The American Promise – Lecture Notes
Chapter 13 – The Slave South, 1820 – 1860
I. The Growing Distinctiveness of the South
A. Cotton Kingdom, Slave Empire
1. Western Migration—In the first half of the nineteenth century, millions of
Southerners migrated west; by midcentury, the South encompassed nearly a million
square miles, much of it planted in cotton; heavy migration led to statehood for
Arkansas, Texas, and Florida.
2. The Cotton Kingdom—The South’s climate and geography were ideally suited
for the cultivation of cotton; only needed two hundred frost-free days and plenty of
rain; production soared from 300,000 bales in 1830 to nearly 5 million in 1860,
when the South produced three-fourths of the world’s supply.
3. Slave Empire—Cotton rested on the backs of slaves; most worked in gangs in
fields under the direct supervision of whites; the international slave trade was
outlawed, but the domestic trade flourished; slave population grew enormously; by
1860, the South contained 4 million slaves, more than all the other slave societies in
the New World combined; increase came from natural reproduction.
B. The South in Black and White
1. Southern Demographics—In 1860, one in every three Southerners was black;
there were approximately 4 million blacks and 8 million whites; only one in
seventy-six Northerners was black.
2. African American Cultural Influence—Presence of large numbers of African
Americans had profound consequences for the development of Southern culture;
blacks shaped southern language, food, music, religion, and accents.
3. The “Intellectual” Defense of Slavery—Most direct consequence of the South’s
biracialism was southern whites’ commitment to white supremacy; states passed
laws called slave codes that required the total submission of all slaves to all whites,
not just their masters; intellectuals joined legislators in the campaign to strengthen
slavery; they employed every imaginable defense, turning to the law, history, and
biblical interpretation as evidence of their claims; argued giving blacks rights would
lead to sexual mixing of races, called miscegenation; George Fitzhugh argued that
slavery was better than ruthless northern capitalism and claimed that masters
protected their slaves.
4. Claims of Black Inferiority—The bedrock of the defense of slavery; argued
slavery was necessary and proper because blacks were lesser human beings; argued
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that slavery lifted blacks to civilization and that slaves and masters were friends;
defended the institution as a “positive good” rather than a “necessary evil.”
5. Unifying around Race Rather than Class—The system of slavery encouraged
whites to unify around race rather than to divide by class; slavery meant white
dominance, white superiority; differences among whites were bridged by
membership in the ruling class.
C. The Plantation Economy
1. Who Owned Slaves?—Only about one-fourth of the white population lived in
slaveholding families; most slaveholders owned fewer than five slaves; those who
owned twenty or more slaves were known as planters, who made up only 12
percent of slaveowners but still dominated the southern economy.
2. The Cotton Plantation and U.S. Exports—All major cash crops—tobacco, sugar,
rice, and cotton—grew on plantations; tobacco, sugar, and rice were labor intensive
and often dangerous to cultivate; cotton took over after the advent of Eli Whitney’s
cotton gin; relatively easy to grow and took little capital to get started; planters
produced 75 percent of the South’s cotton; plantation slavery benefited the nation;
by 1840, cotton accounted for more than 60 percent of American exports; most
went to Great Britain, but some of the profits went to northern middlemen who
bought, sold, and shipped cotton; provided capital for northern industry, which
found a market for its textiles and tools in the South.
3. Diverging Economies—The economies of the North and South steadily diverged;
the North developed a mixed economy, with agriculture, commerce, and
manufacturing; the South remained overwhelmingly agricultural; the South
developed fewer factories and cities, thus it attracted relatively small numbers of
European immigrants; some southern critics railed against the excessive
commitment to cotton and slaves.
4. The “Backward Labor System”—Northerners claimed slavery was a backward
labor system; Southerners invested less of their capital in industry, transportation,
and public education; planters’ desire to reinvest in agriculture ensured the
momentum of the plantation economy.
II. Masters and Mistresses in the Big House
A. Paternalism and Male Honor
1. Overseers—Smaller planters supervised the labor of their slaves themselves;
larger planters hired overseers who went to the fields with the slaves; left the
planter free to concentrate on marketing, finance, and general plantation affairs.
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2. “Christian Guardianship”/Paternalism—In the nineteenth century, planters
increasingly characterized their mastery in terms of what they called “Christian
guardianship,” and what historians have called “paternalism”; paternalism denied
the brutality of slavery; said plantations joined master and slave in a relationship
that benefited both; in exchange for the slaves’ labor and obedience, masters
provided basic care and necessary guidance for a childlike, dependent people.
3. The Economy of Paternalism—Paternalism was part propaganda and part selfdelusion, but it was also economically shrewd; masters took care of their slaves so
they could work harder and, just as important, reproduce; did lead to a small
improvement in slaves’ welfare, but paternalism should not be mistaken for
kindness and goodwill; it encouraged better treatment because it made economic
sense to provide at least minimal care for valuable slaves.
4. Southern Idea of Honor—Paternalism provided slaveholders with a means of
rationalizing their rule, but it also provided some slaves with leverage over the
conditions of their lives; slave owners would sometimes negotiate with slaves so
they did not earn reputations as cruel tyrants; slaves could get garden plots or a few
days off. Social standing, political advancement, and even self-esteem rested on a
reputation of honor; defending honor became a male passion, and conflicts over
honor often led to dueling.
5. Miscegenation—Planters took no opposition from any of their dependents, black
or white; laws prohibited interracial sex, but white men often forced themselves on
black slaves; slavery, honor, and male domination dominated southern life.
B. The Southern Lady and Feminine Virtues
1. Gendered Expectations—Like their northern counterparts, southern ladies
were expected to possess feminine virtues of piety, purity, chastity, and obedience
within the context of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity; chivalry—the South’s
romantic ideal of male-female relationships—both glorified and subordinated the
southern woman; daughters of planters confronted chivalry’s demands at an early
age; the educations they received aimed at fitting them to become southern ladies.
2. Subordinating Slaves and Women—Most spokesmen for slavery defended the
subordination of women, claiming that slavery freed white women from drudgery;
in reality, having servants required the plantation mistress to work long hours
managing and supervising; while masters used their status as slaveholders as a
springboard into public affairs, the mistress remained on the plantation; mistresses
lived privileged lives, but they did not live lives of leisure.
3. Grounds for Discontent—Plantation mistresses also had significant grounds for
discontent, including miscegenation; lived alongside the children their husbands
fathered with their slaves; still, most accepted slavery.
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A. Work
1. Field Hands—All slaves who were capable of productive labor worked; the
overwhelming majority of all plantation slaves in 1860 worked as field hands; they
cleared the fields at the beginning of the year, planted and cultivated in spring and
summer, and picked in the fall; worked in gangs.
2. House Servants—Only a few slaves (only about one in every ten) became house
servants; nine out of ten house servants were women; less physically demanding,
but they were constantly on call; bore the brunt of white rage when they could not
please constantly.
3. Skilled Artisans—No more than one in twenty slaves worked in a skilled trade;
most were blacksmiths and carpenters.
4. Slave Drivers—Rarest of all; no more than one male slave in a hundred; task was
driving other slaves to work harder in the fields; normally, slaves worked from what
they called “can to can’t”—from “can see” in the morning to “can’t see” at night.
B. Family and Religion
1. Slave Culture and Family—Slaves worked from dawn to dusk; but at night and
all day Sundays and usually Saturday afternoons, slaves were left largely to
themselves; created a culture of their own; one of the most important consequences
of the slaves’ limited autonomy was the preservation and persistence of the family;
the black family survived slavery; slave marriages were not legally recognized, but
plantation records reveal that marriages were often long-lasting; primary cause of
ending marriage was death of a spouse, but the second most frequent cause was the
sale of a husband or wife; sales destroyed hundreds of thousands of slave marriages.
2. African American Christianity—Also provided slaves with a refuge and a
reason for living; evangelical Baptists and Methodists converted slaves from African
beliefs; by mid-nineteenth century, as many as one-quarter of all slaves claimed
church membership; planters began promoting Christianity in the quarter because
they saw the slaves’ salvation as part of their obligation; also hoped that religion
made slaves more obedient; slaves met in their cabins or secretly in the woods and
created an African American Christianity that served their needs, not those of the
masters’; Christianity did not entirely drive out traditional African beliefs; many still
believed in conjurers and witches, and slaves’ Christian music, preaching, and rituals
reflected the influence of Africa.
C. Resistance and Rebellion
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1. Types of Resistance—Slaves understood that accommodation was the price of
survival, but they did not suffer slavery passively; engaged in day-to-day resistance
against their enslavers; spectrum of slave resistance ranged from mild to extreme:
told stories of resistance by the fireside in a slave cabin; broke tools and feigned
illness to evade work in the fields; running away was a widespread form of protest,
but escape from the Lower South was almost impossible.
2. Scarcity of Revolt—Violent assaults on slavery by large numbers of slaves were
very rare; slaves were not content, but they understood they had almost no chance
of success; whites outnumbered blacks and were heavily armed
IV. The Plain Folk
A. Plantation Belt Yeomen
1. Small Farmers—Lived within the orbit of the planter class; grew mainly food
crops, but also devoted a portion of their land to cotton; farms ran only on family
labor; tied to planters because they could not afford cotton gins or baling presses
and had no link to urban merchants.
2. Class Politics—A dense network of relationships laced small farmers and
planters together in patterns of reciprocity and mutual obligation; planters hired
out surplus slaves; yeomen helped police slaves on slave patrols; plantation belt
yeomen may have envied, and at times even resented, wealthy slaveholders, but in
general, small farmers learned to accommodate; they did not want to overthrow the
planter regime; instead, they wanted entry into it.
B. Upcountry Yeomen
1. Geography—Hills and mountains of the South resisted the penetration of slavery
and plantations; higher elevation, colder climate, rugged terrain, and poor
transportation made it difficult for commercial agriculture; yeomen dominated
these isolated areas, making planters and slaves scarce.
2. The Family Farm—At the core of upcountry society was the independent farm
family working its own patch of land; raised hogs, cattle, and sheep; sought selfsufficiency and independence; all members of the family worked, but the domestic
sphere was subordinated to the will of the father; production for home consumption
was more important than production for the market.
3. Defending Slavery—With so few slaves, slaveholders had much less social and
economic power in the upcountry; but people in the upcountry did not oppose
slavery; as long as upcountry yeomen were free to lead their own lives, they
defended slavery and white supremacy just as staunchly as did other white
Southerners.
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C. Poor Whites
1. Northern Opinion—Majority of slaveless white Southerners were hardworking,
landholding small farmers; most Northerners, however, believed that slavery had
condemned most whites to poverty, brutality, and backwardness; called them
hillbillies or rednecks; believed that they were ignorant, diseased, and degenerate.
2. Southern Realities—In reality, only one in four nonslaveholding rural whites
was landless and very poor; although some earned reputations for violence and
mayhem, most lived responsible lives.
3. Working to Become Yeomen—Many poor whites were eager to climb into the
yeomanry; but the cotton boom of the 1850s increased land prices and made
upward mobility more difficult for poor whites; poor whites shared common
cultural traits with yeomen farmers.
D. The Culture of the Plain Folk
1. Isolated Lives—Plain folk lived isolated, local lives on scattered farms and in tiny
villages; bad roads and a lack of newspapers meant that everyday life revolved
around family, a handful of neighbors, the local church, and perhaps a country store.
2. Leisure Time—Work occupied most of their time, but plain folk also enjoyed
music, dancing, tobacco use, fishing, and hunting.
3. Education and Religion—Plain folk did not usually associate “book learning”
with the basic needs of life; approximately one southern white man in five was
illiterate in 1860; illiteracy rate for women was even higher; spent more hours in
revival tents than in classrooms; not all rural whites were religious, but many were;
the most characteristic feature of their evangelical Christian faith was the revival;
hymns provided guides to right and wrong and assured eternal salvation.
V. Black and Free: On the Middle Ground
A. Precarious Freedom
1. Population Growth—There were few free blacks in the colonial era, but the
population swelled after the Revolution; the natural rights philosophy of the
Declaration of Independence and the egalitarian message of evangelical
Protestantism joined to challenge slavery.
2. White Oppression—In the 1820s and 1830s, state legislatures acted to stem the
growth of the free black population and to shrink the liberty of those blacks who
had already gained their freedom; new laws denied masters the right to free their
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slaves; others humiliated and restricted them by subjecting them to special taxes,
prohibiting them from interstate travel and increasingly subjecting them to the
same laws as slaves; elaborate system of regulations confined most free African
Americans to a constricted life of poverty and dependence; typically rural,
uneducated, unskilled agricultural laborers and domestic servants.
3. Denmark Vesey—Whites feared free blacks might cherish their race more than
their status as free people and would lead slaves in rebellion; in 1822, whites in
Charleston accused free black Denmark Vesey of plotting with slaves to slaughter
the city’s whites; whites never found any weapons, but officials hanged 35 black
men, including Vesey.
B. Achievement despite Restrictions
1. The Advantages of Freedom—Free African Americans made the most of the
advantages their status offered; free blacks could legally marry, choose their
occupations, and own property, even though most remained propertyless.
2. Free Black Elite—Some free blacks escaped poverty and degradation;
particularly in urban areas, a small elite of free blacks developed and even
flourished; they were usually light-skinned African Americans who worked at
skilled trades as tailors, carpenters, or mechanics; operated schools for their
children and traveled out of state; a few free blacks, such as William Ellison of South
Carolina, owned slaves in large numbers and exploited them for labor.
VI. The Politics of Slavery
A. The Democratization of the Political Arena
1. Political Reforms and Increased Suffrage—Reforms that swept the nation in
the first half of the nineteenth century reached deeply into the South; southern
politics became democratic politics for white men; eliminated wealth and property
requirements for voting; white male suffrage ushered in an era of vigorous electoral
competition; voter turnout often approached 80 percent.
2. Increasing Partisanship—As politics became more democratic, it also grew
more partisan; both Whigs and Democrats tried to portray themselves as a friend to
the plain white folk; as in other parts of the nation, Whigs tended to favor
government intervention, while Democrats opposed it.
B. Planter Power
1. Southern Officeholders and Slavery—Whether Whig or Democrat, southern
officeholders were likely to be slave owners; won elections even as they were in the
minority of the population; by 1860, the percentage of slave owners in state
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legislatures ranged from 41 percent in Missouri to nearly 86 percent in North
Carolina; legislators often owned large numbers of slaves.
2. Convincing the Common Man—Upper-class dominance of southern politics
reflected the elite’s success in persuading the white majority that what was good for
slaveholders was also good for them; reminded common whites that most had farms
of their own and that they enjoyed an elevated social status; most slaveholders took
pains to win the plain folk’s trust and to nurture their respect; convinced wary plain
folk of their democratic convictions and egalitarian sentiments, whether they were
genuine or not.
3. Protecting Slavery—Legislatures protected planters’ interests while giving the
impression of protecting small farmers’ interests as well; established low tax rates
on land to curry favor with yeomen but in reality, the tax on slaves was even lower;
powerful whites also dismissed slavery’s critics from college faculties, drove them
from the pulpit, and hounded them from public life; people could suggest mild
reforms of slavery, but no Southerner could any longer safely call slavery evil or
advocate for its destruction; in the antebellum South, the rise of the “common man”
occurred alongside the continuing, even growing, power of the planter class, but the
politics of slavery helped knit together all of white society.
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