Chapter 16 Slideshow Flashcards
How did the Cotton Kingdom develop into an agricultural factory?
- Planters bought more slaves and land
- Northern shippers reaped large profits from the cotton trade
- The prosperity of the North, South, and England rested on the bent backs of enslaved bondsmen
Nations growing wealth
Cotton accounted for half the value of American export
What did Cotton export earnings provide?
The capital for the republics economic growth
How much cotton did the South produce?
Half of the entire worlds supply of cotton
- About 75% came from acres of the South
What gave southern leaders power?
The dependence that Britain was tied to them by cotton threads
- In their eyes “cotton was king”
- Cotton was a powerful monarch
What was the South?
A planter aristocracy
In 1850, how many families owned more than 100 slaves?
1,733
What did the families that owned more than 100 slaves provide?
- Political and social leadership
- Enjoyed a lions share of southern wealth
- Could educate their children in the finest schools
- Money provided leisure for study, reflection, and statecraft
Since dominance by a favored aristocracy was undemocratic, what did that cause?
- Widened gap between rich and poor
- Hampered tax-supported public education
How did the plantation system shape the lives of southern women?
- The mistress commanded a sizable household staff
- Relationships between mistress and slaves ranged from affectionate to atrocious
How did slavery strain the bonds of womanhood?
- Some mistresses showed tender regard for their bondwomen
- Some slave women took pride in their status as “members” of the household
- Virtually no slaveholding women believed in abolition
Plantation life
- Plantation life was worrisome, distasteful, and sordid because it despoiled the good earth
- Quick profit led to excessive cultivation or “land butchery”
- Caused heavy leakage of population to the West and Northwest
What was the economic structure of the South?
Became increasingly monopolistic
- The big got bigger and the small smaller
Financial instability of the plantation system
- There was over speculation in land and slaves
- The slaves represented a heavy investment of capital
- An entire slave quarter might be wiped out by disease
What did the dominance by King Cotton lead to?
A dangerous dependence on a one-crop economy
- Prices we’re at the mercy of world conditions
- The whole system discouraged healthy diversification
What did immigrants add to the South?
Manpower and wealth of the North
In 1860 only _______ of the southern population was foreign-born as compared to _______ for the North
4.4%…18.7%
Why was German and Irish immigration discouraged to the South?
From the competition of slave labor, by the high cost of fertile land and by European ignorance of cotton growing
How many southern whites owned slaves?
Only 1,733 owned 100 or more, most owned less than 10, 1/4 of white southerners owned slaves or belonged to a slaveholding family
What were lesser masters?
Small farmers
What were the least prosperous no slave holding whites known as?
“Poor white trash” even by slaves
Who was among the most stoutest defenders of the slave system?
Whites without slaves who had no direct economic stake in preserving slavery
Were poorer whites better off than slaves?
Some, no
Who were the mountain whites
- Living in the valleys of the Appalachian range
- Independent small farmers
- Mountain whites had little in common with the whites of the flatlands
- When the war came, the tough-fibered mountain whites constituted a vitally important peninsula of Unionism
- They played a significant role in crippling the Confederacy
- They were the only concentrated Republican strength in the solid South
South’s free blacks
- About 250,000 by 1860
- Free black population trace their emancipation to the idealism of Revolutionary days
- Many were mulattoes
- Some purchased their freedom
- Many owned property
- Kind of “third race” with restrictions
- Unpopular in North
Northern climate for free blacks
- Several states forbade their entrance
- Most denied them the right to vote
- Some barred from public schools
- Northern blacks were particularly hated by the Irish immigrants with whom they competed for jobs
- Antiblack feelings were stronger in the North than in the South
When did the legal importation of African slaves into America end?
1808, outlawed by congress
When did Britain abolish the slave trade?
1807
- The royal Navy’s West African Squadron seized hundreds of slave ships and freed thousands of grateful captives
- Yet 3 million enslaved Africans were shipped to Brazil and the West Indies after 1807
Price of black ivory
In the US, the price was so high before the civil war that countless thousands of black were smuggled into the South
What did the suppression of international slave trade foster?
The growth of a vigorous internal slave trade
What did the increase of slave population come from?
Natural reproduction
- It distinguished North American slavery from slavery in more southerly New World societies
What did planters regard their slaves as?
Investments
- Of some $2 billion of their capital by 1860
What were the slaves the primary form of in the South?
Wealth
- They were cared for as any asset is cared for by a prudent capitalist
- Sometimes spared from dangerous work
- Slavery was profitable, even though it hobbled the economic development of the region as a whole
Was breeding slaves encouraged?
No
- Women who bore 13 or 14 babies were prized as “rattlin’ good breeders”
- White masters would force their attentions on female slaves fathering a sizable mulatto population, most of which remained enchained
Slave auctions
Brutal sights
- The most revolting aspects of slavery
- Families were separated with distressing frequency
- This was slavery’s greatest psychological horror
- Abolitionists decried the practice
How did slaves live?
- Slavery meant hard work, ignorance, oppression
- They had no political rights and minimal protection
- Savage beatings made sullen laborers
- Lash marks hurt resale values
Black belt
Black concentration of the Deep South
- Stretched from South Carolina to Georgia into the new southwest: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana
- Life was often rough and raw, for the slaves it was harder
Most blacks lived on ______ plantations of _______ or more slaves
Large…20
In some countries, blacks accounted for ______
75%
Was family life stable?
Relatively, and a distinctive African American slave culture developed
Were forced separations common?
On smaller plantations
Were blacks able to manage family life in slavery?
Yes; most slaves were raised in stable two-parent households
How did African Americans display their African cultural roots?
When they avoided marriage between first cousins, in contrast to the frequent intermarriage of close relatives among the ingrown planter aristocracy
African roots visibility in the slaves’ religion:
- Many Christianized during the second great awakening
- Yet they molded their own distinctive religious forms from a mixture of Christian and African elements
- African practice of responsorial style of preaching - the give and take between caller and dancers
How was slavery degrading the victims?
- They were deprived of the dignity and sense of responsibility that come from independence and the right to make choices
- They were denied education
How did victims of the “peculiar institution” devise ways to show protest?
- showed their pace of their labor to the barest minimum
- filched food from the “big house”
- They pilfered other goods
- They sabotaged expensive equipment
- They poisoned their masters’ food
How were slaves universally pined for freedom?
- Many took to their heels as runaways
- Others rebelled, though never successfully
How did slavery leave a mark on whites?
- It fostered the brutality of the whip, the bloodhound, and the branding iron
- White southerners increasingly lived in a state of imagined siege, surrounded by potentially rebellious blacks inflamed by abolitionist propaganda from the North
- Their fears bolstered a theory of biological racial superiority
What did the inhumanity of “peculiar institution” cause
Anti slavery societies
When did abolitionist sentiment first start?
At the time of the revolution, especially among Quakers
The American Colonization Society
- Purpose to transport blacks bodily back to Africa
- In 1822 the Republic of Liberia, on West African coast, was established for former slaves
Republic of Liberia
- Monrovia was the capital, named after President Monroe
- Some 15,000 freed slaves were transported over 4 decades
- Most blacks had no wish to be transported into a strange civilization after having become partially Americanized
William Wilberforce
- A member of the British parliament, an evangelical Christian reformer whose family had been touched by the preaching of George Whitefield
Theodore Dwight Weld
- Appealed with special power and directness to his rural audiences of untutored farmers
- Was materially aided by two wealthy and devout New York merchants - Arthur and Lewis Tappan
Where did Weld pay his way to?
Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio
- Expelled with other students for organizing an 18 day debate in slavery
What did Weld assemble?
A potent propaganda pamphlet, American Slavery as it is
What did William Lloyd Garrison write?
The liberation - his militantly anti slavery newspaper
Who founded the American Anti-Slavery Society?
Garrison, Wendell Phillips
Black abolitionists
David Walker - Appeal to the Colored Citizens of World
- Advocated a bloody end to white supremacy
Sojourner Truth
Fought for black emancipation and women’s rights
Martin Delany
One of the few black leaders who took seriously the notion of mass recolonization of Africa
- In 1859 he visited West Africa’s Niger Valley seeking a suitable site for relocation
Garrison personality vs Douglass personality
G: stubbornly principled
D: flexibly practical
Garrison interests
More interested in his own righteousness than in the substance of the slavery evil itself
Garrison demands
Repeatedly demand that the “virtuous” North secede from the “wicked” South
What did Garrison publicly burn?
A copy of the constitution as “a convent with death and an agreement with hell”
What did critics and former supporters charge that he was?
Cruelly probing the moral wound in America’s underbelly, but offered no acceptable balm
What did Douglass want to do
He and other abolitionists increasingly looked to politics to end the blight of slavery
What did most abolitionists, including Garrison, follow?
The logic of their beliefs and supported war as the price of emancipation
Where were anti slavery societies more numerous?
More South of the Mason-Dixon Line than north of it
What did emancipation proposals that the Virginia legislature debated and defeated do?
- The debate marked a turning point
- Slave states tightened their slave codes
- Moved to prohibit emancipation of any kind, voluntary or compensated
Nat Turners rebellion in 1831
- Sent waves of hysteria
- Planters slept with pistols
- Garrison was bitterly condemned as a terroir and inciter of murder
- The state of Georgia offered $5,000 for his arrest and conviction
Nullification of 1832
- Further implanted haunting fears in white southern minds
- Jailings, whippings, and lynching now greeted rational efforts to discuss the slavery problem
How did pro slavery whites respond
By launching a massive defense of slavery as a positive good
Gag resolution
- Pushed through Congress by sensitive southerners
- Required all such anti slavery appeals to be tabled without debate
Were abolitionists like Garrisonians popular or unpopular in the North?
Unpopular
