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  The Cuban story reprised what had happened in other Caribbean islands two centuries earlier; where the sugar economy took hold, plantations evolved and were worked by African slaves. But this nineteenth-century Cuban sugar industry was different. It was highly mechanised and it thrived at the very time when other empires were turning their back on slavery. What happened in Cuba was a reminder that slavery could prosper even in an era when modern capitalism was transforming the economies of the Western world. There was no evidence, from Cuba, that slavery was outdated or uneconomic – even in the modernising, industrialising world of the mid-nineteenth century.

  As we shall see in Chapter 4, the revolution of 1791-1804 swept aside slavery and the slave economy in St-Domingue, and ousted the French colonial government, but perversely that led to the arrival of waves of Africans in Spanish America. The years of revolution and the demise of French control set off a frenzy for the expansion of the slave trade and tropical staple production’.[12] In Puerto Rico, for example, three times the number of Africans were landed between 1775 and 1807 than in the previous two centuries. This pattern was true from the River Plate to Spanish Florida, from Venezuela to Peru. All restraints on slave imports had been abandoned and Africans were shipped in to make the most of the economic opportunities created by the collapse of France’s great exporting colonies. The end result was that Spain’s slave-based economy in the Americas was more dynamic after 1800 than at any period in its history.

  Puerto Rico’s experience of slavery was, like Cuba’s, a relatively small-scale affair until the late eighteenth century. San Juan was a port city which was a fortified part of Spain’s Caribbean defences, but it concentrated on exporting agricultural produce to Europe. That changed with the expansion of sugar and coffee cultivation, helped by refugee planters and their slaves from St-Domingue, or Haiti as it became known. But it was the major expansion of sugar in the 1820s and 1830s that prompted Puerto Rico’s growing demand for Africans. Compared to Cuba, however, the figures were small. In the years 1826–50, while Cuba imported 318,000 Africans, Puerto Rico received only 12,000. Even so, wherever sugar flourished in Puerto Rico, there we find the heaviest concentration of slaves. The island’s sugar industry also employed many more free people than on other islands, but it was on a much smaller scale than Cuba’s. It could not modernise and mechanise to the same extent, and it became much less competitive. From the mid-nineteenth century both slavery and sugar declined in Puerto Rico.[13]

  The result was that the slave populations of these two major Spanish islands were very different. In Puerto Rico, slavery peaked at 51,000 slaves in 1846, but, by then, Cuba was home to 324,000. Equally, slaves never formed more than a small proportion of Puerto Rico’s overall population: 12 per cent at most in the nineteenth century. In Cuba, the story was very different. In the 1840s, slaves formed 43 per cent of the population. In the nineteenth century, Cuba had become what its French and British neighbours had been since the late seventeenth century: a genuine slave society. This is hardly surprising when we look at the imports of Africans into Cuba.

  Cuba had followed the pattern evident from São Tomé to Brazil, Brazil to Barbados, Barbados to Jamaica and St-Domingue. It was shaped by the advance of sugar as a major (though not always the sole) driving force in the transformation of an island and colony, and all made possible by astonishing numbers of African slaves. Spain, the first colonial power to experiment with slavery in the Americas, was still clinging to slave-based economies three centuries later, though by then most other empires had thrown in the slaving towel. There were, however, two major exceptions to this story: Brazil and the USA.

  African slaves had begun to arrive in North America soon after the early European settlements, though by then Europeans were already accustomed to African slaves on the African coast and in other parts of the Americas. Early Dutch settlers in North America soon used slaves. By the 1660s, some 20 per cent of the (admittedly small) population of New Amsterdam (New York) consisted of African slaves. For the next century Africans continued to be a small presence in Vermont, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island, but they performed important work (generally of the most strenuous kind) in a string of urban and rural activities. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves worked in every conceivable job in the northern colonies, from domestic service to road building, from cattlemen to skilled artisanal work, normally working alongside free white workers. But that huge northern region did not have dominant export crops – say, sugar or tobacco – on which slavery thrived and flourished elsewhere. What happened in Virginia and Maryland was quite different.

  The arrival of poor Britons in that region seemed more than adequate at first for the fledgling colonies’ economic and labouring needs, but that flow dried up by the late seventeenth century and local landowners began to turn to African labour, shipped in, almost to their doorstep, by Atlantic slave ships nosing their way along the rivers of the Chesapeake. As tobacco came to dominate the local economy, slaves began to dominate the labouring population, both in the fields and as skilled workers. Given the predominance of small tobacco farms, most slaves lived and worked on small properties, and slave masters owned relatively small groups of slaves. This was quite unlike the sugar planters in the Caribbean and Brazil with their massive gangs counted in their hundreds. Tobacco slaves lived and worked close to their owners, and to other white people, with all the complex social and cultural consequences such daily – and often intimate – proximity created. On the sugar lands, slaves lived in what contemporaries often called ‘African’ villages, physically and culturally distant from white people. Slavery differed greatly between the two regions.

  From the 1720s North America’s slave population began to diverge from Brazil and the Caribbean. It had begun to expand by natural increase, while elsewhere it grew only because of ever more African imports. North American slave owners thus became less dependent on the Atlantic slave ships, but at the same time they began to worry about the expansion of the slave population. They feared being overwhelmed and overawed by their subject people, though that concern receded after 1820, when the new cotton economy of the South provided slave holders in the old territories with a blessed (and profitable) relief. Now they could sell slaves to American slave traders who moved them onto the new cotton plantations of the South.

  South Carolina’s slave system was founded by settlers and their slaves moving from Barbados. They arrived equipped both with a slave code and with a mentality about slaves that was markedly different from the tobacco planters further north. The development of rice cultivation – harsh, debilitating and severe – was closer to labour in sugar than in tobacco, and local slaves retained striking African cultural features (including language), which were lost in the Chesapeake. Africans dominated the rice fields, not only as labourers but as experienced workers in the peculiarities of rice cultivation. Others were to be found in all sorts and conditions of jobs, especially in the thriving port city of Charleston (which was the landing point for 40 per cent of all Africans shipped to North America before American abolition in 1808). Slaves also proved vital for the defence of the colony throughout much of the eighteenth century, mainly against the dangers posed by Spaniards (in Florida) and by local Indians. But the real threat to the system was to come from the slaves themselves. The Stono rebellion in 1739 proved to be the most severe in colonial North America. In many respects it was in keeping with the persistent dangers posed by slaves in the Caribbean and Brazil.[14]

  The emergence of the USA from its British colonial status was significantly helped by a new form of North American slavery. It substantially helped to drive forward the material wellbeing of the young republic. It also gave birth to a new slave trade, though not, this time, from Africa. A new inland and coastal trade evolved in the USA, which saw slaves from the old slave states of the eastern seaboard transported to the rich lands of the American South.

  This was the story of ‘King Cotton, a story not
only of the transformation of the institution of American slavery but also of the rapid conversion of the USA itself into an emergent industrial powerhouse. Like sugar before it, slave-grown cotton was to have ramifications on a global scale. And yet, it involved an astonishing irony. According to David Brion Davis, the US Declaration of Independence (1776) showed that the very idea of slavery is a fiction or fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose’.[15] The words are clear enough:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  Despite this ringing declaration, eighty years later, on the eve of the Civil War, the USA had more than four million slaves. The republic, which had staked out its identity as a land of freedom and rights, was home to the largest slave population anywhere in the Americas. It grew and thrived on cotton.

  The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney made possible the spread of short-staple cotton across an enormous expanse of the US South after 1791. Over the next seventy years, the cotton South evolved into one of the key engines in the astonishing growth of the US economy. In the 1780s the US produced less than 1 per cent of the world’s cotton but by 1810 that has soared to just over 53 per cent. On the eve of the Civil War in 1861 it had increased to 80 per cent. Although slavery continued in the states of the Old South (tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice in South Carolina), both were characterised by small slave holdings; groups of ten to twenty slaves for tobacco farms, fifty to a hundred for rice. Cotton, on the other hand, employed armies of people – free and enslaved – and by the time the war started, more than half of all US slaves lived in the cotton South.

  Slave numbers also began to increase in a new US sugar industry in Louisiana, itself acquired only in 1803 from France. That fledgling industry was helped at first by émigrés from Haiti. Louisiana’s sugar estates doubled in the 1820s, increasing even faster in the 1840s, and by mid-century there were some 1,536 sugar estates in the state. By the time of the Civil War, some 125,000 slaves worked on the state’s sugar estates, though by then cotton was the unrivalled employer of North American slaves.[16]

  Slave-grown cotton was the lifeblood of the expanding textile industries of New England and Britain. Some 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton imports came from the USA, and by the Civil War the US was exporting more cotton than all the world’s other cotton exporters combined. Despite cyclical downturns, the overall pattern was of ever-increasing cotton production and exports, helped by the US government making cheap land available to adventurous settlers willing to make the move westwards (in the company of their slaves). It was also a result of the wider expansion of the US economy, with its improved internal and oceanic transport, the emergence of a sound banking system and the development of new and efficient heavy industries.[17]

  Cotton and slavery spread inexorably across the US South: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and extending into Texas. By 1850 the US was producing 2.5 million bales of cotton a year (each bale weighed 181 kg). A decade later that output had doubled again. Behind this data lay a new transatlantic commercial axis. American cotton was shipped to Liverpool, thence to the myriad cotton mills of Lancashire. They, in turn, re-exported their finished textiles through Liverpool, to provide the wider world with cheap clothing. Lancashire textiles flooded first into the USA, then into Latin America, the Middle East and India. In the process, Liverpool had undergone its own transformation. By the late eighteenth century, it had been the major port of the North Atlantic slave trade, but by the mid-nineteenth century it had become the great entrepôt for slave-grown US cotton and finished Lancastrian textiles. Exports from Liverpool had, by the 1820s, even outstripped exports from London.[18]

  The cotton plantations of the US South absorbed huge numbers of slaves via the internal slave trade. Almost one million people travelled along the slave routes leading to the cotton belt: twice as many slaves as had crossed the Atlantic to North America from Africa. Often sold from hand to hand, they passed from owners in the east to the cotton planters. Sometimes, they journeyed with their original owners. Others travelled by ship from Norfolk to New Orleans, for example, thence up the Mississippi to their new homes. Often, these journeys involved those heart-breaking scenes of family breakup and separation, leaving a deep scar on the family and folk memory of African-Americans throughout the USA.

  The migrations of enslaved (and free) people recast the populations of the South, which had previously been thinly populated. In forty years between 1810 and 1850, the population of Louisiana, for example, increased from 77,000 to half a million, Alabama from 9,000 to 772,000. And the majority of those people were slaves. What had emerged – in a very short period – was a pattern long familiar in the Caribbean and Brazil: societies where the great majority of people were black.

  The popular image that springs to mind when thinking about the US South is of large cotton plantations. In reality, most slaves were owned in small numbers. In 1860, almost a quarter of Southern slave owners each had between 50 and 200 slaves. The converse of this pattern was the widespread ownership of slaves. More than a third of a million Americans owned slaves at mid-century, though the majority of slaves in 1860 worked in cotton, and it was the cotton planter who dominated the social and political culture of the South. They were among the wealthiest of contemporary Americans, a fact readily confirmed by a visit to their surviving homes on plantations and their town houses in New Orleans to this day.

  Visitors to the US South were struck (as they were in Brazil at much the same time) by the inescapable presence of slaves – in towns, on rural properties and in domestic life. They were found wherever hard physical work was needed; labouring on construction sites (towns blossomed across the South), building railways, manning each and every local industry, and working on the thousands of steamboats that churned up and down the Mississippi. Above all, they worked the cotton fields that stretched across the South.

  It was here that American slaves endured a harsh working regime, often brutally enforced by overseers who were largely unrestrained and whose capricious violence and malice compounded the miseries of work in an unforgiving environment. It was a cruel and remorseless system, but it yielded astonishing wellbeing and profits to planters and their backers. Moreover, cotton snugly integrated itself into the wider economy of the USA. The northern states benefited greatly from slavery, their heavy industries feeding the expansion of cotton while their banks sustained and profited from cotton’s success. The cotton industry was not an isolated, regional phenomenon: it was a vital element in the expansive US economy and cotton’s spokesmen were heeded in Washington. Within a single lifetime, cotton had become a golden crop, with customers begging for more. In 1820 it provided 32 per cent of all US exports. Less well known, the US South was as dependent on steam power (in the form of the steamboats) as the cotton mills of Lancashire.

  The British demand for cotton was voracious, growing at 5 per cent a year to 1850. By then, 3.5 million people in Britain were employed, one way or another, in cotton. A decade later, 4,000 people owned cotton mills in Britain. The workers involved – slaves in the fields in the US, cotton operatives in the mills of northern England – worked at labouring disciplines that were new to human history. A new form of work discipline became an essential element in the way the entire system functioned. Although factory discipline has long been discussed among historians of the industrialising West, less well known and studied is the work discipline that had been fundamental to slavery for centuries.

  By the mid-nineteenth century it was clear that Lancashire in particular would be lost without American cotton – and therein lay a major risk. What would happen to cotton, and to Lancashire, if slavery in the US was abolished? Slave holders throughout the Americas had traditionally raised this threat whenever slavery had been challenged. Who would do the back-breaking labour
(in sugar/coffee/rice/cotton) if slavery were abolished, and when all attempts to find alternative forms of labour had proved fruitless? Cotton needed slaves in the USA in the nineteenth century, just as sugar had needed them in Brazil and the Caribbean a century before, and as Cuba did at much the same time. In the event, there were other forms of labour ready to fill any vacuum vacated by slaves freed from the plantations. Nonetheless, whenever emancipation was discussed, the simple necessity of slavery had been a powerful card played by slave holders and their backers before the world’s consumers of slave-grown produce.

  Cotton in 1850, like sugar in 1750, was at the centre of a massive global empire, with millions of people, on both sides of the Atlantic, employed in its cultivation, refinement and manufacture, and with many millions more consuming the final outcome in all corners of the globe. And the entire system hinged on the slavery of Africans and their offspring born as slaves in the Americas.

  The slave system that had evolved, so quickly, around cotton in the US South seemed a sharp break from the slave systems that had previously characterised North America from the seventeenth century: it was more pervasive, harsher, more powerful – and more rewarding to the nation at large – than any earlier forms of slavery. But it came at a terrible price.

  It constituted a gross violation of millions of people. The forced migrations, sale and marshalling of millions of slaves were made possible by astonishing levels of violence. Slave narratives – slave voices – which provide a haunting descant to this story, return time and again to the personal and communal violence that accompanied slave life in the South. Yet had not this always been true of the story of African slavery from its earliest days? The history of slavery in the Americas is one of violence inflicted on millions of people: on the coast of Africa, on the Atlantic ships, and in slaves’ workplaces across the Americas. Modern students, when confronted by this depressingly miserable history, often ask a simple and obvious question. Why did the slaves – normally in the majority – not rebel, overthrow their masters and secure their freedom? Why did so many people languish for so long in such miserable slavery? This same question lay at the heart of the slaveholders’ worst nightmares. Slave owners slept uneasily because they lived not merely on the fruits of slave labour, but also in the midst of slave defiance.