nce of a white slaveowner would bother him enough that he would free his slaves as a matter of principle. This latter pattern was most common in areas, especially the North, where slavery was not of significant economic importance, and it especially intensified during the periods of religious revivalism known as the Great Awakenings. As a result, by 1860, about half of the free African-American population in the United States lived in the North, even though the great majority of the African-American population of the United States was in the South (Berlin, 1976, p. 299).
Throughout the United States, both before and after the Civil War, African-Americans were everywhere at best second-class citizens, but there were great differences from region to region in what sort of restrictions of rights and privileges (relative to those enjoyed by free whites) African-Americans were subjected to, and in what sort of personal and communal identities they evolved. These differences arose primarily from the economic, social, cultural, and demographic differences between these regions.
The great and deciding factor behind African-American slavery in the United States was, of course, the antebellum system of agricultural plantations in the South. The labor-intensive cultivation of cotton (especially), tobacco, rice, and other crops could be carried out by slaves, no matter how reluctant and inefficient they may have been as workers. There continues to be scholarly debate over whether this system was ever economically sound, compared to what might have been possible by use of free and therefore much more efficient labor, but a consensus on this issue is difficult to reach because of a lack of sufficient hard economic data. It has often been argued that, in cold, hard fact, Eli Whitney's cotton gin did far more than either warfare or humanitarianism to end slavery as an economic institution.
In any event, the common public concept of the a...