History of Slavery in The United States - 1790 To 1850

1790 To 1850

While the Constitution protected the slave trade, in the first two decades of the postwar era, state legislatures in both the North and South made decisions to extend freedom to more men, resulting in a dramatic rise in the number and of free blacks and their proportion in the United States by 1810. Most free blacks were in the North, but in the Upper South, the proportion went from less than one percent of all blacks to more than 10 percent, even as the number of slaves were increasing. After that, the cotton gin made the cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable, as it could be processed, and cotton cultivation spread dramatically throughout the Deep South, increasing the internal market for slaves.

The protections of slavery in the Constitution strengthened the political power of southern representatives and the southern economy had links nationwide. As the historian James Oliver Horton noted, slaveholders and the commodity crops of the South had a strong influence on United States politics and economy; New York City's economy was closely tied to the South through shipping and manufacturing, for instance. In addition, he said,

"in the 72 years between the election of George Washington and the election of Abraham Lincoln, 50 of those years a slaveholder as president of the United States, and, for that whole period of time, there was never a person elected to a second term who was not a slaveholder."