Northern South Slavery

In the Northern States slavery was allowed but it wasn’t as vital to the North’s economy as it was to the South’s. Slaves that lived in the North were often domestic servants to small farmers and rural ironworks. The populations of the slaves themselves were very small, because Northern farms were not large-scale enterprises that focused on producing one cash crop; they had required fewer slaves to do the work and were generally smaller. The Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states had legally permitted slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but a few decades before the Civil war, many of the slaves were emancipated through a series of state legislature statutes; that ended up creating the Northern Free States and the Southern slave …show more content…
Before the Civil War, nearly 4 million black slaves toiled in the American South. By law, slaves were the personal property of their owners in all of the Southern states except for Louisiana. The master held absolute authority over his human property. “The master may sell him, dispose of his person, his industry, and his labor; the slave can do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire anything but what must belong to his master.” The Slaves themselves had no constitutional rights, they couldn’t testify in court against a white person and they could not leave the plantation without permission. They often found themselves being rented out, used as prizes in lotteries, or as wagers in card games and horse races. In the South there were many defenders of Slavery and most of them argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labor was the foundation of their economy. The cotton economy would collapse, the tobacco crop would dry in the fields and Rice would cease to be profitable. Many of them also argued that if all the slaves were freed, there would be widespread unemployment and chaos. This would lead to uprisings, bloodshed, and