The South and the Slavery Controversy



The South and the Slavery Controversy Chapter 16

|King Cotton |White Majority |Free Blacks |Slave life |Abolitionism |

|William Lloyd Garrison |Frederick Douglas |The South’s Response |The Institution of | |

| | | |slavery | |

Eli Whitney’s cotton gin created an explosion of cotton cultivation and a demand for labor, chaining the slave to the gin and the plantation owner to the slave.

King Cotton – Caught up in an economic spiral, the planters bought more slaves and land to grow more cotton, so as to buy still more slaves and land.

• Quick profits led to excessive cultivation – ruining the land.

• To a large degree, the prosperity of both the North and South rested on the backs of southern slaves

• Cotton accounted for half the value of all American exports after 1840

• Southern leaders were fully aware that Britain was tied to them by cotton threads, and this dependence

o If a war between the north and south broke out the south believed Britain would come to their aid.

• The economic structure of the South became monopolistic

o Land in the hands of the few – many smaller farmers left

• The temptation to over-speculate in land and slaves caused many to go into debt

• One crop economy

o Watched much of their money go to northern middlemen

• Repelled large scale European immigration, which added to the manpower and wealth of the North

White Majority – Outlines the social hierarchy of the South

• The Planter Aristocracy

o By 1850 only 1,733 families owned more than 100 slaves

o Educated their children in the north or overseas

▪ For that reason not strong supporters of tax supported public schools

o Very undemocratic (running the south)

o Women living on the plantations ran the “Big House”

• The Smaller slave owners

o Did not own a majority of the slaves, but they were the majority of the masters

o Farmers resembled those in the North with the exception of owning slaves

• Whites who did not own slaves

o About ¾ of all southern whites

o Lived in the backcountry and mountain valleys

o Subsistence farmers – Cotton Kingdom is a dream

• Least Prosperous non-slave owning (often called hillbillies, poor white trash)

o Often called lazy, but recent evidence reveals many were ill

o Strong supporters in preserving slavery

▪ Hope for class mobility – they same day could own slaves

▪ Racial superiority

• Mountain Whites (lived in the Appalachian range)

o Civilization had largely passed them by, and they still lived under frontier conditions. They were a kind of living ancestry for some of them retained Elizabethan speech forms and habits that had long since died out in Britain.

Free Blacks – About 250,000 free blacks in the south by 1860

• Emancipated during the revolutionary war

• Many were mulattoes, usually the emancipated children of a white planter and his black mistress

• Some owned property

• Like a third race

o Prohibited from working in certain places, testifying in court against whites, vulnerable to being highjacked back into slavery

• Free black were unpopular in the North

o Especially against those competing for jobs

o Did not have the same rights as whites

The Institution of slavery --- 1860 were about 4 million slaves

• Legal importation of slaves into America ended in 1808

o But slaves still smuggled in because of the profits

• Slaves were considered investments

o Spared dangerous jobs

• Slavery was profitable for the great planters, but it staled the economic growth of the rest of the region

Slave Life

• Conditions varied greatly from region to region, from small farm to large plantation and from master to master

• They had no civil or political rights and deprived of their dignity

• Floggings were common

o Substitute for the wage-incentive and a symbol of the master’s power

• Savage beatings made sullen laborers, and lash marks hurt resale values

• 1860s most slaves were concentrated in the “black belt” of the Deep South that stretched from South Carolina and Georgia into new southwest Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

o This area tended to be harsher

• A majority of the slaves lived on larger plantations that harbored communities of twenty or more slaves

• Forced separations more common on smaller plantations

• Slave marriage and continuity of family identity were important

• African cultural traits are evident

o Religious practices – responsorial

• There was no American Dream

• Slaves did fight back

o Slowed the pace of their labor to the barest minimum

o Stole food from the Big House

o Sabotaged expensive equipment

o Runaway

o Armed rebellions (not very successful)

▪ Caused many whites to paranoid of slave rebellions

Abolitionism – The inhumanity of slavery gradually caused antislavery societies to form

• Because of the widespread loathing of blacks some of the earliest abolitionist efforts focused on transporting the blacks back to Africa

o Liberia with the capital Monrovia was created

o Most blacks did not want to go ( they were born in America)

• Attitudes change in 1833 when the British emancipated their slaves in the West Indies.

• Great Awakening also changed many attitudes

o Charles Finney, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe

o Uncle Tom’s Cabin

William Lloyd Garrison – Was the most famous American abolitionist, an advocate of “nonresistance” and editor of The Liberator

Garrison received little education and practiced a number of trades before becoming a printer in Maryland. He first crusaded for nationalism and temperance, then for moderate abolition, before being converted to radical abolition. Besides attacking slavery, The Liberator promoted many other causes, including peace, women’s rights, temperance, and abolition of capital punishment. Garrison eventually denounced the northern churches and the Constitution for their compromises with slavery. He was often threatened by anti-abolitionist mobs, and several southern states offered rewards for his arrest. Despite his pacifism he supported the Civil War as a means to end slavery.

1833 – The American anti-slavery society was created

Frederick Douglass – Was a former slave who became the leading pre-Civil War black abolitionist and the most influential African American of the nineteenth century.

Douglass’s original name was Frederick Bailey. His father was white and his mother a black slave from whom he was separated at an early age. His first escape attempt failed, and he landed in jail. He was trained as a ship caulker in Baltimore and escaped to New York in 1838 by disguising himself as a sailor.

He moved to Boston, changed his name to Douglass to avoid capture, and worked as a common laborer for three years. After a speech before an antislavery meeting, he became an abolitionist agent. He eventually split with Garrison and formed his own paper, The North Star. After the Civil War he was prominent in Republican politics and served in various federal position, such as minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891.

The South’s Response

• Slave states tightened their slave codes

• Proslavery whites responded by launching

• Slavery, they claimed, was supported by the authority of the Bible and the wisdom of Aristotle

• Believed the master-slave relationships really resembled those of a family

• They would compare their slaves with the wage slaves in the North

• These proslavery arguments only widened the split between the north and south

Free speech was often limited -- Gag resolution – it required all such antislavery appeals to be tabled without debate.

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