Slave Country

Adam Rothman. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

After achieving independence, the United States acquired sovereignty over a vast area west of the Appalachians and the original colonies-turned-States. The spread of chattel slavery to the southern half of this domain--and beyond, after the acquisition of the Louisiana territory--was anything but preordained; the story of how this happened, specifically in the Deep South (defined here as the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) between the 1780's and 1820 is covered ably in this book.

As Rothman points out in the Introduction, the institution of slavery came with the new nation as a heritage of the colonial period, but that does not explain why it survived and in fact expanded in the first several decades of independence. The United States was a Republic, born of a revolution formerly committed to ideals of liberty and equality. The tension between the rhetoric of the Revolution on the one hand, and the reality of race-based slavery on the other, had troubled many Americans, and had led to the gradual decline of the institution in the North. Yet, within a few decades, the newly established states of the Deep South were firmly committed to plantation slavery as the foundation of their economies, and the source of much of their political and social elite.

None of this, again, was inevitable; in the Preface Rothman states "Slavery's expansion in the Deep South emerged from contingent global forces, concrete policies pursued by governments, and countless small choices made by thousands of individuals in diverse stations of life."(xi)

The original vision for how the lands of the West should be settled was articulated by Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a peaceful, agrarian settling of the vast American interior by good Republican--white--farm families. He also believed, or at least hoped, that somehow the spread of Americans westward across the North American continent would somehow diffuse slavery to the point where it would disappear as an institution and a moral problem. There were two problems with this vision; to begin with, it ignored powerful economic incentives which would encourage the continuation and expansion of slavery, and it failed to account for what would happen to slaves themselves once the institution somehow organically died off. Jefferson's vision had no place for black people. This fact would heavily mitigate any meaningful move toward widespread emancipation in the spreading "slave country".

Furthermore, the spread of settlement into these new lands created conflicts with neighboring colonial powers as well as Indian nations and existing inhabitants. The incorporation of Louisiana into the American polity was problematic, as the city of New Orleans in particular was both very cosmopolitan and had a very different social and racial caste system than the roughly binary white-vs.-black racial hierarchy that was forming in the increasingly democratic (white) Republic of Jeffersonian America. Conflict was inevitable; the Jeffersonian vision could not last contact with the complex realities on the ground.

What followed was a period marked by both demographic growth and economic expansion on one hand, and violence and discord on the other. Cotton and sugar boomed as commodities, and a flood of voracious new settlers--particularly the well-off who could use money and connections to acquire the best land, first--moved in to turn more and more of the region into productive plantation land, worked by an ever-increasing population of enslaved people. At the same time, Indian wars, slave resistance (including the largest single slave revolt in US history, in 1811), and the War of 1812 all contributed to the process of destabilizing the old order and violently clearing the way for the growth and spread of a new slave-based social and economic order.

By the end of the period, the Deep South had emerged as the heart of what was becoming the "Slave Power". There would be further conflict and war ahead, but when the book concludes, the creators of the Deep South could convince themselves that they were the bulwark of a new order which would, in fact, hold it's own for several decades.