A History of the American People

the demand for slaves. Southerners argued that by resuming the slave trade the cost of slaves in
America would be sharply reduced, thereby boasting the economy of the whole country. The
aggressive message of the South was: slavery must be extended because it makes economic
sense for America. But beneath this aggressive tone was the deep insecurity of Southerners who
had no real moral answer to the North's case and knew in their hearts that the days of slavery
were numbered.
That sense of insecurity was justified, because in the late 1850s it became obvious that dreams
of a vast expansion of slavery to the west and into the Caribbean and other Hispanic areas were
fantasies, and the reality was a built-in and continuing decline of Southern political power.
Calhoun, in almost his dying words in 1850, had warned the South that if they did not act soon,
and assert his theory of states' rights, if necessary by force, they were doomed to a slow death:
they would never be stronger than they were, and could only get weaker. That was demonstrated
to be good advice; in May 1858 the free state of Minnesota entered the Union, followed by
another free state, Oregon, in February 1859, while Kansas, being a slave territory, was denied
admission. So the Congressional balance, as Calhoun had foreseen, was destroyed for ever. The
South was now outvoted in the Senate 36 to 30 and in the House the gap was enormous, 147 to
90.
Southerners' sense of insecurity was deepened by the fact that, while they boasted publicly that
Cotton is King' andThe Greatest Staple in the World,' they were painfully aware of the
weaknesses of their cotton-slave economy. Most plantations were in debt or operated close to the
margins of profitability. During the 1850s, world cotton prices tended to fall. More and more
countries were producing raw cotton-a trend which would knock large nails in the South's coffin
when the war began. In the light of economic hindsight, it can be seen that the plantation system,
as practiced, was fundamentally unsound, and some planters grasped this at the time. Plantations
absorbed good land and ruined it, then their owners moved on. There was an internal conflict in
the South, as the newer estates in the Deep South were more scientific and efficient (and bigger),
and thus tended to take black slave labor away from the tidewater and border areas, and push up
the price of slaves. This, at a time of falling cotton prices, put further pressure on profit margins.
As the price of slaves rose, slavery as an institution became more vital to the South: to the Deep
South because they used slaves more and more efficiently, to the Old and border South because
breeding high-quality, high-priced slaves was now far more important than raising tobacco or
cotton. Professor Thomas R. Dew of William and Mary College, in his book The Pro-Slavery
Argument of 1852, asserted: `Virginia is a negro-raising state for other states: she produces
enough for her own supply and 6,000 [annually] for sale.'
Actually, Virginia was living on its slave-capital: blacks formed 50 percent of the Virginia
population in 1782, but only 37 percent in 1860s-it was selling its blacks to the Deep South.
Virginia and other Old South or border states concentrated on breeding a specially hardy type of
negro, long-living, prolific, disease-free, muscular, and energetic. In the 1850s, about 25,000 of
these blacks were being sold, annually, to the Deep South." The 1860 census showed there were
8,099,000 whites in the South and 3,953,580 slaves. But only 384,000 whites owned the slaves:
10,781 owned fifty and more; 1,733, a hundred and more. So over 6 million Southern whites had
no direct interest in slavery. But that did not mean they did not wish to retain the institution-on
the contrary: poor whites feared blacks even more than the rich ones did. By 1860 there were
already 262,000 free blacks in the Southern states, competing with poor whites for scarce jobs,
and a further 3,018 were manumitted that year. Poor whites were keener than anyone on penal
legislation against slaves: they insured no state recognized slave marriage in law, and five states