Price McGinnis
November 13, 2014
History 205 – History of Slavery in the U.S
Dr. McKinney
Slave Trade in Antebellum South
The South, these two words conjure up serene, peaceful images of
sweet tea, country
music, and
apple pie; but “Sweet Home Alabama” wasn’t always so sweet. It is no secret
that America has a giant black eye on its body of history, and that black eye
is slavery. One of the most horrendous and degrading instances of the
corruption of the practice of trade was during the institution of slavery. This
horrendous institution took place in the South below the “Bible Belt” amidst
all the Southern hospitality. While slaveholders like Miriam Hilliard felt “the slave market
held dreams of transformative possibilities”[1], the slave market
was a wretched attempt at de-humanizing African Americans. The slave market in
the antebellum era South indirectly infected other areas of the country and was
a catalyst for racism in the United States. The slave market perpetuated racism
by degrading African Americans and allowed White Americans to feel superior to
minorities,
especially the African Americans.
Slavery,
and specifically the slave market, was maliciously infectious and although Northern and free
states did not allow slavery nor the buying and selling of slaves, the institution and
overall market still affected these states. One of the primary instances of Southern
slavery effecting free states, was the strengthening of the fugitive slave law in 1850. This
made it easier for Southern slave owners to retrieve their slaves from the free
north. No matter where these slaves went, free state or not, those states had to respect the
institution.[2] The
fact that slave owners could retrieve slaves from the free north, regardless of the
slave’s free or enslaved status, truly shows how slavery was prevalent in all parts of the
United States,
not just the South.
One of the most degrading aspects of the slave trade in the
antebellum era South was the slave market, an appalling and undignified event where
slaves were inspected and sold just like cattle or livestock. Slaves were kept
in pens, much
like cattle and Walter Johnson, in his book, Soul by Soul, tells us,
“In the daily life of the slave pens, slaves were treated as physical manifestations of the
categories the traders used to select their slaves.”[3] Slaves
were arranged according to how they looked physically. These slave pens allowed
for racism to run rampant because the white men held jurisdiction over the
slaves, all of
which were black. During the inspections of slaves that preceded the buying and
selling of slaves,
slave owners and buyers would attempt to get a medical record of the slaves.
This helped to further perpetuate slavery and is evident when Walter Johnson
makes the claim,
“In Southern courtrooms and medical journals, slaves’ misbehavior was often attributed to
an inward disposition of character, which meant that there was something invariably, inevitably, perhaps
biologically “bad” about the slave.”[4]
The fact that judges,
jurors, doctors, and nurses felt
that blacks were biologically “bad” is a concrete example of how the slave
market, and the
medical aspect of the market in particular, helped fuel racism in the antebellum era South
by degrading African Americans. This was done by attempts to prove that African
Americans were naturally inferior to White Americans.
While the slave market degraded African Americans and
stimulated racism,
the slave market also allowed for White Americans to foster the idea that they
were superior to African Americans. One of leading sciences in the medical
field that was employed through the slave market was phrenology, which is the study
of the cranium or skull. White Americans used this science to prove that
because African American skulls were shaped differently from White American
skulls, African
Americans were inferior to Whites.[5] Walter
Johnson tells us that White Americans, “bought slaves to make themselves, frugal, independent, socially acceptable, or even fully white.”[6] The
fact that white Americans felt that they had to buy another human of another
race to gain social acceptance and even feel “white” shows that White Americans
thought that they were superior to the African Americans.
The slave market in the South during the antebellum era was a
horrendous occurrence in which human beings were sold to other human beings for
profit. The slave market perpetuated and even encouraged racism. The market did not
only affect the south, however, it spread like a disease indirectly throughout
the United States. The market degraded African Americans by using medical “advances”
to show how in-human they were. Not only were African Americans degraded, but also White
Americans were made to feel superior, if not glorified, over the slaves. The
market gave Whites a feeling of being fully white and socially acceptable when
buying black slaves according to Walter Johnson. Because of these things that
transpired during the antebellum South, the slave market spurred racism to
thrive in the United States. The racism and race based issues are all still
being dealt with today, in an effort to be a post-racial world.
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