Life Under Slavery and the Gilded Age Economy
Life for Enslaved Men and Women
During the nineteenth century, enslaved African Americans worked on large plantations in the US South under brutal conditions.
Daily Life and Coping Mechanisms
- In the early 19th century, most enslaved men and women worked on large agricultural plantations as house servants or field hands.
- Life for enslaved men and women was brutal; they were subject to repression, harsh punishments, and strict racial policing.
- Enslaved people adopted a variety of mechanisms to cope with the degrading realities of life on the plantation. They resisted slavery through everyday acts, while also occasionally plotting larger-scale revolts.
- Enslaved men and women created their own unique religious culture in the US South, combining elements of Christianity and West African traditions and spiritual beliefs.
Life on the Plantation
In the early 19th century, most enslaved people in the US South performed primarily agricultural work. By 1850, only 400,000 enslaved people lived in urban areas—where many engaged in skilled labor such as carpentry, blacksmithing, and pottery. Almost three million worked on farms and plantations. Because most of the agricultural output of the South was produced on large plantations, more than half of all enslaved men and women lived on plantations that had more than 20 enslaved laborers; about a quarter lived on plantations that had more than 50.
Large plantations had field hands and house servants. House servants performed tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and driving, while the field hands labored for up to 20 hours a day clearing land, planting seed, and harvesting crops.
Although enslaved men and women sometimes were able to exercise a degree of autonomy in their work—such as on rice plantations in South Carolina—field hands typically worked in a gang-labor system, under which large groups of enslaved laborers toiled under the supervision of an overseer.
The division of labor on most plantations was gender-based, with women typically in charge of duties such as sewing, cooking, quilting, cleaning the house, supervising the children, and serving as midwives—though many enslaved women worked in the fields as well.
Brutality and Resistance
Life for most enslaved men and women was brutal and harsh. They were frequently separated from their family members because most slaveowners had no compunction about splitting up families in order to improve their own financial situation.
Moreover, as slavery expanded in the Lower South in the early 19th century, legal codes governing the behavior of enslaved men and women became more harsh. Enslaved people were not allowed to defend themselves against violence from whites, nor did they have any legal standing in the courts. They were not allowed to testify, unless it was against another enslaved person or a free black person. They could not enter into contracts, nor could they own property; they were not allowed to leave their owner’s property without express permission.
Punishments for infractions were severe. Whipping was prescribed for minor offenses, and branding, mutilation, and even death were employed as punishment for more serious transgressions. Slave patrols—basically militias of free white men—were created to oversee and enforce the slave codes. Such strict racial policing was designed partly to ensure that enslaved people would never be able to revolt against those who held them in bondage.
Despite all the precautions that white Southerners took to prevent slave rebellions, they did sometimes occur. In 1831, for instance, Nat Turner, an enslaved Virginia man whose owner had taught him to read and who was viewed as a prophet by the other enslaved men and women, organized an insurrection. The uprising began with the killing of Turner’s owner, and within 24 hours, the enslaved rebels managed to kill 60 white people. The revolt was ultimately crushed by law enforcement, and Turner and 13 other slaves were executed. The insurrection terrified white Southerners and resulted in the formulation of even more stringent legal codes governing the behavior of enslaved people.
Resistance to slavery did not just manifest in organized plots and rebellions. Enslaved men and women engaged in acts of everyday resistance, such as stealing food to supplement their meager rations or feigning illness to get out of working. Slaves also performed acts of sabotage, such as breaking farm tools or purposely destroying crops. Sometimes they went so far as to injure, maim, or even kill themselves in order to escape the brutal reality of a life of forced servitude. Others simply fled the plantation, seeking to escape to freedom in the North.
Religion and Slave Culture
Religion played a big role in the lives of many enslaved men and women. Slaveholders often encouraged, condoned, or turned a blind eye to religious activity and worship among their slaves. In some cities of the South, slaves formed their own congregations with their own preachers and religious services. The biblical story of the exodus, during which Moses led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, held special resonance for enslaved people.
Slave culture in the US South drew on influences other than Christianity. West African spiritual traditions and beliefs were a huge part of the culture of enslaved men and women. Some of these traditions included the belief in the power of totems and protective charms, and the practice of conjuring—predicting the future. Enslaved people held their own gatherings and celebrations where they danced, sang, and told folktales.
Abolitionism in Black and White
The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, ignited antislavery sentiment in the North. The abolitionist movement, which gathered steam in the years after the compromise, was centered in New England and many prominent leaders of the movement were white, upper-middle-class social reformers and clergy members.
Many Americans reacted negatively to seeing women so active in the public sphere. This propelled the question of a woman’s proper role in society to the forefront of political debate; the Grimké sisters then became instrumental in a related social cause, the early women’s rights movement. Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist and feminist, observed, “The comparison between women and the colored race is striking . . . both have been kept in subjection by physical force.” Other women who would become prominent in the women’s rights movement, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony, agreed.
But, by far, one of the most influential women at the time was Harriet Tubman.
The Slave Economy
The South relied on slavery heavily for economic prosperity and used wealth as a way to justify enslavement practices.
Cotton is King
- With the invention of the cotton gin, cotton became the cash crop of the Deep South, stimulating increased demand for enslaved people from the Upper South to toil the land.
- As the disparity between plantation owners and poor white people widened in the Deep South, deeply entrenched racism blurred perceived class divides.
- The slave economy of the South had international economic reach since the majority of cotton was sold abroad; it connected the United States to the international marketplace.
By the mid-19th century, southern commercial centers like New Orleans had become home to the greatest concentration of wealth in the United States. Slavery shaped the culture and society of the South, which rested on a racial ideology of white supremacy. And importantly, many whites believed slavery itself sustained the newly prosperous Southern economy.
However, cotton was a labor-intensive crop, and many plantation owners were reducing the number of people they enslaved due to high costs and low output. In 1793, Eli Whitney revolutionized cotton production when he invented the cotton gin, a device that separated the seeds from raw cotton. Suddenly, a process that was extraordinarily labor-intensive could be completed quickly and easily. By the early 1800s, cotton emerged as the South’s major cash crop—a good produced for commercial value instead of for use by the owner. Cotton quickly eclipsed tobacco, rice, and sugar in economic importance.
American plantation owners began to turn to the world market to sell their newfound surplus. Cotton had the advantage of being easily stored and transported. A demand for it already existed in the industrial textile mills in Great Britain, and in time, a steady stream of slave-grown American cotton would also supply northern textile mills. Southern cotton, picked and processed by newly-profitable slaves, helped fuel the 19th-century Industrial Revolution in both the United States and Great Britain.
This lucrative international trade brought new wealth and new residents to New Orleans as products and people travelled down the new water highway of the US, the Mississippi River. The invention of the steamship dramatically increased the use of the river as a quick and easy way of transporting goods. By 1840, New Orleans alone had 12 percent of the nation’s total banking capital. Enslaved people, cotton, and the steamship transformed the city from a relatively isolated corner of North America to a thriving metropolis that rivaled New York in importance.
By 1850, of the 3.2 million enslaved people in the country’s fifteen slave states, 1.8 million were producing cotton. By 1860, slave labor was producing over two billion pounds of cotton per year. Indeed, American cotton soon made up two-thirds of the global supply, and production continued to soar. By the time of the Civil War, South Carolina politician James Henry Hammond confidently proclaimed that the North could never threaten the South because “cotton is king.” The production of cotton brought the South more firmly into the larger American and Atlantic markets. About 75% of the cotton produced in the United States was eventually exported abroad. Exporting at such high volumes made the United States the undisputed world leader in cotton production. Although the larger American and Atlantic markets relied on southern cotton in this era, the South also depended on these markets for obtaining food, manufactured goods, and loans. Thus, the market revolution transformed the South just as it had other regions.
Sold Down the River: The Domestic Slave Trade
With the cotton boom in the Deep South came a spike in demand for enslaved laborers to work the fields. Although Congress abolished the foreign slave trade in 1808, Americans continued to smuggle Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. However, the domestic slave trade primarily supplied the necessary labor force. As the tobacco crop dwindled, former tobacco farmers in the older states of Virginia and Maryland found themselves with “surplus” enslaved laborers whom they were obligated to feed, clothe, and shelter. Some slaveholders responded to this situation by freeing enslaved laborers; far more decided to sell them.
The domestic slave trade offered many economic opportunities for white men. Between 1790 and 1859, slaveholders in Virginia sold more than half a million enslaved laborers. The phrase “to be sold down the river,” used by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, refers to this forced migration from the upper southern states to the Deep South, lower on the Mississippi, to grow cotton.
Since the conditions of slavery—as well as chances of escape—got progressively worse farther south, slaveholders in the Upper South wielded the notion of being “sold down the river” as a threat to keep their slaves in line. All told, the movement of slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South made up one of the largest forced internal migrations in the United States.
Economic Inequality in the “Slavocracy”
The South prospered, but its wealth was very unequally distributed. Upward social mobility did not exist for the millions of enslaved people who produced a substantial portion of the nation’s wealth, while poor southern whites envisioned a day when they might rise enough in the world to own enslaved laborers of their own. Because of the cotton boom, there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River Valley by 1860 than anywhere else in the United States.
However, in that same year, only three percent of white people owned more than 50 enslaved people, and two-thirds of white households in the South did not own any slaves at all. Distribution of wealth became more and more concentrated at the top; fewer white people owned enslaved laborers in 1860 than in 1840.
Despite this unequal distribution of wealth, non-slaveholding white people, many of them called yeoman farmers, shared with white planters a common set of values, most notably a belief in white supremacy. Whites, whether rich or poor, were bound together by racism. The institution of race-based slavery defused class tensions among whites because no matter how poor they were, white southerners had race in common with the mighty plantation owners. Significantly, all white southerners were also bound together by the constant, prevailing fear of slave uprisings.
The Gilded Age: Social Darwinism
Mark Twain called the late 19th century the “Gilded Age.” By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In the popular view, the late 19th century was a period of greed and guile: of rapacious Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers, of shady business practices, scandal-plagued politics, and vulgar display.
It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism. But it is more useful to think of this as modern America’s formative period, when an agrarian society of small producers were transformed into an urban society dominated by industrial corporations.
The late 19th century saw the creation of a modern industrial economy. A national transportation and communication network was created, the corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations.
Social Darwinism is a term scholars use to describe the practice of misapplying the biological evolutionary language of Charles Darwin to politics, the economy, and society.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) is one of the most important books in the annals of both science and history. In Origin and in his subsequent writing Darwin offered a revolutionary scientific theory: the process of evolution through natural selection. In short, natural selection means that plants and animals evolve over time in nature as new species arise from spontaneous mutations at the point of reproduction and battle with other plants and animals to get food, avoid being killed, and have offspring. Darwin pointed to fossil records, among other evidence, in support of his theory.
Social Darwinism
Soon, some sociologists and others were taking up words and ideas which Darwin had used to describe the biological world, and they were adopting them to their own ideas and theories about the human social world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these Social Darwinists took up the language of evolution to frame an understanding of the growing gulf between the rich and the poor as well as the many differences between cultures all over the world.
The explanation they arrived at was that businessmen and others who were economically and socially successful were so because they were biologically and socially “naturally” the fittest. Conversely, they reasoned that the poor were “naturally” weak and unfit and it would be an error to allow the weak of the species to continue to breed. They believed that the dictum “survival of the fittest” (a term coined not by Charles Darwin but by sociologist Herbert Spencer) meant that only the fittest should survive.
Unlike Darwin, these sociologists and others were not biologists. They were adapting and corrupting Darwin’s language for their own social, economic, and political explanations. While Darwin’s theory remains a cornerstone of modern biology to this day, the views of the Social Darwinists are no longer accepted, as they were based on an erroneous interpretation of the theory of evolution.
Social Darwinism, Poverty, and Eugenics
Social Darwinian language like this extended into theories of race and racism, eugenics, the claimed national superiority of one people over another, and immigration law.
Many sociologists and political theorists turned to Social Darwinism to argue against government programs to aid the poor, as they believed that poverty was the result of natural inferiority, which should be bred out of the human population. Herbert Spencer gave as an example a young woman from upstate New York named Margaret, whom he described as a “gutter-child.” Because government aid had kept her alive, Margaret had, as Spencer wrote, “proved to be the prolific mother” of two hundred descendants who were “idiots, imbeciles, drunkards, lunatics, paupers, and prostitutes.” Spencer concluded by asking, “Was it kindness or cruelty which, generation after generation, enabled these to multiply and become an increasing curse to the society around them?” These ideas inspired the eugenics movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which sought to improve the health and intelligence of the human race by sterilizing individuals it deemed “feeble-minded” or otherwise “unfit.” Eugenic sterilizations, which disproportionately targeted women, minorities, and immigrants, continued in the United States until the 1970s.
Social Darwinism, Immigration, and Imperialism
The pernicious beliefs of Social Darwinism also shaped Americans’ relationship with peoples of other nations. As a massive number of immigrants came to the United States during the Second Industrial Revolution, white, Anglo-Saxon Americans viewed these newcomers—who differed from earlier immigrants in that they were less likely to speak English and more likely to be Catholic or Jewish rather than Protestant—with disdain. Many whites believed that these new immigrants, who hailed from Eastern or Southern Europe, were racially inferior and consequently “less evolved” than immigrants from England, Ireland, or Germany. Similarly, Social Darwinism was used as a justification for American imperialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, as many adherents of imperialism argued that it was the duty of white Americans to bring civilization to “backwards” peoples.
During and after World War II, the arguments of Social Darwinists and eugenicists lost popularity in the United States due to their association with Nazi racial propaganda. Modern biological science has completely discredited the theory of Social Darwinism.