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4.0 million
- 4.0 million were enslaved (89%), held by 385,000 slaveowners.
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How many slaves did the antebellum South have?
How many slaves did the antebellum plantations work?
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How did antebellum men defy slavery?
Did slavery die in the antebellum South?
What percentage of Southerners did not own slaves?
In the 18th century, the Atlantic slave trade brought enslaved Africans to the South during the colonial period as a source of labor for the harvesting of crops. There were almost 700,000 enslaved persons in the U.S. in 1790, which equated to approximately 18 percent of the total population or roughly one in every six people.
- The Cotton Gin
- The Value of A Slave
- Plantations of The “Old South”
- Regulating Slavery
- Expanding Southwest
- The Internal Slave Trade
- Slave Life on Plantations
- Resistance and Escape
At the end of the eighteenth century the farming economy of the South was in trouble. Many wished to convert their farms to grow cotton because England, having recently developed new machines to process cotton into cloth, would buy as much cotton as southerners could grow. But separating the fragile cotton fibers from the seed—a process known as gi...
The rise in need for slaves came exactly at the time that Congress banned the Atlantic slave trade, which forbade the importation of slaves from foreign lands. Slaves suddenly became much more costly. In 1810 the price of a “prime field hand” was nine hundred dollars; by 1860 that price had doubled to eighteen hundred dollars. Despite the ban on fo...
The years from 1831 to 1861, the high point of cotton plantation culture, came to be known as the classic era of the “Old South,” often depicted in popular literature with images of large plantations with pillared mansions run by aristocratic gentlemen with hundreds of slaves. In fact the vast majority of southerners at the time were struggling far...
Southerners lived in great fear of slave uprisings and did everything in their power to prevent their slaves from finding opportunity to discuss plans for escape or revolt. The southern states passed “slave codes,” which made it illegal for slaves to read and write, to attend church services without the presence of a white person, or to testify in ...
As depleted soil lowered farm productivity in states such as Virginia and South Carolina, cotton planters moved into Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee , Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida , Missouri , Texas , and Arkansasbetween 1790 and 1860, bringing their slaves with them. From the 1830s through the 1850s the steady shuffle of slave coffles (groups of sl...
Because it was illegal to import slaves from other countries, an internal slave trade developed among the slave states of the South. It was an ugly business and slave traders were considered the least reputable of white men. Nevertheless the southern plantation economy could prosper only because of the transfer of surplus slaves from the upper Sout...
Life for slaves on plantations was, at best, very difficult. While many plantations were run by impersonal overseers who did not hesitate to apply the lash, some wealthy southern plantation owners viewed themselves as father figures for their slaves and took pride in treating them with kindness. People who owned smaller farms and worked alongside t...
In most southern states, whites outnumbered slaves. The strict slave codes and slave patrols made it difficult to escape, and the lack of mountains and forests made it difficult to hide. Nonetheless up until the time of emancipation (freeing of the slaves) in 1863, about fifty thousand slaves a year ran away for varying lengths of time. Most of the...
Apr 24, 2024 · Using primarily Black-authored evidence from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narrative Project interviews with formerly enslaved people, published slave narratives, and slaveholder documents from across the antebellum South, this article examines how slaveholders interfered in enslaved couples’ intimate lives and forced them to ...
The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with hundreds of slaves. In fact, such situations were rare. Fully 3/4 of Southern whites did not even own slaves; of...
Nov 5, 2017 · Wealthy slaveholders brutally enforced the enslavement of blacks while repressing and degrading poor whites who they saw as disaffected pariahs that could upend the rigid hierarchy of the...
Jan 24, 2023 · Tens of thousands of men and women in the antebellum years defied slavery by running away, thereby sending an explicit message of their refusal to accept exploitation and oppression.
Jun 15, 2023 · Scholars have estimated that forced separations probably destroyed one out of every three first marriages among slaves in the Upper South; at least half of all slave families in the region were ruptured through the deportation of either a spouse or child during the antebellum period.
