1. Ch.16: The South and the Slavery Controversy

2. “Cotton is King!” THE COTTON GIN REVOLUTIONIZED PRODUCTION
Develops into a huge agricultural factory.
Quick profits attracted planters to Virginia.
Yields were bountiful and rewards were high.
Planters bought (they needed) more slaves and land to produce more cotton.
Northern shippers gained large profits from Cotton trade
Transport cotton to England, sell it, then buy manufactured goods for the US.

3. King Cotton cont.
Cotton accounted for ½ the value of exports after 1840.
South produced more than ½ of the entire world’s cotton supply.
The prosperity of both North and South rested on the backs of southern slaves.
Britain was tied to them (south) by cotton threads.
“Cotton was King,” the gin was his throne and the black bondsmen were his henchmen.

4. The Planter “Aristocracy”
Before the Civil War, the South was in some respects was an oligarchy—heavily influenced by a planter aristocracy or elite.
In 1850 only 1,733 families owned more than 100 slaves each.
Mint-Julep South of the tall-columned and white painted plantation mansion & “Cottonocracy.”
The planter aristocrats enjoyed a lion’s share of southern wealth.
They educated their children in the finest private schools.
Money provided leisure time.
They felt a sense of obligation to serve the public.

5. Cont. Dominance by a favored aristocracy was basically undemocratic.
The gap between rich and poor widened.
Hampered tax-supported public education.
Sir Walter Scott was a favorite author of elite southerners. He helped them idealize a feudal society, though their economic actives were capitalistic.
Opposed by Mark Twain
Said that Scott aroused
Southerners to fight for a
Decaying social structure.

6. Slaves of the Slave System
Plantation agriculture was wasteful.
Largely b/c King Cotton despoiled the earth.
Quick profits led to excessive cultivation, or “land butchery.”
Which caused large population to move West and NW.
The economic structure of the South became increasingly monopolistic.
Financial instability of the plantation system.
Temptation to over speculate in land and slaves.
Slaves = heavy investment of capital (perhaps $1,200 each)
Other Expenses: injury, death, run away.

7. Dangerous dependence on a one-crop economy.
System discouraged diversification of agriculture & manufacturing.
South resented North b/c they benefitted at their expense.
Increased commissions and interest in northern middlemen, banks, agents, and shippers.
(South spent their life in servitude to Yankee manufacturing)
The Cotton Kingdom also repelled large-scale European immigration.
In 1860 only 4.4% of the southern population was foreign born.
German and Irish immigration discouraged.
Competition of slave labor
High cost of fertile land
European ignorance of cotton growing

8. The White Majority Few southern whites lived in mansions.
Smaller slave owners did not own a majority of the slaves, but they made up a majority of the masters.
Lived in modest farmhouses and sweated beside their bondsmen in the cotton fields working just as hard as slaves.
The great body of whites who owned no slaves at all.
By 1860 swelled to include 75% of all whites.
They made a simple living from the thinner soils of the backcountry and the mountain valleys.
(Subsistence farmers) Raised corn & hogs –not cotton
Lived in isolation

9. Cont. Least prosperous non-slaveholding
Known also “poor white trash,” “hillbillies,” “crackers,” and “ clay eaters.”
All whites without slaves had no direct stake in the preservation of slavery, yet they were among the stoutest defenders of the slave system that existed in the South. WHY?
The idea: “American dream” of upward social mobility.
Their presumed racial superiority

10. Free Blacks: Slaves Without Masters
The South’s free blacks numbered about 250,000 by 1860.
Upper South, the free black population traced its origins to emancipation inspired by the idealism of Revolutionary days.
Deep South, many free blacks were mulattoes.
Emancipated children from white planter and his black mistress.
The free blacks in the South were a kind of “third race”
Many owned property
Vulnerable to being “high jacked” back into slavery.

11. Free blacks were also unpopular in the North
several states forbad their entrance
most denied them from the right to vote
some barred blacks from public schools
Hated by immigrants
Anti-black feeling was stronger in the North than in the South.
Fredrick Douglas
Former slave, abolitionist, and self-educated orator
Mobbed and beaten by northern rowdies.

12. Plantation Slavery
1860 there were nearly 4 million slaves in the South.
Legal importation of African slaves into America ended in when Congress outlaws slave imports.
“black ivory” was so high before the Civil War that thousands of blacks were smuggled into the South.
The increase in the slave population came not from imports but instead from natural reproduction.

13. cont. Planters regarded the slaves as investments.
They were the primary form of wealth in the South.
They were cared for as an asset is cared for by a prudent capitalist.
They were sometimes spared dangerous work.
Slave auctions were brutal
Sold along side cattle and horses
Families were separated
Perhaps slavery’s greatest psychological horror
Abolitionists criticized the practice

15. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) Had a tremendous impact.
Uncle Tom is an African American who retains his integrity and refuses to betray his fellow slaves at the cost of his life. In contrast, his tormenter Simon Legree, the Northern slave-dealer turned plantation owner, enraged them with his cruelty.
Stowe convinced readers that the institution of slavery itself was evil, Because of her work, thousands rallied to the anti-slavery cause.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

16. Life under the Lash Living conditions of slaves varied.
Slavery= hard work, ignorance, and oppression.
(men/women) toiled from dawn to dusk in the fields, under the watchful eyes and ready whip-hand of a white overseer or black “driver.”
They had no civil or political rights.
Floggings were common.
strong-willed slaves were sometimes sent to “breakers.”
savage beatings made sullen laborers
lash marks hurt resale values

18. By 1860 slaves concentration in “black belt” of the Deep South that stretched from SC and GA into the new southwest states of AL, MI, and LA.
Family life of slaves tended to be relatively stable, and a distinctive African-American slave culture developed.
Most slaves were raised in stable two-parent households.
African roots were also visible in the slaves’ religious practices.
Heavily Christianized by the evangelists of the Second Great Awakening, blacks in slavery molded their own distinctive religious forms from a mixture of Christian and African elements.

19. The Burdens of Bondage Slavery was degrading
Deprived of dignity & the right to make choices’
Denied education
The “American dream” became a cruel and empty mockery
Slaves devised countless ways to counter the “peculiar inst”
Slowed the work pace (min)
Stole food from “big house”
Sabotaged expensive equipment-stopped work

20. Slaves pined for Freedom
Run away
Others rebelled:
1800:Gabriel in Richmond, VA
1822: Denmark Vessey in Charleston, SC
1831: Nat Turner
Whites became paranoid of Black revolts, and they had to degrade themselves, along with their victims, as noted by distinguished Black leader Booker T. Washington.
Slavery left mark on whites
Fostered the brutality of the whip, the bloodhound, and the branding iron.

21. Early Abolitionism
Some efforts focused on transporting the blacks back to Africa.
American Colonization Society: 1817
Send free African-Americans to Africa as an alternative to emancipation in the United States.
Republic of Liberia: on W African coast est. for formal slaves
15,000 were transported: strange b/c they were partially Americanized
By 1860, almost all southern slaves were no longer Africans

22. In the 1830s, abolitionism really took off, with the Second Great Awakening and other things providing support.
Theodore Dwight Weld was among those who were inflamed against slavery.
Inspired by Charles Grandison Finney, Weld preached against slavery and even wrote a pamphlet, American Slavery As It Is

23. Radical Abolitionism
On January 1st, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published the first edition of The Liberator triggering a 30- year war of words and in a sense firing one of the first shots of the Civil War.
Other dedicated abolitionists rallied around Garrison, such as Wendell Phillips, a Boston patrician known as “abolition’s golden trumpet” who refused to eat cane sugar or wear cotton cloth, since both were made by slaves.
Martin Delaney: advocated mass re-colonization back to Africa.

24. The greatest Black abolitionist: Frederick Douglass, who was a great speaker and fought for the Black cause despite being beaten and harassed.
His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, depicted his remarkable struggle and his origins, as well as (duh) his life.
While Garrison seemed more concerned with his own righteousness, Douglass increasingly looked to politics to solve the slavery problem.
He and others backed the Liberty Party in 1840, the Free Soil Party in 1848, and the Republican Party in the 1850s.
In the end, many abolitionists supported war as the price for emancipation.

25. The South Lashes Back
In the South, abolitionist efforts increasingly came under attack.
Southerners began to organize a campaign talking about slavery’s positive good, conveniently forgetting about how their previous doubts about “peculiar institution’s” morality.
Southern slave supporters pointed out how masters taught their slaves religion, made them civilized, treated them well, and gave them “happy” lives.

26. They also noted the lot of northern free Blacks, now were persecuted and harassed, as opposed to southern Black slaves, who were treated well, given meals, and cared for in old age.
In 1836, Southern House members passed a “gag resolution” requiring all antislavery appeals to be tabled without debate, arousing the ire of northerners like John Quincy Adams.
Southerners also resented the flood of propaganda in the form of pamphlets, drawings, etc…

27. Abolitionist Impact (North)
For a long time, abolitionists like the extreme Garrisonians were unpopular, since many had been raised to believe the values of slavery compromises in the Constitution.
Also, his secessionist talks contrasted against Webster’s cries for union.
The South owed the North $300 million by the late 1850s, and northern factories depended on southern cotton to make goods.
Many abolitionists’ speeches provoked violence and mob outbursts in the North, such as the 1834 trashing of Lewis Tappan’s New York House.

28. In 1835, Garrison miraculously escaped a mob that dragged him around the streets of Boston.
Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy of Alton, Illinois, who impugned the chastity of Catholic women, had his printing press destroyed four times and was killed by a mob in 1837; he became an abolitionist martyr.
Yet by the 1850s, abolitionist outcries had made an impact on northern minds and were beginning to sway more and more toward their side.