A.P.
Chapter 16: “The South and the Slavery Controversy”
~
1793 – 1860 ~
I.
“Cotton’s
Is King!”
1.
Before
the 1793 invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, slavery was a
dying business, since the South was burdened with depressed prices,
unmarketable goods, and over-cropped lands.
a.
After
the gin was invented, growing cotton became wildly profitable and easier, and
more slaves were needed.
2.
The
North also transported the cotton to
3.
The
South produced more than half the world’s supply of cotton, and held and
advantage over countries like
4.
The
South believed that since
II.
The
Planter “Aristocracy”
1.
In
1850, only 1733 families owned more tan 100 slaves each, and they were the
wealthy aristocracy of the South, with big houses and huge plantations.
2.
The
Southern aristocrats widened the gap between the rich and the poor and hampered
public-funded education by sending their children to private schools.
a.
Also,
a favorite author among them was Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivan Hoe,
who helped them idealize a feudal society with them as the kings and queens and
the slaves as their subjects.
3.
The
plantation system shaped the lives of southern women.
a.
Mistresses
of the house commanded a sizable household of mostly female slaves who cooked,
sewed, cared for the children, and washed things.
b.
Mistresses
could be kind or cruel, but all of them did at one point or another abuse their
slaves to some degree; there was no “perfect mistress.”
III.
Slaves
of the Slave System
1.
Cotton
production spoiled the earth, and even though profits were quick and high, land
was ruined, and cotton producers were always in need of new land.
2.
The
economic structure of the South became increasingly monopolistic because as
land ran out, smaller farmers sold their land to the large estate owners.
3.
Also,
the temptation to overspeculate in land and in slaves caused many planters to
plunge deep into debt.
a.
Slaves
were valuable, but they were also a gamble, since they might run away or be
killed by disease.
4.
The
dominance of King Cotton likewise led to a one-crop economy whose price level
was at the mercy of world conditions.
5.
Southerners
resented the Northerners growing fat (getting rich) at their expense while they
were dependent on the North for clothing, other food, and manufactured goods.
6.
The
South repelled immigrants from
IV.
The
White Majority
1.
Beneath
the aristocracy were the whites that owned one or two or a small family of
slaves; they worked hard on the riled with their slaves and the only difference
between them and their northern neighbors was that there were slaves living
with them.
2.
Beneath
these people were the slaveless whites that raised corn and hogs, sneered at
the rich cotton “snobocracy” and lived simply and poorly.
a.
Some
of the poorest were known as “poor white trash” and “hillbillies” and were
described as listless, shiftless, and misshapen.
b.
It
is now known that these people weren’t lazy, just sick, suffering from
malnutrition and parasites like hookworm.
3.
Even
the slaveless whites defended the slavery system because they all hoped to own
a slave or two some day, and they could take perverse pleasure in knowing that,
no matter how bad they were, they always “outranked” Blacks.
4.
Mountain
whites, those who lived isolated in the wilderness under Spartan frontier
conditions, hated white aristocrats and Blacks, and they were key in crippling
the Southern secessionists during the Civil War.
V.
Free
Blacks: Slaves Without Masters
1.
By
1860, free Blacks in the South numbered about 250,000.
2.
In
the upper South, these Blacks were descended from those freed by the idealism
of the Revolutionary War (“all men were created equal”).
3.
In
the deep South, they were usually mulattoes (Black mother, White father who was
usually a master) freed when their masters died.
4.
Many
owned property; a few owned slaves themselves.
5.
Free
Blacks were prohibited from working in certain occupations and forbidden from
testifying against whites in court; and as examples of what slaves could be,
Whites resented them.
6.
In
the North, free Blacks were also unpopular, as several states denied their
entrance, most denied them the right to vote and most barred them from public
schools.
7.
Northern
Blacks were especially hated by the Irish, with whom they competed for jobs.
8.
Antiblack
feeling was stronger in the North, where people liked the race but not the
individual, than in the South, were people liked the individual but not the
race.
VI.
Plantation
Slavery
1.
Although
slave importation was banned in 1808, smuggling of them continued due to their
high demand and despite death sentences to smugglers
2.
However,
the slave increase (4 million by 1860) was mostly due to their natural reproduction.
3.
Slaves
were an investment, and thus were treated better and more kindly and were
spared the most dangerous jobs, like putting a roof on a house, draining a
swamp, or blasting caves.
a.
Usually,
Irishmen were used to do that sort of work.
4.
Slavery
also created majorities or near-ones in the Deep South, and the states of South
Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana accounted for half of
all slaves in the South.
5.
Breeding
slaves was not encouraged, but thousands of slaves were “sold down the river”
to toil as field-gang workers, and women who gave birth to many children were
prized.
a.
Some
were promised freedom after ten children born.
6.
Slave
auctions were brutal, with slaves being inspected like animals and families
often mercilessly separated; Harriet Beecher Stowe seized the emotional
power of his scene in her Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
VII.
Life
Under the Lash
1.
Slave
life varied from place to place, but for slaves everywhere, life meant hard
work, no civil or political rights, and whipping if orders weren’t followed.
2.
Laws
that tried to protect slaves were difficult to enforce.
3.
Lash
beatings weren’t that common, since a master could lower the
value of his slave if he whipped him too much.
4.
Forced separation of spouses, parents and children seem
to have been more common in the upper South, among smaller plantations.
5.
Still, most slaves were raised in stable two-parent
households and continuity of family identity across generations was evidenced
in the widespread practice of naming children for grandparents or adopting the
surname of a forebear’s master.
6.
In contrast to the White planters, Africans avoided
marriage of first cousins.
7.
African also mixed Christian religion with their own
native religion, and often, they sang Christian hymns as signals and codes for
news of possible freedom; many of them sang songs that emphasize bondage (“Let
my people go.”)
VIII. The Burdens of Bondage
1.
Slaves had no dignity, were illiterate, and had no
chance of achieving the “American dream.”
2.
They also devised countless ways to make trouble
without getting punished to badly.
a.
They worked as slowly as they could without getting
lashed.
b.
They stole food and sabotaged expensive equipment.
c.
Occasionally, they poisoned their masters’ food.
3. Rebellions, such as the 1800 insurrection by a slave named Gabriel in Richmond, Virginia, and the 1822 Charleston rebellion led by Denmark Vesey, and the 1831 revolt semiliterate preacher Nat Turner, were never successful.
4.
Whites
became paranoid of Black revolts, and they had to degrade themselves, along
with their victims, as noted by distinguished Black leader Booker T.
Washington.
IX.
Early
Abolitionism
1.
In
1817, the American Colonization Society was founded for the purpose of
transporting Blacks back to Africa, and in 1822, the Republic of Liberia
was founded for Blacks to live.
2.
Most
Blacks had no wish to be transplanted into a strange civilization after having
been partially Americanized.
3.
By
1860, virtually all slaves were not Africans, but native-born African-Americans.
4.
In
the 1830s, abolitionism really took off, with the Second Great Awakening
and other things providing support.
5.
Theodore Dwight Weld was among those who were inflamed against slavery.
6.
Inspired
by Charles Grandison Finney, Weld preached against slavery and even
wrote a pamphlet, American Slavery As It Is.
X.
Radical
Abolitionism
1.
On
January 1st, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published the first
edition of The Liberator triggering a 30-year war of words and in a
sense firing one of the first shots of the Civil War.
2.
Other
dedicated abolitionists rallied around Garrison, such as Wendell Phillips,
a Boston patrician known as “abolition’s golden trumpet” who refused to eat
cane sugar or were cotton cloth, since both were made by slaves.
3.
David Walker, a Black abolitionist, wrote Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the
World in 1829 and advocated a bloody end to white supremacy.
4.
Sojourner Truth, a freed Black woman who fought for black emancipation and women’s
rights, and Martin Delaney, one of the few people who seriously
reconsidered Black relocation to Africa, also fought for Black rights.
5.
The
greatest Black abolitionist was an escaped black, Frederick Douglass,
who was a great speaker and fought for the Black cause despite being beaten and
harassed.
a.
His
autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, depicted his
remarkable struggle and his origins, as well as (duh) his life.
b.
While
Garrison seemed more concerned with his own righteousness, Douglass
increasingly looked to politics to solve the slavery problem.
c.
He
and others backed the Liberty Party in 1840, the Free Soil Party in 1848, and
the Republican Party in the 1850s.
6.
In
the end, many abolitionists supported war as the price for emancipation.
XI.
The
South Lashes Back
1.
In
the South, abolitionist efforts increasingly came under attack and fire.
2.
Southerners
began to organize a campaign talking about slavery’s positive good,
conveniently forgetting about how their previous doubts about “peculiar
institution’s” morality.
3.
Southern
slave supporters pointed out how masters taught their slaves religion, made
them civilized, treated them well, and gave them “happy” lives.
4.
They
also noted the lot of northern free Blacks, now were persecuted and harassed,
as opposed to southern Black slaves, who were treated well, given meals, and
cared for in old age.
5.
In
1836, Southern House members passed a “gag resolution” requiring all
antislavery appeals to be tabled without debate, arousing the ire of
northerners like John Quincy Adams.
6.
Southerners
also resented the flood of propaganda in the form of pamphlets, drawings, etc…
XII.
The
Abolitionist Impact in the North
1.
For
a long time, abolitionists like the extreme Garrisonians were unpopular, since
many had been raised to believe the values of the slavery compromises in the
Constitution.
a.
Also,
his secessionist talks contrasted against Webster’s cries for union.
2.
The
South owed the North $300 million by the late 1850s, and northern factories
depended on southern cotton to make goods.
3.
Many
abolitionists’ speeches provoked violence and mob outbursts in the North, such
as the 1834 trashing of Lewis Tappan’s New York House.
4.
In
1835, Garrison miraculously escaped a mob that dragged him around the streets
of Boston.
5.
Reverend
Elijah P. Lovejoy of Alton, Illinois, who impugned the chastity of
Catholic women, had his printing press destroyed four times and was killed by a
mob in 1837; he became an abolitionist martyr.
6.
Yet
by the 1850s, abolitionist outcries had been an impact on northern minds and
were beginning to sway more and more toward their side.
