Defining Slavery

SLAVERY IN THE UNITED

STATES

Out of extreme cruelty was borne gospel, jazz, blues, r n b, soul and so much more…

Defining Slavery

Period: 1600-1860

A slave is a person totally subject to her or his owners' will.

The 1926 Slavery Convention described slavery as "...the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised..." Therefore a slave is someone who cannot leave an owner, master, overseer, controller, or employer without explicit permission, and who will be returned if they stray or escape. They may be "legally" owned, or controlled to the same extent informally.

How does slavery differ from other forms of exploitation such as serfdom, forced labor, or the subordination of women in patriarchal societies? The traditional definition of slavery was legal. Slaves were peoples’ property and could be bought and sold, traded, leased, or mortgaged like a form of livestock.

Because they are under the personal dominion of an owner, slaves were always vulnerable to sexual exploitation and cruel punishment. In all cultures, slaves were symbolically dishonoured. For example, they were branded, tattooed, or required to wear distinctive collars, clothing, or hairstyles.

Also, regardless of place and time period or the ethnicity of the slaves, societies have imposed certain common stereotypes on slaves – that they were licentious, childlike, lazy, irresponsible, dim-witted, and incapable of freedom.

Questions

1.

Put the 1926 Slavery Convention definition of slavery into your own words.

2.

How was slavery different to other forms of exploitation?

3.

Why were slaves vulnerable?

4.

Why do you think slaves were ‘symbolically dishonoured? What was the purpose of doing this and for what effect?

5.

What were some stereotypes of slaves?


STATES


Slavery in the United States

Beginning at least as early as 1502, European slave traders shipped approximately 11 to 16 million slaves to the Americas, including

500,000 to what is now the United States. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, slaves could be found in every area colonized by

Europeans.

Initially, English colonists relied on indentured white servants, but by the late seventeenth century, faced with a shortage of servants, they increasingly resorted to enslaved Africans.

Three distinctive systems of slavery emerged in the American colonies.

In Maryland and Virginia, slavery was widely used in raising tobacco and corn and worked under the "gang" system. In the South Carolina and

Georgia low country, slaves raised rice and indigo, worked under the

"task" system, and were able to reconstitute African social patterns and maintain a separate Gullah dialect. In the North, slavery was concentrated on Long Island and in southern Rhode Island and New Jersey, where most slaves were engaged in farming and stock raising for the West

Indies or were household servants for the urban elite.

The American Revolution had contradictory consequences for slavery.

Thousands of slaves freed themselves by running away. In the South, slavery became more firmly entrenched, and expanded rapidly into the

Old Southwest after the development of the cotton gin. In the North, in contrast, every state freed slaves by statute, court decision, or enactment of gradual emancipation schemes.

During the decades before the Civil War, slave grown cotton accounted for over half the value of all United States exports, and provided virtually all the cotton used in the northern textile industry and 70 percent of the cotton used in British mills. The slave South failed to establish commercial, financial, or manufacturing companies on the same scale as the North.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington were slaveholders. So, too, were Benjamin Franklin and the theologian


STATES


Jonathan Edwards. John Newton, the composer of "Amazing Grace," captained a slave ship early in his life. Robinson Crusoe, the fictional character in Daniel Defoe's famous novel, was engaged in the slave trade when he was shipwrecked.

Slavery has often been treated as a marginal aspect of history, confined to courses on southern or African American history. In fact, slavery played a crucial role in the making of the modern world. Slavery provided the labor force for the Slavery played an indispensable role in the settlement and development of the New World.

Slavery dates to prehistoric times and could be found in ancient Babylon, classical Greece and Rome, China, India, and Africa as well as in the

New World.

Questions

1.

On what kind of people did English colonists initially rely?

2.

Why did they have to resort to Africans?

3.

What were the three kinds of slavery to emerge in the United

States?

4.

What was the difference between the kind of work slaves did in the south of the United States to what they did in the North?

5.

Who were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin?


STATES


Reading 1:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the...most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.....Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Thomas Jefferson, 1782

Reading 2:

An hour before day light the horn is blown. Then the slaves arouse, prepare their breakfast, fill a gourd with water, in another deposit their dinner of cold bacon and corn cake, and hurry to the field again. It is an offense invariably followed by a flogging, to be found at the quarters after daybreak....

The hands are required to be in the cotton field as soon as it is light in the morning, and, with the exception of ten or fifteen minutes, which is given them at noon to swallow their allowance of cold bacon, they are not permitted to be a moment idle until it is too dark to see, and when the moon is full, they often times labor till the middle of the night. They do not dare to stop even at dinner time, nor return to the quarters, however late it be, until the order to halt is given by the driver....

Finally, at a late hour, they reach the quarters, sleepy and overcome with the long day's toil. All that is allowed them is corn and bacon, which is given out at the corncrib and smoke-house every Sunday morning. Each one receives, as his weekly allowance, three and a half pounds of bacon, and corn enough to make a peck of meal.

That is all.

Solomon Northrup

Reading 3:

The laborers begin work at six o'clock in the morning, have an hour's rest at nine for breakfast, and many have finished their assigned task by two o'clock, all of them by three o'clock. In summer, they divide their work differently, going to bed in the middle of the day, then rising to finish their task, and afterward spending a great part of the night in chatting, merry-making, preaching, and psalm-singing....

The laborers are allowed Indian meal, rice, and milk, and occasionally pork and soup. As their rations are more than they can eat, they either return part of it at the end of the week, or they keep it to feed their fowls, which they usually sell, as well as their eggs, for cash, to buy molasses, tobacco, and other luxuries....

The sight of the whip was painful to me as a mark of degradation, reminding me that the lower orders of slaves are kept to their work by mere bodily fear, and that their treatment must depend on the individual character of the owner or overseer.


STATES


Sir Charles Lyell

Reading 4:

The Negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The Negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day....Besides they have their Sabbaths and holidays.

The free laborer must work or starve. He is more of a slave than the Negro, because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labor end. He has no liberty, and not a single right.

George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All or Slaves Without Masters, 1857

Reading 5:

On the 12th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of Men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.

Question: Do you not find yourself mistaken now?

Answer: Was not Christ crucified?

Since 1830, I had been living with Mr. Joseph Travis, who was a kind master who had placed great trust in me. On Saturday evening, August 20th [1831] we decided to meet the next day for a meal and to work out our plan of attack....It was quickly agreed we should start at home (Mr. J. Travis') on that night.

I took my station in the rear, and, as it was my object to carry terror and destruction wherever we went, I placed fifteen or twenty of the best armed and most to be relied on in front, who generally approached the houses as fast as their horses could run.

This was for two purposes--to prevent their escape and strike terror to the inhabitants.

Confessions of Nat Turner, 1831


STATES


Reading 6:

Follow the Drinking Gourd

When the sun comes back and the first quail calls,

Follow the drinking gourd.

for the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom,

If you follow the drinking gourd

The river bank will make a very good road,

The dead trees show you the way.

Left foot, peg foot traveling on,

Follow the drinking gourd.

Negro spiritual

Questions

1. Which account offers the most accurate description of slavery?

2. On what grounds did apologists defend slavery?

3. Why does Nat Turner say he led a revolt against slavery? What does his account tell us about the radical potential of slave religion?

African Americans After Slavery

All freedmen...over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in

January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or night time, and all white persons so assembling with freedmen...shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined in the sum of not exceeding in the crease of a freedman...fifty dollars, and a white man two hundred dollars, and imprisoned at the discretion of the court....

And in case of any freedman...shall fail for five days after the imposition of any fine...for violation of this act...it shall be ...the duty of the sheriff...to hire out said freedman...to any person who will, for the shortest period of service, pay said fines....

Mississippi Black Code, 1865

This is an institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism...its peculiar objects being...to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless, from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers....


STATES



STATES


Interrogations to Be Asked

5th. Are you opposed to Negro equality, both social and political?

6th. Are you in favor of a white man's government in this country?

Principles of the Ku Klux Klan

These men are not only armed, disciplined, oath-bound members of the

Confederate army, but they work in disguise; and their instruments are terror and crime....They pretended, I believe, in the outset to be representative ghosts of the

Confederate dead...and they terrified men, women and children, white and black....They are secret, oath-bound; they murder, rob, plunder, whip, and scourge; and they commit these crimes, not upon the high and lofty, but upon the lowly, upon the poor, upon feeble men and women who are utterly defenseless.

Senator John Sherman on the Ku Klux Klan, 1871

It is assumed that the power of Congress [includes the] authority for declaring by law that all persons shall have equal accommodations and privileges in all inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement; the argument being that the denial of such equal accommodations and privileges is in itself a subjection to a species of servitude within the meaning of the [Thirteenth] amendment....

Can the act of a mere individual, the owner of the train, the public conveyance, or place of amusement, refusing the accommodation, be justly regarded as imposing any badge of slavery.... We are forced to the conclusion that such an act if refusal has nothing to do with slavery or involuntary servitude. Mere discriminations on account of race [is] not regarded as badges of slavery.

Supreme Court invalidates the postwar Civil Rights Act in the Civil Rights

Cases, 1883

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority....The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the Negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races....

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

Supreme Court upholds segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896


STATES


The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country....But in view of the Constitution...there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respects of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.

Justice John Harlan's dissent, 1896

I do not think it was ever intended by the Creator that the two races should live together upon equal terms...One or the other must rule. The people of the South tried to share with the Negro the government of the country after the war, but the Negro declined to share with the white man. Black heels rested cruelly upon white necks for many years after the close of the war. The white man endured the Negro's misrule, his insolence, impudence, and infamy. He suffered his criminal incapacity to govern until the public domain had been well-nigh squandered and the public treasury looted....We invoked the law of self-preservation; we arose in the might of an outraged race and...the southern white man drove from power the scalawag, the carpetbagger, and the incompetent Negro.

James K. Vardaman, 1914

Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life....

You [white Southerners] can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen....In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

Booker T. Washington, 1895

As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years that have occurred:

1. The disenfranchisement of the Negro.

2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.

3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the

Negro.

These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington's teachings; but his propagandas, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment.

W.E.B. DuBois, 1903

I believe Booker T. Washington's heart is right, but that in fawning, cringing and groveling before the white man he has cost his race their rights, and that twenty years


STATES

Out of extreme cruelty was borne gospel, jazz, blues, r n b, soul and so much more… hence, as he looks back and sees the harm his course has done his race, he will be brokenhearted over it.

Charles Satchel Morris, 1906

While most of us were agonizing over the Negro's relation to the State and his political fortunes, Booker Washington saw that there was a great economic empire that needed to be conquered. He saw an emancipated race chained to the soil by the

Mortgage Crop System, and other devices, and he said, "You must own your own farms"--and forthwith there was a second emancipation. He saw the industrial trades and skilled labor pass from our race into other hands. he said, "The hands as well as the head must be educated."

William Henry Lewis, 1915

1. Describe the obstacles that stood in the way of economic and political equality for Southern blacks in the late l9th century.

2. How did the Supreme Court respond to the growth of racial segregation?

3. Describe the conflicting strategies pursued by black leaders to achieve full racial equality.

4. What advice did Booker T. Washington offer to black Southerners?

5. Why did Washington's opponents criticize his "Atlanta Compromise"? Are their criticisms valid?

6. Which in your view was the most effective strategy for late l9th century black

Southerners to pursue--accommodation to racial prejudice and efforts for economic self-development or a commitment to full political and social equality?

The Supreme Court and Civil Rights

Hall v. DeCuir 1878 Struck down Louisiana law barring racial discrimination on railroads and other "common carriers."

U.S. v. Harris 1882 Declared federal laws punishing murder and assault unconstitutional.

Civil Rights Cases 1883 Struck down Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Plessy v. Ferguson 1896 Upheld Louisiana law requiring "separate but equal" accommodations on railroads.

Williams v. Mississippi 1898 Upheld a state law requiring a literacy test for voting.

African Americans - from Slavery to Freedom

Blacks Living


STATES


Outside the South

1860

1870

1880

400,000

500,000

600,000

1. Where did most blacks live after the Civil War--in the South or outside the

South?

2. In what conditions did most Southern blacks live after the Civil War?

Lynchings

1885

1890

1895

184

96

179

1900

1905

1910

1915

1920

1925

1930

115

62

76

69

61

17

21

1935

1940

1945

1950

1955

20

5

1

2

3

1. When was lynching most common?

2. What factors may have contributed to a decline in lynching?

STRANGE FRUIT by DAVID MARGOLICK

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.


STATES


Defining Slavery

Related documents

Products

Support

Defining Slavery

Related documents

Add this document to collection(s)

Add this document to saved

Suggest us how to improve StudyLib