Gender, Mastery and Nation: Race and Slavery in the United States

Abstract

Students of world slavery often grasp by virtue of comparative training what is not so often clear to those who have studied exclusively American practices. Antebellum southern slavery in the United States was exceptional in a number of essential respects. It existed as a very large (4 million by many counts at the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861), enslaved population that was self-reproducing (with no significant external slave trade after 1808), and masters and slaves were separated by race. This system became especially remarkable because of its durability, lasting well into what most would define as an era that was ideologically and economically modern. Certain strains of thought after the American Revolution (1775–83) concluded that eventually the resonance of the American political enlightenment would end human slavery in North America. Indeed, most of the northern United States abolished slavery on their own shortly after the war, and similar sentiments in the British Empire would end the fading practice of slavery in Canada by 1833. However, the explosion of the south-eastern American cotton economy starting in the 1790s created the seeming anomaly of a vast slave-based economic system rising in the midst of modernity — a phenomenon that seemed distinctly backward to those standing outside of it. Whether American slavery was in fact, an economic throwback or something that was suited to supply the intensifying industrial revolution has been a matter of intense, long-standing debate among historians.