The Pursuit of Perfection

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SLAVES AND MASTERS

America: Past and Present

Chapter 11

The Divided Society of the Old South

  • Wealth divides white Southerners by class
  • White society also divided by region
  • Black society also divided with about 6% free
  • Race divides all Southerners by caste

The World of Southern Blacks

  • Constant resistance of Southern ideology, repression
  • Constant aspiration to freedom
  • Psychic survival helped create and maintain a unique African American ethnicity

Slaves’ Daily Life and Labor

  • 90% of slaves lived on plantations or farms
  • Most slaves on cotton plantations worked sunup to sundown, 6 days/week
  • About 75% of slaves were field workers, about 5% worked in industry
  • Urban slaves had more autonomy than rural slaves

Slave Families, Kinship, and Community

  • Normal family life difficult for slaves
  • fathers cannot always protect children
  • families vulnerable to breakup by masters
  • Most reared in strong, two-parent families
  • Extended families provide nurture, support amid horror of slavery
  • Slave culture a family culture that provided a sense of community

African American Religion

  • Black Christianity the cornerstone of an emerging African American culture
  • Whites fear religion’s subversive potential, try to supervise churches and preaching
  • Slave religion kept secret from whites
  • reaffirmed the inherent joy of life
  • preaches the inevitable day of liberation

Resistance and Rebellion

  • 1800--Gabriel Prosser
  • 1822--Denmark Vesey
  • 1831--Nat Turner

Resistance and Rebellion (2)

  • Run away often aided by the Underground Railroad
  • Work-related
  • work slowdowns
  • sabotage
  • poison masters
  • Stories, songs asserting equality

Slave Rebellions and Uprisings, 1800-1831

Free Blacks in the Old South

  • Southern free blacks severely restricted
  • Sense of solidarity with slaves
  • Generally unable to help
  • Repression increased as time passed
  • By 1860 some state legislatures were proposing laws to force free blacks to emigrate or be enslaved

White Society in the Antebellum South

  • Only a small percentage of slaveowners lived in aristocratic mansions
  • less than 1% of the white population owned 50 or more slaves
  • Most Southern whites were yeomen farmers

The Planters' World

  • Big planters set tone, values of Southern life
  • Planter wealth based on
  • commerce
  • land speculation
  • slave-trading
  • cotton planting
  • Plantations managed as businesses
  • Romantic ideals imitated only by richest

Planters and Paternalism

  • Planters pride themselves on paternalism
  • Better living standard for Southern slaves than others in Western Hemisphere
  • Relatively decent treatment due in part to their increasing economic value after 1808
  • Planters actually deal little with slaves
  • Slaves managed by overseers
  • Violent coercion accepted by all planters

Small Slaveholders

  • Slave conditions worst with fewer than 20
  • slaves share the master's poverty
  • slaves at the complete mercy of the master
  • Masters often worked alongside the slaves
  • Most slaves would have preferred the economic and cultural stability of the plantation

Yeomen Farmers

  • Small farmers resent large planters
  • Some aspire to planter status
  • Many saw slavery as guaranteeing their own liberty and independence
  • Slavery viewed as a system for keeping blacks "in their place"

A Closed Mind and a Closed Society

  • Planters fear growth of abolitionism
  • Planters encourage closing of ranks
  • Slavery defended as a positive good
  • Africans depicted as inferior
  • slavery defended with Bible
  • slavery a humane asylum to improve Africans
  • Slavery superior to Northern wage labor
  • Contrary points of view suppressed

Slavery and the Southern Economy

  • White Southerners perceived their economic interests to be tied to slavery
  • Lower South: slave plantation society
  • Upper South: farming and slave-trading region

The Internal Slave Trade

  • Mixed farming in Virginia and Maryland
  • Need less labor, more capital
  • Upper South sells slaves to lower South
  • Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky take on characteristics of industrializing North
  • Sectional loyalty of upper South uncertain

Slave Concentration, 1820

The Rise of the Cotton Kingdom

  • "Short-staple" cotton drives cotton boom
  • Cotton gin makes seed extraction easy
  • Year-round requirements suited to slave labor
  • Cotton in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, east Texas
  • Large planters dominate cotton production
  • 1850--South produces 75% of world's cotton, cotton the most important U.S. business

Slave Concentration, 1860

Slavery and Industrialization

  • Southerners resent dependence on Northern industry, commerce
  • Southerners project industrial schemes
  • some propose using free white labor
  • others propose the use of slaves
  • Slaves work in southern factories
  • High cotton profits discourage shift to industry

The "Profitability" Issue

  • Slavery not profitable for South as a whole
  • White small farmers have lower living standards than most Northern farmers
  • Profits from cotton not well-distributed
  • Slave system results in waste of human resources, Southern underdevelopment

Worlds in Conflict

  • Separate Southern worlds
  • planters
  • slaves
  • less affluent whites
  • free blacks
  • Held together by plantation economy, web of customary relationships