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8 SLAVERY AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION tion. But when we today—and this includes historians—think back to the problem of slavery at the Convention, we too often think of it as if that history that subsequently unfolded was the history they foresaw, expected, or experienced—but it wasn’t. Paradoxically perhaps, achieving clarity on the history that occurred after the adoption of the Constitution is most important for accurately understanding our topic. The posthistory—the history after the Constitution was made—involved a real transformation of the slavery system. In the period around the time of the Constitutional Convention, the main use of slave labor in America was to produce tobacco in the upper South and rice and indigo in the lower South. But starting in the 1790s, the Southern economy shifted to cotton. And the shift to cotton was fueled by two technological developments. First was the development of steam-powered machinery, which led to the development of the textile industry in Britain, which led to the production of cheaper cotton cloth, which led, in turn, to a rising demand for raw cotton. The second big technological breakthrough was the famous cotton gin. The cotton gin was particularly important in driving the transformation of the Southern economy because the kind of cotton that could be grown readily in the American South was a kind in which the fibers of cotton and the seeds of the cotton were very difficult to separate. The cotton gin made it possible to do this separation cheaply and relatively easily. With the cotton gin, cotton became an economically viable crop for the South, and with the ever-increasing demand for raw cotton, it became an economically lucrative crop. The difference cotton production made after the Constitutional Convention is readily visible in a few simple statistics. In 1790, roughly at the time of the Convention, the United States produced 3,000 bales of cotton. In 20 years, that figure increased six-fold, and by 1858, near the start of the Civil War, cotton production stood at four million bales—from three thousand to four million, more than a thousand-fold increase. Cotton became the leading American export, and the dollar value of cotton was greater than that of all other American exports combined.
MICHAEL P. ZUCKERT 9 That the slave system that produced this cotton, which was so economically profitable, should be transformed by this immense growth in the cotton industry is therefore not a matter for surprise. And that the slave system should become larger and more important, more entrenched, I think should be relatively easy to see. But we cannot read back from the history of what did happen to cotton, and thus to slavery, in the post-1790 world to the expectations and plans of the men who wrote the Constitution. That future, which we all see so clearly, was completely opaque and unexpected to them. Instead, they looked back on a history and trajectory of slavery in America that was quite different—the history and trajectory before 1787. Of course, as is well known, slavery by the mid–18th century was well established on the American continent. All 13 colonies at the time of the revolution had slavery; slavery existed in French America and slavery existed in Spanish America. In 1750, according to the best estimates, about 20 percent of the population of what would become the United States was black, most of whom were slaves. But this population was very unevenly distributed. In the North, less than 5 percent of the population was black; in the South, on average 40 percent was black, with a high of 60 percent in South Carolina. The situation of slavery, though, was much affected by the American Revolution and its aftermath. There was a combination of events and trends that actually set slavery back in those years. One cause was that the British, for example, offered freedom to slaves in the South who would come and fight on their side, and there were quite a few slaves who took them up on that. Moreover, there were many other slaves who took advantage of wartime chaos to flee from slavery. Beyond that, in a movement that one important historian has called “the contagion of liberty,” all the northern states moved to abolish slavery in the years after the revolution. Individual, voluntary manumission was occurring, and state laws were passed even in the South making it easier and easier to free your slaves. In 1787, the Congress under the Articles of Confederation passed the Northwest Ordinance, prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory,
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