The "Oligarchic" South?

--1860: 5.6 million whites

--1700 own around 100 slaves

--46,274 own around 20 slaves

--slave population was 3.84 million

--26,000 free blacks in the South

--36% of families in South own
slaves in 1830

--25% of families in South own
slaves in 1860

--"Cotton is King!"...75% of Britain's cotton came from the South.

--between 1820 and 1860, around 2 million African Americans were either forcibly moved by their owners or sold to others in the Gulf states region

--Traveling the 1,460 miles from Baltimore to New Orleans in 1850 meant riding five different railroads, two stage coaches, and two steamboats.

--In 1850, 20 percent of adult white southerners could not read or write, compared to a national figure of 8 percent.

--According to economic historians Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, "After 1815 much of the nation's growth was generated by increased British demand for cotton and Midwestern settlement that created opportunities for regional specialization and trade."



A SUPREME COURT OF NORTH CAROLINA CASE GIVES SLAVEOWNERS IMMUNITY FOR ATTACKING THEIR SLAVES...
State v. Mann: 1829

SIGNIFICANCE: A Southern judge with little sympathy for slavery rendered a powerful and logical pro-slavery opinion, further entrenching Southern slavery, while opening it to Northern attack.

North Carolina had fewer slaves than most other states in the future Confederacy. But in the two decades leading up to the Civil War, that state's Supreme Court produced one of the most notorious pro-slavery opinions in American history.

In 1829 Elizabeth Jones, who owned a slave named Lydia, hired her out for a year to John Mann of Chowan County. Lydia was unhappy with the arrangement, and at one point Mann decided to punish her, possibly by whipping her. But Lydia escaped during the punishment, and began to run away. Mann shouted to her, ordering her to stop, but Lydia continued to run. Mann then shot and wounded her. Such, at least, was Mann's story.

The rest of Ruffin's opinion, in fact, was one of the most readable, logical, and capable defenses of slavery that a Southerner ever wrote. Ruffin observed that although Mann did not own Lydia, and that Elizabeth Jones might well be able to sue him for damaging her property, Mann still had the right to use as much force to control Lydia as Jones herself would have had, since Lydia was legally under his control. The question, then, was how much force a master could use against his slave.

Ruffin's conclusion was blunt. Slavery was designed for the good of the master, and not for the good of the slave, he wrote. In order for the master to have the full benefit of the slave, he had to be able to break the slave's will, to make the slave obey him. "Such obedience," wrote Ruffin, "is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect." The court could not interfere with the master's power over his slave, continued Ruffin. "The slave, to remain a slave, must be made sensible, that there is no appeal from the master." In short, Ruffin held, the law gave the master absolute power over the slave. He recognized that this was unjust, but clearly it was the law.

The Mann opinion came down just as abolitionism was gaining ground in the North. It highlighted the tension between law and justice, and the fact that more and more people were coming to see that slavery was wrong, even though it was both legal and constitutional.

SOURCE: http://law.jrank.org/pages/2446/State-v-Mann-1829.html
WRITTEN BY AUTHOR Buckner F. Melton, Jr.