234 Chapter 8 Toward a National Economy
In the 1780s many opponents of slavery began to
think of solving the “Negro problem” by colonizing
freed slaves in some distant region—in the western dis-
tricts or perhaps in Africa. The colonization movement
had two aspects. The first one was a manifestation of an
embryonic black nationalism that reflected the disgust of
black Americans with local racial attitudes and
their interest in African civilization. Paul Cuffe, a
Massachusetts Quaker, managed to finance the emigra-
tion of thirty-eight of his fellow blacks to British Sierra
Leone in 1815, but few others followed. Most influen-
tial Northern blacks, the most conspicuous among them
the Reverend Richard Allen, bishop of the African
Methodist Church, opposed the idea vigorously.
The other colonization movement, led by whites,
was paternalistic. Some white colonizationists genuinely
abhorred slavery. Others could not stomach living with
free blacks; to them colonization was merely a polite
word for deportation. Most white colonizationists were
conservatives who considered themselves realists.
The colonization idea became popular in Virginia
in the 1790s, but nothing was achieved until after the
founding of theAmerican Colonization Societyin
- The society purchased African land and estab-
lished the Republic of Liberia. However, despite the
cooperation of a handful of black nationalists and the
patronage of many important white Southerners,
including Presidents Madison and Monroe and Chief
Justice Marshall, it accomplished little. Although
some white colonizationists expected ex-slaves to go
to Africa as Christian missionaries to convert and “civ-
ilize” the natives, few blacks wished to migrate to a
land so alien to their own experience. Only about
12,000 went to Liberia, and the toll taken among
them by tropical diseases was large. As late as 1850 the
black American population of Liberia was only 6,000.
The cotton boom of the early nineteenth century
acted as a brake on the colonization movement. As
cotton production expanded, the need for labor in
the South grew apace. The price of slaves doubled
between 1795 and 1804. As it rose, the inclination of
even the most kindhearted masters to free their slaves
began to falter. Although the importation of slaves
from abroad had been outlawed by all the states, per-
haps 25,000 were smuggled into the country in the
1790s. In 1804 South Carolina reopened the trade,
and between that date and 1808, when the constitu-
tional prohibition of importation became effective,
some 40,000 were brought in. Thereafter the miser-
able traffic in human beings continued clandestinely,
though on a lesser scale.
The cotton boom triggered an internal trade in
slaves that frequently ripped black families apart. While it
had always been legal for owners to transport their own
slaves to a new state if they were settling there, many
states forbade, or at least severely restricted, interstate
commercial transactions in human flesh. A Virginia law
of 1778, for example, prohibited the importation of
slaves for purposes of sale, and persons entering the state
with slaves had to swear that they did not intend to sell
them. Once cotton became important, these laws were
either repealed or systematically evaded. There was a
surplus of slaves in one part of the United States and an
acute shortage in another. A migration from the upper
South to the cotton lands quickly sprang up. Slaves from
“free” New York and New Jersey and even from New
England began to appear on the auction blocks of
Savannah and Charleston. Early in the Era of Good
Feelings, newspapers in New Orleans were carrying
reports such as, “Jersey negroes appear to be particularly
adapted to this market.... We have the right to calcu-
late on large importations in the future, from the success
which hitherto attended the sale.”
By about 1820 the letter of the law began to be
changed. Soon the slave trade became an organized
business, cruel and shameful, frowned on by the “best”
people of the South, managed by the depraved and the
greedy, yet patronized by nearly anyone who needed
labor. “The native land of Washington, Jefferson, and
Madison,” one disgusted Virginian told a French visi-
tor, “[has] become the Guinea of the United States.”
The lot of African Americans in the Northern
states was almost as bad as that of Southern free
blacks. Except in New England, where there were few
blacks to begin with, most were denied the vote,
either directly or by extralegal pressures. They could
not testify in court, intermarry with whites, obtain
decent jobs or housing, or get even a rudimentary
education. Most states segregated blacks in theaters,
hospitals, churches, and on public transportation
facilities. They were barred from hotels and restau-
rants patronized by whites.
Northern blacks could at least protest and try to
convince the white majority of the injustice of their
treatment. These rights were denied their Southern
brethren. They could and did publish newspapers and
pamphlets, organize for political action, and petition
legislatures and Congress for redress of grievance—in
short, they applied methods of peaceful persuasion in
an effort to improve their position in society.Roads to Market
Inventions and technological improvements were
extremely important in the settlement of the West.
On superficial examination, this may not seem to have
been the case, for the hordes of settlers who struggled
across the mountains immediately after the War of
1812 were no better equipped than their ancestors
who had pushed up the eastern slopes in previous