I recently read a “Did You Know?” type of article that listed a number of “common misconceptions”, one of which was that the Emancipation Proclamation “ended slavery” when in fact, it only declared free the slaves of Confederate states that were not under Union control, and gives a specific list of such states. This left out legally slaves held in states like Maryland or Missouri that never (got to) leave the Union to join the Confederacy, or even West Virginia which explicitly splintered from Virginia in order to remain with the Union (while still legalizing slavery).
I actually knew that already, but it got me to wondering: who was the last “legally sold” slave in the US (Union or Confederate)? I remember reading an interview with a man described as “the last living American slave” in the late 1970s or early 1980s. And in fact, a SDMB thread from back in 2004 asked who the last surviving former slave was in the US, pointing to a similar interview. But what I’m wondering here is: who was the last person “sold at auction”? Or perhaps more strictly speaking, recorded as property in a legal record?
More broadly, how active was the slave market during the Civil War in the Confederacy, or in the legal slave-holding areas of the Union like those mentioned above? Because if slaves were expensive (and I assume they were), then purely from a financial perspective, and if there was the general feeling that slavery would be abolished in the very near future if the Union were to win, why would someone take the risk of dropping hundreds of dollars on “property” that could soon be unbonded?
Were new slaves continually brought in from Africa during the war? I would expect not, as the Union embargo surely included human cargo.
They were not, and indeed had not been since 1808, when the importation of slaves to the US became illegal. Smuggling occurred, but apparently never in significant numbers. Wiki says
I can’t answer to that degree of specificity. I can tell you that the last states in which slavery was legal were Kentucky and Delaware, in which cases emancipation occurred only with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865. Each of the other states exempted from the EP abolished slavery on its own before 1865.
Given that there were about 200,000 slaves in Kentucky (in 1860) and a couple of thousand in Delaware, identifying any “last individual” would be problematic. Clearly sales dropped off as emancipation approached, but I’ve never seen anyone attempt to identify the very last sale.
No. Even if you could run the Union blockade, the Confederacy itself did not allow the importation of slaves.
There was enough profit (and risk) in smuggling ordinary goods during the Civil War; stowing slaves would have risked the death penalty for the captain if caught. (The Lincoln administration sought and carried out the death penalty on Nathaniel Gordon, one of the few people convicted for prewar slave importation, in 1862.)
Huh, I either never learned this or it didn’t sink in. So by far most of the slaves in the South (and in the Union) at the time of the Civil War were native born?
Why would a society with human slaves as one of the pillars of its economy choose to limit the growth of that population? I can see where once there was a suitably large pool of slaves born Stateside that it would no longer be economically necessary or viable to “import” new ones, but had that really happened by 1807? It would seem the strongest argument against it would be a moral and ethical one – in which case, how did they justify outlawing the importation of slaves, but not the institution itself?
I looked up the Wikipedia article on [URL=“Slavery in the United States - Wikipedia”]Slavery in the United States](Atlantic slave trade - Wikipedia) and it is a numbing and sordid read… But on the topic of a ban on “importation” of slaves to the US, all it says is:
*
Some of the British colonies attempted to abolish the international slave trade, fearing that the importation of new Africans would be disruptive. … All of the colonies except Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798 – although some of these laws were later repealed.*
Disruptive how? Because the FOBs from Africa who survived the Middle Passage might have more spirit to resist?
…or do I not want to know? Even skimming that article was profoundly upsetting.
Sadly, there was no need to import slaves. The ones here already had large numbers of children. Both from other slaves and uh, the Master of the house. Mulatto’s became a third race in many states.
The problem was growing exponentially every generation.
I’m not sure this is sadder than the situation in South America, where there was a continuous need to import slaves due to their short lives under typically brutal conditions.
It would probably be challenging to find many examples anywhere in the world where “genetic mixing” was not an aspect of slavery.
Because of the substantial and growing opposition to the “peculiar institution.”
Any serious attempt to do so in 1807 would have meant the end of the country (and of course the continuation of slavery). More than 50 years later, it almost did.
Well, and if you don’t need to import why would you? I can’t imagine preferring “wild” slaves to the “domestic” ones you’ve got already, who are more likely to be healthy and strong. They don’t speak English, they’ve just been on a very long sea voyage from which I’m sure none arrived healthier than they started (and of course many didn’t disembark at all), they weren’t raised as slaves and may be much more likely to run or revolt or generally cause problems with your other slaves… where’s the upside? Unless you’re Brazil and kill all your slaves within a few years of importation and therefore need a constant new source.
As was said of Henry VIII, it’s a rare situation that allows a man to satisfy his conscience and his pocketbook at the same time.
From a conscience standpoint, reformers focused on the horrors of the slave trade before society was ready to condemn slavery itself. Even people who regarded Africans as subhuman could be disgusted by slave ships, in the sense that we today would be disgusted by cruelty to animals. Clarkson and Wilberforce waged a long campaign to abolish the slave trade (but not slavery itself) within the British Empire, which was successful in 1807.
From a pocketbook standpoint, within the colonies, once the slave population became self-sustaining, slave holders benefited from banning the trade. It made their own slaves (and their children) more valuable.
Of course, if you were an up-and-coming planter, looking to add a lot of land and slaves in a hurry, the import ban hurt you. It made slaves more expensive. Such persons did sometimes argue for resuming the slave trade, opposed strict enforcement of the ban, and bought (cheap) illegally smuggled slaves. But they never overcame the double-edged opposition to lifting the ban, either within the US after 1807 or even within the Confederacy.
Many slave owners in eastern states like Virginia and the Carolinas actually made more money from breeding and selling slaves to the western states than they did from raising crops. So banning the importation of slaves from Africa was good business. And this also explains (along with political representation in Congress) why southerners were so big on the expansion of slavery into new territories - they wanted new markets.
The Constitution is a series of compromises between political philosophies. The power of the state government versus the power of the federal government, the need for defense versus the horror of a standing army, and on and on.
The biggest rift of all was slavery. The South was adamant about protecting slavery, but it wanted a United States. So a whole series of compromises were made by both sides.
One of the most intense issues was a ban on importing more slavery. The North wanted an absolute ban, the South an absolute freedom to do so. The compromise was to just put off the inevitable confrontation.
Here’s a fun fact that shows how intense and taboo the issue was: the words slave or slavery never appear in the Constitution. Unless you knew what they were talking about, you couldn’t even figure out what some of the clauses meant.
That’s why Article I has this weirdly phrased clause:
Those “persons” are slaves. The founders took the issue and moved it 20 years down the line, hoping that it would resolve itself by then. Antislavery sentiment had huge moral backing by then and as noted above, the states passed bans of their own. And a bill was signed by Jefferson in 1807 that banned the slave trade starting January 1, 1808. Here’s a nice summary.
That didn’t settle anything. In fact, the South became more and more furious that the North dared interfere into its central issue and way of life. That led to all those other “compromises” you read about in history class, the Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, along with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and more. What those all had in common was a battle over whether slavery would be allowed in the states and territories that were being added to the Union. And the real bottom line was that the South held half the Senate. It could block any legislation against slavery. It had to ensure that half of all new states were slave states so that it could maintain this tacit veto. This history shaped the first half of the 19th century. And it’s why people insist that the Civil War was about slavery and nothing else. Everything the South did from 1808 to 1860 was predicated on slavery.
The 13th Amendment was adopted on December 6, 1865. That officially put an end to all slavery. Since the war had been over for more than six months, no slaves existed at the time, although I’m sure a few were never told of their legal status until later.
As I said, ratification of the 13th Amendment was the official marker.
What happened earlier? The House approved the amendment on January 31, 1865, sending it to the states. The war was almost over. There’s no question that sentiment in the country was for the abolition of slavery.
The question you’re asking seems to come down to whether any southerners in the North, who had traveled there with their slaves, got away with claiming that their slaves were still slaves when that probably would be a dangerous thing to do, given the current climate.
It’s possible, certainly, even though I haven’t found any mention of it, either online or in the several books I checked. And we know, as I also said, that some owners tried successfully to hide the end of slavery and kept people on as de facto slaves in outlying areas, which could be almost anywhere in those days.
Openly parading a slave going “neener, neener, it’s still legal”? It’s a big and varied country, but I don’t think it happened very often. There wouldn’t have been very many slaves for it to happen to in the first place by 1865. How many southerners would take that chance? Even so I can’t rule it out, if that’s what you’re asking.
Perhaps a difference was seen between breaking up/dislocating people & families from known societies and providing some form of living for the unfortunate souls who have lost their society and families with no way to return them.
Or to put it another way the slaves already here have no hope of a live other then what they know, which is being a slave. So it is morally justifiable in keeping them as such, actually a moral imperative as they would perish on their own (it’s amazing how anything can be turned around to sound positive), and they are benefiting by having the white man provide food and housing.
But it would have been better to leave them where they were, that is not possible with the current slaves, but lets not get any more.
No, that’s not what I’m asking. You posted that no slaves existed at the time the 13th Amendment went into effect (December 6, 1865). But I’m not sure that’s true.
As Freddy pointed out, Kentucky and Delaware were slave states. They did not join the CSA so their slaves were not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. As far as I know, Freddy’s also correct that no other law ended slavery in those states prior to the 13th Amendment. So there were still legally slaves on December 5, 1865.
I think that’s a tough argument to make in view of the fact that a common position among abolitionists was that ex-slaves should be sent back to Africa. If people felt that it was unfair to disrupt people’s lives and send them somewhere far away from their birthplace (and if people believed ex-slaves couldn’t survive on their own) nobody would have advanced this idea.
Thomas Jefferson brought his personal slave Sally Hemings with him to France.
There must have been many Americans traveling abroad with slaves in the 1860’s.
I wonder if they were considered free even though they weren’ in the U.S.?