THE UNITED STATES IN 1790
In 1790 the federal government took the first census of the new country. The census takers found a population of four million people: fewer than the superpowers of the day, for the British had nearly fifteen million people and the French numbered twenty-six million. One-fifth of the Americans (800,000) were African Americans held in slavery. The small US population was dispersed over the eastern third of an entire continent, for the nation stretched 1,000 miles east-to-west, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and about 2,000 miles from Florida, on the south, to the Great Lakes, on the north.
This vast country had only five cities (Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston) that exceeded 10,000 people, and the largest, Philadelphia, had barely 50,000. More than 90 percent of the people lived in the countryside on scattered farms and plantations. Thoroughly agricultural, the nation lacked much manufacturing except for a few small ironworks and many shipyards. Americans exported their surplus farm produce to pay for manufactured goods imported from Britain, which had industrialized. Most American farms barely supported the large families that lived on them. Along the Atlantic coast, the land seemed well cultivated, but in the hilly hinterland the settlements became small and stumpy pockets in a heavily forested land. The settlers slowly cleared away the forest with hand tools: axes, hoes, and shovels.Because the best-built and largest houses tend to survive (while the typical small houses are torn down or rot away), we imagine that the early Americans led lives of gracious leisure among future antiques. In fact, the large families of the early nation crowded into tiny, unpainted houses of log or clapboard, measuring 18 by 20 feet, with two rooms on the ground floor and a sleeping loft overhead. Few people enjoyed any privacy. Glass windows and stone chimneys were luxuries. Of course, the houses had no electricity, no plumbing, and no heating except for what an open fireplace could provide. Keeping those fires going meant long hours cutting and hauling firewood. Insects swarmed through the doors kept open for ventilation in the warm months. Calls of nature meant a walk to a crude, wooden privy.
The good news was that almost everyone, except the slaves, had plenty to eat, although the diet depended heavily on salted meat (usually pork) washed down with whiskey made from corn. Americans took immense pride in how much they could eat, how fast they could eat it, and at the amount of salt and of animal fat that they could consume.
By law, a married woman was a “femme covert,” which meant subordination to her husband, who owned any property that she brought into the marriage. Married women could not sue or be sued in the courts. They could not draft wills, make contracts, or buy and sell property. If they earned any wage, the money legally belonged to their husbands. Even if a husband absconded for a time, his wife remained bound by coverture, and so he could claim any business she conducted or money she earned during his absence.
It was more than law and custom that denied women political and social equality; it was also the long and exhausting work that left them little time and energy. Women tended chickens, milked cows, made meals for their large families, and cleaned houses that kept filling with dirt trekked in from the fields. They had to make by hand most of the clothing worn by the family and wash that clothing by hand with soap they also had to make from scratch. Because there was virtually no artificial birth control, married women spent the first fifteen to twenty years of their marriages either pregnant or nursing.But the Revolution did generate some new ideas that began, very slowly, to open new opportunities for women to escape the constrictions of the traditional household. Abigail Adams and other thoughtful women articulated a new concept of women as Republican mothers. They noted that the republic depended on a virtuous citizenry of men. Virtue meant an ability to put the public good ahead of self-interest. Women noted that a young man’s character depended on his rearing by his mother, who instilled the values of virtue. In 1791, Judith Sargent Murray wrote that God had “assigned the care of making the first impressions on the infant minds of the whole human race, a trust of more importance than the government of provinces and the marshaling of armies.”
Republican motherhood offered a larger place for women in society, but it also reinforced their domestic position. The promoters of Republican motherhood continued to think that women should only work in and around the home. Rather than seek the right to vote, they primarily wanted respect for their contributions to their families. Consequently, women claimed a right and a duty to speak out on public issues that affected their children, so that they could better raise virtuous sons. To that end, they sought greater legal protections from abusive and drunken husbands, and eventually the right to own property and to speak in public.
THE CONTENTIOUS ISSUE OF SLAVERY
In 1776, slavery was legal and present in every state, but far more slaves lived in the South, where they had become essential to the plantation economy. Raising tobacco, rice, and indigo depended on slave labor. Cotton joined that list after 1793, when Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin, which improved ten-fold over hand labor the pace of removing seed husks from the cotton balls. Thereafter cotton cultivation and slavery expanded rapidly in tandem across the South.
The Revolution led some leaders, including Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, to discern the hypocrisy of preaching liberty while practicing slavery, but they felt stymied by the economic importance and political popularity of slavery to most white southerners. The founders recognized that the southern states would accept no union without at least implicit protections for slavery—a position embraced by the federal Constitution. Congress did bar slavery in the Northwest Territory (north of the Ohio River), but allowed it in the Southwest Territory. Congress also abolished the importation of slaves from abroad, but did not do so until 1807. The federal government did nothing to stem the much larger interstate trade in slaves and had no authority to abolish slavery in the states.
The federal impotence on slavery left the issue to the states. During the 1780s and 1790s, the northern states gradually began to abolish slavery. State court decisions freed the slaves in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but most of the northern states eliminated slavery gradually and by legislative enactment. For example, in 1799 New York stipulated that freedom would come to slaves once a woman reached twenty-five years and a man twenty-eight years.
It was relatively easy to abolish slavery in the northern states, where slaves comprised only 5 percent of the population. But slaves accounted for 40 percent of the southern population. No southern state would emancipate the slaves for fear that abolition would damage the plantation economy and that free blacks would seek revenge for their long sufferings under slavery. Thomas Jefferson insisted, “We have a wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale and self-preservation on the other.”
During the early 1780s, Virginia and Maryland did allow owners individually to free slaves through a process known as manumission. Consequently, the free black population in those two states grew from almost none in 1775 to 94,000 in 1810. Most African Americans, however, remained enslaved in Virginia and Maryland, and the other southern states discouraged manumissions.
White southerners dreaded a deadly uprising by their slaves. Their nightmare nearly became reality in and around Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. A blacksmith named Gabriel recruited at least 500 fellow slaves to seize arms from the state arsenal and dictate emancipation to the governor. They planned to strike on the night of August 30, 1800, but a thunderstorm suddenly flooded roads and bridges, making it tough to assemble the rebels. Tipped off, the white authorities rallied the militia and hunted down the rebel leaders. Virginia hanged twenty-seven rebels including Gabriel. A traveler reported that one of the rebels (unnamed in the record) declared, “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer had he been taken by the British and put to trial. I have adventured my life in endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.” It chilled white southerners to hear their Revolutionary rhetoric turned against them.
Rather than reconsider slavery, the Virginians decided that they had been too soft on their slaves and had allowed them too much leeway to move around without proper passes. The leaders concluded that free blacks set a bad example, inspiring slaves to think that they could and should be free as well. In 1806 the Virginia legislature required any newly freed slave to leave the state, which discouraged further manumissions. Rejecting the libertarianism of the Revolution, southern leaders gradually adopted an aggressive defense of slavery, which insisted that blacks were racially inferior and unfit for freedom.
Only the most liberal of the southern planters could imagine some plan of gradual emancipation, but even they would not allow freed blacks to remain in America. Deporting freed men and women to Africa was prohibitively expensive, however, and the plantation economy was too profitable for most slaveholders to forsake. Finally, almost all the slaves had been born in America, spoke English, and had, over the generations, developed an African American culture.