The Second Middle Passage

1. The Second Middle Passage

2. Ban on Import of Slaves Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves Any Place within the United States

3. The Constitution protected international slave trade for 20 years. • 1807 Congress bans the importation of slaves. • While illegal imports continued, the ban made such imports much less frequent.

4. Textile-Based Industrialization Illustration from 1836 of men and women at work in a textile mill

5. Industrial Revolution began in English textile mills in the 1760s. • Spread to the New England states in the early 1800s • Radically increased the demand for cotton.

6. New England Textile Mills

7. Cotton Gin Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin Patent Drawing, 1794

8. Eli Whiney patented the cotton gin in 1794. • Made it easier to separate cotton fiber from cottonseed. • Without the gin one person cold clean one pound of cotton per day. • With the cotton gin one person could clean 50 pounds of cotton per day.

9. Domestic Slave Trade 1835 advertising for purchase of slaves in Maryland

10. As the demand for cotton rose so did the demand for slaves, especially in the Lower South. • At the same time the Upper South experienced an agricultural depression, so they in turn sold their slaves “down river” at tremendous profits. • Cotton surpassed tobacco as the South’s largest cash crop.

11. King Cotton

12. From 1790 to 1860 cotton production increased by more than 1,500%. • After 1820 cotton represented the majority of U.S. exports. • The cotton gin made cleaning the cotton much faster, nothing was developed to speed up cotton picking.

13. Cotton Picking 1860 photograph of slaves picking cotton in Alabama

14. Cotton picking increased 2.1% per year. • Due to what planters called the “pushing system,”(the use of violence to increase production)

15. New Slave States and Territories

16. As cotton profits grew, planters expanded south and west into new land seized from Native Americans and annexed from Mexico. • Planters imported tens of thousands of slaves to harvest the cotton being planted. • This internal slave trade is refered to ny some historians as the Second Middle Passage.

17. Central Historical Question Why is the domestic slave trade referred to as the Second Middle Passage?