Free Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich Page B

Mississippi’s production alone would swell from 20,000 bales in 1821, to 962,006 in 1859, almost one-quarter of the nation’s total output. And in each of the four decades before 1840 the slave population of Mississippi more than doubled.
    The phenomenal expansion of the cotton economy carried slavery with it across the coastal states, through the still half-settled Mississippi Territory, and beyond, until the “Cotton Kingdom” stretched from the Atlantic coast to Texas. By 1800, when slavery in New York was on the brink of extinction, Georgia would tally more than fifty-nine thousand slaves, and they would reach almost half a million by the eve of the Civil War. Slave traders made fortunes buying up “surplus” slaves, and long, grim lines of them chained together in awkward lockstep became a familiar sight on the roads leading westward from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas to the slave markets of the frontier Southeast. The new states wanted slaves, and more slaves. Lawyers, doctors, ministers, even the better class of “mechanics” dreamed of one day owning a plantation and slaves. “A plantation well stocked with hands, is the ne plus ultra of every man’s ambition who resides at the south,” one Northern traveler observed. “Young men who come to this country, ‘to make money,’ soon catch the mania, and nothing less than a broad plantation, waving with the snow white cotton bolls, can fill their mental vision.”
    Although the movement for voluntary manumission lingered on, deluding those who supported it into thinking that they were having a serious impact on slavery as a whole, it was becoming clearer that slavery was not going to disappear. Even as states passed legislation limiting the transatlantic slave trade, the actual number of slaves in the United States continued to grow steadily. Voluntary manumissions freed thousands, but they were merely a drop in the demographic bucket as the total number of slaves swelled due to natural increase from just under 900,000 in 1800, to about 1.2 million in 1810, to slightly more than 2 million in 1830, more than doubling in just thirty years. Their number would double again by the outbreak of the Civil War.
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    On the morning of Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, there were already signs that the optimism of the Revolutionary era was a spent force. As idealism collided with economic imperatives, southerners began to insist that the right to own slaves was their most important liberty, and that to deprive them of it would be to subject them to “slavery.” The excesses of the French Revolution, followed soon afterward by the horrifying spectacle of successful slave insurrection against French rule on the island of Sante-Domingue (present-day Haiti), in 1791, raised slave owners’ anxiety to the level of near panic. In the course of the decade, thousands of refugees fled to the United States, bearing tales of slaughter and rapine that fueled Americans’ worst fears of what a slave rebellion might bring. George Washington’s government advanced seven hundred thousand dollars to aid the embattled white planters, while rumors of an impending French invasion that would arm the slaves swept through the South. Jefferson predicted that the “revolutionary storm” would sweep through the United States, bringing massacres in its wake. He warned that if American slaves were not freed and deported, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.” Southern suspicions of secret collaboration between abolitionistsand slaves were further whetted by statements like those of a Presbyterian preacher named David Rice, who praised the rebels as “brave sons of Africa…sacrificing their lives on the altar of liberty,” and by the president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, who proclaimed that a “Negro war” in the United States would benefit the antislavery