Initially, mercantilist views characterized the conduct of the slave trade. The primary purpose of mercantilism, an economic system that developed during the transition of America from colonies to states, was to unify and increase the power and financial wealth of a nation through strict government regulation of the national economy. .
According to Carl Abbott, in the years following the American Revolution, slavery, which had never been so prevalent or economically important in the North as in the South, became the South's "peculiar institution." Between 1774 and 1804 all the northern states undertook to abolish slavery. In some states emancipation was immediate, but more often--as in New York and New Jersey--it was gradual, freeing slaves born after passage of the state's emancipation act when they reached a given age, usually in their twenties.(Abbott) .
Nevertheless, despite widespread questioning of its morality and a surplus of private liberation's in the Upper South during the revolutionary era, bondage actually expanded in the southern states. The spread of cotton production following the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 sharply increased the demand for slave labor and made possible the emergence of a vast new slave empire as southerners moved west. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the United States contained about half a million slaves. Between the North and the South, on the eve of the Civil War the country held almost 4 million slaves, confined entirely to the South.
Southern slaves were viewed in economic terms of labor to capital. While the ownership of slaves was a source of pride in plantation owners, this interdependence created a vicious cycle of rashness that caused slave owners to become irrational. In the South, slaveholdings varied according to size, location, and crops produced. Slavery in cities differed substantially from that in the countryside. These slaves were very valuable to the slaveholding planter class.
