 1. Machinery sales began to increase dramatically




in the early-to-mid 1800s. Who purchased a
majority of these finished products?
2. How did westward expansion impact
mechanical and agricultural innovation?
3. How did McCormick help the North, and
Whitney help the South?
4. Concerning industrial progress, what was the
American System?
5. What contributed to rising prosperity during
the early-to-mid 1800s?
 6. What more than anything contributed to




the increased sales of newspapers in the
early 1800s?
7. Who enjoyed the Minstrel shows the
most?!
8. What did PT Barnum contribute to
America?
9. Why did fiction take off as a literary
genre during this time period?
10. Define Transcendentalism.
 Forced the South to rethink slavery
 Many in Virginia began to wonder if gradual
emancipation would be a wise choice
 Others begin to double down on the
structural control of the institution
 How did this happen?
 The South gradually expanded south and west
 Indian removal made this expansion easier
 British textile industry was a boom
 Lower South was suited to the cultivation of
cotton
 Wet springs and summers, dry autumns
 Cotton requires neither expensive irrigation
canals nor costly machinery
 Did not even require an abundance of slaves
 In 1860 between 35-50% of cotton farmers did not
own slaves
 However, southern slave population nearly
doubled in the early 1800s, and cotton employed
¾ of all southern slaves
 The numbers of growth grew together
 Cotton was also compatible with the growing of
corn (planted and harvested before or after)
 Acreage of corn in the South exceeded cotton
 This did allow the South to be somewhat self
sufficient (money did not drain out of the region)
 1. residents in the Lower had come from the
Upper
 2. all white southerners benefited from the
3/5 compromise
 3. abolitionists clumped all southerner
together
 4. profitability of cotton and sugar
increased the price of all slaves throughout
the region
 North continued to urbanize; the South
continued to remain rural
 South’s urban was ½ that of New England and
the mid-Atlantic states
 Why?
 Lack of industries (only 10% of U.S.
manufacturing)
 Industrial output was less than New
Hampshire’s
 Why?
 Southern factories were small and produced for
local markets
 Examples: grain to flour; corn to meal; logs to
lumber
 Industrial slavery scared Southerners
 Too much independence
 Problem of money, not labor
 Give up slaves (status); cash crops were a “sure
thing”
 South also has an “education deficiency”
 Reluctance to tax property
 Rejection of compulsory nature
 Unconvinced of the need
 Little dependency on the written word
 Few complex economic transactions
 Planters did not care for an educated poor white
workforce
 The Planters
 The Small Slaveholders
 The Yeomen
 The People of the Pine Barrens
 Twenty+ slaves
 Plantations with a high level of division of labor
 Domestic staff, pasture staff, outdoor artisans,
indoor artisans, and field hands
 Planters vie with one another for stately
mansions
 However the wealth is in the slaves ($1700 per
slave)
 If one sells a slave, he gives up his prestigious
status
 Plantations were expensive with high fixed
costs
 Large plantation owners were often indebted
to agents
 Planters often moved and it disrupted their
social connections
 They coped by sometimes leaving the
plantations to overseers
 Plantation mistresses had many
responsibilities
 Had to deal with the abundance of
mulatto children
 88% of all slaveholders owned fewer than 20
slaves; most fewer than 10
 1 of every 5 slaves employed outside of
agriculture
 These slave holders were younger
 Nonslaveholding family farmers – largest
single group of southern whites
 Most were landowners (50-200 acres) and
did hire slaves at harvest time; most of their
acreage was subsistence crops
 Tended to settle in the upland regions
(Piedmont, hill country)
 Leading characteristic was self-sufficiency,
with modest profit; most transactions took
place within the community
 10% of southern whites
 Lived where they did by choice
 They were the evidence by northerners that
slavery degraded poor whites
 However, they could feed themselves where the
urban poor could not
 The Americans of the South are brave,
comparatively ignorant, hospitable, generous,
easy to irritate, violent in their resentment,
without industry or the spirit of enterprise.
 Alexis de Tocqueville
 Planters and urban commercial were Whig
 Yeomen tended to be Democrats
 The four social groups tended to settle in
different regions
 More mingling in the Upper South than the
Lower
 Whites did not work for whites, so there was a
certain amount of independence
 Between 1830-60 slaveholders gained an increasing
proportion of the South’s wealth
 The size of this class shrank to 25% from 36% during
that same time
 Some southerners began supporting reopening the
slave trade to cash in on status
 Others took to Hinton Helper’s The Impending Crisis
of the South
 Called on nonslaveholding class to end slavery for their
own self interest
 Why not attack the institution?
 Hope to become a slaveholder
 Acceptance of racial assumptions
 Emancipation meant a race war
 Positive good instead of a necessary evil
 Ancient civilizations had it
 Better than “wage slavery” of the North
 Religious argument began
 St. Paul’s words
 Abolitionists were trying to destroy the family
 Churches split into southern wings
 They provide the opportunity for Christian
responsibility
 Murder rate was 10X higher
 Slavery helped create the violent white




south
Honor and a sensitivity to ones reputation
Dueling was a refined alternative to
random violence of the lower classes
Recourse through the law struck many as
cowardly
Gentlemen could recognize gentlemen
 1700s and 1800s was different
 1700s- young, diverse regional origin, mostly
men
 Slave trade ended in 1808
 After that, male/female balance created a
native-born slave population
 Northern factory workers did not have drivers
 White overseers and black drivers
 Advancement within slavery was the goal for
many
 House slave often had disdain for the field
hands and poor whites
 Law provided neither recognition nor




protection of the slave family
A slave could witness the sale of 11 family
members
Marriage? Until death or distance do you
part
Slaves created their own family morality
Fictive kin
 North America is #1
 1. gender equalized more rapidly
 2. other crops, etc.
 Perennial shortage of white labor
 Slave or free, nonagricultural labor was
easier to find in the South
 No immigrants
 Lure of cotton farming to poor whites