Generations of Captivity by Ira Berlin

Author:Ira Berlin [Berlin, Ira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0674016246
Publisher: Harvard University Press

THE SEABOARD SOUTH

The effects of the Second Middle Passage were not confined to the southern interior. While the exiles struggled with the task of creating a new economy for their owners and a new community for themselves, those left behind faced an equal challenge in resuscitating and extending the old ones. Soil exhaustion, competition from the west, and fluctuating world markets were all leaving their mark on the seaboard South. As planters, farmers, and mechanics tried to reestablish their former prosperity by turning to new commodities, new technologies, and new forms of organization, they were pressed to reconstruct their labor force, introducing new workers and employing old ones in novel ways. In the process, slaves found their lives altered, sometimes beyond recognition.

The recasting of slave life took a variety of forms, in large measure because the region was so diverse and because the boundaries of the region changed as states that once imported slaves began to export them. In some places, like Maryland and Virginia, the transformation of agriculture and artisanal production was well under way, having begun in the mid-eighteenth century. In other places, such as portions of Kentucky and Missouri, plantation economies remained vibrant and expansive with the introduction of new staples or new varieties of old ones. In still other places, like lowcountry Carolina and Georgia, the changes might be best characterized as agricultural adjustment.

Of the eighteenth-century’s great staples, none survived better than rice. The post-revolutionary revival of rice cultivation and the replacement of indigo with short-staple cotton sustained the expansion of slavery between the Cape Fear River in North Carolina and the St. Johns River in Florida. During the nineteenth century, wealth became ever more concentrated in the hands of the largest planters; indeed, lowland planters had secured their status as the greatest of the southern grandees. In 1860 more than half of the South’s largest planters grew rice. Some, like Nathaniel Heywood, who owned well over two thousand slaves, were wealthy beyond the imagination of most Americans. But despite the prosperity of individual planters, the lowcountry did not regain its standing as the richest region in America. Behind the façade of enormous personal wealth, competition from rice growers on the other side of the globe was pushing the lowcountry into an economic decline from which it never recovered.80

The planters’ great wealth and the haunting specter of decline deeply affected lowcountry slaves. Many were sold from their ancestral homes to sustain the owners’ prosperity, and the demands on those who remained grew ever more stringent. For some slaves, this required enlarging the rice fields and performing the hated mud work that accompanied the construction of new embankments. For others, it meant mastering new machinery that planters installed in hopes of increasing productivity. But since neither new fields nor new equipment restored the lowcountry’s former preeminence, planters drove their slaves harder, reclaiming more and more of the riverine swamps and turning them into plantations, which they irrigated with tidal flows. The cost in lost lives and misery was horrendous.

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