Growth of the black population inante bellumAmerica, 1820–1860

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Abstract
The period between 1820 and 1860 is one of the most interesting and critical in the history of black Americans. These 40 years saw the revitalization of the institution of slavery, and following the War of 1812, its rapid expansion across the South. A series of changes accompanied the rise of the Cotton Kingdom that have sometimes been characterized as having produced out of a heterogeneous area, loosely tied to slavery, a society that was in some respects monolithic, totalitarian, and dependent culturally and economically upon the maintenance of slavery. Within the 40 years preceding the Civil War the South was thus transformed. Ironically, this transformation, which more surely than ever before made slavery the keystone of Southern society, occurred after the abolition of the international slave trade; that is, the increasing dependence upon slavery, which comprehended about 90% of the black population on the eve of the Civil War, came at a time when the South had no legal access to external sources of supplies of slaves — a thing that was usually thought to be necessary to the maintenance of a slave system over a long period of time.

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