1800-1850: Intensifying Debates
Big Idea
Free and enslaved Black men and women continued to assert their claim to the liberties and freedoms enumerated in the founding documents. Southern economic reliance on enslaved labor and Northern discomfort with the morality of enslavement created intense political battles in Congress and across the States.
What’s important to know?
National Commemoration: Rev. Absalom Jones called for January 1, 1808 to be a national day of commemoration, as it was the legal end to the Atlantic Slave trade.
Domestic Slave Trade: The importation of enslaved persons became illegal in the United States, but the domestic forced bondage of Black people and the purchase and sale of human beings continued—especially in the American South.
Congressional Debates: Throughout the first half of the century, debates became increasingly intense in Congress as the balance of power between “slave” and “free” states was continually challenged when new territories were admitted as states.
Economic Dependence: The South’s economy had been built upon the enslavement of human beings. Arguments as to the morality of enslavement did nothing to change Southern political leaders mindset as their wealth and status was completely dependent upon the continued subjugation of Black people.
1: National Commemoration
Rev. Absalom Jones
Image Source: Wikipedia
As agreed during the Constitutional Convention, in 1808 Congress outlawed the importation of slaves via the Atlantic Slave trade.
Enslaved and free Blacks celebrated by designating January 1st as their holiday. The Reverend Absalom Jones called for a national day of commemoration.
“Let the first of January, the day of the abolition of the slave trade in our country, be set apart every year, as a day of public thanksgiving for that mercy” (Dayle, 2012, 139).
In his sermon marking the occasion, he noted that God had “come down” to rescue them as he did in the Bible with ancient Israel.
2: Domestic Slave Trade
While the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, it did not affect plantation slavery, where White plantation owners relied on enslaved Black women to replenish their labor source. Nor did this legal change alter the racial hierarchy that perpetuated the belief in the superiority of the “White race.”
3: Congressional Debates
William L. Dayton, anti-slavery Senator from New Jersey in Congress, 1856.
Image Source: Wikipedia
Pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions spent much of the first half of the nineteenth century debating the morality and legality of the institution. Increasingly, southern states felt threatened by abolitionist activities fostered in the North, and northern statesmen felt offended by the immorality of the institution of slavery.
As populations in the West grew and more territories petitioned to be recognized as states, these debates only increased. The southern states feared that if states entered as non-slave states that this imbalance would put the pro-slavery elements of the government in the minority. Northern states, increasingly convinced of the immorality of slavery, argued vehemently against its continuation in the new states coming into the union.
Community Members
Benjamin Gratz Brown, anti-slavery advocate from Missouri
Image Source: Wikipedia
Did you know? Benjamin Gratz Brown (1826-1885) was a lawyer, soldier, and anti-slavery activist in the Missouri legislature from 1852-1859. He opposed the pro-slavery party in the state and helped form the Republican party of Missouri.
During the Civil War, he led a regiment and a brigade of the Missouri State Militia fighting for the Union. He was a U.S. Senator from 1863-1867 where he voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery. He then served as Governor of Missouri from 1871-1873 (Brown, 2018).
4: Economic Dependence
Aside from the ideologies that sustained slavery, the South’s entire economy was dependent upon the institution. When the cotton gin made cotton production much easier and faster, the popularity of growing cotton in the South grew exponentially. Southern White plantation owners made their money through enlarging their fields and purchasing more enslaved Black laborers to work those fields.
The confrontation, therefore, involved morality and economics. As historian Andrew Shankman (Mason and Hammond, 2011) noted, “throughout the long 1820s those conceiving the American System were thoroughly preoccupied with slavery” (p. 248).
Students
Want to learn more? Watch the video below to learn about the connection between cotton, American wealth, and enslaved persons in American history.
Video from Crash Course Black American History.
Your Turn
How did economic arguments overshadow moral concerns in the Congressional debates? How do economic interests continue to influence societal conversations around how we as a nation should respond to the harms done through the enslavement of millions of Black people?
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Library of Congress materials on the antebellum era, the growing abolitionist movement, and the political decisions made during the era, which led to the Civil War.
Explore a digital journey through African American history with the North Star provided by the National African and African American History Museum
Read Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2016).
Read the 1619 Project article on the connections between capitalism and slavery.
Listen to the 1619 Project Podcast on economic disparities and slavery.
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Teaching materials from the 1619 Project and the Pulitzer Center on the antebellum United States.
Lesson plan from the Library of Congress on using primary sources to teach about antebellum slavery.
Antebellum reform excerpts for classroom use from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Materials about King Cotton for educational use from the City University of New York.
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Craemer, T., Smith, T., Harrison, B., Logan, T. D., Bellamy, W., & Darity, W. A. (2023). Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved. In The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (pp. 22–62).
Hartman, S. J. (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press.
Myers, A. C. (2011). Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston. University of North Carolina Press.
Ramey Berry, D. (2007). Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia. University of Illinois Press.
White, D. G. (1999). Let My People Go: African Americans 1804-1865. Oxford University Press.
——-. (1985). Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. W.W. Norton.
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Brown, Benjamin Gratz. (2018). In P. Lagasse & Columbia University, The Columbia Encyclopedia (8th ed.). Columbia University Press. https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NjAzODc5?aid=107448
Brown, B. G. Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
Deyle, S. (2012). An Ambiguous Legacy: The Closing of the African Slave Trade and America’s Own Middle Passage. In Gleeson, D.T. and Lewis, S. eds., Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans.
Shankman, A. (2004). Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism & Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania. University Press of Kansas.
Hammond, J. C. and Mason, M. (2011). Contesting slavery: the politics of bondage and freedom in the new American nation. University of Virginia Press.