Focus Question:
Focus Question:
Why did slavery thrive for over 200 years in one of the most democratic societies in the world?
Do Now
Hypothesize an answer to the focus question above.
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Vocabulary matching (before reading)
Match the words below with their closest definition.
1. bondage __ a. make rules or laws about
2. codify __ b. woven materials
3. abolition __ c. raised crops on
4. textiles __ d. elimination
5. cultivated __ e. captivity
Activity: On the following page there are two reading we will be analyzing to try to come up with a more substantial reason for the focus question . After each reading we will complete the accompanying questions.
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The U.S. Economic Addiction to Slavery
“In The Beginning”
1. After 1700, why did Southern planters make a change from indentured servants to slaves as their main labor force?
2. How did planters try to justify the slavery of Africans?
3. In what THREE ways did enslaved Africans seek their freedom?
4. What were TWO ways the U.S. Constitution strengthened slavery?
“King Cotton”
5. Why did slavery become more profitable after the 1790s?
6. How did changes in the demand for cotton affect the lives of slaves?
7. In what ways did slavery economically benefit not just the South but the North as well?
VIDEO: “Slavery and the Making of America”
1. Why did Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the Louisiana Purchase as “an empire for liberty” turn out instead to be an empire for slavery?
2. How did the invention of the cotton gin affect cotton production in the South? How did it affect the value of slaves?
3. Why did the slave trade develop its own language, according to historian Ira Berlin?
4. In what ways was the U.S. in the mid-1800s becoming “two separate societies”?
5. What made slaves “the most valuable thing in the nation beside the land itself”?
Summary Questions:
• In what we have read, listened to, and seen, what was the attitude of the American government toward slavery?
• Why do you think this was so?
• In what ways was cotton such an important crop for the United States as a country?
• Why was it important to the South?
• Why to the North?
• How did the value of cotton affect the lives of slaves?
• Were Northerners also to blame for the perpetuation of slavery?
• Which Northerners? Textile Mill owners? Cotton exporters? Bankers who loaned planters money? Workers who made textiles? People who bought the cotton goods?
• Have you learned anything in today’s lesson that could help explain how a system as morally wrong and cruel as slavery persisted in the United States for so long?
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