Engerman S.L., Gallman R.E. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 1: The Colonial Era

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Economic

and

Social Development of the South

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shipped out of several colonial ports and to various European nations; since

volume and prices fluctuated dramatically with changing conditions in the

interior, no one has yet compiled a consistent series. However, evidence

from Charlestown and New Orleans, the dominant export centers, sug-

gests a slow expansion from a total of roughly £30,000 sterling around

1710 to perhaps £50,000 in 1750, and £80,000 in 1770. The trade made

an important contribution to southern export earnings, although its share

declined as plantation agriculture expanded. Still, at mid-century, deer-

skins accounted for about a third of the value of exports through New

Orleans, and 18 percent for Charlestown, figures that fell to about 20

percent and 6 percent, respectively, by the 1770s.

For a time, a trade in Native American slaves was also an important part

of the frontier economy. The evidence will not support a precise descrip-

tion of the volume of that trade, but it is possible to sketch its outline.

The Spanish had raided the Southeast for slaves since the sixteenth cen-

tury, while the English in Virginia and the French in Louisiana acquired

Indian slaves when opportunities appeared. The trade, however, centered

on Charlestown and the lowcountry. Although Indian slaves appeared in

South Carolina as early as 1683, the trade was initially a secondary activ-

ity, subordinate to the trade in deerskins and the political aims of the

English and their Native

allies.

Indian slaves were captured almost inciden-

tally, as a byproduct of other processes, and most were exported to earn

foreign exchange. After 1700, however, the lowcountry export boom led

to a sharp increase in demand for labor, which transformed relationships

between the English and Native peoples. The slave trade gained in impor-

tance and was no longer subordinated to the deerskin trade or to political

concerns. More Indians were captured and more were kept in the

lowcountry to make rice, grow provisions, and produce naval stores.

During the first decade of the eighteenth century, Indian slaves were the

fastest growing group in South Carolina, rising from 200

percent of the

total population) in 1700 to 1500 (15 percent) by 1710. Their numbers

continued to grow in the next decade, but less rapidly. In 1720, there

were roughly 2,000 Indian slaves, but they made up only 11 percent of

the population. Thereafter, both their numbers and their share fell

sharply, to fewer than 500 and less than 1 percent of the inhabitants by

1740.

The intensification of the slave trade proved devastating to the Indians.

It was a bloody, violent business, impossible to institutionalize, that

demanded increased warfare and ever more raiding. It produced sharp

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288 Russell R. Menard

population decline and the total destruction of several smaller groups.

And it led to major political changes as Indians struggled to protect

themselves by forming larger and more effective federations and by elabo-

rating a

"play-off"

system in which rivalries between the English, French,

and Spanish were exploited in efforts to control the worst excesses of the

European invasion. Population decline and political restructuring quickly

lowered the supply of Indian slaves, reducing it to a mere trickle by the

1720s.

It has been argued that planter preferences played the key role in the

decline of Native slavery, that they found Indians unsatisfactory as workers

and replaced them with Africans as soon as possible. However, prices for

Indian slaves rose rather than fell as their numbers declined, by 50 to 100

percent from the 1720s to the 1730s, suggesting that planters would have

purchased more had they been available. But if the preferences of the

individual planter purchasers did not produce the collapse of the native slave

trade, their political concerns as members of an emerging ruling class

proved critical. Beginning in 1716, the Carolina Assembly began to assert

control over the Indian trade, enacting over the next 15 years legislation

that, among other things, restricted dealing in

slaves.

The legislation

was

reaction to the dangers that trade posed, dangers clearly revealed in the

Yamasee War ofi7i5—17. While the origins of the conflict are complex, it

clear that Indian grievances against the

slave

trade helped to initiate it and

that slave traders welcomed it as a way of increasing supplies. The war

devastated the

colony.

Some

400 colonists were killed, more than f 100,000

in property was destroyed, half

the

cultivated land was abandoned, starva-

tion threatened, trade was disrupted, and taxes rose sharply to pay for

defense. And it was nearly worse, with only luck and skillful diplomacy

preventing the alliance of

Creeks,

Choctaws, and

Yamasees

from overwhelm-

ing Carolina and destroying the colony. In the midst of

rapid expansion

produced by the export boom, Carolina planters had too much at stake to

tolerate such risks.

While the consequences of the Indian slave trade were clearly disastrous

for Native peoples, the impact of the trade in deerskins is less certain. On

the one hand, it led to increases in income as commercial hunting raised

productivity and as access to guns, metal tools and utensils, and manufac-

tured textiles improved material living

standards.

On the other hand, it led

to dependency and decline over the long term. When pelt supplies fell,

Indians were left with heavy debts and dependent on European manufac-

tures,

but with much smaller incomes from deerskin production and a

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Economic

and Social Development of the South 289

territory so reduced in size that return to precontact forms of economic

organization was no longer an option. There is evidence that for some

Native peoples on the southern frontier, the gains outweighed the costs

during the middle to late decades of the eighteenth century. Although there

were periods of ferocious conflict when Indian groups fought each other over

territory, resisted European expansion, or were caught up in imperial wars,

the level of violence declined with the collapse of the slave trade. Further,

some groups were able to use the play-off system to maintain or even

increase autonomy as the French (and later Spanish) presence in the lower

Mississippi valley grew. The slow expansion of the deerskin trade appar-

ently did not deplete supplies, and many Indian groups were able to inte-

grate commercial hunting with agriculture, fishing, and gathering in ways

that enhanced income. Moreover, the activity generated by the trade offered

some additional employment opportunities, especially in transport, while

the growing European presence provided a market for food and handicrafts.

The best evidence of relative prosperity is demographic. The rapid decline

that reduced Indian numbers began to slow in the 1720s and was actually

replaced by a modest increase starting in the 1750s (see Figure 6.1). Decline

continued among natives along the coast, but in the southern interior, in

what was still "Indian country," some groups registered remarkable gains.

The Choctaws and Chickasaws, for example, grew from a low of about

14,000 in 1730 to nearly 18,000 in 1790, while the Creeks increased from

io.ooo in 1715 to 15,000 in 1790.

This relatively prosperous interlude between the demographic collapse

of the early stages of contact and the nineteenth-century era of removal was

threatened and ultimately destroyed by European expansion. One threat

came from the French settlements along the Gulf Coast and in the lower

Mississippi valley, a region usefully thought of as "greater Louisiana."

Although they established a permanent presence in 1699, the French were

slow to gain a firm foothold: as late as 1715, the colonial population

amounted to only 400 people, most of them soldiers, officials, or clerics

scattered among several small administrative outposts. The region experi-

enced a minor population boom in the 1720s, shortly after the French

government turned the colony over to John Law's

Compagnie

des Indes in

1717.

Over the next 15 years, the Company shipped some 7,000 Europe-

ans and an equal number of Africans to the colony. Conditions were ter-

rible,

however, "and the country was emptied as rapidly as it had filled."

Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, History and General

Description

New

Prance,

6 vols., trans.

John Gilmary Shea (New York, 1866-72), VI, 69.

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290 Russell R. Menard

By 1730, the colonial population numbered only 5,300, about two-thirds

of them African slaves. Disappointment with the Company's effort was

compounded by a deterioration in relations with neighboring Indians,

culminating in the destructive Natchez War of

1729—31.

In the after-

math, the French government resumed control of the colony but showed

little interest in its development. In 1760, the colonial population of

greater Louisiana amounted to just over 9,000, including perhaps

5,300

slaves.

Colonial development quickened when the region was partitioned in

the aftermath of the Seven

Years'

War. France ceded its territory east of the

Mississippi above Lake Pontchartrain to Great Britain, which reorganized

the region as West Florida. New Orleans, the lower delta, and the west

bank became Spanish Louisiana. Both colonial powers worked to promote

trade and plantation agriculture, attract immigrants, and encourage invest-

ment. Population boomed, more than doubling between 1760 and 1775,

doubling again by 1790, when the colonial inhabitants surpassed 42,000,

including some 23,000 slaves. By then, the entire region was under

Spanish control, albeit temporarily, as a result of Spain's conquest of West

Florida in 1783.

Economic developments mirrored the growth of population. Until the

end of the French period, the economy was dominated by the Indian trade.

A small plantation sector began to emerge during the 1720s around New

Orleans and upriver at Point Coupee, where planters used slaves to make

modest quantities of tobacco, indigo, and timber products for export as

well as foodstuffs for the local market. That sector grew slowly for the next

40 years, but it was not until the era of partition that greater Louisiana

emerged as a plantation colony. By 1775, annual exports of indigo and

tobacco from New Orleans were worth more than six times the value of

deerskin exports. Plantation development was less rapid in British West

Florida, and peltries remained the dominant export there for a longer

time.

However, that colony also produced significant amounts of indigo,

tobacco, and forest products by 1775.

While the expansion of great Louisiana intruded on "Indian country"

during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the greater threat

came from the east and the invasion of the southern backcountry. Al-

though there is a sense in which the South had a backcountry from the last

decades of the seventeenth century as relentless expansion extended the

area of colonial occupation steadily inland from the Chesapeake Bay, it was

not until the 1730s when settlers crossed the Fall Line (the line east of the

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Appalachians marking the end of the coastal plains and the beginning of

the Piedmont Plateau) in substantial numbers that phrases such as "Back

Parts,"

"Back Settlements," and "Back Country" entered contemporary

usage. The concept was clearly Eurocentric: from the perspective of Native

peoples, a phrase such as "front country" appears more apt. And it served

to contrast the orderly, hierarchical, "civilized" coast with the violent,

leveling, "primitive" interior. Historians, following Turner, have stripped

the notion of its pejorative implications but retained the contrast and its

underlying assumption that a fundamental social, economic, and cultural

unity bound the backcountry into a coherent region with an integrity of

its own.

There is evidence to support the assumption. The regions' population

was chiefly European in background, without the substantial African

presence so critical to coastal societies. The backcountry was dominated by

farms rather than plantations, shipped less of its output abroad than did

the tidewater, and exhibited lower wealth levels and less inequality.

Backcountry settlers also had grievances against coastal-dominated govern-

ments, grievances which sometimes brought large numbers of them to-

gether to advance a common political agenda. Nevertheless, the assump-

tion that the backcountry formed a coherent, unified social, economic,

and cultural region is misleading, on several counts.

For one thing, the region grew explosively in the half-century before the

American Revolution, at rates more than twice the mainland

average.

Still

"Indian country" in 1730, by 1775 the backcountry

was

home to more than

a quarter of a million colonials, more than 20 percent of the South's popula-

tion and nearly a third of the whites. Such rapid growth would test the

coherence and unity of any society, but the migrant streams which fed that

rapid increase were especially diverse. Immigrants from the north of En-

gland, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, most of whom entered the region

by way of Philadelphia (leading Turner to call the region a "new Pennsylva-

nia"^),

were joined by migrants from the East, many of them third- or

fourth-generation Americans seeking the opportunity no longer found in

the tidewater. Many of the men who moved to the backcountry shared

aspirations, especially a determination to maintain their "independence" -

meaning that they and their dependents could

live

comfortably and securely

without relying on the good will of others

—

and to achieve "improvement"

by acquiring the capital and labor to develop their farms and by transform-

" Frederick Jackson Turner, The

Frontier

American

History (New York: 1947), 68.

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Russell

R. Menard

ing the backcountry in ways that would make it more like the societies of

the seaboard.'

However, broadly shared aspirations did not mean an ab-

sence of conflict or the general acceptance of the rule of those in power, and

political authority remained fragile at the eve of the Revolution.

Further, sharp regional differences quickly appeared in the structure of

backcountry society, differences in large part related to the date of Euro-

pean settlement and the degree of integration to the coast. New settle-

ments in the backcountry went through a process similar to that along the

tobacco coast. Opportunities attracted migrants who at first built a rela-

tively egalitarian (if poor) society that later witnessed rising wealth levels,

growing inequality, a contraction of opportunities as the region filled up,

and high rates of outmigration as residents, unable to achieve indepen-

dence, struck out for better prospects. These developments were often

accompanied by a noticeable economic reorientation as farmers, who had

initially concentrated on food production for home use and the local

market, gradually increased their wealth through the farm-making pro-

cess,

acquired slaves, and began to ship livestock and livestock products,

tobacco, indigo, hemp, and grains overland and downriver to tidewater

ports for sale abroad. Coastal planters and merchants often encouraged

such reorientation as they invested in land, sent out their younger sons

with slaves to develop estates, extended credit, and built stores both to

purchase backcountry produce for export and to supply settlers tools,

clothing, and amenities. These processes led to considerable differentia-

tion within the region as the oldest parts of the backcountry were "im-

proved" and became more like the coast. In South Carolina on the eve of

the Revolution, for example, the inventories of decedents who lived near

the Fall Line were appraised at slightly more than about £300 sterling and

reported an average of six

slaves;

those who lived farther inland were worth

£150,

with only two slaves per estate. Eventually, contemporaries ac-

knowledged the process by using the terms

middlecountry

and

upcountry

distinguish the two areas.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that the backcountry was a coherent

region comes from the

regulator

movements,

the outbreaks of insurrectionary

violence that shook North and South Carolina in the 1760s and 1770s. In

See Jack P. Greene, "Independence, Improvement, and Authority: Towards a Framework for

Understanding the Histories of the Southern Backcountry during the Era of the American Revolu-

tion,"

in Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert, eds., An Uncivil War: The

Southern

Backcountry

during the American

Revolution

(Charlottesville, VA, 198;), 3—36.

*» For the terminology, see Rachel N. Klein,

Unification

of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in

the

South

Carolina

Backcountry,

7760-1808 (Chapel Hill, 1990), 7.

Economic

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293

part, the violence aimed to redress grievances against governments domi-

nated by tidewater planters and unresponsive to backcountry interests.

Complaints included inadequate representation, corruption in land policy

and local government, tax policies that favored the tidewater, and a lack of

concern with defense of the frontier, control of

local

criminals, and public

improvements, especially in transport. While the regulator movements

built solidarity and distinguished backcountry from tidewater, they also

served the interests of

some

settlers to "improve" the region, to hasten its

transformation by creating conditions important to the development of

plantation agriculture. Most regulator violence was directed not against

the coast but internally, against "vagrants" who were "little more than

white Indians," "back inhabitants who choose to live by the wandering

indolence of hunting than by the more honest and domestic employment

of planting."'

It was not simply that such people offended the sensibili-

ties of improving farmers. They also threatened security by stealing prop-

erty, taking livestock, and, especially, offering refuge to escaped slaves.

While the region remained frontier, such "vagrants" were of slight con-

cern, but as settlers flooded in, built farms, and aspired to plantation

agriculture, the "vagrants" had to be forced out so that the process of

"improvement" could proceed apace.

CONCLUSION

The economy of the several Souths grew impressively during the century

and a half of British colonial rule. While growth came at a high price to

Indians and Africans, its benefits were shared widely among white south-

erners, and a few big planters and merchants grew rich. Growth and the

prosperity it brought rested not simply on American resources but on the

ability to exploit opportunities within the framework provided by the Old

Empire, to take advantage of its markets, cheap manufactured goods,

protection, commercial services, and credit. Given the apparent material

benefits of membership in the Empire, why did colonists mount a resis-

tance to Great Britain after 1760 and then fight a long, costly war for

independence? The puzzle deepens when it is recalled that growth was

especially rapid in the quarter-century leading up to the Revolution, and

it deepens yet further when the short-term costs of independence are

*> For the quotations, see ibid., 51.

294

Russell

R. Menard

assessed. For the colonies as a whole, incomes fell sharply during the war

and recovery was slow: it was not until the first decade of the nineteenth

century that per capita incomes in the United States again reached the

level achieved in the colonies in 1774. The costs of independence were

especially high in the South. Southern per capita incomes, at or above the

"national" average in 1774, were perhaps one-third below that average in

1798,

while the southern share of "national" exports fell from 63 percent

in ca. 1770 to 40—45 percent in the early 1790s. Colonists, and especially

the southern gentry, seem to have committed "econocide." Why?

One answer is that southerners were heavily indebted to British mer-

chants and saw the Revolution as an opportunity to escape those obliga-

tions.

This line of reasoning implies that colonial prosperity was false and

achieved by mortgaging the future. While British credit helped to finance

the purchase of manufactures and slaves, and while some planters were

overextended and burdened by chronic indebtedness, for the South as a

whole, the size of the debt owed to foreign creditors was not excessive.

The average annual value of southern exports seems to have been larger

than that debt. Most planters were good risks, and the debt they carried

was modest given their incomes. Nor were southerners overly dependent

on Britain for investment capital: by the 1770s, the internal debt (loans

between southerners) dwarfed the external one, suggesting that the South

could

finance

continued growth out of its own

resources.

Southern prosper-

ity did not rest on mortgaged futures and planters who lived beyond their

means but on the productivity of its farms and plantations and especially

on its ability to produce crops much in demand elsewhere in the Atlantic

world.

Another answer is that economic concerns were unimportant to the

Revolutionary leadership, that the conflict turned on politics, especially

questions of liberty, representation, and self-government. That is a narrow

view of the movement, however. Economic developments provided the

means for independence and shaped the aspirations that gave colonists the

nerve to take the risks. Independence was thinkable in the 1770s because

growth in the colonial era had created an economy that could stand alone

and support a government able to hold its own against the great powers of

the day. Perhaps more important, economic progress filled colonists with

pride in their accomplishments and nurtured visions of a bountiful future.

Southerners were surrounded by evidence of their rise to "wealth and great-

ness"

in the form of prosperous farms and big plantations, impressive

fortunes held by the

gentry,

great crops of tobacco, rice, and indigo, and the

Economic

and Social Development of the South 295

growth of population and of colonized territory. That evidence was pro-

jected into the future by southern gentlemen, eager for their "turn to figure

on the face of the earth, and in the annals of the world," whose aspirations

were shaped by visions of an American empire that would extend the

accomplishments of the colonial economy and the key institutions of an

emerging South

—

plantation agriculture, African slavery, and the develop-

ing planter class

—

into the next century and across the continent.

>• David Ramsey, The History of the

American

Revolution,

2 vols. (Trenton, NJ: 1811), II, 452.