Creating the American South, 1790-1860
Chapter One: Creating the American South, 1790-1860
The American South expanded with a speed and to a size few could have imagined in 1790. Three migrations created the South over the next seventy years: tens of thousands of indigenous peoples driven from ancestral lands, millions of white farmers filling an enormous expanse, and millions of enslaved people moved to raw, new plantations. The paths of migration began from many sources and flowed in many directions at the same time. Tracing those paths reveals the enormous scale, velocity, and complexity of the few decades in which the American South took the form that would shape it for centuries to come.
Migration created the anomalies that defined the slave South. Slavery concentrated on the richest land and yet spread everywhere in the region. Most white southerners did not own enslaved people, yet the institution went everywhere white settlers went. It benefited nonslaveholders little, and yet the migration of nonslaveholders allowed the slave South to expand as fast as the North. The place of slavery in the territories held little practical consequence for the white majority of southerners, and yet they went to war to defend that expansion. Only migration can explain these puzzles.
Indigenous Peoples, Communication and Trade Routes, and Spanish Territory
Indigenous Peoples, Communication and Trade Routes, and Spanish Territory
The great expanse of the interior of the southeastern United States remains in the possession of Native peoples in 1800, surrounded by territory lightly occupied by the Spanish and scattered settlers of various backgrounds. These diverse groups trade and travel among one another and with the Caribbean people to the south and the indigenous peoples to the north.
1790-1800
White Population Change, 1790–1800
In the first decade after the United States creates its federal census, white population surges into central Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and the upcountry of South Carolina and Georgia. White population declines in the older eastern areas of Virginia and South Carolina, even in some newer areas bypassed by more promising lands nearby.
Black Population Change, 1790–1800
The population of enslaved people grows in more targeted areas than the white population. Slavery expands where planters can afford rich lands and where such labor can be made to pay most rapidly: the rich bluegrass region of Kentucky and the cotton-producing areas of upcountry Carolina.
1800-1810
Black Population Change, 1800–1810
The enslaved population expands in Middle Tennessee and continues to grow in the Virginia Piedmont. Far to the west, slavery spreads rapidly along the lower Mississippi River between Natchez and New Orleans, fed by the introduction of cotton and sugarcane.
White Population Change, 1800–1810
White settlers without slaves pour into central Kentucky and Tennessee to take possession of inexpensive land even as they leave parts of the Carolina and Georgia Piedmont, where slavery is growing rapidly. Some white Americans move to the lower Mississippi Valley. In the meantime, eastern Virginia and North Carolina continually lose white residents.
Comparison of Black and White Population Change, 1810-1820
Black and White Population Change, 1810-1820
Planters and traders move enslaved people into northern Alabama as cotton production spreads into the interior and along the Mississippi River. The enslaved population builds on the eastern boundary of the Cherokees in Georgia. Eastern Virginia exports ever more enslaved people into the new cotton lands.
Black Population Change, 1820—1830
African American people are brought to many places at once, from Kentucky, Tennessee, and northern Alabama in the Upper South to the burgeoning Piedmont of South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama as well as to the lower Mississippi Valley and Louisiana.
White Population Change, 1820–1830
White settlers surge into northern Georgia, northern Alabama, and western Tennessee after the War of 1812 and the treaties that follow. The eastern parts of the South suffer declining white populations as the fever for cheap land spreads.
Cessions of Indigenous Lands Between 1814 and 1835 (Animation)
Despite generations of white incursions on their lands, Native peoples hold some of the richest lands in the southeastern United States, occupying parts of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Population Density, 1830
By 1830, the Piedmont, the bluegrass and Cumberland Basin, the Holston Valley of Tennessee, coastal South Carolina, and a few places along the Mississippi River hold relatively dense populations. Most of the South, however, remains lightly settled. The areas occupied by Native peoples have diminished, but they are still evident.
Black Population Change, 1830–1840
The defining shape of the slave South finally becomes apparent, as enslaved people are concentrated along the “Black Belt,” stretching from Georgia to Mississippi. The domestic slave trade extracts a brutal toll not only in the oldest enslaved areas of Virginia and South Carolina but also in the more recently enslaved areas of the Georgia Piedmont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The sugar plantations of Louisiana demand ever more enslaved workers.
Prices of Enslaved People, 1804–1861
The prices for enslaved people rise to great heights and then plummet, but beginning in the mid-1840s, fed by the relentless global demand for cotton and the transformation of vast areas into new plantations, slave prices mount steadily for the next fifteen years.
The Expulsion of Indigenous Peoples, 1830s
After generations of wars, treaties, cessions, and dispossessions, the United States uses the power of the federal government to drive the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole peoples from their remaining lands. The long and deadly journeys of these indigenous peoples to the Indian Territory mark a capitulation to the demands of white speculators as well as settlers.
White Population Change, 1830–1840
After the dispossession of the Native peoples, white settlers flood into their lands, leaving much of the older South, from Virginia through Georgia, virtually stagnant. The Piedmont, the first cotton frontier, sees massive departures.
Louisiana Sugar Parishes, 1860
After decades of development and the massive importation of enslaved people, the rivers of southern Louisiana are lined with long strands of sugar plantations, the wealthiest agricultural properties in the nation.
White Population Change, 1840–1850
Relatively few white people move into the burgeoning plantation districts being filled with enslaved people. Instead, white settlers, abandoning the Piedmont of South Carolina and Georgia, move into the Upper South, Arkansas, northern Louisiana, and East Texas.
Black Population Change, 1840–1850
The concentration of enslaved people in the new plantation districts expands into Arkansas and Texas, while the drain of the slave trade in the East slows during hard times.
Comparison of Black and White Population Change, 1850-1860
Slavery grows ever-more-intensely focused on the most fertile lands during this decade of high prices for enslaved people. These laborers convert the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta into raw plantations. The enslaved population of the Upper South barely grows, as young people are shipped farther south and away from their families. The rush to the West accelerates and broadens, as white settlers leave not only the Piedmont but also the Cumberland Plateau of Middle Tennessee for Texas and Arkansas.
In what would prove to be the culmination of the slave South, the polarizing effect of slavery on the region’s population became ever clearer. While the enslaved population was forced into expanding population districts to the south and west, white southerners avoided those very places and abandoned areas they or their parents had moved not long before.
Railroads, 1860
Complementing the South’s extensive system of rivers, railroads grow rapidly during the 1850s. While not as extensive as those of the North and Midwest, the South develops a large, new network of transportation and communication.
Population Density, 1860
The areas of greatest population density are those where enslaved people labor on plantations, not where white people create the dense rural, town, and urban communities emerging in the North and Midwest.
Percentage of Foreign-Born Population, 1860
While some immigrants come to southern cities and parts of Texas, the divergence between the North and the South has grown extreme by 1860. The enormous population movement within the South, both white and African American, is almost entirely native-born.
Ratio of Enslaved Men to Enslaved Women, 1860
The domestic slave trade separates men from women, as traders and planters ship male workers to the sugar fields of Louisiana and Texas as well as to the new plantation areas along the Mississippi River.
Most parts of the South, by contrast, display a disproportionate share of enslaved females, as small slaveholders purchase women who perform a wide range of work as well as bear children claimed by the owner of the mother. The older areas of slavery, especially in Virginia, are left with a larger share of men.
Production of Cotton, 1860
Cotton has spread in a vast belt from South Carolina into Louisiana and Texas. Its production is anchored in the Black Belt and along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to Memphis, establishing itself in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas as well as in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta.
Election of 1860 & White Population Change 1850-1860
Areas with great concentrations of enslaved people but little white population growth across the Upper South as well as in the Georgia Piedmont and the Mississippi Delta vote for the Constitutional Union Party and its platform of protecting slavery where it is already entrenched.
