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Slavery in the South Essay

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Slavery in the South

A large majority of whites in the South supported slavery even though fewer of a quarter of them owned slaves because they felt that it was a necessary evil and that it was an important Southern institution. In 1800 the population of the United States included 893,602 slaves, of which only 36,505 were in the northern states. Vermont, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey provided for the emancipation of their slaves before 1804, most of them by gradual measures. The 3,953,760 slaves at the census of 1860 were in the southern states. Eminent statesmen from the earliest period of the national existence, such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington regarded slavery …show more content…

If at one time slavery had been common in much of the Americas, by the middle of the 19th century it remained only in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the southern United States. In an era that celebrated liberty and equality, the slaveholding Southern states appeared backward and repressive. This drew most Northerner's into the abolitionist movement not so much for the behalf of slaves, but how slavery made the United States look. Despite this, the slave economy grew rapidly, enriched by the spectacular increase in cotton cultivation to meet the growing demand of Northern and European textile manufacturers. Southern economic growth, however, was based largely on cultivating more land. The South did not undergo the industrial revolution that was beginning to transform the North; the South remained almost entirely rural. In 1860 there were only five Southern cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants (only one of which, New Orleans, was in the Deep South); less than 10 percent of Southerners lived in towns of at least 2500 people, compared to more than 25 percent of Northerners. The South also increasingly lagged in other indications of modernization, from railroad construction to literacy and public education. For these reasons, many Southerners felt that slavery was all too necessary because their agrarian economy was based around it. Many feared that the abolition of slavery would result in a Southern economic collapse. The biggest gap between North and

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