What was the primary reason that slavery became more widespread in the south than in the north?

Conversations about slavery in the United States frequently center on the South and the Civil War. Yet the roots of slavery in the New World go much deeper than that—back to the original British colonies, including the northernmost in New England. Although New England would later become known for its abolitionist leaders and its role in helping formerly enslaved Southern blacks and those escaping slavery, the colonies had a history of using enslaved and indentured labor to create and build their economies.

The Origins of American SlaveryThe concept of slavery was hardly a new one when England’s colonists reached North American shores, as it had been practiced in Europe for more than a century before the colonies. So the arrival of Africans in Virginia in 1619 was not the start of a new phenomenon, but the beginning of human trafficking between Africa and North America based on the social norms of Europe.

While slavery grew exponentially in the South with large-scale plantations and agricultural operations, slavery in New England was different. Most of those enslaved in the North did not live in large communities, as they did in the mid-Atlantic colonies and the South. Those Southern economies depended upon people enslaved at plantations to provide labor and keep the massive tobacco and rice farms running. But without the same rise in plantations in New England, it was more typical to have one or two enslaved people attached to a household, business, or small farm.

In New England, it was common for individual enslaved people to learn specialized skills and crafts due to the area’s more varied economy. Ministers, doctors, tradesmen, and merchants also used enslaved labor to work alongside them and run their households. As in the South, enslaved men were frequently forced into heavy or farm labor. Enslaved women were frequently forced to work as household servants, whereas in the South women often performed agricultural work.

New England’s Forced Laborers: the Enslaved, Indentured Servants, and Native Americans

Part of the reason slavery evolved differently in New England than in the middle and southern colonies was the culture of indentured servitude. As a carryover from English practice, indentured servants were the original standard for forced labor in New England and middle colonies like Pennsylvania and Delaware. These indentured servants were people voluntarily working off debts, usually signing a contract to perform slave-level labor for four to seven years. Historians estimate that more than half of the original population of the American colonies was brought over as indentured servants.New England colonies were also slower to start accepting African slavery in general—possibly because there were local alternatives to enslaved Africans. Early in New England’s history, a different kind of human trafficking emerged: enslaving and shipping local Native Americans to the West Indies. This kind of slavery was limited compared to the number of enslaved Africans and indentured servants that eventually came to New England, but exporting and enslaving these native people was an undeniable part of early New England human trafficking.

Enslaved Africans quickly replaced indentured servants on plantations in Virginia, Maryland, and other Southern colonies, but in New England, imported enslaved people were initially given the same status as indentured servants. This changed in 1641, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws for enslaved people differentiating enslaved labor from the indentured servants’ contract labor, which took away the enslaved’s rights.

Still, the New England colonies began to show differences in their approaches to slavery, even as slavery became more common in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in the 18th century. The colonial government in Rhode Island—which had the largest enslaved population by the 1700s—tried, though ultimately failed, to enforce laws that gave the enslaved the same rights as indentured servants and set enslaved individuals free after 10 years of service. Although human trafficking continued to flourish throughout the 1700s, these first moves to break up human trafficking foreshadowed what was to come in the New England colonies.

Becoming the “Free North”

The use of slavery throughout the colonies (particularly the southern ones) continued to grow throughout the 18th century, but as the colonies moved closer to revolution against England, there was a growing trend of questioning slavery and its practices in New England. The number of people freed from bondage in New England grew, as the enslaved who fought in the Revolutionary War (on both sides) were offered freedom.

Religious societies like the Quakers (who believed that slavery was sinful and amoral) began the first stirrings of anti-slavery movements in New England. These early movements would later form the backbone of the 19th century abolitionist movements that would spread throughout the United States.

New England governments began to step in as well, outlawing active human trafficking in the Connecticut and Rhode Island colonies. However, few colonial leaders wanted a full repeal of slavery at the time. It was not until the last decades of the 18th century that the former New England colonies began the long process of outlawing slavery via emancipation statutes. These were "gradual emancipation" laws, however, designed to phase out the institution over many years. Though the enslaved populations dwindled over time after these laws were passed, enslaved people were still legally held for decades in some northern states. Despite passage of these gradual emancipation laws in 1784, Rhode Island and Connecticut didn't free their last enslaved people until the 1840s.

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When Europeans first colonized the North American continent, the land was vast, the work was harsh, and there was a severe shortage of labor. White bond servants, paying their passage across the ocean from Europe through indentured labor, eased but did not solve the problem. Tensions between settlers and former indentured servants increased the pressure to find a new labor source. Early in the seventeenth century, a Dutch ship loaded with African slaves introduced a solution—and yet paradoxically a new problem—to the New World. Slaves proved to be economical on large farms where labor-intensive cash crops, such as tobacco, sugar and rice, could be grown.

The slave market in Atlanta, Georgia, 1864. Library of Congress

By the end of the American Revolution, slavery became largely unprofitable in the North and was slowly dying out. Even in the South the institution was becoming less useful to farmers as tobacco prices fluctuated and began to drop. Due to the decline of the tobacco market in the 1760s and 1770s many farmers switched from producing tobacco to wheat, which required less labor leading to surplus of slaves. However, in 1793 northerner Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin; this device made it possible for textile mills to use the type of cotton most easily grown in the lower South. The invention of the cotton gin brought about a robust internal slave trade. As the lower South became more established in cotton production the region required more slave labor, which they received from upper South slaveowners looking to offload their surplus of slaves. In 1808, the United States banned the international slave trade (the importation of slaves), which only increased the demand for domestically traded slaves. In the upper South the most profitable cash crop was not was not an agricultural product but the sale of human lives. Although some southerners owned no slaves at all, by 1860 the South’s “peculiar institution” was inextricably tied to the region’s economy and society.

Torn between the economic benefits of slavery and the moral and constitutional issues it raised, white southerners grew more and more defensive of the institution. They argued that black people, like children, were incapable of caring for themselves and that slavery was a benevolent institution that kept them fed, clothed, and occupied, and exposed them to Christianity. Most northerners did not doubt that black people were inferior to whites, but they did doubt the benevolence of slavery. The voices of Northern abolitionists, such as Boston editor and publisher William Lloyd Garrison, became increasingly violent. Educated blacks such as escaped-slave Frederick Douglass wrote eloquent and heartfelt attacks on the institution and spoke on abolitionist circuits about their experience enslaved.

Anti-slavery proponents organized the Underground Railroad to help slaves escape north to freedom. Although fictionalized, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 immensely popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin opened northerner’s eyes to some of the horrors of slavery and refuted the southern myth that blacks were happy as slaves.

In reality, treatment of slaves ranged from mild and paternalistic to cruel and sadistic. Husbands, wives, and children were frequently sold away from one another and punishment by whipping was not unusual. In 1857 the United States Supreme Court in the decision Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that all blacks, whether free or enslaved, lacked the rights to citizenship and thus could not sue in federal court. The Supreme Court took their decision a step further by deeming that Congress had in fact exceeded its authority in the earlier Missouri Compromise because it had no power to forbid or abolish slavery in the territories. The Supreme Court also ruled that popular sovereignty, where new territories could vote on entering the union as a free or slave state, lacked constitutional legitimacy. Thus, slaves had no legal means of protesting their treatment. Due to the Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and other earlier slave uprisings, Southerners feared servile insurrection above all else but this was rare. Instead as a form of resistance slaves would pretend illness, organize slowdowns, sabotage farm machinery, and sometimes commit arson or murder. Running away for short periods of time was common.

Slaves work in Sea Islands, South Carolina. Library of Congress

The outbreak of the Civil War forever changed the future of the American nation and perhaps most notably the future of Americans held in bondage. The war began as a struggle to preserve the Union, not a struggle to free the slaves but as the war dragged on it became increasingly clear to President Abraham Lincoln the best way to force the seceded states into submission was to undermine their labor supply and economic engine which was sustaining the south—slavery. Many slaves escaped to the North in the early years of the war, and several Union generals established contraband policies in the southern land that they conquered. Congress passed laws permitting the seizure of slaves from rebellious southerners as the rules of war allow for the seizure of property and the United States considered slaves property. On September 22, 1862, following the strategic Union victory at Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln presented the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

This document decreed that, by the power of the United States armed forces, all slaves in states that were still in rebellion one hundred days after January 1, 1863 would be "thenceforward and forever free." Furthermore, Lincoln established an institution through which free blacks could join the U.S. Army, an unprecedented level of integration at that time. The United States Colored Troops (USCT) served on many battlefields, won numerous Medals of Honor, and ensured eventual Union victory in the war.

On December 6, 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War, the United States adopted the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed the practice of slavery.

Sources

Patricia L. Faust, ed., Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War, (Harper Perennial, 1991)
John S. Bowman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Civil War, (Dorset Press, 1992)
Bruce Catton, The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, (Bonanza Books, 1982).