PROFF STAN
patick8
pages_238-265.pdf
A slave auction in Virginia. 1861
. . . whatever accidents or misfortunes might attend my flight nothing could
be worse than what threatened my stay.
— Hannah Crafts
►
sold at blie
auction, at Spring Wit, n the
County of Ilenwstead, on a
credit a VW eiVe altatihS, 09
Vri
day Ow *Sat day of this pres-
ent mootta, 13 yonng and v
sable 03*N-es, consisting o 4aperiee Ilien &VW , beto 12 and 1 years of
age,
Walla about 43 years vv
If;;U:X,' "' 0,." "' ' '" ''' '
VON IN
1 0 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY
179os-185os
HOW DID attitudes in the South toward slavery change after the invention
of the cotton gin?
WHAT WA S life like for the typical slave in the American South?
SLAVE COLLAR R r
S Hmozvn VIRGIN LAVE
MARKET
WHAT ROLE did religion play in African American slave communities?
WHAT WERE the values of yeoman farmers?
WHO MADE up the planter elite?
WHAT PROSLAVERY arguments were developed in the first half
of the nineteenth century?
240 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os
AMERICAN COMMUNI{T I
ES Cotton Communities in the Old Southwest
IN 1834, SAMUEL TOWNES OF SOUTH CAROLINA CAUGHT "ALABAMA Fever." Restive under what seemed to him excessive demands from his large and well-connected family, Samuel rebelled by marrying a woman of whom his family disapproved and moving with her and his slaves to Perry County, Alabama, a newly opened part of the Old Southwest suitable for growing cotton. There he practiced law in the village of Marion, bought a planta- tion on the banks of the Cahaba River, and acquired ten to fif- teen more slaves. Almost all of Samuel's new possessions were bought on credit. Samuel's desire for wealth caused him to drive his slaves very hard. Always convinced that they were malinger- ing, he demanded that his overseer "whip them like the devil" to pick more cotton.
The Panic of 1837 devastated Samuel's ambitions. As the price of cotton fell to 7 cents a pound (from 15 cents in 1836), banks demanded repayment of their generous loans. Samuel sold some slaves, and rented out the labor of others, but he was forced to ask for loans from the family he had been so eager to escape. In 1844 his plantation was sold at auction. Three years later, his health failed, and he and his wife, Joanna, had no choice but to return to South Carolina and the charity of kinfolk.
The rapid westward expansion of cotton cultivation exposed the undeveloped state of community formation among the southern elite. The plantation form of agriculture, which had been the rule in the South since its earliest days, meant that cities were few and community institutions like churches and schools were rare. Slave- owning families depended almost entirely on kinship networks for assistance (and the obligations that Samuel Townes wished to avoid) and for sociability. Families who moved west frequently found themselves lost without their customary family connections. Wider community connections and support lagged behind the pursuit of profits to be made
from cotton. What of the slaves that Samuel brought with him? Once
part of a larger Townes family group in South Carolina, the slaves that Samuel owned were separated from their kinfolk perma- nently and had to adjust to living with a number of newly pur- chased slaves in Alabama. Most of the new slaves were bought as individuals and were usually still in their teens or even younger. Young male slaves were favored for the backbreaking work of cut-
ting trees and clearing land for cultivation. Sometimes owners worked side by side with their workers at this initial stage. But gen- erally, uniformity and strict discipline were the rule on cotton plantations. Owners eager to clear land rapidly and make quick profits often drove the clearing crews at an unmerciful pace. And, as Samuel Townes had, they attempted to impose strict discipline and a rapid pace on the work gangs that planted, hoed, and har- vested cotton. Slaves from other parts of the South, used to more individual and less intense work, hated the cotton regime and most of all hated the overseers who enforced it.
Only long-practiced African American community-building strategies saved these young transported slaves—some called it a "Second Middle Passage"—from complete isolation. Beginning in the earliest days of slavery, Africans from many different tribes built their own communities by using the language of kinship (for example, "brother," "sister," "uncle," "aunt," and "child") to encompass everyone in new imagined families. On one hand, the cultivation of cotton required many workers, thus creating the conditions necessary for large slave communities in the Old Southwest. On the other hand, because the price of cotton was unstable, probably many shared the experience of the Townes slaves, who were sold again when the plantation failed.
Thus, the new land in the Old Southwest that appeared to offer so much opportunity for owners
bred tensions caused by forcible sale and migra- tion, by the organization and pace of cotton cultivation, and by the owners' often violent efforts to control their slaves in a new region where community bonds were unde-
veloped. For planters and slaves alike, migra- tion broke long-standing family ties that were
the most common form of community through- out the South. The irony is that African Americans,
who were the most cruelly affected, knew better how to build new communities than did their privileged owners.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, world demand for cotton transformed the South, promoting rapid expansion and unprecedented prosperity. But it also tied the South to a slave system that was inherently unstable and violent. Although southern slave owners frequently talked about their plantations as communities and their slaves as family, the slave system was not one community but two with the strengths of the slave com- munity largely invisible to the owners.
HOW DID attitudes in the South
toward slavery change after the
invention of the cotton gin?
myhistcOylab Review Summary
IMAGE KEY for pages 238-239
a. A chain used to tie gangs of slaves. b. "The Shadow" plantation of Louisiana. c. A slave auction in Virginia, 1861. d. A whip of coiled rope used on slaves. e. An auction of eight black slaves. f. Mature cotton bolls on the stem of a
plant. g. Slaves carry sacks of cotton on their
heads on a South Carolina plantation field.
h. A slave collar with an attached tag from the slave market in Richmond, Virginia.
i. African American worshippers in a sketch by Joseph Becker.
j. A log cabin in New Braunfels, Texas in a painting by Carl G. von Iwonski.
k. Colonel and Mrs. James A. Whiteside in a James Cameron painting.
I. A proslavery cartoon, 1841.
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 17gos-185os CHAPTER 10 24 1
KING COTTON AND SOUTHERN EXPANSION
S Lavery had long dominated southern life. African American slaves grew the great export crops of the colonial period—tobacco, rice, and indigo—on which slave owners' fortunes were made, and their presence shaped south-
ern society and culture (see Chapter 4). Briefly, in the early days of American independence, the slave system waned, only to be revived by the immense prof- itability of cotton in a newly industrializing world. Cotton became the dominant crop in a rapidly expanding South that more than doubled in size (see Map 10.1). The overwhelming economic success of cotton and of the slave system on which it depended created a distinctive regional culture quite different from that devel- oping in the North.
COTTON AND EXPANSION INTO THE OLD SOUTHWEST
Short-staple cotton had long been recognized as a crop ideally suited to south- ern soils and growing conditions. But it had one major drawback: the seeds were so difficult to remove from the lint that it took an entire day to hand-clean a single pound of cotton. The invention in 1793 that made cotton growing prof- itable was the result of collaboration between a young Northerner named Eli Whitney and Catherine Greene, a South Carolina plantation owner. Whitney built a prototype cotton engine, dubbed "gin" for short, a simple device con- sisting of a hand-cranked cylinder with teeth that tore the lint away from the seeds. At Greene's suggestion, the teeth were made of wire. With the cotton gin, it was possible to clean more than fifty pounds of cotton a day. Soon large and small planters in the inland regions of Georgia and South Carolina had begun to grow cotton. By 1811, this area was producing 60 million pounds of cotton a year and exporting most of it to England.
Other areas of the South quickly followed South Carolina and Georgia into cotton production. New land was needed because cotton growing rapidly depleted the soil. The profits to be made from cotton growing drew a rush of southern farmers into the so-called black belt—an area stretching through west- ern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi that was blessed with exceptionally fertile soil. Following the War of 1812, Southerners were seized by "Alabama Fever." In one of the swiftest migrations in American history, white Southerners and their slaves flooded into western Georgia and the areas that would become Alabama and Mississippi (the Old Southwest). On this frontier, African American pio- neers (albeit involuntary ones) cleared the forests, drained the swamps, broke the ground, built houses and barns, and planted the first crops.
Like the simultaneous expansion into the Old Northwest, settlement of the Old Southwest took place at the expense of the region's Indian population (see Chapter 9). Beginning with the defeat of the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend in 1814 and ending with the Cherokee forced migration along the "Trail of Tears" in 1838, the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Semi- noles—were forced to give up their lands and move to Indian Territory (see
Chapter 11). Following the "Alabama Fever" of 1816-20, several later surges of southern
expansion (1832-38, and again in the mid-1850s) carried cotton planting over the Mississippi River into Louisiana and deep into Texas. In the minds of the mobile, enterprising Southerners who sought their fortunes in the West, cotton profits and expansion went hand in hand. But the expansion of cotton meant the
expansion of slavery.
MISSOURI KENTUCKY
ct. TENNESSEE ARKANSAS
NORTH CAROLINA
SOUTH CAROLINA
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
Gulf of Mexico
MICHIGAN
CONNECTICUT
OHIO INDIANA
ILLINOIS UNORGANIZED
TERRITORY
NEW YORK
PENNSYLVANIA NEW JERSEY
DELAWARE
MARYLAND VIRGINIA
Original states
By 1821
By 1850
I I
242 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os
it. MAP EXPLORATION 1, To explore an interactive version of this map, go to http://www.prenhall.com/faraghertIc/map10.1
MAP 10.1 The South Expands, 1790-1850 This map shows the dramatic effect cotton production had on southern expansion. From the original six states of 1790, westward expansion, fueled by the search for new cotton
lands, added another six states by 1821 and three more by 1850.
WHY WAS cotton production especially suited to slave labor?
SLAVERY THE MAINSPRING—AGAIN
Industrial Revolution Revolution in the means and organization of production.
The export of cotton from the South was the dynamic force in the developing Amer- ican economy in the 1790-1840 period. Just as the international slave trade had been the dynamic force in the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century (see Chapter 4), southern slavery financed northern industrial development in the nine- teenth century.
The rapid growth of cotton production was an international phenomenon. The insatiable demand for cotton was a result of the technological and social changes that we know today as the Industrial Revolution. Beginning early in the eighteenth century, a series of inventions resulted in the mechanized spinning and weaving of cloth in the world's first factories in the north of England. The abil- ity of these factories to produce unprecedented amounts of cotton cloth revolu- tionized the world economy. The invention of the cotton gin came at just the right time. British textile manufacturers were eager to buy all the cotton that the South could produce. By the time of the Civil War, cotton accounted for almost 60 per-
cent of American exports. The connection between southern slavery and northern industry was very
direct. Most mercantile services associated with the cotton trade (insurance,
QUICK REVIEW
The Economics of Slavery
♦ Worldwide demand for cotton supported slavery.
• Export of cotton a dynamic part of American economy.
♦ Northern industry directly con- nected to slavery.
vi 7-6 Benjamin Banneker, An African American Calls for an End to Slavery (1791)
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 17gos- 185os CHAPTER 10
243
This 1855 illustration of black stevedores loading heavy bales of cotton onto waiting steamboats in New Orleans is an example of the South's dependence on cotton and the slave labor that produced it.
for example) were in northern hands and, significantly, so was shipping. This economic structure was not new. In colonial times, New England ships domi- nated the African slave trade. Some New England families invested some of their profits in the new technology of textile manufacturing in the 1790s. Other merchants made their money from cotton shipping and brokerage. Thus, as cotton boomed, it provided capital for the new factories of the North (see Chapter 12).
A SLAVE SOCIETY IN A CHANGING WORLD
In the flush of freedom following the American Revolution, all the northern states abolished slavery or passed laws for gradual emancipation, and a number of slave owners in the Upper South freed their slaves (see Chapter 7). On January 1, 1808, the earliest date permitted by the Constitution, a bill to abolish the importation of slaves became law. Nevertheless, southern legislatures were unwilling to write steps toward emancipation into law, preferring to depend on the charity of indi- vidual slave owners.
But attitudes toward slavery rapidly changed in the south following the inven- tion of the cotton gin in 1793 and the realization of the riches to be made from cotton. White Southerners believed that only African slaves could be forced to work day after day, year after year, at the rapid and brutal pace required in the cot- ton fields of large plantations in the steamy southern summer. As the production of cotton climbed higher every year in response to a seemingly inexhaustible inter- national demand, so too did the demand for slaves and the conviction of South- erners that slavery was an economic necessity.
As had been true since colonial times, the centrality of slavery to the econ- omy and the need to keep slaves under firm control required the South to become a slave society, rather than merely a society with slaves, as had been the case in the North. What this meant was that one particular form of social relationship, that of master and slave (one dominant, the other subordinate), became the model for all relationships, including personal interactions between white husbands and wives as well as interactions in politics and at work.
At a time when the North was experiencing the greatest spurt of urban growth in the nation's history (see Chapter 13), most of the South remained rural: less than 3 percent of Mississippi's population lived in cities of more than 2,500 residents, and only 10 percent of Virginia's did. The agrarian ideal, bolstered by
PENNSYLVANIA NEW JERSEY
INDIANA OHIO
ILLINOIS Washington DC :'--- DELAWARE
`MARYLAND VIRCiIhJIA
TENNESSEE. Columbia
Augusta • SOUTH CAROLINA MISSISSIPPI Macon • •Charleston
ALABAMA GEORGIA Savannah
NORTH CAROLINA
1860
I I Area of cotton production Distribution of slave population
1820
I I Area of cotton production Distribution of slave population
LOUISIANA •
Baton Rouge• • Mobile -New Orleans
ATLANTIC
OCEAN FLORIDA
0,- NORTH
INDIAN ARKANSAS k TENNESSEE CAROLINA
Columbia TERRITORY . Augusta SOUTH CAROLINA
94141551PM Macon. • •Charleston
MA • Savannah LOUISIANA :-:--: GEORGIA
Baton Rouge.,. Mobile New Orleans
Gulf of Mexico
Gulf of Mexico
PENNSYLVANIA - -NEW
JERSEY
INDIANA OHIO
ILLINOIS Washington DC - DELAWARE
MARYLAND
MISSOURI KENTUCKY
VIRGINIA
ATLANTIC FLORIDA
OCEAN
KANSAS
TERRITORY
MISSOURI •
TERRITORY
ARKANSAS
TERRITORY
In New Orleans, in the streets outside large slave pens near the French Quarter, thousands of slaves were displayed and sold each year. Dressed in new clothes provided by the traders and exhorted by the traders to walk, run, and other-
wise show their stamina, slaves were presented to buyers. For
their part, suspicious buyers, unsure that traders and slaves themselves were truthful, poked, prodded, and frequently stripped male and female slaves to be sure they were as healthy as the traders claimed.
Although popular stereotype portrayed slave traders as unscrupulous outsiders who persuaded kind and reluctant masters to sell their slaves, the historical truth is
WHY WAS the increasing dominance of cotton cultiva- tion in the Lower South accompanied by a growing con-
centration of slaves in that region?
244 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os- 185os
t*" KENTUCKY
MAP 10.2 Cotton Production and the Slave Population, 1820-60 In the forty years from 1820 to 1860, cotton production grew dramatically in both quantity
and extent. Rapid westward expansion meant that by 1860 cotton pro-
duction was concentrated in the black belt (so called for its rich soils) in
the Lower South. As cotton production moved west and south, so did the
enslaved African American population that produced it, causing a dra-
matic rise in the internal slave trade.
Sam Bowers Hilliard, Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State
University Press, 1984).
the cotton boom, encouraged the antiurban and anticom- mercial sentiments of many white Southerners. The South also lagged behind the North in industrialization and in canals and railroads (see Chapter 12). In 1860, only 15 per- cent of the nation's factories were located in the South.
Other changes, however, could not be so easily ignored. Nationwide, the slave states were losing their political domi- nance because their population was not keeping pace with that of the North. Equally alarming, outside the South, anti- slavery sentiment was growing rapidly. Southerners felt directly threatened by growing abolitionist sentiment in the North and by the 1834 action of the British government elim- inating slavery on the sugar plantations of the West Indies. The South felt increasingly hemmed in by northern opposi- tion to the expansion of slavery.
THE INTERNAL SLAVE TRADE
The cotton boom caused a huge increase in the domestic slave trade. Plantation owners in the Upper South (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee) sold their slaves to meet the demand for labor in the new and expand- ing cotton-growing regions of the Old Southwest. Cumula- tively, between 1820 and 1860, nearly 50 percent of the slave population of the Upper South took part against their will in southern expansion (see Map 10.2). More slaves—an esti- mated 1 million—were uprooted by this internal slave trade and enforced migration in the early nineteenth century than were brought to North America during the entire time the international slave trade was legal (see Chapter 4).
Purchased by slave traders from owners in the Upper South, slaves were gathered together in notorious "slave pens" in places like Richmond and Charleston and then moved south by train or boat. Often slaves moved on foot, chained together in groups of fifty or more known as "cof- fles." Chained slaves in coffles were a common sight on southern roads and one difficult to reconcile with the notion
of slavery as a benevolent institution. Arriving at a central
market in the Lower South like Natchez, New Orleans, or
Mobile, the slaves, after being carefully inspected by poten- tial buyers, were sold at auction to the highest bidder (see Map 10.3).
St. Petersburg
Mobile.
Vicksburg
LOUISIANA Jackson atchez•
Baton Rouge
New Orleans
PENNSYLVANIA _NEWJERSEY
Baltimore Washington D.C. 0
Alexandria/9 SY--- DELAWARE VIRGINIA 1 --MARYLAND
°Richmond
• Norfolk \
NORT CAROLINA • Salisbury
WilTington
SOUTH CAROLINA
Charleston
NEBRASKA IOWA TERRITORY
KANSAS TERRITORY
MISSOURI
z. ILLINOIS
St. Louis'
INDIAN TERRITORY
Memphis°
ARKANSAS
GEORGIA
Montgomery Savannah
Pensacola
FLORIDA
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
Gulf of Mexico
-4-- Slave trade route
0 Major trading center
• Trading center Havana „
CUBA
TEXAS
San Antonio
Galveston
OHIO INDIANA
Ohio R.
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os CHAPTER 10
vaito 245
MAP 10.3
Internal Slave Trade, 1820-60 Between 1820 and 1860, nearly 50 percent of the slave population of the Upper South was sold to labor on the cotton plantations of the Lower South. This map shows the various routes by which they were "sold down the river," shipped by boat or marched south.
Historical Atlas of the United States (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1988).
WHAT AGRIECULTURAL trends help explain the relative decline of slavery in the Upper South?
much harsher. Traders, far from being shunned by slave-owning society, were often respected community members. Similarly, the sheer scale of the slave trade makes it impossible to believe that slave owners only reluctantly parted with their slaves at times of economic distress. Instead, it is clear that many owners sold slaves and sep- arated slave families not out of necessity but to increase their profits. The sheer size and profitability of the internal slave trade made a mockery of southern claims for the benevolence of the slave system.
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY
S urely no group in American history has faced a harder job of community building than the black people of the antebellum South. Living in intimate, daily contact with their oppressors, African Americans nevertheless created
an enduring culture of their own, a culture that had far-reaching and lasting influ- ence on all of southern life and American society as a whole (see Chapter 4).
WHAT WAS life like for the typical
slave in the American South?
myhistchlab Review Summary
246 'wt$fr114.
CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os
This engraving from Harper's Weekly
shows slaves, dressed in new clothing,
lined up outside a New Orleans slave pen for inspection by potential buyers before the actual auction began. They were often threatened with punishment if they did not present a good appear- ance and manner that would fetch a high price.
THE MATURE AMERICAN SLAVE SYSTEM
On January 1, 1808, the United States ended its participation in the international slave trade. Although a small number of slaves continued to be smuggled in from Africa, the growth of the slave labor force depended primarily on natural increase—that is, through births within the slave population. The slave population, estimated at 700,000 in 1790, grew to more than 4 million in 1860. A distinctive African American slave community, which had first emerged in the eighteenth century (see Chapter 4) , expanded dramatically in the early years of the nineteenth century. This commu- nity was as much shaped by King Cotton as was the white South.
Cotton growing concentrated slaves on plantations, in contrast to the more dis- persed distribution on smaller farms in earlier generations. The size of cotton plan- tations fostered the growth of slave communities. Over half of all slaves lived on plantations with twenty or more other slaves, and others, on smaller farms, had links with slaves on nearby properties. Urban slaves were able to make and sustain so many secret contacts with other African Americans in cities or towns that slave own- ers wondered whether slave discipline could be maintained in urban settings. There can be no question that the bonds among African Americans were what sustained them during the years of slavery.
In law, slaves were property, to be bought, sold, rented, worked, and otherwise used (but not abused or killed) as the owner saw fit. But slaves were also human beings, with feelings, needs, and hopes. Even though most white Southerners believed black people to be members of an inferior, childish race, all but the most brutal masters acknowledged the humanity of their slaves. White masters learned to live with the two key institutions of African American community life: the family and the African Amer- ican church, and in their turn slaves learned, however painfully, to survive slavery.
THE GROWTH OF THE SLAVE COMMUNITY
Of all the New World slave societies, the one that existed in the American South was the only one that grew by natural increase rather than through the constant importation of captured Africans. This fact alone made the African American community of the South different from the slave societies of Cuba, the Caribbean
QUICK REVIEW
Life and Death
♦ Mortality rate of slave children under five was twice that of white counterparts.
♦ Infectious diseases were endemic in the South.
♦ Malnutrition and lack of basic sanitation took a high toll on slaves.
Manumission The freeing of a slave.
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os CHAPTER 10 247
islands, and Brazil. In order to understand, we must examine the circumstances of survival and growth.
The growth of the African American slave population was not due to better treatment than in other New World slave societies, but to the higher fertility of African American women, who in 1808 (the year the international slave trade ended) had a crude birthrate of 35 to 40, causing a 2.2 percent yearly population growth. This was still below the fertility rate of white women, who had a crude birthrate of 55 and a 2.9 percent annual population growth. But by midcentury, the white rate had dropped to 1.99 percent, while the black rate remained high. African American slave women adopted the white practice of breastfeeding for only one year, and on average gave birth to six or eight children at year-and-a-half intervals. But they also suffered from the contradictory demands of slave owners, who wanted them to work hard while still having children, for every slave baby increased the wealth of the owners.
As a result, because pregnant black women were inadequately nourished, worked too hard, or were too frequently pregnant, mortality rates for slave chil- dren under five were twice those for their white counterparts. At the time, own- ers often accused slave women of smothering their infants by rolling over them when asleep.
Health remained a lifelong issue for slaves. Malaria and infectious diseases such as yellow fever and cholera were endemic in the South. White people as well as black died, as the life expectancy figures for 1850 show: 40 to 43 years for white people and 30 to 33 years for African Americans. Slaves were more at risk because of the cir- cumstances of slave life: poor housing, poor diet, and constant, usually heavy, work. Sickness was chronic: 20 percent or more of the slave labor force on most plantations were sick at any one time.
FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE
Slavery was a lifelong labor system, and the constant and inescapable issue between master and slave was how much work the slave would—or could—be forced to do. Southern white slave owners claimed that by housing, feeding, and clothing their slaves from infancy to death they were acting more humanely than northern
industrialists who employed people only during their working years. But in spite of occasional instances of manumission—the freeing of a slave—the child born of a slave was destined to remain a slave.
Children lived with their parents (or with their mother if the father was a slave on another farm or plantation) in housing provided by the owner. Husband and wife cooperated in loving and sheltering their children and teaching them survival skills. From birth to about age seven, slave children played with one another and with white children, observing and learning how to survive. They saw the penal- ties: black adults, perhaps their own parents, whipped for disobedience; black women, perhaps their own sisters, violated by white men. And they might see one or both parents sold away as punishment or for financial gain. They would also see
signs of white benevolence: special treats for children at holidays, appeals to loy- alty from the master or mistress, perhaps friendship with a white child.
The children would learn slave ways of getting along: apparent acquiescence to white demands; pilfering; malingering, sabotage, and other methods of slow- ing the relentless work pace. But many white Southerners genuinely believed that their slaves were both less intelligent and more loyal than they really were. Fred- erick Douglass, whose fearless leadership of the abolitionist movement made him the most famous African American of his time, wryly noted, As the master stud- ies to keep the slave ignorant, the slave is cunning enough to make the master think he succeeds."
Cotton
Domestic Work
Rice, Sugar, Hemp
Tobacco
Mining, Lumbering, Industry, Construction
Figure 10.1 Distribution of Slave Labor, 1850 I n 1850, 55 percent of all slaves worked in cotton, 10 percent in tobacco, and
another 10 percent in rice, sugar, and
hemp. Ten percent worked in mining,
lumbering, industry, and construction,
and 15 percent worked as domestic ser-
vants. Slave labor was not generally used
to grow corn, the staple crop of the yeo-
man farmer.
248 uisk CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os Black children had no schooling of any kind: in most of the southern
states, it was against the law to teach a slave to read, although indulgent owners often rewarded their "pet" slaves by teaching them in spite of the law. At age twelve, slaves were considered full grown and put to work in the fields or in their designated occupation.
55% The explosive growth of cotton plantations changed the nature of south- ern slave labor. In 1850, 55 percent of all slaves were engaged in cotton grow- ing. Another 20 percent labored to produce other crops: tobacco (10 percent), rice, sugar, and hemp. About 15 percent of all slaves were domes- tic servants, and the remaining 10 percent worked in mining, lumbering, industry, and construction (see Figure 10.1).
FIELD WORK AND THE GANG SYSTEM
The field workers, 75 percent of all slaves, were most directly affected by the gang labor system employed on cotton plantations (as well as in tobacco and sugar). Cotton was a crop that demanded nearly year-round labor: from planting in April, to constant hoeing and cultivation through June, to a picking season that began in August and lasted until December. Owners
divided their slaves into gangs of twenty to twenty-five, a communal labor pattern reminiscent of parts of Africa, but with a crucial difference— these workers were supervised by overseers with whips. On most plantations, the bell sounded an hour before sunup, and slaves were expected to be on their way to the fields as soon as it was light. Work continued till noon, and after an hour or so for lunch and rest, the slaves worked until nearly dark. In the evening, the women prepared dinner at the cabins and everyone snatched a few hours of unsupervised socializing before bedtime.
Work was tedious in the hot and humid southern fields, and the overseer's whip was never far away. Cotton growing was hard work: plowing and planting, chopping weeds with a heavy hoe, and picking the ripe cotton from the stiff and scratchy bolls, at the rate of 150 pounds a day.
Slaves aged fast in this regime. Poor diet and heavy labor undermined health. When they were too old to work, they took on other tasks within the black com- munity, such as caring for young children. Honored by the slave community, the elderly were tolerated by white owners, who continued to feed and clothe them until their deaths. Few actions show the hypocrisy of southern paternalism more clearly than the speed with which white owners evicted their elderly slaves in the 1860s when the end of the slave system was in sight.
Gang System The organization and supervision of slave field hands into
working teams on Southern
plantations.
HOUSE SERVANTS
In the eighteenth century, as profits from slavery grew, slave owners diverted an increasing proportion of slave labor from the fields to the house service necessary to sustain their rich lifestyles. By one calculation, fully one-third of the female slaves in Virginia worked as house servants by 1800, but the figures were much lower in the newly opened cotton lands in the West.
At first glance, working in the big house might seem to have been preferable to working in the fields. Physically, it was much less demanding, and house slaves were often better fed and clothed. They also had much more access to information, for white people, accustomed to servants and generally confident of their loyalty, often forgot their presence and spoke among themselves about matters of interest to the slaves: local gossip, changes in laws or attitudes, or policies toward disobedient or rebellious slaves.
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os CHAPTER 10 th, 249
For many white people, one of the worst surprises of the Civil War was the eagerness of their house slaves to flee. Considered by their masters the best treated and the most loyal, these slaves were commonly the first to leave or to organize mass desertions.
From the point of view of the slave, the most unpleasant thing about being a house servant (or the single slave of a small owner) was the constant presence of white people. There was no escape from white supervision. Many slaves who were personal maids and children's nurses were required to live in the big house and rarely saw their own families. Cooks and other house servants were exposed to the tempers and whims of all members of the white family, including the children, who prepared themselves for lives of mastery by practicing giving orders to slaves many times their own age. And house servants, more than any others, were forced to act grateful and ingratiating. At the same time, genuine intimacy was possible, especially between black nurses and white children. But these were bonds that the white chil- dren were ultimately forced to reject as the price of joining the master class.
ARTISANS AND SKILLED WORKERS
A small number of slaves were skilled workers: weavers, seamstresses, carpenters, blacksmiths, mechanics. Black people worked as lumberjacks (of the 16,000 lum- ber workers in the South, almost all were slaves), as miners, as deckhands and stokers on Mississippi riverboats, as stevedores loading cotton on the docks of Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, and sometimes as workers in the hand- ful of southern factories. Because slaves were their masters' property, the wages of the slave belonged to the owner, not the slave.
The extent to which slaves made up the laboring class was most apparent in cities. A British visitor to Natchez in 1835 noted slave "mechanics, draymen, hostel- ers, labourers, hucksters and washwomen and the heterogeneous multitude of every other occupation." In the North, all these jobs were performed by white workers. In part because the South failed to attract as much immigrant labor as the North, southern cities offered both enslaved and free black people opportunities in skilled occupations such as blacksmithing and carpentering that free African Americans in the North were denied.
SLAVE FAMILIES
As had been true in the eighteenth century, families remained essential to African American culture (see Chapter 4). No southern state recognized slave marriages in law. Most owners, though, not only recognized but also encouraged them, sometimes even performing a kind of wedding ceremony for the couple. Masters encouraged mar- riage among their slaves, believing it made the men less rebellious, and for economic reasons they were eager for the slave women to have children. Whatever marriages meant to the masters, to slaves they were a haven of love and intimacy in a cruel world and the basis of the African American community. Husbands and wives had a chance, in their own cabins, to live their own lives among loved ones. The relationship between slave husband and wife was different from that of the white husband and wife. The mas- ter—slave system dictated that the white marriage be unequal, for the man had to be dominant and the woman dependent and submissive. Slave marriages were more equal, for husband and wife were both powerless within the slave system. Both knew that neither could protect the other from abuse at the hands of white people.
Family meant continuity. Parents made great efforts to teach their children the family history and to surround them with a supportive and protective kinship network. The strength of these ties is shown by the many husbands, wives, children,
8-1
Isaac, Memoirs of a Monticello Slave (1847)
QUICK REVIEW
Slave Families
• Marriage not legally recognized but encouraged among slaves.
♦ Parents made great efforts to teach and protect their children.
♦ The internal slave trade made separation a constant danger.
250 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os
Slave quarters built by slave owners, like these pictured on a South Carolina plan-
tation, provided more than basic shelter.
Slave quarters were the center of the
African American community life that
developed during slavery.
Collection of The New-York Historical Society. Photo-
graph by G.N. Barnard, Bagoe Collection, ca. 1865,
negative number 48169.
Second Great Awakening Religious revival among black and white
Southerners in the 1790s.
and parents who searched for each other after the Civil War when slavery came to an end.
Given the vast size of the internal slave trade, fear of separation was constant—and real. One in every five slave marriages was broken, and one in every three children sold away from their families. These figures clearly show that slave owners' sup- port for slave marriages was secondary to their desire for profits. The scale of the trade was a strong indication of the economic reality that underlay their protestations of paternalism.
In the face of constant separation, slave com- munities attempted to act like larger families. Follow- ing practices developed early in slavery, children were taught to respect and learn from all the elders, to call all adults of a certain age "aunt" or "uncle," and to call children of their own age "brother" or "sister" (see Chapter 4). Thus, in the absence of their own family, separated children could quickly find a place and a source of comfort in the slave community to which they had been sold.
This emphasis on family and on kinship networks had an even more funda- mental purpose. The kinship of the entire community, where old people were respected and young ones cared for, represented a conscious rejection of white paternalism. The slaves' ability, in the most difficult of situations, to structure a com- munity that expressed their values, not those of their masters, was extraordinary. Equally remarkable was the way in which African Americans reshaped Christian- ity to serve their needs.
FREEDOM AND RESISTANCE
W hatever their dreams, most slaves knew they would never escape. Free-dom was too far away. Almost all successful escapes in the nineteenth century (approximately a thousand a year) were from the Upper South (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri). A slave in the Lower South or the Southwest simply had too far to go to reach freedom. That meant that ways to endure and to resist became all the more important.
AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGION
Black Christianity was an enabling religion: it helped slaves, to survive, not as pas- sive victims of white tyranny but as active opponents of an oppressive system that they daily protested in small but meaningful ways. In their faith, African Ameri- cans expressed a spiritual freedom that white people could not destroy.
African religions managed to survive from the earliest days of slavery in forms that white people considered as "superstition" or "folk belief." In the nineteenth century, these African traditions allowed African Americans to reshape white Chris- tianity into their own distinctive faith that expressed their deep resistance to slavery.
The Great Awakening, which swept the South after the 1760s, introduced many slaves to Christianity, often in mixed congregations with white people (see Chapter 5). The transformation was completed by the Second Great Awakening, which took root among black and white Southerners in the 1790s. The number of African American converts, preachers, and lay teachers grew rapidly, and a
WHAT ROLE did religion play in
African American slave communities?
myhisteiiylab Review Summary
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-1850s CHAPTER 10 251
distinctive form of Christianity took shape. Free African Americans founded their own independent churches and denominations. By the 1830s, free African Amer- ican ministers like Andrew Marshall of Savannah and many more enslaved black preachers and lay ministers preached, sometimes secretly, to slaves. Their message was one of faith and love, of deliverance, of the coming of the promised land.
African Americans found in Christianity a powerful vehicle to express their long- ings for freedom and justice. But why did their white masters allow it? Some white people, themselves converted by the revivals, doubtless believed that they should not deny their slaves the same religious experience. But many southern slave own- ers expected Christianity to make their slaves obedient and peaceful. Forbidding their slaves to hold their own religious gatherings, owners insisted that their slaves attend white church services. On many plantations, slaves attended religious services with their masters every Sunday, sitting quietly in the back of the church or in the bal- cony, as the minister preached messages justifying slavery and urging obedience. But at night, away from white eyes, they held their own prayer meetings.
In churches and in spontaneous religious expressions, the black community made Christianity its own. Fusing Christian texts with African elements of group activ- ity, such as the circle dance, the call-and-response pattern, and, above all, group singing, black people created a unique community religion full of emotion, enthusiasm, and protest. Nowhere is this spirit more compelling than in the famous spirituals: "Go Down Moses," with its mournful refrain "Let my people go"; the rousing "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel . . . and why not every man"; the haunting "Steal Away."
QUICK REVIEW
Religion and Slavery
• A variety of African religions sur- vived in America.
• The Great Awakening introduced many slaves to Christianity.
• Most planters favored Christianity among slaves only if they had control.
African cultural patterns persisted in the preference for night funerals and for solemn pageantry and song, as
depicted in British artist John Antrobus's Plantation Burial, ca. 1860. Like other African American customs,
the community care of the dead contained an implied rebuke to the masters' care of the living slaves.
John Antrobus, "Negro Burial." Oil painting. The Historic New Orleans Collection. #1960.46.
252 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 1790s-185os
Harriet Tubman was 40 years old when this photograph (later hand- tinted) was taken. Already famous for her daring rescues, she gained
further fame by serving as a scout, spy, and nurse during the Civil War.
rogs*ri! This drawing shows the moment, almost two months after the fail- ure of his famous and bloody slave revolt, when Nat Turner was accidentally discovered in the woods near his home plantation. Turner's cool murder of his owner and methodical organization of
his revolt deeply frightened many white Southerners.
OTHER KINDS OF RESISTANCE
The rapid geographical spread of cotton introduced a new source of tension and resistance into the slave—master rela- tionship. White Southerners did everything they could to pre- vent escapes and rebellions. But despite almost certain recapture, slaves continued to flee and to help others do the same. Escaped slave Harriet Tubman of Maryland, who made twelve rescue missions freeing sixty to seventy slaves in all (later inflated to three hundred as Tubman's rescues became leg- endary), had extraordinary determination and skill. As a female runaway, she was unusual, too: most escapees were young men, for women often had small children they were unable to take and unwilling to leave behind.
Slaves who knew they could not reach freedom still fre- quently demonstrated their desire for liberty or their discon- tent over mistreatment by taking unauthorized leave from their plantation. Hidden in nearby forests or swamps, pro- vided with food smuggled by other slaves from the plantation, the runaway might return home after a week or so, often to rather mild punishment. Although in reality, most slaves could have little hope of gaining freedom, even failed attempts at rebellion shook the foundations of the slave system, and thus temporary flight by any slave was a warning sign of discontent that a wise master did not ignore.
SLAVE REVOLTS
The ultimate resistance, however, was the slave revolt. South- ern history was dotted with stories of former slave conspiracies and rumors of current plots (see Chapter 4). But when in 1831, Nat Turner actually started a rebellion in which a num- ber of white people were killed, southern fears were greatly magnified.
A literate man, Nat Turner was a lay preacher, but he was also a slave. It was Turner's intelligence and strong religious commitment that made him a leader in the slave community. Turner began plotting his revolt after a religious vision in which he saw "white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle." Turner and five other slaves struck on the night of August 20, 1831. Moving from plantation to plantation and killing a total of fifty-five white people, the rebels numbered sixty by the next morning, when they fled from a group of armed white men. More than forty blacks were executed after the revolt, includ- ing Turner, who was captured accidentally after he had hidden for two months in the woods.
Conspiracies and actual or rumored slave resistance began in colonial times (see Chapter 4) and never ceased. These plots exposed the truth white Southerners preferred to ignore: only force kept Africans and African Americans enslaved, and because no system of control could ever be total, white Southerners could never be completely safe from the possibility of revolt. Nat Turner brought white Southerners' fears to the surface. After 1831, the possibility of slave insurrection was never far from their minds.
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os CHAPTER 10 253
FREE AFRICAN AMERICANS
Another source of white disquiet was the growing number of free African Americans. By 1860, nearly 250,000 free black peo- ple lived in the South. For most, freedom dated from before 1800, when antislavery feeling among slave owners in the Upper South was widespread and cotton cultivation had yet to boom.
Most free black people lived in the countryside of the Upper South, where they worked as tenant farmers or farm laborers. Urban African Americans were much more visi- ble. Life was especially difficult for female-headed families, because only the most menial work—street peddling and laundry work, for example—was available to free black women. The situation for African American males was somewhat better. Although they were discriminated against in employment and in social life, there were opportunities for skilled black craftsmen in trades such as blacksmithing and car- pentry. Cities such as Charleston, Savannah, and Natchez were home to flour- ishing free African American communities that formed their own churches and fraternal orders.
Throughout the South in the 1830s, state legislatures tightened black codes— laws concerning free black people. Free African Americans could not carry firearms, could not purchase slaves (unless they were members of their own fam- ily), and were liable to the criminal penalties meted out to slaves (that is, whippings and summary judgments without a jury trial). They could not testify against whites, hold office, vote, or serve in the militia. White people increasingly feared the influence free black people might have on slaves, for free African Americans were a living challenge to the slave system. Their very existence disproved the basic southern equations of white equals free, and black equals slave. No one believed more fervently in those equations than the South's largest population group, white people who did not own slaves.
One of the ways Charleston attempted to control its African American population
was to require all slaves to wear badges
showing their occupation. After 1848, free black people also had to wear badges, which were decorated, ironical- ly, with a liberty cap.
13-3 Nat Turner, Confession (1831)
THE WHITE MAJORITY
vir he pervasive influence of the slave system in the South is reflected in the startling contrast of two facts: two-thirds of all Southerners did not own slaves, yet slave owners dominated the social and political life of the region. POOR WHITE PEOPLE
From 30 to 50 percent of all southern white people were landless, a proportion similar to that in the North. But the existence of slavery limited the opportunities for poor white people. Slaves made up the permanent, stable workforce in agri- culture and in many skilled trades. Many poor white people led highly transient
lives in search of work, such as farm labor at harvest time, which was only tempo- rary. Others were tenant farmers working under share-tenancy arrangements that kept them in debt to the landowner. Although they farmed poorer land with less equipment than landowning farmers, most tenant farmers grew enough food to sustain their families. Like their landowning neighbors, tenant farmers aspired
to independence. Relationships between poor whites and black slaves were complex. White
men and women often worked side by side with black slaves in the fields and were socially and sexually intimate with enslaved and free African Americans. White people engaged in clandestine trade to supply slaves with items like liquor that slave
WHAT WERE the values of yeoman
farmers?
myhistociylab Review Summary
Black codes Laws passed by states and municipalities denying many rights of citizenship to free black people before the Civil War.
QUICK REVIEW
Yeoman Farmers
♦ Most independent farmers in the South lived on family farms.
♦ Farmers formed tight networks of friends and family.
*Slavery linked large planters and yeoman farmers.
254 liPtf CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os Yeoman Independent farmers of the South, most of whom lived on family-sized farms.
owners prohibited, helped slaves to escape, and even (in an 1835 Mississippi case) were executed for their participation in planning a slave revolt. At the same time, the majority of poor white people insisted, sometimes violently, on their racial superiority over blacks. But the fact was that the difficult lives of poor whites served to blur the crucial racial distinction between independent whites and supposedly inferior, dependent black people on which the system of slavery rested.
SOUTHERN "PLAIN FOLK"
The word "yeoman," originally a British term for a farmer who works his own land, is often applied to independent farmers of the South, most of whom lived on fam- ily-sized farms. Southerners themselves referred to them as "plain folk," as opposed to the gentry who owned slaves. Although yeoman farmers sometimes owned a few slaves, in general they and their families worked their land by themselves.
Just as elsewhere in the South, family was the mainstay of community: Farm men and women depended on their relatives and neighbors for assistance in large farm tasks such as planting, harvesting, and construction. Projects requiring lots of hands, like logrollings, corn shuckings, and quilting bees, were community events. Farmers repaid this help and obtained needed goods through complex sys- tems of barter with other members of the community:
Where yeomen and large slave owners lived side by side, as in the Georgia black belt where cotton was the major crop, slavery again provided a link between the rich and the "plain folk." Large plantation owners often bought food for their slaves from small local farmers, ground the latter's corn in the plantation mill, ginned their cot- ton, and transported and marketed it as well. But although planters and much smaller yeomen were part of a larger community network, in the black belt the large slave owners were clearly dominant. Only in their own up-country communities did yeomen feel truly independent.
The goal of yeoman farm families was economic independence. Their mixed farming and grazing enterprises, supported by kinship and community ties, afforded them a self-sufficiency epitomized by Carl G. von Iwonski's painting of this rough but comfortable log cabin in New Braunfels, Texas.
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os CHAPTER 10 255
The dominance of the large planters was due at least in part to the ambition of many yeomen, especially those with two or three slaves, to expand their hold- ings and become rich. These farmers, enthusiastic members of the lively democ- ratic politics of the South, supported the leaders they hoped to join.
But for a larger group of yeomen, independence and not wealth was most important. Many southern yeomen lived apart from large slaveholders in the up- country regions where plantation agriculture was unsuitable. The very high value southern yeomen placed on freedom grew directly from their own experience as self-sufficient property-owning farmers in small, family-based communities, and from the absolute, patriarchal control they exercised over their own wives and children. This was a way of life that southern "plain folk" were determined to pre- serve. It made them resistant to the economic opportunities and challenges that capitalism and industrialization posed for northern farmers, which southern yeomen perceived as encroachments on their freedom.
The irony was that the freedom yeomen so prized rested on slavery. White people could count on slaves to perform the hardest and worst labor, and the degradation of slave life was a daily reminder of the freedom they enjoyed in com- parison. Slavery meant that all white people, rich and poor, were equal in the sense that they were all free. The democratization of politics in the early nine- teenth century and the enactment of nearly universal white manhood suffrage perpetuated the belief in white skin privilege, even though the gap between rich and poor white people was widening.
THE MIDDLING RANKS
In the predominantly rural South, cities provided a home for a small commercial middle class of merchants, bankers, factors (agents) , and lawyers on whom the agricultural economy depended to sell its produce to a world market. As in the North, small industrial cities, often including textile mills and heavier industry, clus- tered along the fall line where the rivers dropped down from the highlands to the coastal plains.
The effort of William Gregg of South Carolina to establish the cotton tex- tile industry illustrates some of the problems facing southern entrepreneurs. Gregg, a successful jeweler from Columbia, South Carolina, became convinced that textile factories were a good way to diversify the southern economy and to provide a living for poor whites who could not find work in the slave-dominated employment system. He enthusiastically publicized the findings of his tour of northern textile mills but found a cool reception. His request to the planter- dominated South Carolina legislature for a charter of incorporation for a tex- tile mill passed by only one vote. In 1846, he built a model mill and a company town in Graniteville, South Carolina, that attracted poor white families as employ- ees. Gregg adapted southern paternalism to industry, providing a school and churches and prohibiting alcohol and dancing, yet paying his workers 20 percent less than northern wages. His experience in the competitive textile industry led him to favor the protective tariff, thus putting him at odds with the general atti- tude in South Carolina that had solidified at the time of the Nullification Crisis (see Chapter 11).
Another noteworthy exception was the Tredegar Iron Works. Many southern planters scorned members of the commercial middle class like William Gregg because they had to please their suppliers and customers and thus lacked, in planters' eyes, true independence. This was an attitude strikingly different from that in the North, where the commercial acumen of the middle class was increas-
ingly valued (see Chapter 12).
Figure 10.2 Slaveholding and
Class Structure in the South, 1830
The great majority of the southern white population were yeoman farmers.
In 1830, slave owners made up only 36 percent of the southern white population; owners of more than fifty slaves constituted a tiny 2.5 percent.
Yet they and the others who were
middling planters dominated politics,
retaining the support of yeomen who
prized their freedom as white men above
class-based politics.
U.S. Bureau of the Census.
18%
64%
Nonslaveholders
Owning 5 or fewer slaves
Owning 5-50 slaves
Owning 50 or more slaves
256 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os
PLANTERS
R emarkably few slave owners fit the popular stereotype of the rich and leisured plantation owner with hundreds of acres of land and hundreds of slaves. Only 36 percent of southern white people owned slaves in 1830,
and only 2.5 percent owned fifty slaves or more. Just as yeomen and poor whites were diverse, so, too, were southern slave owners (see Figure 10.2).
SMALL SLAVE OWNERS
The largest group of slave owners were small yeomen taking the step from subsis- tence agriculture to commercial production. To do this in the South's agricultural economy, they had to own slaves. But upward mobility was difficult. Owning one or two slaves increased farm production only slightly, and it was hard to accumulate the capital to buy more.
Such a slave owner was economically vulnerable: a poor crop or a downturn in cotton prices could wipe out his gains and force him to sell his slaves. When times improved, he might buy a new slave or two and try again, but getting a secure foot- ing on the bottom rung of the slave-owner ladder was very difficult. The roller-coaster economy of the early nineteenth century did not help matters, and the Panic of 1837 was a serious setback to many small farmers.
For a smaller group of slave owners, the economic struggle was not so hard. Middle-class professional men—lawyers, doctors, and merchants—frequently managed to become large slave owners because they already had capital (the pay from their pro- fessions) to invest in land and slaves. Sometimes they received payment for their ser- vices, not in money, but in slaves. These owners were the most likely to own skilled slaves—carpenters, blacksmiths, and other artisans—and to rent them out for profit. By steady accumulation, the most successful members of this middle class were able to buy their way into the slave-owning elite and to confirm that position by marrying their sons or daughters into the aristocracy.
THE PLANTER ELITE
The slave-owning elite, those 2.5 percent who owned fifty slaves or more, enjoyed the prestige, the political leadership, and the lifestyle to which many white South- erners aspired. Almost all great slave owners inherited their wealth. Increasingly after 1820, as universal manhood suffrage spread, planters had to learn how to appeal to the popular vote, but most never acquired "the common touch." The smaller slave owners, not the great planters, formed a clear majority in every south-
ern state legislature. The eastern seaboard had first given rise to a class of rich planters in the colonial
period. In the nineteenth century, these planters ranged from land rich but labor poor Thomas Chaplin of Tombee Plantation who grew sea-island cotton, to rice planter Nathaniel Heyward, who through wealthy marriages and land purchases amassed
45,000 acres of land and over 2,000 slaves. As Southerners and slave owning spread westward, membership in the elite
broadened to include the new wealth of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Natchez, on the Mississippi River, became so wealthy that its rich planters were popularly called "nabobs" (from a Hindi word for Europeans who had amassed
fabulous wealth in India). The extraordinary concentration of wealth in Natchez—in 1850, it was the
richest county in the nation—fostered a self-consciously elite lifestyle that derived not from long tradition but from suddenly acquired riches. Fastidious Northern-
WHO MADE up the planter elite?
myhisteiiylab Review Summary
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 17gos-185os CHAPTER 10 257
ers such as Thomas Taylor, a Pennsylvania Quaker who visited Natchez in 1847, noted: "Many of the chivalric gentry whom I have been permitted to see dashing about here on highbred horses, seem to find their greatest enjoyment in recount- ing their bear hunts, 'great fights,' and occasional exploits with revolvers and Bowie knives—swearing 'terribly' and sucking mint juleps & cherry cobblers with straws."
PLANTATION LIFE
The urban life of the Natchez planters was unusual. Many wealthy planters, espe- cially those on new lands in the Old Southwest, lived in isolation on their planta- tions with their families and slaves. Through family networks, common boarding school experience, political activity, and frequent visiting, the small new planter elite consciously worked to create and maintain a distinctive lifestyle that was mod- eled on that of the English aristocracy, as Southerners understood it. This entailed a large estate, a spacious, elegant mansion, and lavish hospitality.
But this gracious image was at odds with the economic reality. Large num- bers of black slaves had to be forced to work to produce the wealth that supported the planters' gracious lifestyle. Each plantation, like the yeoman farm but on a larger scale, aimed to be self-sufficient, producing not only the cash crop but also most of the food and clothing for both slaves and family. A large plantation was an enterprise that required many hands, many skills, and a lot of management. Large plantation owners might have overseers or black drivers to supervise field work, but frequently they themselves had direct financial control of daily operations.
The planter elite developed a paternalistic ideology to justify their rigorous insistence on the master–slave relationship. According to this ideology, each plan- tation was a family composed of both black and white. The master, as head of the plantation, was head of the family, and the mistress was his "helpmate." The mas- ter was obligated to provide for all of his family, both black and white, and to treat them with humanity. In return, slaves were to work properly and do as they were told, as children would. Most elite slave owners spoke of their position of privilege as a duty and a burden. John C. Calhoun spoke for many slave owners when he described the plantation as "a little community" in which the master directed all operations so that the abilities and needs of every member, black and white, were "perfectly harmonized." Convinced of their own benevolence, slave owners expected not only obedience but also gratitude from all members of their great "families."
THE PLANTATION MISTRESS
The paternalistic model locked plantation mistresses into positions that bore heavy responsibility but carried no real authority. The difficulties experienced by these privileged women illustrate the way the master–slave relationship of a slave soci- ety affected every aspect of the personal life of slave owners.
Plantation mistresses spent most of their lives tending "family" members— including slaves—in illness and in childbirth, and supervising their slaves' perfor- mance of such daily tasks as cooking, housecleaning, weaving, and sewing. In addition, the plantation mistress often had to spend hours, even days, of behind- the-scenes preparation for the crowds of guests she was expected to welcome in her role as elegant and gracious hostess.
Despite the reality of the plantation mistress's daily supervision of an often extensive household, she did not rule it: her husband did. The plantation master was the source of authority to whom wife, children, and slaves were expected to look for both rewards and punishments. A wife who challenged her husband or sought
QUICK REVIEW
Plantation Mistresses
• Mistresses ran the household staff.
♦ Mistresses were responsible for arrangements for visitors.
♦ Husbands were usually the real authority on the plantation.
258 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os- 185os
co 13-1 State v. Boon (1801)
9-12 Harriet Jacobs, The Trials of a
Slave Girl (1861)
more independence from him threatened the entire paternalistic system of control.
After all, if she were not dependent and obedient, why should slaves be?
In addition to their strictly defined family roles, many southern women also suf-
fered deeply from their isolation from friends and kin. Sometimes the isolation of life
on rural plantations could be overcome by long visits, but women with many small
children and extensive responsibilities found it difficult to leave.
Although on every plantation black women served as nursemaids to young
white children and as lifelong maids to white women, usually accompanying them
when they moved as brides into their own homes, there are few historical examples
of genuine sympathy and understanding of black women by white women of the
slave-owning class. Few of the latter seemed to understand the sadness, frustration,
and despair often experienced by their lifelong maids, who were forced to leave their own husbands and children to serve in their mistresses' new homes.
COERCION AND VIOLENCE
There were generous and benevolent masters, but most large slave owners believed
that constant discipline and coercion were necessary to make slaves work hard (see
Seeing History). Some slave owners used their slaves with great brutality. Owners
who killed slaves were occasionally brought to trial (and usually acquitted), but no
legal action was taken in the much more frequent cases of excessive punishment,
general abuse, and rape. All southern slave owners, not just those who experienced
the special tensions of new and isolated plantations in the Old Southwest, were
engaged in a constant battle of wills with their slaves that owners frequently resolved
by violence.
One of the most common violations of the paternalistic code of behavior (and
of southern law) was the sexual abuse of female slaves by their masters. Usually, mas-
ters forcibly raped their women slaves at will, and slave women had little hope of
defending themselves from these attacks. Sometimes, however, long-term intimate rela-
tionships between masters and slaves developed.
It was rare for slave owners to publicly acknowledge fathering slave children or
to free these children, and black women and their families were helpless to protest
their treatment. Equally silenced was the master's wife, who for reasons of modesty
as well as her subordinate position was not supposed to notice either her husband's
infidelity or his flagrant crossing of the color lines.
An owner could do what he chose on his plantation, and his sons grew up
expecting to do likewise. Unchecked power is always dangerous, and it is not sur-
prising that it was sometimes misused. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the
southern slave system is how much humanity survived despite the intolerable condi-
tions. For that, most of the credit goes not to white paternalism, but to African Amer-
icans and the communities they created under slavery.
THE DEFENSE OF SLAVERY
6 6 lavery informs all our modes of life, all our habits of thought, lies at the basis of our social existence, and of our political faith,"
announced South Carolina planter William Henry Trescot in 1850,
explaining why the South would secede from the Union before giving up slav-
ery. Slavery bound white and black Southerners together in tortuous ways that
eventually led, as Trescot had warned, to the Civil War. Population figures tell
much of the story of the complex relationship between whites and blacks: of the
12 million people who lived in the South in 1860, 4 million were slaves. These
WHAT PROSLAVERY arguments
were developed in the first half of the
nineteenth century?
myhisttiOylab Review Summary
I
"Gordon Under Medical Inspection"
his horrifying image of the badly scarred back of a former slave named Gordon
appeared in Harper's Weekly in July 1863. He was an escaped slave who entered Union
lines in Baton Rouge in March 1863, arriving in the bedraggled condition shown
on the left. Under medical examination, he
revealed the scars from a whipping three
AFTER VIEWING this image, how seriously months earlier. As the third picture shows,
would you consider claims that southern slavery he promptly joined the Union Army.
was a benign, paternalistic system?
Although abolitionist literature frequently
described brutal whippings endured by slaves,
few people in the North can have seen such graphic examples before the publication of
this article in 1863. Since that time, the picture of Gordon's back has frequently been used
to illustrate the violence of the slave system. There is no question that whipping was a fre-
quent punishment in the slaveholding South and that masters, mistresses, and overseers,
in fits of temper, whipped harshly. Although we do not know if Gordon's scars were repre-
sentative, the image makes it impossible to deny the reality of brutality in the slave system. ■ Illustrations from photographs by McPherson and Oliver, in Harper's Weekly, July 4, 1863, p. 429.
RAID OF SITCOM tila CAROLINA voLuvrxrats (COL. 110
.
atm* TILE ales russenoNs ON Tin COILNASIER, s. c.—oss l'Auu
42,-) -, - ,.
Its TYPICAL NEGRO.1 es tAu out as
ewe osisdbIos on* ostortosasoly 147:sf tra04.,....s tbo........
.rus,..uf rm.:7. ...r111...
..„..• 11114 G t1.1.161 ooisIo vs elm - -
Its :SAY. Irmsdtb Osse to*UoUse tb. pbs =,...' ..7 4,S...11, iriZ
b' 5ii i..: .".. .,....::;:rZtr, :=1,1:.:::::,
,,F; ,7:27....55,....1.t.i.... ........: 'gr. Or•
cos*, orto *soma boo bb moo: 4 Mob. wan
W. W....A .... 11... Sr Nos To* Tbs, .— - —. — mm 'Y
Lou. . Mist
.rs
▪
=s2.4:zsE o;:rsstro=
...:ss. os a.s. ' twidl: sr sy ssobti sorsubs by WM..* sad Mrs, of As Mr.
'ter "'brat..."'" :Los at so feu ...SW osul
?2r.,":"171 .:4 s ...".•=t, = *.s a ry...... ."..."4
Tostr. rs*"r:ZirVesl.t...r. ja ....._ **/414715Xot ror...sli.
r" ' " ' " . ''' " ' ''''*.' .. 11
•
4 sig. s . b. . . .t. Trt ". . .". a • ... II. 7 1 Vs irs.=. . . Trio : . .7.7" ;..
":: bsolbs........ss . -.
lasub Its Ow of *an :studs rosrossis Os Is asi or Ilms, :la asst. eon owl
...:1 std. sm. :0 An bow lb last ors
thruilk Ow *mph set btyllally shord os be boob
1.111. got Ago os. AN. by by 00:r.. ..16 me-
al softflsors sat sr.*. of Wooba , ass,
or obroolks 16 blt wt.,* Om gambol *mom. bodss swim* tel... asssoni boo Swoon. —bra book Ossomout sod wowed Id* Os some
ot s :U*sist sbabbabea ma Cbessoss•Asy
last a sisl abo dinlyebuswas Us* Usis0 Us..
gallsrab 8.1084 Os ...AU .... r.r..1 I.
Iwo. Ids vsn **Oat Mb lis wok b. bb 1 0.0.111. misss :WA Is sanlbl Is IA* sod*.
Abu fessisit sub Ma os woo*, bo
Uy Po y ry
Is ms son, Sob sb u
Aso l b b t ,
buruslydor dof
Or usu.
Al ass dos la LosiSoso U ••••••....uss -
0010.0.
259
260 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os
4 ,0 13-4
Lewis Tappan, An Abolitionist Defends the Amistad Mutineers (1839)
co 14-1 William Lloyd Garrison, The
Liberator (1831)
Denmark Vesey's conspiracy The most carefully devised slave revolt in which rebels planned to seize control of Charleston in 1822 and escape to freedom in Haiti, a free black republic, but they were betrayed by other slaves, and seventy-five conspirators were executed.
Nat Turner's Revolt Uprising of slaves in Southampton County, Virginia, in the summer of 1831 led by Nat Turner that resulted in the death of fifty-five white people.
sheer numbers of African Americans reinforced white people's perpetual fears of black retaliation for the violence exercised by the slave master. Every rumor of slave revolts, real or imagined, kept those fears alive. The basic question was this: What might slaves do if they were not controlled?
DEVELOPING PROSLAVERY ARGUMENTS
Once the cotton boom began in the 1790s, Southerners increasingly sought to justify slavery. They found justifications for slavery in the Bible and in the histo- ries of Greece and Rome, both slave-owning societies. The strongest defense was a legal one: the Constitution allowed slavery.
The Missouri Crisis of 1819-20 alarmed most Southerners, who were shocked by the evidence of widespread antislavery feeling in the North. South Carolinians viewed Denmark Vesey's conspiracy, occurring only two years after the Missouri debate, as an example of the harm that irresponsible northern antislavery talk could cause. In the wake of the Vesey conspiracy, Charlestonians turned their fear and anger out- ward by attempting to seal off the city from dangerous outside influences. In Decem- ber 1822, the South Carolina legislature passed a bill requiring that all black seamen be seized and jailed while their ships were in Charleston harbor. Initially most alarmed about free black people from Haiti, Charlestonians soon came to believe that north- ern free black seamen were spreading antislavery ideas among their slaves.
After Nat Turner's Revolt in 1831, Governor John Floyd of Virginia blamed the uprising on "Yankee peddlers and traders" who supposedly told slaves that "all men were born free and equal." Thus, northern antislavery opinion and the fear of slave uprisings were firmly linked in southern minds. This extreme reaction, which Northerners viewed as paranoid, stemmed from the basic nature of a slave society: anything that challenged the master-slave relationship was viewed as a basic threat to the entire system.
AFTER NAT TURNER
In 1831, the South began to close ranks in defense of slavery. Several factors con- tributed to this regional solidarity. Nat Turner's revolt was important, linked as it was in the minds of many Southerners with antislavery agitation from the North. Militant abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator, the newspaper that was to become the leading antislavery organ, in 1831. The British gave notice that they would soon abolish slavery on the sugar plantations of the West Indies, an action that seemed to many Southerners much too close to home. Emancipation for West Indian slaves came in 1834. Finally, 1831 was the year before the Nullification Crisis (see Chapter 11) was resolved. Although the other southern states did not support the hotheaded South Carolinians who called for secession, they did sympathize with the argument that the federal government had no right to interfere with a state's special interest (namely, slavery).
By 1835, every southern legislature had tightened its laws concerning control of slaves. For example, they tried to blunt the effect of abolitionist literature by pass- ing laws forbidding slaves to learn how to read. In only three border states—Ken- tucky, Tennessee, and Maryland—did slave literacy remain legal. Slaves were forbidden to gather for dances, religious services, or any kind of organized social activity without a white person present They were forbidden to have whiskey because it might encourage them toward revolt. The penalty for plotting insurrection was death. Other laws made manumission illegal and placed even more restrictions on the lives of free black people. In many areas, slave patrols were augmented and became more vigilant in restricting African American movement and communica- tion between plantations.
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 17gos-185os CHAPTER 10
261
In 1836, Southerners introduced a "gag rule" in Washington to prevent con-
gressional consideration of abolitionist petitions. Attempts were made to stifle all
open debate about slavery within the South; dissenters were pressured to remain
silent or to leave. In addition to fueling fears of slave rebellions, the growing abolitionist sen-
timent of the 1830s raised the worry that southern opportunities for expansion
would be cut off. Southern politicians painted melodramatic pictures of a belea-
guered white South hemmed in on all sides by "fanatic" antislavery states. At home,
Southerners were forced to contemplate what might happen when they had "to
let loose among them, freed from the wholesome restraints of patriarchal author-
ity . . . an idle, worthless, profligate set of free negroes" whom they feared would
"prowl the . . . streets at night and [haunt] the woods during the day armed with
whatever weapons they could lay their hands on."
Finally, southern apologists moved beyond defensiveness to develop proslavery
arguments. One of the first to do this was James Henry Hammond, elected a South
Carolina congressman in 1834. In 1836, Hammond delivered a major address to
Congress in which he denied that slavery was evil. Rather, he claimed, it had pro-
duced "the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed
on the face of the earth." In 1854, another southern spokesman, George Fitzhugh,
asserted that "the negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the
freest people in the world" because all the responsibility for their care was borne by
concerned white masters. Fitzhugh contrasted southern paternalism with the heart-
less individualism that ruled the lives of northern "wage slaves."
CHANGES IN THE SOUTH
In spite of these defensive and repressive proslavery measures, which made the
South seem monolithic in northern eyes, there were some surprising indicators
of dissent. One protest occurred in the Virginia state legislature in 1832, when
nonslaveholding delegates, alarmed by the Nat Turner rebellion, forced a two-
week debate on the merits of gradual abolition. In the final vote, abolition was
defeated 73 to 58. Although the subject was never raised again, this debate was a
startling indicator of frequently unvoiced doubts about slavery that existed in
the South.
But slavery was not a static system. From the 1830s on, financial changes increas-
ingly underlined class differences among southern whites. It was much harder to
become a slaveholder: from 1830 to 1860, slave owners declined from 36 to 25 per-
cent of the population. In 1860, the average slaveholder was ten times as wealthy as
the average nonslaveholder. A major reason for the shrinking number of slave own-
ers and their increased wealth was the rapidly increasing price of slaves. High prices
caused the internal slave trade to flourish: during the 1850s, slave owners from the
Upper South sold some 250,000 slaves to the Lower South for handsome profits. By
1850, in the Chesapeake (Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware), where American slav-
ery had its origin, the percentage of slave owners had fallen to 28 percent, while the
comparable figures for Louisiana and Mississippi were 45 percent. Such differences
in the extent of slaveholding between the Upper and Lower South threatened regional
political unity (see Map 10.4).
Another alarming trend was the disintegration of the slave system in south-
ern cities. The number of urban slaves greatly decreased because plantation own-
ers deeply distrusted the effect of cities on the institution of slavery. Urban slaves
led much more informed lives than rural ones and were often in daily contact with
free blacks and urban poor whites. Many slaves were hired out and a number even
hired out their own time, making them nearly indistinguishable from northern
13-2 David Walker, A Black
Abolitionist Speaks Out (1829)
myhistdrylab Exploring America: Alexis de Tocqueville
KENTUCKY MISSOURI
1%
ARKANSAS TENNESSEE
75% NORTH CAROLINA
3%
1%
SOUTH CAROLINA
ATLANTIC
OCEAN FLORIDA
Gulf of Mexico
TEXAS
3%
DELAWARE
VIRGINIA \ MARYLAND
23%
2%
Slaves
1.1 Free African Americans Whites
ALABAMA
MISSISSIPPI
411 LOUISIANA GEORGIA
1%
262 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os
MAP 10.4
Population Patterns in the South, 1850 In South Carolina and Mississippi, the enslaved African American population outnumbered the white population; in four other Lower South states, the per- centage was above 40 percent. These ratios frightened many white Southerners. White people also feared the free black population, though only three states in the Upper South and Louisiana had
free black populations of over 3 percent. Six states had free black populations that were so small
(less than 1 percent) as to be statistically insignificant.
WHERE WERE the greatest concentrations of African Americans? How would you explain the patterns the map reveals?
"free labor." Other urban slaves worked in commercial and industrial enterprises in jobs that were nearly indistinguishable from those of whites.
Economic changes adversely affected poor whites and yeomen as well. Increased commercialization of agriculture (other than cotton) led to higher land prices that made it harder for poor whites to buy or rent land. Extensive railroad building in up-country regions during the boom of the 1850s ended the isolation of many yeomen, exposing them for the first time to the tempta- tions and dangers of the market economy. While slave owners grew increas- ingly worried about threats from the abolitionist and capitalist North, yeomen worried about local threats to their independence from banks, railroads, and activist state governments.
In spite of these signs of tension and dissent, the main lines of the southern argument were drawn in the 1830s and remained fixed thereafter. The defense of slavery stifled debate within the South, prevented a search for alternative labor sys- tems, and narrowed the possibility of cooperation in national politics. In time, it
made compromise impossible.
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os CHAPTER 10 263
CHRONOLOGY
1790s Second Great Awakening
Black Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches founded
1793 Cotton gin invented
1800 Gabriel Prosser's revolt discovered in Virginia
1806 Virginia tightens law on manumission of slaves
1808 Congress prohibits U.S. participation in the
international slave trade
1816-20 "Alabama Fever": migration to the Old Southwest
1832 Virginia legislature debates and defeats a measure for gradual emancipation
1834 Britain frees slaves throughout the empire, including in its Caribbean colonies
1835 Charleston crowd burns abolitionist literature
Tightening of black codes completed by southern legislatures
1836 Congress passes "gag rule" to prevent discussion of antislavery petitions
James Henry Hammond announces to Congress that slavery is not evil
Missouri Crisis
Denmark Vesey's conspiracy in Charleston
Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia
William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing an antislavery newspaper, the Liberator
1832 Nullification Crisis
1846 William Gregg opens model textile mill at Graniteville, South Carolina
1854 George Fitzhugh publishes Sociology for the South, a defense of slavery
1857 Hinton Helper publishes The Impending Crisis, an attack on slavery
1819-20
1822
1831
1832-38 "Flush Times": second wave of westward expansion
1858 James Henry Hammond's "King Cotton" speech
CONCLUSION
he amazing growth of cotton production after 1793 transformed the South and the nation. Physically, the South expanded explosively west-
ward: in all, seven southern states were admitted to the Union between 1800 and 1845. Cotton production fastened the slave system of labor upon the
region. Although the international slave trade was abolished in 1808, the inter- nal slave trade flourished, with devastating effects on African American fami- lies. Nationally, the profitable cotton trade fueled economic development and provided much of the original capital for the infant factory system of the North. Cotton production was based on the labor of African American slaves, who built strong communities under extremely difficult circumstances. The cohesion of African American families and the powerful faith of African American Chris- tianity were the key community elements that bred a spirit of endurance and resistance. White Southerners, two-thirds of whom did not own slaves, denied their real dependence on slave labor by claiming equality in white skin privi- lege, while slave owners boasted of their own paternalism. But the extreme fear generated by a handful of slave revolts and the growing number of free African
Americans in many areas gave the lie to white claims of benevolence. In the 1830s, the South defensively closed ranks against real and perceived threats to the slave system. In this sense, the white South was nearly as trapped as the African American slaves they claimed to control. And in its growing concern for the defense of the slave system, the South's role in national politics became
more rigid, as we shall see in the next chapter.
264 10 CHAPTER 10 THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os-185os
REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. How did cotton production after 1793 transform the social and politi-
cal history of the South? How did the rest of the nation benefit? In
what way was it an "international phenomenon"?
2. What were the two key institutions of the African American slave com-
munity? How did they function, and what beliefs did they express?
3. The circumstances of two groups—poor whites and free African
Americans—put them outside the dominant southern equations of
white equals free and black equals slave. Analyze the difficulty each group encountered in the slave-owning South.
4. Who were the yeoman farmers? What was their interest in slavery?
5. Southern slaveholders claimed that their paternalism justified their
ownership of slaves, but paternalism implied obligations as well as priv-
ileges. How well do you think slaveholders lived up to their paternalis-
tic obligations?
6. How did slave owners justify slavery? How did their defense change
over time?
......•••1111111r
KEY ERMS
myhistOrylab Flashcard Review
Black codes (p. 253) Denmark Vesey's conspiracy (p. 260)
Gang System (p. 248) Industrial Revolution (p. 242)
Manumission (p. 247) Nat Turner's Revolt (p. 260)
Second Great Awakening (p. 250)
Yeoman (p. 254)
RECOMMENDED READING Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity (2003). A compelling survey of the changing
nature of American slavery.
Joan E. Cashin, A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (1991).
Explores the effects on slave owners of separation from family networks.
Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (2005). This story of the inter-
twined lives of a white Christian slaveowning minister and his slaves on a
Georgia plantation shows how he failed to reconcile the enslaved to their
condition.
Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2005).
The effects of the trade on American life.
Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974). The land-
mark book that redirected the attention of historians from slaves as victims
to the slave community as an active participant in paternalism.
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY, 179os- 185os CHAPTER 10 265
Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (2007). An in- novative study about the ways the informal and unnoticed ways of slaves
linked plantations into African American neighborhoods.
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery 1619-1877 (1993). A well-written, comprehen- sive survey.
Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (1995). A study of yeomen that links their prized political and economic indepen- dence with their strong patriarchal control over their own families.
Donald P. McNeilly, The Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society, 1819-1861 (2000). Traces slavery and society in Arkansas from frontier to cotton plantations.
Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South (2004). An outstanding two-volume study of southern life and thought from 1800 to 1865.
Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum
South (2001). How slave communities sought to protect their children.
For study resources for this chapter, go to wwwmyhistorylab.com and choose Out of Many, Teaching and Learning Classroom Edition. You will find a wealth of study and review material for this chapter, including pretests and posttests, customized study plan, key-term review
flash cards, interactive map and document activities, and documents for analysis.
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
