Yet Veseys were rare. Most slaves appeared at
least resigned to their fate. Many seemed even to
accept the whites’ evaluation of their inherent abilities
and place in society. Of course in most instances it is
impossible to know whether this apparent sub-
servience was feigned in order to avoid trouble.
Slaves had strong family and group attachments
and a complex culture of their own, maintained, so
to speak, under the noses of their masters. By a mix-
ture of subterfuge, accommodation, and passive
resistance, they erected subtle defenses against
exploitation, achieving a sense of community that
helped sustain the psychic integrity of individuals.
But slavery discouraged, if it did not extinguish,
independent judgment and self-reliance. These
qualities are difficult enough to develop in human
beings under the best of circumstances; when every
element in white society encouraged slaves to let
others do their thinking for them, to avoid ques-
tioning the status quo, to lead a simple life, many
did so willingly enough. Was this not slavery’s
greatest shame?
Whites, too, were harmed by the slave system.
Associating working for others with servility dis-
couraged many poor whites from hiring out to earn
a stake. Slavery provided the weak, the shiftless,
and the unsuccessful with a scapegoat that made
their own miserable state easier to bear but harder
to escape.
More subtly, the patriarchal nature of the slave
system reinforced the already existing tendency
toward male dominance over wives and children typi-
cal of the larger society. For men of exceptional char-
acter, the responsibilities of ownership could be
ennobling, but for hotheads, alcoholics, or others
with psychological problems, the power could be
brutalizing, with terrible effects on the whole planta-
tion community, whites and blacks alike.
Aside from its fundamental immorality, slavery
caused basically decent people to commit countless
petty cruelties. “I feel badly, got very angry and
whipped Lavinia,” one Louisiana woman wrote in
her diary. “O! for government over my temper.”
But for slavery, she would surely have had better
self-control. The finest white Southerners were
often warped by the institution. Even those who
abhorred slavery sometimes let it corrupt their
thinking: “I consider the labor of a breeding
woman as no object, and that a child raised every 2
years is of more profit than the crop of the best
laboring man.” This cold calculation came from the
pen of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration
of Independence, a man who, it now seems likely,
fathered at least one child by a slave.
Manufacturing in the South
Although the temper of southern society discouraged
business and commercial activities, considerable man-
ufacturing developed. Small flour and lumber mills
flourished. There were important rope-making
plants in Kentucky and commercial cotton presses,
used to compact cotton into 500-pound bales, in
many southern cities. Iron and coal were mined in
Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In the 1850s the
Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond did an annual
business of about $1 million.
The availability of the raw material and the
abundance of waterpower along the Appalachian
slopes made it possible to manufacture textiles prof-
itably in the South. By 1825 a thriving factory was
functioning at Fayetteville, North Carolina, and
soon others sprang up elsewhere in North Carolina
and in adjoining states. William Gregg’s factory, at
Graniteville, South Carolina, established in 1846,
was employing about 300 people by 1850. It was a
constant moneymaker. An able propagandist as well
as a good businessman, Gregg saw the textile busi-
ness not only as a source of profit but also as a
device for improving the lot of the South’s poor
whites. He worked hard to weaken the southern
prejudice against manufacturing and made his plant
a model of benevolent paternalism similar to that of
the early mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. As with
every other industry, however, southern textile man-
ufacturing amounted to very little when compared
with that of the North. While Gregg was employing
300 textile workers in 1850, the whole state of
South Carolina had fewer than 900. In 1860
Lowell, Massachusetts had more spindles turning
cotton into yarn than the entire South.
Less than 15 percent of all the goods manufac-
tured in the United States in 1860 came from the
South; the region did not really develop an indus-
trial society. Its textile manufacturers depended on
the North for machinery, for skilled workers and
technicians, for financing, and for insurance. When
the English geologist Charles Lyell visited New
Orleans in 1846, he was astounded to discover that
the thriving city supported not a single book pub-
lisher. Even a local guidebook that he purchased
bore a New York imprint.The Northern Industrial Juggernaut
The most obvious change in the North in the decades
before the Civil War was the rapid growth of industry.
The best estimates suggest that immediately after the
War of 1812 the United States was manufacturing lessThe Northern Industrial Juggernaut 329