Because of their frequent duelling, reckless gambling and excessive drinking, the Southerners whose social activities focused on Charleston were often judged to be indolent and self-indulgent, if not downright dissolute. Yet the Duke de La Rochfoucauld-Liancourt, who knew the capitals of Europe, found in Charleston better company and livelier entertainment than he had expected, while that devout Calvinist, Jedidiah Morse, declared that in no part of America were “the social blessings enjoyed more rationally and literally.” Life in the plantation mansions and spacious town houses would have been less pleasant had the aristocracy not possessed an army of servants unable to leave at will, who kept the routine of the household functioning smoothly. While Northern communities were making the adjustments made necessary by the rapid decline of indentured servitude and the gradual emancipation of slaves, Southern families, especially in the Tidewater, were enjoying the tradition of personal service which had slowly been created among the slaves, and which was now exemplified by blacks several generations removed from their African origins.
Throughout the South, slaves were growing more important as a base for the entire social structure. This was notably so in South Carolina, where the lowland counties in 1790 reported almost three times as many slaves as whites. The black slave was able to resist the malaria of the rice fields and swamps much better than the white man, and he could be sacrificed, if necessary, when yellow fever struck with epidemic force. As cotton spread into the uplands, the market for servile labor became ever wider and stronger. In 1790, only one-fifth of the population of the South Carolina Piedmont was black; twenty years later the ratio had risen to one-third. The retreat of the farmer who used only free white labor had already begun. It was the Carolina rice planters who had blocked prohibition of the African slave trade in the United States Constitution; and in 1803 the Carolina cotton planters took the lead in securing state legislation reopening that traffic.
From the day the first Negroes were brought into Virginia there was persistent doubt, despite the hardening of custom into law, concerning the moral justification of hereditary bondage, and probably at no time were the slave owners themselves more deeply troubled than in the half-century after the Revolution. The system seemed particularly offensive in communities where liberty poles had recently been raised and where the rights of men were still much discussed at tavern and courthouse. North of Maryland this anomaly was slowly disappearing as gradual emancipation was written into state laws. Though the Southern states, as well as the Northern, had eloquent opponents of slavery, the institution could not easily be modified in regions where climate, the routine production of staples and large numbers of blacks provided utilitarian arguments for its perpetuation.
Southern liberals at the close of the 18th century were deeply impressed by the European philosophers and hoped to make their rationalistic philosophy a force for social reform. Yet their humanitarian program concerning slavery far outran their actual achievements. Most of Virginia’s great political leaders agreed with George Mason, aristocratic owner of Gunston Hall and 300 slaves, who had written the state’s bill of rights, that slavery was a slow poison infecting the body politic. Jefferson rejoiced that Chancellor George Wythe and George Tucker were indoctrinating youthful abolitionists in the College of William and Mary. The influential liberals found strong supporters among the patrician planters – many in Maryland and Virginia and a few in South Carolina and Georgia – and for the generation before 1800 they gave the stamp of approval to manumission; but in no Southern state were they able to repeal those statutes without which slavery could not long have survived.
The relation between master and man was not, in the long run, to be determined by the libertarian doctrines of patrician planters, nor by the high ideals of humanitarian Quakers and other religious folk. More influential was the achievement of those pioneers who went out and acquired the fertile river valleys between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi. This agricultural conquest of the West meant not the decline but the expansion of slavery – expansion into the pennyroyal districts of Kentucky, into the limestone basins of Tennessee, and along the streams that watered the broad coastal plain as they flowed toward the Gulf of Mexico. Men of property were not numerous among those pioneers who first defied the menace of hostile Indians in order to seek new homes in the wilderness, and such property as they owned seldom included slaves. Yet the census of 1790 revealed that one-sixth of the Kentuckians were slaves – black slaves. Already the tobacco planter had pushed his way through the mountain passes to escape the declining production of worn-out acres; and within a decade the cotton grower would start that steady advance into the fertile strips south of Tennessee, where the plantation system with slave labor was to dwarf all other forms of agriculture.
