An American Lion

I’ve stumbled across some good history, so here you go:

Why was 1808 a pivotal year in American history?  Its significance has little to do with the fact that James Madison was elected to succeed his friend Thomas Jefferson as President, extending the Democratic-Republican party’s hold on the White House and increasing Federalist frustration, or with the new nation’s early drift toward future hostilities with the British.  Instead, the signal event of the year was the end of the African slave trade. Over the subsequent decades, this ban on the importation of slaves from overseas dramatically reshaped the institution of slavery in the United States.

The end of the foreign slave trade limited forever the size of the slave population in the United States.  After 1808, the size of the nation’s slave population depended on the natural increase of the slave population and the scope of slave smuggling.  Hence southern slaveholders, eager to secure enough slave labor to cultivate their staples, knew that only practices which effectively encouraged slave reproduction could insure the continued growth of their workforce.  Once the federal ban took effect, more lower South slaveholders accepted the idea that  encouraging longevity and reproduction among slaves held the key to the future of the region’s economy.  William Johnson, a United States Supreme Court Justice and a South Carolinian, summed up these views in 1815 when he told a Charleston audience that all slaveholders should “see in the propagation of their slaves the only resource for future wealth.” 

Moreover, this limit on size of the southern slave population prompted white southerners to reconsider possible ways of addressing what many of them still saw, in the tradition of the founders, as the problem of slavery.  After the closing off the foreign slave trade in 1808, both the upper and lower South sought answers to the slavery question in their respective regions through an internal reconfiguration of slavery.

You can read the whole article, if you’re interested, and yes, I am aware that this is filler. In blogging, filler is put up in order to show that the blogger is actively trying to find things to blog about. Filler keeps the readers moving along, but very little blogging effort has to be put towards it. In point of fact, I put a lot of effort into this piece of filler, but only insomuch as I’m admitting it is filler and as I am admitting to my occasional use of items as filler. I don’t do it more than seven or eight times a day, trust me.