The Black Urban Population of the Pre-Civil War South

Abstract

T HE PRE-CIVIL WAR black population of the South was predominantly rural. Only one in forty blacks resided in an urban place of the slave states in 1790, and by 1860 this proportion had only slightly more than doubled. But this small group of Southern black urban dwellers has attracted a disproportionate share of scholarly interest because it provides a key to both the viability of the institution of slavery and the origins of the black urban ghetto. At the founding of the nation the slave states, with 40 percent of the nation's population, held only 20 percent of the urban population and by the outbreak of the Civil War those proportions were the same. But five cities had reached metropolitan status by 1860 and the slave states held over 70 urban places. In the fast-growing cities of Baltimore, New Orleans, St. Louis, Louisville, and Washington black workers learned the skills and trades that would prepare them for emancipation and slaves, as Frederick Douglass wrote,1 were almost free. The black population of all these major cities and of 40 percent of all urban places in the slave states, however, declined numerically in the decade before the Civil War. This decline has been interpreted as evidence of both the disintegration and the viability of slavery. Wade2 argues that in the urban environment the division of slave and free, black and white, could not be maintained. City life changed the relationship of slaves and masters to that of workers and employers, undermining the social distance established between blacks and whites under slavery.3 Slaves in the city, freer to congregate, with more opportunity for trained and less supervised jobs, and with greater access to the influence of free blacks were harder to control. The increasing costs of controlling slaves in the cities, the incongruity between slavery and urban employment and the increasing fear of slave rebellions led to a shift of slaves from urban to rural areas in an effort to maintain an institution undermined in the urban environment. Wade thus locates the cause of the urban decline of blacks in the response of slave owners to a threatened breakdown in institutionalized race relations. Goldin,4 and following her Fogel and Engerman,5 see the decline in urban slavery as the result of an economically rational shift of labor in response to differences in urban and rural supply and demand. Rather than urban slavery declining due to its social and economic incongruity, slaves were shifted from urban to rural areas because the demand for