The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
Episode Two: The Age of Slavery (1800 – 1860)
with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
1. How did enslaved people see the American Revolution?
2. How many people were enslaved in America at the time of the Revolution?
3. What did Mum Bett (later known as Elizabeth Freeman) accomplish in Sheffield, MA in 1781?
4. How did the religious revival of the Great Awakening change the way some people saw slavery?
5. Who was Richard Allen?
6. How did Southern lawmakers respond to small groups of freed slaves forming their own communities?
7. Describe the slave revolt that was planned by Gabriel in Richmond, VA in 1800.
8. How did Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin increase demand for slave labor?
9. Which factors led to the Second Middle Passage (slaves from the Upper South being sold to planters in the
Depp South)?
10. How many African Americans were sold during the Second Middle Passage?
11. How were slaves transported to the Deep South?
12. How were women specifically impacted on this forced migration?
13. What effect did the Second Middle Passage have on black families?
14. What was the Brown Fellowship Society?
15. How could free blacks get their spouses out of slavery?
16. Natchez, MS was the
of slavery in 1850?
17. Why did people purchasing slaves prefer women?
18. How did America go from having 400,000 slaves brought from Africa to having a population of more than
4,000,000 slaves in 1860?
19. Who made the metal instruments of oppression used against slaves?
20. Describe Nat Turner’s rebellion.
21. What effect did Nat Turner’s rebellion have on slaveholding America?
22. When Southern slaveholders realized the rest of the world was moving toward ending slavery, what
arguments did they start to make for continuing their practice of enslavement?
23. How did free blacks respond to increase in legal restrictions and violence in the North?
24. Describe Frederick Douglass’s path to abolitionism.
25. How many runaway slaves did the Underground Railroad assist?
26. What was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850?
29. What rights did free blacks in Canada have in the 1850s?
30. Who was Margaret Garner?
31. How was Margaret Garner’s story used by Southern slaveholders? How was it used by Northern
abolitionists?