THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED
STATES 1492-1877
Slavery and the South
REVIEW QUESTIONS
• What is sectionalism, how does it differ from
nationalism in the American context?
• What were the main aspects of the states
rights movement?
• What was the central issue in the Nullification
Crisis?
• What other issue caused a major controversy
in the 1830s?
WHO AM I?
• My nickname was the Great Compromiser, I
helped to solve the Nullification Crisis
• I sent Indians accross the Mississippi River
• I developed the idea of Nullification
• I was the last president of the revolutionary
generation, I developed a doctrine as well
• I called the election of 1824, which I lost, a
corrupt bargain
ORIGINS OF SLAVERY
• Terms of domination
• Biblical origins Hamian curse: descendants of
Ham will suffer in slavery
• Jews enslaved the Canaanites
• Egyptian slavery
• Slavery in Africa
• Not race based, slaves were close to family,
sometimes treated as family members
• Caliban, Tempest
THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY
• Started by the Portuguese, Spanish
• Large scale: British
• Triangular trade, involving the New England
colonies
• Slave coast, West Africa
• New England transports rum, exchange for
slaves, return slaves via Middle Passage
• Cargo
• Amistad Middle Passage
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMliaXlKxo
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TRIANGULAR TRADE
SLAVE NARRATIVES
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SLAVE NARRATIVE
OLAUDAH EQUIANO
AUTOBIOGRAPHY –Life writing
Captivity narrative, spiritual narrative
Journey from sinner to saint
Heuristic value
Robert Southey coins the term
• Give us free
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee8NvgUR
CZs
AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Slave narratives)
• Cause of its popularity
-Individualism
-people have stories worth telling, audience is
interested
Autobiography: a mirror, revealing the depth of
one’s soul
Autobiographical I, Autobiographical eye
Autobiographical Pact: narrator, subject, writer:
IDENTICAL (Philip Lejeune)
THE NARRATIVE
• THE NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERIC
DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE (1845)
• Race, individualism, and healing as main motives
connected to religion
• Separation, Ordeal, Return (Freedom)-Indian captivity
narrative
• Separation, Ordeal, Escape
• Typology:parallels with the Old Testament
• Self-creation
• You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see
how a slave was made a man
• Conativity, conation: belief in the power of the written
word to change reality
• An individual declaration of independence
CHAPTER TEN
• I lived with Mr. Covey one year. During the first six months of that
year, scarce a week passed without his whipping me
• You are loosed from your moorings and are free, I am fast in my
chains and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale
and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift
winged angels, that fly round the world, I am confined in bands of
iron!
• You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a
slave was made a man
• This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a
slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and
revived within me a sense of my own manhood. My long crushed
spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place and I
now, resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form,
the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact
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ERRORS, MISREPRESENTATIONS
Selective memory
Recreated self
Coded language
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
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Harriet Beecher Stowe
Lyman Beecher, Unitarianism
Sentimental novel, domestic fiction
Extreme character description: Simon Legreebrutal, immoral, cruel, a rake (villain)
• Uncle Tom: slave as Christ
• Uncle Tom: accommodationist
SLAVERY IN AMERICA
• Not simultaneous with the presence of blacks
• First blacks 1619—indentured workers
• Slavery institutionalized: by the end of the
seventeenth century
• Potential cause: fear of poor whites and blacks
forming alliances, i.e. Nathaniel Bacon’s
Rebellion (1676)
• Fear of miscegenation, mixing of the races
SLAVERY IN AMERICA
• Until 1783 both North and South had slavery
• 1787: Three fifth compromise, slaves are
counted as three fifth, slave trade
compromise-importation of slaves is
prohibited after 1808
• Missouri Compromise, 1820 Congress
establishes an imaginary line at 36.30 parallel
• Slavery in the South-plantation economy
PRO-SLAVERY ARGUMENTS
• Biblical arguments: Christ did not prohibit it,
• St. Paul to Corinthians: slave should return home
to master (to tell him that he should be freed)
• Positive good, both for the slave and the owner
• Slave is in better condition than the wage slave in
the North
• Paternalistic argument: plantation is the family
plantation owner: Father, wife: Mother, slave:
Child
• Peculiar institution (southern term for slavery)
BLACK REVOLUTION VIEW
• Enslavement: emphasizing the human aspects,
slavery refers more to the institution
• Slavery is a genocide or holocaust
• Slaves died a social death: chattel, or property
• Cultural death: elimination of African culture
• But: culture preservation
• Syncretization: fusion of African and Western
elements: vodoo, hoodoo, trickster figures,
African-American folk tales Bre’r Rabbitt,
• Malitis (Mallet)
SLAVE REBELLIONS
• Several rebellions in the late 18th, early 19th
century
• 1831: Nat Turner rebellion, Southampton,
Virginia –the most significant slave rebellion
• Struck fear in the heart of slave holders
• Nat Turner claimed to have been led by a
vision
• Some viewed him as the equivalent of
Washington