WARM UP
11.24.14
• If you had to pick THREE adjectives to describe the “OLD
SOUTH”, what would they be?
THE OLD SOUTH
Cotton Is King
• By 1820, slavery was an old institution in America
• Sheryl Crow quote*
The Second Middle Passage
• “peculiar institution”
• slave population had increased to nearly 4 million and slavery had spread
to Arkansas, Louisiana, and eastern Texas. Slaves were one-third of the
South’s entire population and half of the population in the cotton states of
the Deep South.
Map 11.1 Slave Population, 1860
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Table 11.1 Growth of The Slave Population
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
THE OLD SOUTH
Slavery and the Nation
• Although the northern states abolished slavery, slavery affected them, nonetheless
• Constitution
• disproportionate power to southern states
• Slavery touched the lives of all Americans
• Northern merchants and manufacturers participated in the slave economy and profited from it.
• Cotton trade profits helped finance industrial development and internal improvements in the
North.
• Northern ships carried cotton, northern banks financed plantations, northern companies
insured slave property, and northern factories turned cotton into clothing.
The Southern Economy
• Upper South = much smaller % of slaves & slave owners
• Deep South was ALL plantations
• TX to SC
• Inhibited industrial growth
• No large & diverse cities, except for New Orleans
THE OLD SOUTH
Plain Folk of the Old South
• Most southern white families did not own slaves (3/4)
• Many were self-sufficient and remote from markets
• They were often desperately poor and more often illiterate
The Planter Class
• Most slave owners did not own large plantations
• small number of families owned more than 20 slaves;
• even fewer owned more than 100 slaves.
• Planters owned slaves to make huge profits, and they used
those profits for the conspicuous consumption of luxury
goods, creating an aristocratic material life sharply at odds
with life for most northerners.
Map 11.2 Size of Slaveholdings, 1860
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
THE OLD SOUTH
The Paternalist Ethos
• Idea that slaveholding gentlemen took personal responsibility for the wellbeing of their dependent women, children, and slaves.
• This outlook of “paternalism” had long been a feature of American slavery
The Code of Honor
In the South, men of all classes followed a code of
personal honor,
• in which they were expected to
•
•
•
•
defend the reputation of themselves and their families,
with violence if necessary.
Dueling, while illegal, was not uncommon.
Southern white women were even more confined to the home
and the domestic ideal than northern
THE OLD SOUTH
The Proslavery Argument
pro-slavery thought came to dominate southern intellectual and cultural
life.
• Racism—the belief that blacks were innately inferior to whites and suited for
slavery—framed the proslavery argument.
• Slave owners also found justification for slavery in ancient history and the Bible.
• Some southerners argued that black slavery guaranteed equality for whites by
preventing the growth of a white working class in the South.
• Slavery, they argued, provided the economic autonomy and independence that the
North’s industrial workers lacked and which formed the basis of the republic.
Abolition in the Americas
• Southern slaveholders knew of the Haitian Revolution, other slave rebellions, and
British abolition.
•
•
•
Emancipation throughout the Americas strongly shaped debates about slavery and its
future in the United States.
While American slave owners argued that emancipation had been a failure,
abolitionists disagreed.
By 1850, slave systems remained in the western hemisphere only in Cuba, Puerto
Rico, Brazil, and the United States
THE OLD SOUTH
Slavery and Liberty
• South Carolina in particular was home to many who argued
that freedom and equality were not universal entitlements,
even for all whites
• When sectionalism intensified after 1830, more southern
writers and politicians came to defend slavery Slavery and
Civilization
LIFE UNDER SLAVERY
Slaves and the Law
• Legal property of their owners
• Few rights rarely enforced
• Bought and sold
• Could not
• testify in court
• Sign contracts
• Own firearms
• Hold meetings
• Leave farm without permission
• By 1830s, Illegal to teach how to read or write
Conditions of Slave Life
•
•
•
•
some southern states passed laws to prevent slave mistreatment
Better diets than slaves in West Indies and Brazil
Paternalism
 value of slaves encourages better treatment
LIFE UNDER SLAVERY
Free Blacks in the Old South
• Slavery helped define the status of free blacks.
•
•
•
•
By the Civil War, half a million free blacks lived in the United States, the majority in the
South.
In most of the North, free blacks could not vote and had few economic opportunities.
In the South, free blacks could own their own property, could marry, and could not be
bought or sold as slaves.
But they had virtually no other rights in southern society.
•
•
•
They could not own dogs, guns, or liquor; could not strike whites, even in self-defense; and
had to carry proof of their free status.
In other American slave societies, where racial identity was less sharply distinguished, free
blacks amassed property and prestige.
In the United States, the sharp racial distinction between black and white left little room for a
mulatto class to emerge.
The Upper and Lower South
• By 1860, very few of the South’s free blacks lived in the Lower South, and those who did were
mostly in cities.
•
In New Orleans and Charleston,
• In the Upper South, where most southern free blacks lived, they worked mostly for wages as
farm labor. Some free blacks here even owned slaves.
Table 11.3 Free Black Population, 1860
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Map 11.3 Distribution of Free Blacks, 1860
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
LIFE UNDER SLAVERY
Slave Labor
• Slavery was above all a labor system, in which work occupied the entirety of slaves’
time, except for brief meals.
•
On large plantations, slaves performed all kinds of work,
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
from labor in the fields
to skilled labor like carpentry,
engineering,
and shoemaking.
Slaves also worked on steamboats, in mines, in seaports, and on railroads. Local authorities used them
to build roads and other facilities, and the federal government used them to build forts and other public
buildings.
Professionals such as merchants, lawyers, and businessmen used slaves,
and by the Civil War, 200,000 slaves worked in industries such as
• ironworks and tobacco factories.
In southern cities, slaves were used as unskilled labor and skilled artisans. A few slaves were
entrusted with great responsibilities, such as supervising other slaves, selling goods, or
handling money.
Gang Labor and Task Labor
• Most slaves, perhaps as many as 75 percent of women and 90 percent of men, worked
in the fields.
• On small farms, slaves worked alongside their owner.
• The largest concentration of slaves worked on plantations in the Cotton Belt in gangs,
directed by an overseer and maybe a slave “driver.”
• Overseers, tasked with producing large crops, were often brutal.
Map 11.4 Major Crops of the South, 1860
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
LIFE UNDER SLAVERY
Slavery in the Cities
• From the slaves’ perspective, slavery in different regions of the South could be “worse”
in some respects and “better” in others.
•
•
•
Slaves in rice fields faced harsh conditions but had more independence than other slaves
because of task labor and the absence of a large white population.
Skilled urban slave craftsmen had great autonomy and often could hire themselves out and
sometimes even keep their earnings.
Many urban slaves even lived by themselves!
Maintaining Order
• Slavery was based on force.
• Slave owners used a variety of methods to maintain order and discipline
•
Masters could inflict almost any kind of punishment, and it was the rare slave who was not
whipped at some point in his or her life.
•
•
Even minor infractions invited whipping.
Owners used subtler methods, too.
•
•
•
They exploited divisions among the slaves, especially between field hands and house servants.
They created incentives for hard work,
• such as time off
• even cash payments.
The threat of sale was the most powerful weapon owners had, since sale disrupted families and slave
communities.