Chapter Eleven I. Introduction Frederick Douglass

History 1301- U.S. History 1 Chapter Eleven I. Introduction: Frederick Douglass A. Douglass was a slave as a child. B. He was a leader of the abolitionist movement, publishing his autobiography that condemned slavery and racism. II. The Old South A. Cotton Is King 1. Cotton replaced sugar as the world’s major crop produced by slave labor in the nineteenth century. 2. The strength of American slavery rested on cotton. 3. Cotton industry a. Three-fourths of the world’s cotton supply came from the southern United States. b. Cotton supplied textile mills in the North and in Great Britain. c. As early as 1803, cotton represented America’s most important export, and by 1860, it represented well over half the total value of exports. B. The Second Middle Passage 1. Although the African slave trade was prohibited, the sale and trade of slaves within the United States flourished. a. More than 2 million slaves sold from 1820 to 1860. 2. The main business districts of southern cities contained the offices of slave traders, and auctions took place at public slave markets. C. Slavery and the Nation 1. The North was not immune to slavery. a. Slavery shaped the lives of all Americans. b. Northern merchants and manufacturers participated in the slave economy and shared in its profits. i. Ships, banks, insurers, and factories D. The Southern Economy 1. Southern economic growth was different from northern. a. There were few large cities in the South. b. The cities were mainly centers for gathering and shipping cotton. 2. New Orleans was the only city of significant size in the South. a. New Orleans had a large immigrant population. b. With its French and Caribbean heritage, it had a distinctive culture. 3. The region produced less than 10 percent of the nation’s manufactured goods. 4. Slavery proved very profitable for most owners. E. Plain Folk of the Old South 1. Three-fourths of white southerners did not own slaves. 2. Most white southerners lived on self-sufficient farms. a. They were not integrated into the market economy. b. This is the main reason that the South did not develop much industry. 3. Most whites supported slavery. a. A few, like Andrew Johnson and Joseph Brown, spoke out against the planter elite. b. Most white southerners supported the planter elite and slavery because of shared bonds of regional loyalty, racism, and kinship ties. F. The Planter Class 1. In 1850, most slaveholding families owned five or fewer slaves. 2. Fewer than 2,000 families owned 100 slaves or more. 3. Ownership of slaves provided the route to wealth, status, and influence. 4. Slavery was a profit-making system. a. Men watched the world market for cotton, invested in infrastructure, and carefully managed every detail of their plantations. b. Plantation mistresses cared for sick slaves, oversaw the domestic servants, and supervised the plantation when the master was away. 5. Southern slaveowners spent much of their money on material goods. a. The wealthiest spent money on lavish entertainment, vacations, and elegant mansions. G. The Paternalist Ethos 1. Southern slaveowners were committed to a hierarchical, agrarian society. 2. Paternalism was ingrained in slave society and enabled slaveowners to think of themselves as kind, responsible masters even as they bought and sold their human property. a. Reverend Charles C. Jones H. The Code of Honor 1. Southern men sometimes dueled as part of a code of honor. 2. Southern women were often trapped in a "domestic circle" of loneliness. I. The Proslavery Argument 1. By the 1830s, fewer southerners believed that slavery was a necessary evil; instead, they claimed it as the basis for free institutions. 2. The proslavery argument rested on several pillars, including a commitment to white supremacy, biblical sanction of slavery, and the historical precedent that slavery was essential to human progress. 3. Another proslavery argument held that slavery guaranteed equality for whites. 4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes a proslavery selection from "Slavery and the Bible" (1850). 5. White southerners thought slavery was "modern," in tune with the times. a. Southern planters were hardly parochial. They felt a community of interest with slave owners in Cuba and Brazil. b. They used their power in the federal government to insist that American foreign policy promote the interests of slavery throughout the hemisphere. J. Abolition in the Americas 1. Between 1800 and 1840, slavery was abolished in most of Spanish America and the British empire. 2. Abolition in the Americas influenced debates over slavery in the United States. a. Proslavery advocates used the post-emancipation decline in sugar and other cash crops as evidence of British abolitionism’s failure. b. Abolitionists argued that the former slaves’ rising living standards (and similar improvements) showed that emancipation had succeeded. 3. By mid-century, New World slavery remained only in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the United States. K. Slavery and Liberty 1. White southerners declared themselves the true heirs of the American Revolution. 2. Proslavery arguments began to repudiate the ideas in the Declaration of Independence that equality and freedom were universal entitlements. a. John C. Calhoun believed that the language in the Declaration of Independence was indeed dangerous. 3. Southern clergymen argued that submission of inferior to superior was a "fundamental law." L. Slavery and Civilization 1. 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. 2. Abraham Lincoln observed that the proslavery arguments were only functioning to serve the interests of slaveowners, who reaped the greatest benefit from the institution. 3. By 1830, southerners defended slavery in terms of liberty and freedom; without slavery, freedom was not possible. III. Life under Slavery A. Slaves and the Law 1. Slaves were considered property and had few legal rights. 2. 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. 3. Masters also controlled whether slaves married and how they spent their free time. 4. Trial of Celia: Celia killed her master while resisting a sexual assault. a. 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. B. Conditions of Slave Life 1. Some laws protected slaves against mistreatment. a. American slaves as compared to their counterparts in the West Indies and in Brazil enjoyed better diets, lower infant mortality, and longer life expectancies. b. 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. 2. Improvements in the slaves’ living conditions were meant to strengthen slavery, not undermine it. 3. Few slave societies in history have so systematically closed off all avenues to freedom as the Old South. C. Free Blacks in the Old South 1. By 1860, there were nearly half a million free blacks in the United States, and most of them lived in the South. 2. Free blacks were not all that free. a. Free blacks were allowed by law to own property and marry and could not be bought or sold. b. Free blacks were not allowed by law to own a firearm, dogs, or liquor. They could not testify in court or serve on a jury. They could not strike a white person, even in selfdefense. 3. Unlike in Brazil or in the West Indies, there was little room for a mulatto group in the United States; the result was that free blacks in the Old South enjoyed little respect or prosperity, with few exceptions. D. The Upper and Lower South 1. Most free blacks who lived in the Lower South resided in cities like New Orleans and Charleston. a. Some of mixed-race heritage became wealthy and owned slaves. 2. Most free blacks lived in the Upper South. a. They were in rural areas, working for wages as farm laborers. b. The few blacks who owned slaves were free men who had purchased their slave wives and children. i. They could not liberate them because any slave who became free had to leave the state. E. Slave Labor 1. Labor occupied most of a slave’s daily existence. 2. 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 a skilled artisan. F. Gang Labor and Task Labor 1. Most slaves worked in the fields. a. It is estimated that 75 percent of the women and 90 percent of the men worked as field hands. 2. On large plantations, they worked in gangs under the direction of the overseer, a man who was generally considered cruel by the slaves. a. Some of the harshest conditions were in Louisiana sugar fields. b. Rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia still used a colonial-era task system. i. Whites feared malaria-infested swamps. G. Slavery in the Cities 1. Most city slaves were servants, cooks, and other domestics. 2. Some city slaves were skilled artisans and occasionally lived on their own. H. Maintaining Order 1. The system of maintaining order rested on force. 2. There were many tools a master had to maintain order, including whipping, exploiting divisions among slaves, incentives, and the threat of sale. IV. Slave Culture A. The Slave Family 1. Slaves never abandoned their desire for freedom or determination to resist their bondage. 2. Slave culture was a new creation, shaped by African traditions and American values and experiences. 3. Despite the threat of sale and the fact that marriage between slaves was illegal, many slaves did marry and create families. a. Slaves frequently named children after other family members to retain family continuity. b. The slave community had a significantly higher number of female-headed households than the white community. B. The Threat of Sale 1. One slave marriage in three in some states was broken by sale. 2. Many children were separated from their families by sale. a. Ten percent of the teenage slaves in the Upper South were sold in the interstate slave trade. 3. Slave traders paid little attention to preserving family ties. C. Gender Roles among Slaves 1. Traditional gender roles were not followed in the fields, but during their own time, slaves did fall back on traditional gender roles. 2. The family was vital to passing traditions from parent to child. D. Slave Religion 1. Black Christianity was distinctive and offered hope to the slaves. a. Almost every plantation had its own black preacher. b. Slaves worshipped in biracial churches. c. Free blacks established their own churches. 2. Some masters required services with white ministers who emphasized obedience. E. The Gospel of Freedom 1. Slaves transformed Christianity, turning it to their own purposes. a. Mixture of African traditions and Christian beliefs b. Practiced in secret 2. Many biblical stories offered hope and solace to slaves, including Exodus, David and Goliath, and Jonah and the whale. F. The Desire for Liberty 1. Slave culture rested on a sense of the injustice of bondage and the desire for freedom. 2. Slave folklore glorified the weak over the strong, and their spirituals emphasized eventual liberation. 3. 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. 4. Slaves used networking and thus knew about political events and activities of abolitionists. V. Resistance to Slavery 1. Because slaves were outnumbered, slave rebellions were rare, but many other forms of resistance existed. A. Forms of Resistance 1. The most common form of resistance was silent sabotage—the breaking of tools, feigning illness, doing poor work. 2. Less common but more serious forms of resistance included poisoning the master, arson, and armed assaults. B. Fugitive Slaves 1. Slaves had to follow the North Star as their guide. 2. Of the estimated 1,000 slaves a year who escaped, most escaped from the Upper South. 3. In the Deep South, fugitive slaves often escaped to the southern cities to blend in with the free black population. C. The Underground Railroad 1. The Underground Railroad was a loose organization of abolitionists who helped slaves to escape. 2. Harriet Tubman was an escaped slave who in the 1850s rescued about seventy-five others from slavery. 3. Many slaves hid on boats, took an owner’s horse and carriages, and boarded trains to escape. 4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) highlights a piece by Joseph Taper (1840), who escaped from Virginia to Canada. D. The Amistad 1. In 1839, a group of slaves collectively seized their freedom while on board the Amistad. 2. The U.S. Supreme Court accepted John Quincy Adams’s argument that the slaves had been illegally seized in Africa and should be freed. E. Slave Revolts 1. In 1811, an uprising on sugar plantations in Louisiana saw slaves marching toward New Orleans before the militia captured them. 2. In 1822, Denmark Vesey was charged with conspiracy and executed in South Carolina. a. Vesey was a religious man who believed the Bible condemned slavery, and he saw the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence. b. The conspiracy was uncovered before Vesey could act. F. Nat Turner’s Rebellion 1. Nat Turner was a slave preacher and religious mystic. a. He believed God had chosen him to lead an uprising. 2. In 1831, Nat Turner and his followers marched through Virginia, attacking white farm families. a. Eighty slaves had joined Turner and sixty whites had been killed (mostly women and children) before the militia put down the rebellion. b. Turner was captured and executed. 3. Turner’s was the last large-scale rebellion in the South. 4. Turner’s rebellion sent shock waves through the South. a. The Virginia legislature debated plans for gradual emancipation of the state’s slaves but voted not to take that step. b. Instead, Virginia tightened its grip on slavery through new laws further limiting slaves’ rights. 5. The year 1831 marked a turning point for the Old South as white southerners closed ranks and defended slavery more strongly than ever.