, in the
same sense, free. Their slavery was a matter of both race and social
condition, but the condition was limited and determined by race. They
were congenital wards and children, to be well-treated and cared for,
but far happier and safer here than in their own land. As the RichFirst of
all,
—
mond,
their
Virginia,
called for
Examiner put
it
in 1854:
“Let us not bother our brains about what Providence intends to do
with our Negroes in the distant future, but glory in and profit to the
utmost by what He has done for them in transplanting them here,
and
setting
them
to
work on our
plantations.
.
.
.
True philanthropy
Negro, begins, like charity, at home; and if Southern men
would act as if the canopy of heaven were inscribed with a covenant,
in letters of fire, that the Negro is here, and here forever; is our property, and ours forever;
they would accomplish more good for the
race in five years than they boast the institution itself to have accomto the
.
plished in
two
centuries.
.
.
.
.
.”
On
the other hand, the growing exploitation of white labor in
Europe, the rise of the factory system, the increased monopoly of land,
and the problem of the distribution of political power, began to send
wave
new
after
wave
of immigrants to America, looking for
opportunity and
new
democracy.
new
freedom,
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6
The
opportunity for real and
Political
an
on
power
at first
new democracy
America was broad.
property holders and
in
was, as usual, confined to
and learning. But it was never securely based
land. Land was free and both land and property were possible to
nearly every thrifty worker. Schools began early to multiply and open
their doors even to the poor laborer. Birth began to count for less and
less and America became to the world a land of economic opportunity. So the world came to America, even before the Revolution, and
afterwards during the nineteenth century, nineteen million immigrants entered the United States.
When we compare these figures with the cotton crop and the increase of black workers, we see how the economic problem increased
in intricacy. This intricacy is shown by the persons in the drama and
their differing and opposing interests. There were the native-born
Americans, largely of English descent, who were the property holders
and employers; and even so far as they were poor, they looked forward to the time when they would accumulate capital and become, as
they put it, economically “independent.” Then there were the new
immigrants, torn with a certain violence from their older social and
economic surroundings; strangers in a new land, with visions of rising
in the social and economic world by means of labor. They differed in
language and social status, varying from the half-starved Irish peasant
to the educated German and English artisan. There were the free
Negroes: those of the North free in some cases for many generations,
and voters; and in other cases, fugitives, new come from the South,
with little skill and small knowledge of life and labor in their new
environment. There were the free Negroes of the South, an unstable,
harried class, living on sufferance of the law, and the good will of
white patrons, and yet rising to be workers and sometimes owners of
property and even of slaves, and cultured citizens. There was the great
mass of poor whites, disinherited of their economic portion by competition with the slave system, and land monopoly.
In the earlier history of the South, free Negroes had the right to
vote. Indeed, so far as the letter of the law was concerned, there was
not a single Southern colony in which a black man who owned the
requisite amount of property, and complied with other conditions, did
not at some period have the legal right to vote.
Negroes voted in Virginia as late as 1723, when the assembly
enacted that no free Negro, mulatto or Indian “shall hereafter have
any vote at the elections of burgesses or any election whatsoever.” In
North Carolina, by the Act of 1734, a former discrimination against
Negro voters was laid aside and not reenacted until 1835.
A complaint in South Carolina, in 1701, said:
aristocracy of birth
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7
&
taken for as good Electors as
the best Freeholders in the Province. So that we leave it with Your
Lordships to judge whether admitting Aliens, Strangers, Servants,
Negroes, &c, as good and qualified Voters, can be thought any ways
agreeable to King Charles’ Patent to Your Lordships, or the English
Constitution of Government.” Again in 1716, Jews and Negroes, who
had been voting, were expressly excluded. In Georgia, there was at
first no color discrimination, although only owners of fifty acres of
1
land could vote. In 1761, voting was expressly confined to white men.
“Several free Negroes were receiv’d,
In the states carved out of the Southwest, they were disfranchised
as soon as the state came into the Union, although in Kentucky they
voted between 1792 and 1799, and Tennessee allowed free Negroes to
vote in her constitution of 1796.
In North Carolina, where even disfranchisement, in 1835, did not
apply to Negroes
who
already had the right to vote,
it
was
said that
hundred Negroes who had been voting before then usually voted prudently and judiciously.
In Delaware and Maryland they voted in the latter part of the
eighteenth century. In Louisiana, Negroes who had had the right to
vote during territorial status were not disfranchised.
To sum up, in colonial times, the free Negro was excluded from the
suffrage only in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia. In the Border
States, Delaware disfranchised the Negro in 1792; Maryland in 1783
and 1810.
In the Southeast, Florida disfranchised Negroes in 1845; and in the
the several
Southwest, Louisiana disfranchised them in 1812; Mississippi in 1817;
Alabama in 1819; Missouri, 1821; Arkansas in 1836; Texas, 1845.
Georgia in her constitution of 1777 confined voters to white males;
but this was omitted in the constitutions of 1789 and 1798.
As slavery grew to a system and the Cotton Kingdom began to
expand into imperial white domination, a free Negro was a contradiction, a threat and a menace. As a thief and a vagabond, he threatened society; but as an educated property holder, a successful mechanic
or even professional man, he more than threatened slavery. He contradicted and undermined it. He must not be. He must be suppressed,
enslaved, colonized. And nothing so bad could be said about him that
did not easily appear as true to slaveholders.
In the North, Negroes, for the most part, received political enfranchisement with the white laboring classes. In 1778, the Congress
of the Confederation twice refused to insert the word “white” in the
Articles of Confederation in asserting that free inhabitants in each
state should be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of free
citizens of the several states. In the law of 1783, free Negroes were
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8
recognized as a basis of taxation, and in 1784, they were recognized as
voters in the territories. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, “free
male inhabitants of full age” were recognized as voters.
The few Negroes that were in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont could vote if they had the property qualifications. In Connecticut they were disfranchised in 1814; in 1865 this restriction was retained, and Negroes did not regain the right until after the Civil War.
In New Jersey, they were disfranchised in 1807, but regained the right
in 1820 and lost it again in 1847. Negroes voted in New York in the
eighteenth century, then were disfranchised, but in 1821 were permitted to vote with a discriminatory property qualification of $250. No
property qualification was required of whites. Attempts were made at
various times to remove this qualification but
until 1870. In
Rhode
it
was not removed
Island they were disfranchised in the constitution
which followed Dorr’s Rebellion, but finally allowed to vote in
1842. In Pennsylvania, they were allowed to vote until 1838 when the
“reform” convention restricted the suffrage to whites.
The Western States as territories did not usually restrict the suffrage,
but as they were admitted to the Union they disfranchised the Negroes: Ohio in 1803; Indiana in 1816; Illinois in 1818; Michigan in
1837; Iowa in 1846; Wisconsin in 1848; Minnesota in 1858; and Kansas
in 1861.
The Northwest Ordinance and even the Louisiana Purchase had
made no color discrimination in legal and political rights. But the
admitted from this territory, specifically and from the first, denied free black men the right to vote and passed codes of black laws
in Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere, instigated largely by the attitude and
fears of the immigrant poor whites from the South. Thus, at first, in
Kansas and the West, the problem of the black worker was narrow
and specific. Neither the North nor the West asked that black labor
in the United States be free and enfranchised. On the contrary, they
accepted slave labor as a fact; but they were determined that it should
be territorially restricted, and should not compete with free white
states
labor.
What was
system for which the South fought and
risked life, reputation and wealth and which a growing element in
the North viewed first with hesitating tolerance, then with distaste
and finally with economic fear and moral horror? What did it mean
think of oppression
to be a slave? It is hard to imagine it today.
this industrial
We
beyond
all
conception: cruelty, degradation, whipping and starvation,
the absolute negation of
human
rights; or
on the contrary, we may
think of the ordinary worker the world over today, slaving ten,
twelve, or fourteen hours a day, with not enough to eat, compelled by
THE BLACK WORKER
his physical necessities to
movements and
do
this
his possibilities;
and not to do
and we say,
9
that, curtailed in his
here, too,
is
a
slave
and slavery is merely a matter of name.
But there was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from that
we may apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the
called a “free worker,”
enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master;
the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the de-
was the submergence below the arbitrary
will of any sort of individual. It was without doubt worse in these
vital respects than that which exists today in Europe or America. Its
analogue today is the yellow, brown and black laborer in China and
India, in Africa, in the forests of the Amazon; and it was this slavery
fenselessness of family
life. It
that fell in America.
The
cruel
slavery of
Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately
and oppressive system.
murder.
On
the other hand,
It
did not
it is
mean
systematic starvation or
just as difficult to conceive as quite
and humane
masters under whom slaves were as children, guided and trained in
work and play, given even such mental training as was for their good,
and for the well-being of the surrounding world.
The victims of Southern slavery were often happy; had usually adequate food for their health, and shelter sufficient for a mild climate.
The Southerners could say with some justification that when the mass
of their field hands were compared with the worst class of laborers in
the slums of New York and Philadelphia, and the factory towns of
New England, the black slaves were as well off and in some particulars better off. Slaves lived largely in the country where health conditions were better; they worked in the open air, and their hours were
true the idyllic picture of a patriarchal state with cultured
about the current hours for peasants throughout Europe. They received no formal education, and neither did the Irish peasant, the
English factory-laborer, nor the German Bauer; and in contrast with
these free white laborers, the Negroes were protected by a certain
primitive sort of old-age pension, job insurance, and sickness insurance; that is, they must be supported in some fashion, when they were
must have attention in sickness, for they represented invested capital; and they could never be among the unem-
too old to work; they
ployed.
On
the other hand,
it is
just as true that
Negro
slaves in
America
represented the worst and lowest conditions among modern laborers.
One estimate is that the maintenance of a slave in the South cost the
master about $19 a year, which means that they were among the poorest paid laborers in the modern world. They represented in a very real
sense the ultimate degradation of
^e
man. Indeed, the system was
so re-
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io
modern
actionary, so utterly inconsistent with
we
simply
cannot grasp it today. No matter how degraded the factory hand, he
is not real estate. The tragedy of the black slave’s position was preprogress, that
an owner
and to “the cruelty and injustice which are the invariable consequences
of the exercise of irresponsible power, especially where authority must
be sometimes delegated by the planter to agents of inferior education
cisely this; his absolute subjection to the individual will of
and coarser
The
feelings.”
proof of this
They
not…
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