SLAVERY AND SECTIONALISM
One overriding issue exacerbat- ed the regional and economic dif- ferences between North and South: slavery . Resenting the large profits amassed by Northern businessmen from marketing the cotton crop, many Southerners attributed the backwardness of their own section to Northern aggrandizement . Many Northerners, on the other hand, de- clared that slavery — the “peculiar institution” that the South regarded as essential to its economy — was largely responsible for the region’s relative financial and industrial backwardness .
As far back as the Missouri Compromise in 1819, sectional lines had been steadily hardening on the slavery question . In the North, sen- timent for outright abolition grew increasingly powerful . Southern- ers in general felt little guilt about slavery and defended it vehemently . In some seaboard areas, slavery by 1850 was well over 200 years old; it was an integral part of the basic economy of the region .
Although the 1860 census showed that there were nearly four million slaves out of a total population of 12 .3 million in the 15 slave states, only a minority of Southern whites owned slaves . There were some 385,000 slave owners out of about
1 .5 million white families . Fifty per- cent of these slave owners owned no more than five slaves . Twelve percent owned 20 or more slaves, the num- ber defined as turning a farmer into a planter . Three-quarters of South- ern white families, including the “poor whites,” those on the lowest rung of Southern society, owned no slaves .
It is easy to understand the in- terest of the planters in slave hold- ing . But the yeomen and poor whites supported the institution of slavery as well . They feared that, if freed, blacks would compete with them economically and challenge their higher social status . Southern whites defended slavery not simply on the basis of economic necessity but out of a visceral dedication to white supremacy .
As they fought the weight of Northern opinion, political lead- ers of the South, the professional classes, and most of the clergy now no longer apologized for slavery but championed it . Southern publicists insisted, for example, that the rela- tionship between capital and labor was more humane under the slavery system than under the wage system of the North .
Before 1830 the old patriarchal system of plantation government, with its personal supervision of the slaves by their owners or masters, was still characteristic . Gradually, however, with the introduction of large-scale cotton production in the lower South, the master gradu- ally ceased to exercise close personal
CHAPTER 6: SECTIONAL CONFLICT
OUTLINE OF U.S. HISTORY
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supervision over his slaves, and employed professional overseers charged with exacting from slaves a maximum amount of work . In such circumstances, slavery could become a system of brutality and coercion in which beatings and the breakup of families through the sale of individuals were commonplace . In other settings, however, it could be much milder .
In the end, however, the most trenchant criticism of slavery was not the behavior of individual mas- ters and overseers . Systematically treating African-American laborers as if they were domestic animals, slavery, the abolitionists pointed out, violated every human being’s in- alienable right to be free .