In the war of 1812 thirty-three hundred Negroes helped Jackson win the battle of New Orleans, and numbers fought in New York State and in the navy under Perry, Channing, and others.  Phyllis Wheatley, a Negro girl, wrote poetry, and the mulatto, Benjamin Banneker, published one of the first American series of almanacs.

In fine, it seemed in the early years of the nineteenth century that slavery in the United States would gradually disappear and that the Negro would have, in time, a man’s chance.  A change came, however, between 1820 and 1830, and it is directly traceable to the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.

Between 1738 and 1830 there had come a remarkable series of inventions which revolutionized the methods of making cloth.  This series included the invention of the fly shuttle, the carding machine, the steam engine, and the power loom.  The world began to look about for a cheaper and larger supply of fiber for weaving.  It was found in the cotton plant, and the southern United States was especially adapted to its culture.  The invention of the cotton gin removed the last difficulties.  The South now had a crop which could be attended to by unskilled labor and for which there was practically unlimited demand.  There was land, and rich land, in plenty.  The result was that the cotton crop in the United States increased from 8,000 bales in 1790 to 650,000 bales in 1820, to 2,500,000 bales in 1850, and to 4,000,000 bales in 1860.

In this growth one sees the economic foundation of the new slavery in the United States, which rose in the second decade of the nineteenth century.  Manifestly the fatal procrastination in dealing with slavery in the eighteenth century received in the nineteenth century its terrible reward.  The change in the attitude toward slavery was manifest in various ways.  The South no longer excused slavery, but began to defend it as an economic system.  The enforcement of the slave trade laws became notoriously lax and there was a tendency to make slave codes harsher.

This led to retaliation on the part of the Negroes.  There had not been in the United States before this many attempts at insurrection.  The slaves were distributed over a wide territory, and before they became intelligent enough to cooperate the chance of emancipation was held before them.  Several small insurrections are alluded to in South Carolina early in the eighteenth century, and one by Cato at Stono in 1740 caused widespread alarm.  The Negro plot in New York in 1712 put the city into hysterics.  There was no further plotting on any scale until the Haytian revolt, when Gabriel in Virginia made an abortive attempt.  In 1822 a free Negro, Denmark Vesey, in South Carolina, failed in a well-laid plot, and ten years after that, in 1831, Nat Turner led his insurrection in Virginia and killed fifty-one persons.  The result of this insurrection was to crystallize tendencies toward harshness which the economic revolution was making advisable.