Loudoun County Public Schools
The Growth of Slavery and the Old South:The Old South:King Cotton:Cotton replaced sugar as the world’s major crop produced by slave labor in the nineteenth century.The strength of American slavery rested on cotton.Cotton industry:Three-fourths of the world’s cotton supply came from the southern United States.Cotton supplied textile mills in the North and in Great Britain.As early as 1803, cotton represented America’s most important export.The Southern Economy:Southern economic growth was different from northern.There were few large cities in the South.The cities were mainly centers for gathering and shipping cotton.New Orleans was the only city of significant size in the South.New Orleans had a rich immigrant culture.The region produced less than 10 percent of the nation’s manufactured goods.Social Class in the Old South:Three-fourths of white southerners did not own slaves.Most white southerners lived on self-sufficient farms.Most whites supported slavery.A few spoke out against the planter elite.Most white southerners supported the planter elite and slavery because of shared bonds of regional loyalty, racism, and kinship ties.The Planter Class:In 1850, the majority of slaveholding families owned five or fewer slaves.Fewer than 2,000 families owned 100 slaves or more.Ownership of slaves provided the route to wealth, status, and influence.Slavery was a profit-making system.Men watched the world market for cotton, invested in infrastructure, and managed their plantations.Plantation mistresses cared for sick slaves, oversaw the domestic servants, and supervised the plantation when the master was away.Southern slave owners spent much of their money on material goods.Justifications for the “Peculiar Institution”:Slave Owners came up with numerous justifications for the continuation of chattel slavery. This was aimed, primarily, at avoiding questions of hypocrisy regarding a nation that is supposedly “free” but still keeps a large percentage of its population in a state of subjugation.The Paternalist Ethos:Southern slave owners were committed to a hierarchical, agrarian society.Paternalism was ingrained in slave society and enabled Slave owners to think of themselves as kind, responsible masters even as they bought and sold their human property.The Proslavery Argument:By the 1830s, fewer southerners believed that slavery was a necessary evil; instead, they claimed it as the basis for free institutions.Proslavery argument rested on a number of pillars, including a commitment to white supremacy, biblical sanction of slavery, and the historical precedent that slavery was essential to human progress.Another proslavery argument held that slavery guaranteed equality for whites.Slavery and Liberty:White southerners declared themselves the true heirs of the American Revolution.Proslavery arguments begin to repudiate the ideas in the Declaration of Independence that equality and freedom were universal entitlements.John C. Calhoun believed that the language in the Declaration of Independence was indeed dangerous.Southern clergymen argued that submission of inferior to superior was a “fundamental law.”Slavery and Civilization:George Fitzhugh, a Virginia writer, argued that “universal liberty” was the exception, not the rule, and that slaves, because they were not burdened with financial concerns, were the happiest and freest people in the world.Abraham Lincoln observed that the proslavery arguments were only functioning to serve the interests of slave owners, who reaped the greatest benefit from the institution.By 1830, southerners defended slavery in terms of liberty and freedom; without slavery, freedom was not possible.Slavery is a privilege earned, not a right bestowed on all peoples. Slavery and the Old South:The Second Middle Passage:Although the African slave trade was prohibited, the sale and trade of slaves within the United States flourished.The main business districts of southern cities contained the offices of slave traders and auctions took place at public slave markets.Slavery and the Nation:The North was not immune to slavery.Northern merchants and manufacturers participated in the slave economy and shared in its profits.Slavery shaped the lives of all Americans.Slaves and the LawSlaves were considered property and had few legal rights.Slaves were not allowed to testify against a white person, carry a firearm, leave the plantation without permission, learn how to read or write, or gather in a group without a white person present, although some of these laws were not always vigorously enforced.Masters also controlled whether slaves married and how they spent their free time.Trial of Celia: Celia killed her master while resisting a sexual assault.Celia was charged with murder and sentenced to die, but she was pregnant and her execution was delayed until she gave birth, so as not to deny the current master his property right.Conditions of LifeSome laws protected slaves against mistreatment.American slaves as compared to their counterparts in the West Indies and in Brazil enjoyed better diets, lower infant mortality, and longer life expectancies.Reasons for the above include the paternalistic ethos of the South, the lack of malaria and yellow fever in the South, and the high costs of slaves.Improvements in the slaves’ living conditions were meant to strengthen slavery, not undermine it.Slave LaborLabor occupied most of a slave’s daily existence.There were many types of jobs a slave might perform: cutting wood for fuel for steamboats, working in mines, working on docks in seaports, laying railroad track, repairing bridges or roads, or working as skilled artisans.Gang Labor and Task Labor:Most slaves worked in the fields.It is estimated that 75 percent of the women and 90 percent of the men worked as field hands.On large plantations they worked in gangs under the direction of the overseer, a man who was generally considered cruel by the slaves.Slavery in the Cities:Most city slaves were servants, cooks, and other domestics.Some city slaves were skilled artisans and occasionally lived on their own.Maintaining Order:The system of maintaining order rested on force.Masters had complete discretion in inflicting punishment. There were many tools a master had to maintain order, including whipping, exploiting divisions among slaves, incentives, and the threat of sale.It was rare for a slave to go through life without a whippingGeorgia planter noted that he whipped a slave “for not bringing over milk for my coffee”. Slave Culture:Slaves never abandoned their desire for freedom or their determination to resist total white control over their lives. In the face of grim realities, they succeeded in forging a semi-independent culture, centered on the family and church. Slave culture drew on African heritage. Which was evident in the slaves’ music and dances, style of religious worship, and the use of herbs by slave healers to combat disease. Slave culture was shaped by African traditions and American values and experiences. The Slave Family:Despite the threat of sale and the fact that marriage between slaves was illegal, many slaves did marry and create families.Slaves frequently named children after other family members to retain family continuity.The slave community had a significantly higher number of female-headed households as compared to the white community.Gender Roles among Slaves:Traditional gender roles were not followed in the fields, but during their own time, slaves did fall back on traditional gender roles.The family was vital to passing traditions from parent to child.Slave Religion:Black Christianity was distinctive and offered hope to the slaves.Almost every plantation had its own black preacher.Slaves worshipped in biracial churches.Free blacks established their own churches.Masters viewed Christianity as another means of social control and required slaves to attend services conducted by white ministers.The Desire for Liberty:Slave culture rested on a sense of the injustice of bondage and the desire for freedom.Slave folklore glorified the weak over the strong and their spirituals emphasized eventual liberation.All slaves saw the injustice of slavery; the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence and rhetoric of freedom heard around them only strengthened their desire for freedom.Abolition in the Americas:Between 1800 and 1840, slavery was abolished in most of Spanish America and the British empire.Abolition in the Americas influenced debates over slavery in the United States.Proslavery advocates used post-emancipation decline in sugar and in other cash crops as evidence of British abolitionism’s failure.Abolitionists argued that the former slaves’ rising living standards (and similar improvements) showed that emancipation had succeeded.By mid-century, New World slavery remained only in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the United States.Resistance to Slavery:Forms of Resistance:The most common form of resistance was silent sabotage—the breaking of tools, feigning illness, doing poor work.Less common, but more serious forms of resistance included poisoning the master, arson, and armed assaults.Fugitive SlavesSlaves had to follow the North Star as their guide.Of the estimated 1,000 slaves a year to escape, most escaped from the Upper South.In the Deep South, fugitive slaves often escaped to the southern cities, to blend in with the free black population.The Underground Railroad was a loose organization of abolitionists who helped slaves to escape.Harriet Tubman was an escaped slave who made twenty trips to Maryland, leading slaves to freedom.The Amistad: (why is this important, besides being a cool movie?)In 1839, a group of slaves collectively seized their freedom while on board the Amistad.The U.S. Supreme Court accepted John Quincy Adams’s argument that the slaves had been illegally seized in Africa and should be freed.Slave Revolts:1811 witnessed an uprising on sugar plantations in Louisiana, which saw slaves marching toward New Orleans before the militia captured them.In 1822, Denmark Vesey was charged with conspiracy and executed in South Carolina.Vesey was a religious man who believed the Bible condemned slavery and who saw the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence.The conspiracy was uncovered before Vesey could act.Nat Turner’s Rebellion:In 1831, Nat Turner and his followers marched through Virginia, attacking white farm families.Eighty slaves had joined Turner and sixty whites had been killed (mostly women and children) before the militia put down the rebellion.Turner was captured and executed.Turner’s was the last large-scale rebellion in the South.Turner’s rebellion sent shock waves through the South.The Virginia legislature debated plans for gradual emancipation of the state’s slaves, but voted not to take that step.Instead, Virginia tightened its grip on slavery through new laws further limiting slaves’ rights.1831 marked a turning point for the Old South as white southerners closed ranks and defended slavery more strongly than ever.“In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery- as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers-proved indispensable to the national economic development. Cotton also offered a reason for entrepreneurs and inventors to build manufactories in such places as Lowell, Pawtucket, and Paterson, thereby connecting New England’s Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier of the Deep South. And financing cotton growing, as well as marketing and transporting the crop, was a source of great wealth for the nation’s merchants and bankers.” Slave grown cotton was the most valuable export made in America, that the capital stored in slaves exceeded the combined value of all the nation’s railroads and factories, that foreign investment underwrote the expansion of plantation lands in Louisiana and Mississippi, that the highest concentration of steam power in the United States was to be found along the Mississippi rather than on the Merrimack. Too often this the history of slavery is marginalized in the United States, seen as a cul-de-sac or an unintended wrong turn that was destined to go away, when in reality, that was not the case. ................
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