THE MOVEMENT OF NEGROES FROM THE EAST TO THE GULF STATES FROM 1830 TO 1850
The migration of Negroes to the Gulf States, during the years 1830 to 1850, was from the point of view of the Negroes themselves wholly involuntary. The blacks, being at that time preponderately slave, accompanied their masters to new homes in the South and Southwest or constituted the traffic of the domestic slave trade. Explanation of their migration must be sought, therefore, not in any unrest that may have been manifested by the Negroes, but rather in the causes that underlay the movement of the masters to new homes, and that enabled the domestic slave trade to become a profitable enterprise.
This migration, which in some ways assumed a peculiar aspect, bears a definite relation to three general circumstances. In the first place, there was a comparative decline in the productiveness of the seaboard border slave States. In the second, the accessibility to the new lands and practically virgin soils of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana invited the migration of innumerable planters from the border States to this new region. Finally, the rapidly increasing demand of the planters of the Gulf region for slave labor with which to cultivate cotton and other native products tremendously stimulated the domestic slave trade.
Although the seaboard border States, led by Virginia, sent south the bulk of the slaves, it must not be thought that the migration was alone from these States. In fact, as early as 1840,[1] not only Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Delaware, but also North Carolina became slave-exporting areas. Later, too, when the impoverishment of her lands made impossible the further extension of cotton culture, South Carolina joined with these other States and Georgia in exporting slaves to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and, after 1845, to Texas.
The decline in the productiveness of some of the seaboard border slave States has been ascribed to various causes. The failure to rotate crops and the lack of proper and sufficient fertilizer necessary to prevent an impoverishment of the soil some hold to be primary causes. The almost complete dependence upon unskilled, unintelligent slave labor, the conviction prevalent everywhere in slave territory that such labor made that of white men dishonorable, together with the failure to develop fully the manufacturing facilities at hand, have been also generally advanced to explain the decline, particularly, of Maryland and Virginia.
The chief agricultural staple of these States was tobacco. The characteristic soil of the region—a sandy loam—while warm and stimulating was easily exhausted,[2] especially when the planters had improper and inefficient fertilizer, traceable in some measure to a numerical deficiency of live stock, and the incessant culture of tobacco, without crop rotation. The price of tobacco, moreover, was throughout the years from 1818 to 1840 exceedingly low and, at the same time, the newer States of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, as well as the Carolinas and Georgia, were producing large quantities of tobacco. The net result in Virginia and Maryland, therefore, was to make the culture of the plant exceedingly unprofitable.[3] It is held that the soil-exhausting character of tobacco culture, together with the falling prices of the plant, constituted the dominant factors in the decrease in value of agricultural lands of Virginia from $206,000,000 in 1816 to $80,000,000 in 1829.[4]
If the impoverishment of the land through tobacco culture was one factor in the declining productivity of Virginia and Maryland, the almost complete use of unskilled Negro slave labor, particularly in the former State, was decidedly another. Not only was slave labor costly, in that the non-producers, as well as the constant workers, had to be provided for, but also because of the overwhelming ignorance and inertia of such labor. "The grand secret of the difference between free labor and slave labor," wrote a former Virginia resident to the New York Times, "is that the latter is without intelligence and without motive."[5] A large tobacco planter of Virginia adds to this his testimony that the slave's incapacity to perform duties complex in nature, or requiring the least intelligence, precluded the cultivation there of the finer grades of tobacco.[6] While, therefore, the Negro slave was tractable and capable of hard work, he was, without strict supervision, a most unproductive worker. The universal employment of the slave despite his ignorance and inertia doubtless furnishes one clue to the failure of Virginia to exploit, in a reasonable degree, her manufacturing resources.[7]