History of Tennessee - Antebellum Years

Antebellum Years

In the early years of settlement, planters brought slaves with them from Kentucky and Virginia. Enslaved African Americans were first concentrated in Middle Tennessee, where planters developed mixed crops and bred high quality horses and cattle, as they did in the Inner Bluegrass region of Kentucky. East Tennessee had more subsistence farmers and few slaveholders.

During the early years of state formation, there was support for emancipation of slaves, founded in part on fears by whites of competition with slave labor (who could be hired out) in the middle and eastern parts of the state. At the constitutional convention of 1796, free Negroes were given the right to vote if they met residency and property requirements. Efforts to abolish slavery were defeated at this convention and again at the convention of 1834. The convention of 1834 also marked the state's retraction of suffrage for most free African Americans. By then slaveholding had expanded markedly in the state, especially in the Mississippi Delta where cotton planters held large groups of enslaved African Americans, often numbering in the hundreds.

By 1830 the number of African Americans had increased from less than 4,000 at the beginning of the century, to 146,158. This was chiefly related to development of large plantations and transportation of numerous slaves to the Cotton Belt in West Tennessee, in the area of the Mississippi Delta. African American labor created the cotton plantations that generated so much wealth for the planters. By 1860 the enslaved population had nearly doubled to 283,019, with only 7,300 free Negroes in the state. While most of the slaves were concentrated in West Tennessee, planters in Middle Tennessee also used enslaved African Americans for labor but had smaller operations and held fewer slaves. According to the 1860 census, enslaved African Americans comprised about 25% of the state's population of 1.1 million before the Civil War.