US:
A Narrative History Volume 1 – Chapter 13 Review
The Old South
[1820-1860]
Where Is the Real South?
The impeccably dressed Colonel Daniel Jordan,
master of 261 slaves at Laurel Hill, strolls down his oak-lined lawn to the
dock along the Waccamaw River, a day's journey north of Charleston, South
Carolina, to board the steamship Nina. On Fridays, it is Colonel Jordan's
custom to visit the exclusive Hot and Hot Fish Club, founded by his fellow
low-country planters, to play a game of lawn bowling or billiards and be waited
on by black servants in livery as he sips a mint julep in the refined
atmosphere that for him is the South. Several hundred miles to the west another
steamboat, the Fashion, makes its way along the Alabama River near the village
of Claiborne. One of the passengers is upset by the boat's slow pace. He has
been away from his plantation in the Red River country of Texas and is eager to
get back. “Time's money, time's money!” he mutters to anyone who will listen.
“Time's worth more'n money to me now; a hundred percent more, 'cause I left my
niggers all alone; not a damn white man within four mile on 'em.” When asked
what they are doing, since the cotton crop has already been picked, he says, “I
set 'em to clairin', but they ain't doin' a damn thing…. I know that as well as
you do…. But I'll make it up, I'll make it up when I get thar, now you'd better
believe.” For this Red River planter, time is money and cotton is his
world—indeed, cotton is what the South is all about. “I am a cotton man, I am,
and I don't care who knows it,” he proclaims. “I know cotton, I do. I'm dam' if
I know anythin' but cotton.” At the other end of the South, the slave Sam
Williams works in the intense heat of Buffalo Forge, an iron-making factory
nine miles from Lexington, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. As a refiner,
Williams has the most important job at the forge, alternately heating pig iron
in the white-hot coals, then slinging the ball of glowing metal on an anvil,
where he pounds it with huge, water-powered hammers to remove the impurities.
Ambitious and hard working, he earns extra money (at the same rate paid to whites)
for any iron he produces beyond his weekly quota. In some years his extra
income is more than $100. His wife, Nancy, who is in charge of the dairy, earns
extra money as well, and the additional income allows them to buy extra food
and items for themselves and their four daughters. More important, it helps
keep their family intact in an unstable environment. They know that their owner
is very unlikely to sell away slaves who work so hard. For Sam and Nancy
Williams, family ties, worship at the local Baptist church, and socializing
with their fellow slaves are what make life important. In the bayous of the
Deep South, only a few miles from where the Mississippi delta meets the Gulf,
Octave Johnson hears the dogs coming. For over a year Johnson has been a
runaway slave. He fled from a Louisiana plantation in St. James Parish when the
work bell rang before daybreak and the overseer threatened to whip him for
staying in bed. To survive, he hides in the swamps four miles behind the
plantation—stealing turkeys, chickens, and pigs and trading with other slaves.
As uncertain as this life is, nearly 30 other slaves have joined him over the
past year. The sound of the dogs warns Johnson and his companions that the
hound master Eugene Jardeau is out again. This time when the pack bursts upon
them, the slaves do not flee but kill as many dogs as possible. Then they
plunge into the bayou, and as the hounds follow, alligators make short work of
another six. For Octave Johnson the real South is a matter of weighing one's
prospects between the uncertainties of alligators and the overseer's whip—and
deciding when to say no. Ferdinand Steel and his family are not forced, by the
flick of the lash, to rise at five in the morning. They rise because the land
demands it. Steel, in his 20s, owns 170 acres of land in Carroll County,
Mississippi. Unmarried, he moved there from Tennessee with his widowed mother,
sister, and brother in 1836, only a few years after the Choctaws had been forced
to give up the region and march west.His life is one of continuous hard work,
caring for the animals and tending the crops. His mother, Eliza, and sister,
Julia, have plenty to keep them busy: making soap, fashioning dippers out of
gourds, or sewing. The Steel family grows cotton, too, but not with the
single-minded devotion of the planter aboard the Fashion. Self-sufficiency and
family security always come first, and Steel's total crop amounts to only five
or six bales. His profit is never sufficient to consider buying even one slave.
In fact, he would have preferred not to raise any cotton—“We are to[o] weak
handed,” he says—but the five bales mean cash, and cash means that when he goes
to market in nearby Grenada, he can buy sugar and coffee, gunpowder and lead, a
yard or two of calico, and quinine to treat the malaria that is so common in
those parts. Though fiercely independent, Steel and his scattered neighbors
help one another to raise houses, clear fields, shuck corn, and quilt. They
depend on one another and are bound by blood, religion, obligation, and honor.
For small farmers such as Ferdinand Steel, these ties constitute the real
South. The portraits could go on and on. Different people, different Souths,
all of them real. Such contrasts underscore the difficulty of trying to define
a regional identity. Encompassing in 1860 the 15 slave states plus the District
of Columbia, the South was a land of great geographic diversity. It extended
from the Tidewater coastal plain along the Atlantic seaboard to the prairies of
Texas, from the Kentucky bluegrass region to the Gulf coast, from the mountains
of western Virginia to the swamps of the Mississippi delta with its
semitropical climate. The only geographic feature that separated the North and
South was the Ohio River, and it was an avenue of trade rather than a source of
division. Yet despite its many differences of people and geography, the South
was bonded by ties so strong, they eventually outpulled those of the nation
itself. At the heart of this unity was an agricultural system that took
advantage of the region's warm climate and long growing season. Cotton required
200 frost-free days, and rice and sugar even more, which meant that in the
United States these staples could be grown only in the South. Most important,
this rural agricultural economy was based on the institution of slavery, which
had far-reaching effects on all aspects of southern society. It shaped not only
the culture of the slaves but also the lives of their masters and mistresses,
and even of farm families and herders in the hills and backwoods who saw few
slaves in their day-to-day existence. To understand the South, then, requires
grasping how the southern agricultural economy and the institution of slavery
affected the social class structure of both white and black southerners.
The
Social Structure of the Cotton Kingdom
The spread of cotton
stimulated the nation's remarkable economic growth after the War of 1812.
Demand spurred by the textile industry sent the price of cotton soaring on the
international market, and white southerners scrambled into the unplanted lands
of the Southwest to reap the profits to be made in the cotton sweepstakes.
The Cotton Environment
This new cultivation dramatically transformed the South's
landscape, denuding countless acres covered with trees, vines, and brush.
Cotton also imposed a demanding work discipline on slaves, who cultivated
hundreds of acres, and white farming families, who tended many fewer. Typically
they planted the newly cleared land in corn for a year, just long enough for
tree stumps to decompose. In the next spring season, a heavy plow pulled by
oxen or mules cleaved the fields into deep furrows, followed by workers who
pitched cottonseed between the ridges. Then began the battle to protect the
tender, newly sprouted plants. In the spring it was crucial to thin the excess
cotton shoots and to yank out weeds throughout the summer. In years of heavy
rains when such competing vegetation flourished, masters put even their house
slaves into the fields. Otherwise a fungus might rot the cotton boll in wet
weather, or beetles like the boll weevil attack the cotton buds, or—worst of
all—the dreaded army worm invade, stripping field after field of its cotton.
Paradoxically, the more planters succeeded in opening new
lands, the easier it was for the worm (and its parent moth) to spread across an
entire region. During a summer in the 1850s, slaves on one plantation dug a
deep trench between the cotton fields on a neighboring operation, in a
desperate attempt to halt the army worms' progress. Into it they tumbled—“in
untold millions,” one observer reported, until the trench's bottom “for nearly
a mile in extent, was a foot or two deep in [a] living mass of animal life.”
Then the slaves hitched a team of oxen to a heavy log and, as they pulled it
through the ditch, “it seemed to float on a crushed mass” of army worms.
The Boom Country Economy
The difficulties of cultivation did little to discourage
white southerners' enthusiasm for cotton. Letters, newspapers, and word of
mouth all brought tales of the black belt region of Alabama, where the dark
soil was particularly suited to growing cotton, and of the tremendous yields
from the soils along the Mississippi River's broad reaches. “The Alabama Feaver
rages here with great violence and has carried off vast numbers of our
Citizens,” a North Carolinian wrote in 1817. A generation later, as the removal
of the southern Indian tribes opened vast tracts of land to white settlement,
immigrants were still “pouring in with a ceaseless tide,” one observer
reported, “including ‘Land Sharks’ ready to swallow up the home of the redmen,
or the white, as oportunity might offer.” By the 1840s planters even began to
leave Mississippi and Alabama to head for the new cotton frontier along the Red
River and up into Texas. Amazingly, by the eve of the Civil War nearly a third
of the total cotton crop came from west of the Mississippi River.As Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina boasted
in 1858, cotton was king in the Old South. By 1860 the United States produced
three-fourths of the world's supply of cotton. This boom fueled the southern
economy so strongly that following the depression of 1839–1843, the southern
economy grew faster than that in the North. Even so, per capita income in the
South remained below that of the free states, and wealth was not as evenly
distributed in the plantation South as in northern agricultural areas. Southern prosperity however, masked other basic problems
in the economy—problems that would become more apparent after the Civil War.
Much of the South's new wealth resulted from migration of its population to
more productive western lands. Once that prime agricultural land was settled,
the South could not sustain its rate of expansion. Nor did the shift in
population alter the structure of the southern economy, stimulate technological
change, improve the way goods were produced and marketed, or generate internal
markets. The single-crop agriculture practiced by southern farmers rapidly wore
out the soil. Tobacco was a particularly exhaustive crop, and corn also rapidly
drained nutrients. To restore their soils, planters and farmers in the Upper
South increasingly shifted to wheat production, but because they now plowed
their fields rather than using a hoe, this shift intensified soil erosion.
Destruction of the forests, particularly in the Piedmont, where commercial
agriculture now took hold, had the same effect, and many streams quickly silted
up and were no longer navigable. Row-crop agriculture made floods and droughts
more common. In addition, reliance on a single crop increased toxins and
parasites in the soil, making southern agriculture more vulnerable to
destruction than varied agriculture was. Only the South's low population
density lessened the impact on the environment. More remote areas remained
heavily forested, wetlands were still common, and as late as 1860 80 percent of
the region was uncultivated (cattle and hogs, however, ranged over much of this
acreage). Throughout much of the South, farmers fired the woods in the spring
to destroy insects, burn off brush, and increase grass for their browsing
stock. Perhaps the most striking environmental consequence of the expansion of
southern society was the increase in disease, especially in the Deep South.
The Rural South
The Old South was dynamic, expanding, and booming
economically. But the region remained overwhelmingly rural, with 84 percent of
its labor force engaged in agriculture in 1860, compared with 40 percent in the
North. Conversely, the South lagged in manufacturing, producing only 9 percent
of the nation's manufactured goods. During the 1850s some southern
propagandists urged greater investment in industry to diversify the South's
economy. But as long as high profits from cotton continued, these advocates made
little headway. With so little industry, few cities developed in the South. New
Orleans, with a population of 169,000 in 1860, was the only truly southern city
of significant size. Only 1 in 10 southerners lived in cities and towns in
1860, compared with 1 out of 3 persons in the North. As a rural society the
South showed far less interest in education. Southern colleges were inferior to
those in the North, and public secondary schools were virtually nonexistent.
Wealthy planters, who hired tutors or sent their children to private academies,
generally opposed a state-supported school system. Thus free public schools
were rare, especially in the rural districts that made up most of the South.
Georgia in 1860 had only one county with a free school system, and Mississippi
had no public schools outside its few cities. On average southern white
children spent only one-fifth as much time in school as did their northern
counterparts. The net result was high illiteracy rates. Among native-born white
citizens, the 1850 census showed that 20 percent were unable to read and write.
The comparable figure was 3 percent in the middle states and 0.4 percent in New
England. In some areas of the South, more than a third of all white residents
were illiterate.
Distribution of Slavery
Even more than agrarian ways, slavery set the South
apart. Whereas in 1776 slavery had been a national institution, by 1820 slavery
was confined to the states south of Pennsylvania and the Ohio River. The
South's “peculiar institution” bound white and black southerners together in a
multitude of ways. Slaves were not evenly distributed throughout the region.
More than half lived in the Deep South, where African Americans outnumbered
white southerners in both South Carolina and Mississippi by the 1850s.
Elsewhere in the Deep South the black population exceeded 40 percent in all
states except Texas. In the Upper South, however, whites greatly outnumbered
blacks. Only in Virginia and North Carolina did the slave population top 30 percent.
The distribution of slaves showed striking geographic variations within
individual states as well. In areas of fertile soil, flat or rolling
countryside, and good transportation, slavery and the plantation system
dominated. In the pine barrens, areas isolated by lack of transportation, and
hilly and mountainous regions, small family farms and few slaves were the rule.
Almost all enslaved African Americans, male and female, worked in agricultural
pursuits, with only about 10 percent living in cities and towns. On large
plantations, a few slaves were domestic servants and others were skilled
artisans—blacksmiths, carpenters, or bricklayers—but most toiled in the fields.
Slavery as a Labor System
Slavery was, first and foremost, a system to manage and
control labor. The plantation system, with its extensive estates and large
labor forces, could never have developed without slavery, nor could it have met
the world demand for cotton and other staples. Slaves represented an enormous
capital investment, worth more than all the land in the Old South. Furthermore,
slavery remained a highly profitable investment. The average slaveowner spent
perhaps $30 to $35 a year to support an adult slave. Allowing for the cost of
land, equipment, and other expenses, a planter could expect one of his slaves
to produce more than $78 worth of cotton—which meant that about 60 percent of
the wealth produced by a slave's labor was clear profit. For those who pinched
pennies and drove slaves harder, the gains were even greater. By concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the
planter class, slavery shaped the tone of southern society. Planters were not
aristocrats in the European sense of having special legal privileges or formal
titles of rank. Still, the system encouraged southern planters to think of
themselves as a landed gentry upholding the aristocratic values of pride,
honor, family, and hospitality. Public opinion in Europe and in the North had
grown more and more hostile to the peculiar institution, causing white
southerners to feel increasingly like an embattled minority. Yet they clung
tenaciously to slavery, for it was the base on which the South's economic
growth and way of life rested. As one Georgian observed on the eve of the Civil
War, slavery was “so intimately mingled with our social conditions that it
would be impossible to eradicate it.”
Class Structure of the White South
Once a year around Christmastime, James Henry Hammond
gave a dinner for his neighbors at his South Carolina plantation, Silver Bluff.
The richest man for miles around as well as an ambitious politician, the
aristocratic Hammond used these dinners to put his neighbors under personal
obligation to him as well as receive the honor and respect he believed his due.
Indeed, Hammond's social and political ambitions caused him to cultivate his
neighbors, despite his low opinion of them, by hiring them to perform various
tasks and by providing them a variety of services such as ginning their cotton
and allowing them to use his grist mill. These services enhanced his ethic of
paternalism, but his less affluent neighbors also displayed a strong personal
pride. After he complained about the inconvenience of these services, only
three of his neighbors came to his Christmas dinner in 1837, a snub that
enraged him. As Hammond's experience demonstrated, class relations among whites
in the Old South were a complex blend of privilege, patronage, and equality.
The Slaveowners
In 1860 the region's 15 states had a population of 12
million, of which roughly two-thirds were white, one-third were black slaves,
and about 2 percent were free African Americans. Because of the institution of
slavery, the social structure of the antebellum South differed in important
ways from that of the North. Even so, southern society was remarkably fluid,
and as a result, class lines were not rigid. Of the 8 million white southerners
in 1860, only about 2 million (one-quarter) either owned slaves or were members
of slaveowning families. And most slaveowners owned only a few slaves. Censuses
defined a planter as a person who owned 20 or more slaves; by that measure only
about 1 out of every 30 white southerners belonged to families of the planter
class. A planter of consequence needed to own at least 50 slaves, and there
were only about 10,000 such families—less than 1 percent of the white
population. This privileged group made up the aristocracy at the top of the
southern class structure. Owners of large numbers of slaves were rare; only
about 2,000 southerners, such as Colonel Daniel Jordan, owned 100 or more
slaves. Although limited in size, the planter class nevertheless owned more
than half of all slaves and controlled more than 90 percent of the region's
total wealth.
Tidewater and Frontier
Southern planters shared a commitment to preserve slavery
as the source of their wealth and stature. Yet in other ways they were a
diverse group. On the one hand, the tobacco and rice planters of the Atlantic
Tidewater were part of a settled region and a culture that reached back 150 to
200 years. In contrast, such states as Mississippi and Arkansas were at or just
emerging from the frontier stage, since most residents had arrived after 1815. It
was along the Tidewater, especially the bays of the Chesapeake and the South
Carolina coast, that the legendary “Old South” was born. Here, masters erected
substantial homes, some of them—especially between Charleston and Columbia—the
classic white-pillared mansions in the Greek revival style.
The ideal of the Tidewater South was the English country
gentleman. As in England, in the Tidewater South the local gentry often served
as justices of the peace, and the Episcopal church remained the socially
accepted road to heaven. Here, too, family names continued to be important in
politics. While the newer regions of the South boasted of planters with
cultivated manners, as a group the cotton lords were a different breed.
Whatever their background, whether planters, farmers, overseers, or
businessmen, these entrepreneurs had moved west for the same reason so many
other white Americans had: to make their fortunes. By and large, the cotton
gentry were self-made men who through hard work, aggressive business tactics,
and good luck had risen from ordinary backgrounds. For them, the cotton boom
and the exploitation of enslaved men and women offered the opportunity to move
up in a new society that lacked an entrenched elite. That business orientation
was especially apparent in the cotton kingdom, where planters sought to
maximize their profits and constantly reinvested their returns in land and
slaves. As one visitor said of Mississippi slaveholders: “To sell cotton in
order to buy negroes—to make more cotton to buy more negroes, ‘ad infinitum,’
is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thorough-going
cotton planter.” And indeed there was money to be made. The combined annual
income of the richest thousand families of the cotton kingdom approached $50
million, while the wealth of the remaining 666,000 families amounted to only
about $60 million. Although most planters ranked among the richest citizens in
America, their homes were often simple one- or two-story unpainted wooden frame
houses, and some were log cabins. A visitor to one Georgia plantation reported
that the house did not have a pane of glass in the windows, a door between the
rooms, or a ceiling other than the roof. Practical men, few of the new cotton
lords had absorbed the culture and learning of the traditional country
gentleman.
The Master at Home
Whether supervising a Tidewater plantation or creating a
cotton estate on the Texas frontier, the master had to coordinate a complex
agricultural operation. He gave daily instructions concerning the work to be
done, settled disputes between slaves and the overseer, and generally handed
out rewards and penalties. In addition, the owner made the critical decisions
concerning the planting, harvesting, and marketing of the crops. Planters also
watched investments and expenditures, and they often sought to expand their
production by clearing additional fields, buying more land or slaves, or
investing in machinery such as cotton gins. As in any business these decisions
required a sound understanding of the domestic and international market. In
performing his duties the plantation owner was supposed to be the “master” of
his crops, his family, and his slaves. Defenders of slavery held up this
paternalistic ideal—the care and guidance of dependent “children”—maintaining
that slavery promoted a genuine affection between caring master and loyal slaves.
Yet in real life a concern for money and profits undermined this paternalistic
ideal. Some of the most brutal forms of slavery existed on rice tidewater
plantations, where the absenteeism of many owners combined with the sheer
numbers of slaves made close personal ties impossible. Except for a few
domestic servants, owners of large plantations had little contact with their
slaves. Nor could paternalism mask the reality that slavery everywhere rested
on violence, racism, and exploitation.
The Plantation Mistress
Upper-class southern white women, like those in the
North, grew up with the ideal of domesticity, reinforced by the notion of a
paternalistic master who was lord of the plantation. But the plantation
mistress soon discovered that, given the demands placed on her, the ideal was
hard to fulfill. In her youth a genteel lady enjoyed a certain amount of
leisure. But once she married and became a plantation mistress, a southern
woman was often shocked by the size of her responsibilities. Nursing the sick,
making clothing, tending the garden, caring for the poultry, and overseeing
every aspect of food preparation were all her domain. She also had to supervise
and plan the work of the domestic servants and distribute clothing. After taking care of breakfast, one harried Carolina
mistress recounted that she “had the [sewing] work cut out, gave orders about
dinner, had the horse feed fixed in hot water, had the box filled with cork:
went to see the carpenters working on the negro houses … now I have to cut out
the flannel jackets.” Sarah Williams, the New York bride of a North Carolina
planter, admitted that her mother-in-law “works harder than any Northern
farmer's wife I know.” Sarah Pierce Vick, the mistress of a plantation near
Vicksburg, Mississippi, pauses to speak to one of her slaves, who may be holding
feed for her horse. A plantation mistress had many duties and, while enjoying
the comforts brought by wealth and status, often found her life more difficult
than she had anticipated before marriage. Unlike female reformers in the North,
upper-class southern women did not openly challenge their role, but some found
their sphere confining, especially the never-ending task of managing slaves.
Yet without the labor of slaves, the lifestyle of these women was an impossibility.
Some women drew a parallel between their situation and that of the slaves. Both
were subject to male dominance, and independent-minded women found the
subordination of marriage difficult. Susan Dabney Smedes, in her recollection
of growing up on an Alabama plantation, recalled that “it was a saying that the
mistress of a plantation was the most complete slave on it.” Many women were
deeply discontented, too, with the widespread double standard for sexual
behavior and with the daily reminders of miscegenation some had to face. A man
who fathered illegitimate children by slave women suffered no social or legal
penalties, even in the case of rape (southern law did not recognize such a
crime against slave women). In contrast, a white woman guilty of adultery lost
all social respectability. Mary Chesnut, the wife of a South Carolina planter,
knew the reality of miscegenation firsthand from her father-in-law's liaisons
with slave women. She sneered in her diary at the assumptions of male
superiority. “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with
their wives and concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly
resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of
all the mulattoes one sees in everybody's household but her own. Those, she
seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling over.” Still,
only a small minority of women questioned either their place in southern
society or the corrosive influence of slavery. Racism was so pervasive within
American society that the few white southern women who privately criticized the
institution displayed little empathy for the plight of slaves themselves,
including black women.
Yeoman Farmers
In terms of numbers, yeoman farm families were the
backbone of southern society, accounting for more than half the southern white
population. They owned no slaves and farmed the traditional 80 to 160 acres,
like northern farmers. About 80 percent owned their own land, and the rest were
tenant farmers who hoped one day to acquire a homestead. They settled almost
everywhere in the South, except in the rice and sugar districts and valuable
river bottomlands of the Deep South, which were monopolized by large
slaveowners. Like Ferdinand Steel most were semisubsistence farmers who raised
primarily corn and hogs, along with perhaps a few bales of cotton or some
tobacco, which they sold to obtain the cash needed to buy items like sugar,
coffee, and salt. Some were not so much farmers as herdsmen, who set large herds
of scrawny cattle or pigs to forage in the woods until it was time for the
annual drive to market. Yeoman farmers lacked the wealth of planters, but they
had a pride and dignity that earned them the respect of their richer neighbors.
Southern farmers led more isolated lives than their northern counterparts. Yet
the social activities of these people were not much different from those of northern
farmers. Religion played an important role at camp meetings held in late summer
after the crops were laid by and before harvest time. As in the North,
neighbors also met to exchange labor and tools, always managing to combine work
with fun. A Tennessee plain farmer recalled that his neighbors “seem to take delight
in helping each other such as laying railings, cornshucking and house raising.They tried to help each other all they could and danced
all night.” Court sessions, militia musters, political rallies—these too were
occasions that brought rural folk together. Because yeoman farmers lacked cheap
slave labor, good transportation, and access to credit, they could not compete
with planters in the production of staples. When it came to selling their corn
and wheat, small farmers conducted only limited business with planters, who
usually grew as many of their own foodstuffs as possible. In the North urban
centers became a market for small farmers, but in the South the lack of towns
limited this internal market. Thus while southern yeoman farmers were not poor, they
suffered from a chronic lack of money and the absence of conveniences that
northern farm families enjoyed, such as cast-iron stoves, sewing machines, specialized
tools, and good furniture. A few chafed at the absence of public schools and
greater opportunities. Josiah Hinds, who hacked a farm out of the isolated
woods of northern Mississippi, worried that his children were growing up
“wild.” He complained that “education is but little prized by my neighbours,”
who were satisfied “if the corn and cotton grows to perfection …and brings a
fare price, and hog meat is at hand to boil with the greens.” In some ways, then, the worlds of yeoman farmers and
upper-class planters were not only different but also in conflict. Still, a
hostility between the two classes did not emerge. Yeoman farmers admired
planters and hoped that one day they would join the gentry themselves. And even
white southerners who owned no slaves accepted slavery as a means of
controlling African Americans as members of an inferior social caste based on
race. “Now suppose they was free,” one poor farmer told Frederick Law Olmsted.
“You see they'd all think themselves as good as we.” Racism and fear of black
people were sufficient to keep nonslaveholders loyal to southern institutions.
Poor Whites
A majority of white southerners were members of
nonslaveholding yeoman farm families. Ruggedly independent, these families
depended on their own labor and lived under more primitive conditions than
large plantation owners or small farmers in the North. The poorest white
southerners were confined to land that no one else wanted: the wiregrass region
of southeastern Georgia, the sand hills of central South Carolina, the pine
barrens of the coastal plains from Virginia to southeastern Mississippi. These
southerners lived in rough, unchinked, windowless log cabins located in the
remotest areas and were often squatters without title to the land they were on.
The men spent their time hunting and fishing, while women did the domestic work
and what farming they could manage. Largely illiterate, they suffered from
malnutrition stemming from a monotonous diet of corn, pork, and whiskey, and
they were afflicted with malaria and hookworm, diseases that sapped their
energy. Other white southerners scornfully referred to poor whites as crackers,
white trash, sandhillers, and clay eaters. Numbers are hard to come by, but perhaps
5 percent of the white population comprised these poor folk. Because poor
whites traded with slaves, exchanging whiskey for stolen goods, contemptuous
planters often bought them out simply to rid the neighborhood of them. For
their part, poor whites keenly resented planters, but their hostility toward
African Americans was even stronger. Poor whites refused to work alongside
slaves or perform any work commonly done by them and vehemently opposed ending
slavery. Emancipation would remove one of the few symbols of their status—that
they were, at least, free.
The Peculiar Institution
Slaves were not free. That overwhelming fact must be
understood before anything is said about the kindness or the cruelty that
individual slaves experienced; before any consideration of healthy or unhealthy
living conditions; before any discussion of how slave families coped with
hardship, rejoiced in shared pleasures, or worshiped in prayer. The lives of
slaves were affected day in and day out, in big ways and small, by the basic
reality that slaves were not their own masters. If a slave's workload was
reasonable, it remained so only at the master's discretion, not because the
slave determined it to be. If slaves married or visited family or friends on a
nearby plantation, they did so only with the master's permission. If they
raised a family, they could remain together only as long as the master did not
separate them by sale. Whatever slaves wanted to do, they had always to consider
the response of their masters. When power was distributed as unequally as it
was between masters and slaves, every action on the part of the enslaved
involved a certain calculation, conscious or unconscious. The consequences of
every act, of every expression or gesture, had to be considered. In that sense,
the line between freedom and slavery penetrated every corner of a slave's life,
and it was an absolute and overwhelming distinction. One other stark fact
reinforced the sharp line between freedom and slavery: slaves were
distinguished on the basis of color. While the peculiar institution was an
economic system of labor, it was also a caste system based on race. The color
line of slavery made it much easier to brand black people as somehow different.
It made it easier to defend the institution and win the support of yeoman
farmers and poor white southerners, even though in many ways the system held
them back. Hence slavery must be understood on many levels: not only as an
economic system but also as a racial and cultural one, not only in terms of its
outward conditions of life and labor but also through the inner demands it made
on the soul.
Work and Discipline
The conditions slaves encountered varied widely,
depending on the size of the farm or plantation, the crop being grown, the
personality of the master, and whether he was an absentee owner. On small farms
slaves worked in the fields with the owners and had much closer contact with
whites. On plantations, in contrast, most slaves dealt primarily with the
overseer, who was paid by the size of the harvest he brought in and was
therefore often harsh in his approach. The largest plantations, which raised
rice and sugar, also required the longest hours and the most grueling labor. House
servants and the drivers, who supervised the field hands, were accorded the
highest status, and skilled artisans such as carpenters and blacksmiths also
received special recognition. Field hands, both men and women, did the hardest
work and were sometimes divided into plowhands and hoe gangs. Some planters
organized their slaves by the gang system, in which a white overseer or a black
driver supervised gangs of 20 to 25 adults. Although the approach extracted
long hours of hard labor, the slaves had to be constantly supervised and
shirkers were difficult to detect. Other planters preferred the task system,
under which each slave was given a specific daily assignment to complete, after
which he or she was finished for the day. This system allowed slaves to
work at their own pace, gave them an incentive to do careful work, and freed
overseers from having to closely supervise the work. But, as drivers also
discovered, slaves resisted vigorously if masters tried to increase the
workload. The task system was most common in the rice fields, whereas the gang
system predominated in the cotton districts. Many planters used a combination
of the two. During cultivation and harvest, slaves were in the field 15 to 16
hours a day, eating a noonday meal there and resting before resuming labor.
Work was uncommon on Sundays, and frequently only a half day was required on
Saturdays. Even so, the routine was taxing. “We … have everybody at work before
day dawns,” an Arkansas cotton planter reported. “I am never caught in bed
after day light nor is anybody else on the place, and we continue in the cotton
fields when we can have fair weather till it is so dark we can't see to work.” Often masters gave money, additional food, gifts, and
time off to slaves who worked diligently, but the threat of punishment was
always present. Slaves could be denied passes; their food allowance could be
reduced; and if all else failed, they could be sold. The most common instrument
of punishment, however, was the whip. The frequency of its use varied from
plantation to plantation, but few slaves escaped the lash entirely. “We have to
rely more and more on the power of fear,” the planter James Henry Hammond
acknowledged. “We are determined to continue masters, and to do so we have to
draw the rein tighter and tighter day by day to be assured that we hold them in
complete check.”
Slave Maintenance
Planters generally bought rough, cheap cloth for slave
clothing and each year gave adults at most only a couple of outfits and a pair
of shoes that were worn out by the end of the year. Few had enough clothing or
blankets to keep warm when the weather dipped below freezing. Some planters
provided well-built housing, but more commonly slaves lived in cramped, poorly
built cabins that were leaky in wet weather, drafty in cold, and furnished with
only a few crude chairs, benches and a table, perhaps a mattress filled with
corn husks or straw, and a few pots and dishes. To keep medical expenses down,
slaveowners treated sick slaves themselves and called in a doctor only for
serious cases. Conditions varied widely, but on average, a slaveowner spent
less than a dollar a year on medical care for each slave. Even so, the United
States was the only slave society in the Americas where the slave population
increased naturally—indeed, at about the same rate as the white population.
Nevertheless, a deficient diet, inadequate clothing and shelter, long hours of
hard toil, and poor medical care resulted in a lower life expectancy among
slaves.
Resistance
Slaves resisted the bondage imposed on them. The most
radical form of resistance was rebellion, which occurred repeatedly in slave
societies in the Americas. In Latin America, slave revolts were frequent,
involving hundreds and even thousands of slaves and pitched battles in which
large numbers were killed. The most successful slave revolt occurred in
France's sugar-rich colony Saint Domingue (the western part of the Caribbean
island of Hispaniola). There, free blacks who had fought in the American
Revolution because of France's alliance with the United States brought back the
ideals of freedom and equality. The brutally overworked population of half a
million slaves was ready to revolt and received further encouragement from the
example of the French Revolution. Under the leadership of Toussaint
L'Ouverture, rebellion led to the establishment of Haiti in 1804, the second
independent republic in the Western Hemisphere. Elsewhere, Jamaica averaged one significant slave revolt
every year from 1731 to 1823, while in 1823 thousands rose in Guiana. Jamaica,
too, witnessed an uprising, of some 20,000 slaves in 1831. These revolts, and
ones in 1823 and 1824 in British-controlled Demerara, were savagely suppressed.
And in Brazil, which had the largest number of slaves outside the United
States, the government took 50 years to suppress with military force a colony
of about 20,000 slaves who had sought refuge in the mountains. In contrast,
slave revolts were rare in the United States. Unlike in Latin America, in the
Old South whites outnumbered blacks, the government was much more powerful,
most slaves were native-born, and family life was much stronger. Slaves
recognized the odds against them, and many potential leaders became fugitives
instead. In a sense, what is remarkable is that American slaves revolted at
all. Early in the nineteenth century several well-organized uprisings in the
United States nearly materialized. In 1800 Gabriel Prosser, a slave blacksmith,
recruited perhaps a couple hundred slaves in a plan to march on Richmond and
capture the governor. But a heavy thunderstorm postponed the attack and a few
slaves then betrayed the plot. Prosser and other leaders were eventually
captured and executed. Denmark Vesey's conspiracy in Charleston in 1822 met a
similar fate. The most famous slave revolt, led by a literate slave
preacher named Nat Turner, was smaller and more spontaneous. Turner, who lived
on a farm in southeastern Virginia, was given unusual privileges by his master,
whom he described as a kind and trusting man. Spurred on by an almost fanatic
mysticism, Turner became convinced that God intended to punish white people.
One night in 1831 following an eclipse of the sun, he and six confederates
stole out and murdered Turner's master and family. Gaining some 70 recruits as
they went, Turner's band killed 57 white men, women, and children. Along the
way, the members voiced their grievances against slavery and announced that
they intended to confiscate their masters' wealth. Although the uprising was
put down and Turner executed, it left white southerners throughout the region
with a haunting uneasiness. Nat Turner had seemed a model slave, yet who could
read a slave's true emotions behind the mask of obedience? Beyond outright
rebellion, there were other, more subtle, ways of resisting a master's
authority. Running away was one. With the odds stacked heavily against them,
few runaways escaped safely to freedom except from the border states. More
frequently, slaves fled to nearby woods or swamps to avoid punishment or
protest their treatment. Some runaways stayed out only a few days; others held
out for months. Many slaves resisted by abusing their masters' property. They
mishandled animals, broke tools and machinery, misplaced items, and worked
carelessly in the fields. Slaves also sought to trick the master by feigning
illness or injury and by hiding rocks in the cotton they picked. Slaves
complained directly to the owner about an overseer's mistreatment, thereby
attempting to drive a wedge between the two.
The most common form of resistance, and a persistent
annoyance to slaveowners, was theft. Slaves took produce from the garden,
raided the master's smokehouse, secretly slaughtered his stock, and killed his
poultry. “They always told us it was wrong to lie and steal,” recalled
Josephine Howard, a former slave in Texas, “but why did the white folks steal
my mammy and her mammy? They lived over in Africa … That's the sinfullest
stealing there is.” Slaves learned to outwit their masters by wearing an
“impenetrable mask” around whites, one bondsman recalled. “How much of joy, of
sorrow, of misery and anguish have they hidden from their tormentors?”
Frederick Douglass, the most famous fugitive slave, explained that “as the
master studies to keep the slave ignorant, the slave is cunning enough to make
the master think he succeeds.
Slave Culture
Trapped in bondage, faced with the futility of revolt,
slaves could at least forge a culture of their own. By the nineteenth century,
American slaves had been separated from much of their traditional African
heritage, but that did not mean they had fully accepted the dominant white
culture. Instead, slaves combined strands from their African past with customs
that evolved from their life in America. This slave culture was most distinct
on big plantations, where the slave population was large and slaves had more
opportunity to live apart from white scrutiny.
The Slave Family
Maintaining a sense of family was one of the most
remarkable achievements of African Americans in bondage, given the obstacles
that faced them. Southern law did not recognize slave marriages as legally
binding, nor did it allow slave parents complete authority over their children.
Black women faced the possibility of rape by the master or overseer without
legal recourse, and husbands, wives, and children had to live with the fear of
being sold and separated. From 1820 to 1860 more than 2 million slaves were
sold in the interstate slave trade. Such sales separated perhaps 600,000
husbands and wives. Despite their vulnerability, family ties remained strong,
as slave culture demonstrated. The marriage ceremony among slaves varied from a
formal religious service to jumping over a broomstick in front of the slave
community to nothing more than the master giving verbal approval. Whatever the
ceremony, slaves viewed the ritual as a public affirmation of the couple's
commitment to their new responsibilities.Rather than adopting white norms, slaves developed their
own moral code concerning sexual relations and marriage. Although young slaves
often engaged in premarital sex, they were expected to choose a partner and
become part of a stable family. It has been estimated that at least one in five
slave women had one or more children before marriage, but most of these mothers
eventually married. “The Negroes had their own ideas of morality, and they held
them very strictly,” the daughter of a Georgia planter recalled. Black churches
played a leading role in condemning adultery. The traditional nuclear
family of father, mother, and children was the rule, not the exception,
among slaves. Within the marriage the father was viewed as the traditional head
of the family; wives were to be submissive and obey their husbands. Labor in
the quarters was divided according to sex. Women did the indoor work, such as
cooking, washing, and sewing, and men performed outdoor chores, such as
gathering firewood, hauling water, and tending the animals and garden plots.
The men also hunted and fished to supplement the spare weekly rations.
Songs and Stories of Protest and Celebration
In the songs they sang, slaves expressed some of their
deepest feelings about love and work and the joys and pain of life. “The songs
of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart,” commented Frederick Douglass.
Surely there was bitterness as well as sorrow when slaves sang:
We raise the wheat
They give us the corn
We bake the bread
They give us the crust
We sift the meal
They give us the husk
We peel the meat
They give us the skin
And that's the way
They take us in
Yet songs were also central to the celebrations held in
the slave quarters: for marriages, Christmas revels, and after harvest time.
And a slave on the way to the fields might sing:
“Saturday night and Sunday too - Young gals
on my mind.” Slaves expressed themselves through stories as well as song. Most
often these folktales used animals as symbolic models for the predicaments in
which slaves found themselves. In the best known of these, the cunning
Brer Rabbit was a weak fellow who defeated larger animals like Brer Fox and
Brer Bear by using his wits. Other stories were less symbolic and contained
more overt hostility to white people; slaves usually told them only among themselves.
But the message, whether direct or symbolic, was much the same: to laugh at the
master's shortcomings and teach the young how to survive in a hostile world.
The Lord Calls Us Home
At the center of slave culture was religion. The Second
Great Awakening, which had begun on the southern frontier, converted many
slaves, most of whom joined the Methodist and Baptist churches. Slaves
constituted more than a quarter of the members of both of these southern
churches. Slaveowners encouraged a certain amount of religion among slaves as
one means of social control. Masters provided slaves with a minister (often
white), set the time and place of services, and usually insisted that a white
person be present. “Church was what they called it,” one former slave protested,
“but all that preacher talked about was for us slaves to obey our masters and
not to lie and steal.”
In response, some
slaves rejected all religion, while others continued to believe in conjuring,
voodoo, and various practices derived from African religion. But most slaves
sought a Christianity firmly their own, beyond the control of the master. On
many plantations they met secretly at night, in the quarters or at “hush
harbors” in the safety of the woods, where they broke into rhythmic singing and
dancing, modeled on the ring shout of African religion. Even regular services
generated intense enthusiasm. “The way in which we worshiped is almost
indescribable,” one slave preacher recalled. “The singing was accompanied by a
certain ecstasy of motion, clapping of hands, tossing of heads….” In an
environment where slaves, for most of the day, were prevented from expressing
their deepest feelings, such meetings served as a satisfying emotional release.
Religion also provided slaves with values and gave them a sense of self-worth.
Slaves learned that God would redeem the poor and downtrodden and raise them
one day to honor and glory. Rejecting the teaching of some white ministers that
slavery was punishment, slave preachers assured their congregations that they
were the chosen people of God. “This is one reason why I believe in hell,” a
former slave declared. “I don't believe a just God is going to take no such man
as my former master into His Kingdom.” Again, song played a central role.
Slaves sang religious “spirituals” at work and at play as well as in religious
services. Seemingly meek and otherworldly, the songs often contained a hidden
element of protest. Frederick Douglass disclosed that when slaves sang
longingly of “Canaan, sweet Canaan,” they were thinking not only of the Bible's
Promised Land but also of the North and freedom. When slaves heard “Steal Away
to Jesus” sung in the fields, they knew that a secret devotional meeting was
scheduled that evening. Songs became one of the few ways that slaves could
openly express, in the approved language of Christianity, their yearning for
freedom.
The Slave Community
Although slaves managed with remarkable success to
preserve a sense of self-worth in a religion and a culture of their own, the
hard reality of slavery made it impossible to escape fully from white control.
Even the social hierarchy within the slave quarters never was entirely free
from the white world. Slave preachers, conjurers, and herb doctors held status
that no white conferred, but the prestige of a slave driver rested ultimately
on the authority of the white master. Similarly, skilled slaves and house
servants often felt superior to other slaves, an attitude masters consciously
promoted. “We house slaves thought we was better'n the others what worked in
the field,” one personal servant confessed. Light-skinned slaves sometimes
deemed their color a badge of superiority. Fanny Kemble recorded that
one woman begged to be relieved of field labor, which she considered degrading,
“on ‘account of her color.’?” But the realities of slavery and white racism
inevitably drove black people closer together in a common bond. Excluded from
the individualistic white society beyond, slaves out of necessity created a
community of their own.
Free Black Southerners
Of the 4 million African Americans living in the South in
1860, only 260,000—about 7 percent—were free. More than 85 percent of them
lived in the Upper South, with almost 200,000 in Maryland, Virginia, and North
Carolina alone. Free black southerners were also much more urban than the
southern white and slave populations. As a rule, free African Americans were
more literate than slaves, and they were disproportionately female and much
more likely to be of mixed ancestry. Most free black southerners lived in rural
areas, although usually not near plantations. A majority eked out a living
farming or in low-paying unskilled jobs, but some did well enough to own slaves
themselves. In 1830 about 3,600 did, although commonly their “property” was
their wives or children, purchased because they could not be emancipated under
state laws. Only a few were full-blown slaveowners. The boundary sometimes
blurred between free and enslaved African Americans.Sally Thomas of Nashville was technically a slave, but in
the 1830s and 1840s her owner allowed her to ply her trade as a laundress and
keep some of her wages. (She saved some $350, which she used to purchase the
freedom of one of her sons.) The boundary stretched especially for African
Americans working along rivers and the seashore in the fishing trades, as
pilots or seamen, or as “watermen” ferrying supplies and stores in small boats.
Under such conditions, laborers preserved more freedom and initiative than did
most agricultural workers. Along Albemarle Sound in North Carolina, free blacks
and slaves flocked from miles around to “fisherman's courts,” a kind of annual
hiring fair. Amid an atmosphere of drinking, carousing, cockfighting, and
boxing, men who ran commercial fishing operations signed up workers. The crews
would then go down to the shore in late February or early March to net vast
schools of fish, hauling up onto the beach over 100,000 herring in four to
seven hours. Women and children then headed, gutted, cleaned, and salted the
fish. A good “cutter” might head tens of thousands of herring a day. In such settings
African Americans, both free and slave, could share news with folk they did not
regularly see. Following Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831, southern legislatures
increased the restrictions on free African Americans. They were forbidden to
enter a new state, had to carry their free papers, could not assemble when they
wished, were subject to a curfew, often had to post a bond and be licensed to
work, and could not vote, hold office, or testify in court against white
people. Free African Americans occupied an uncertain position in southern
society, well above black slaves but distinctly beneath even poorer white
southerners. They were victims of a society that had no place for them.
Southern Society and the Defense of Slavery
From wealthy planters to yeoman farmers, from free black
slaveholders to white mountaineers, from cotton field hands to urban
craftworkers, the South was a remarkably diverse region. Yet it was united by
its dependence on staple crops and above all by the institution of slavery. As
the South's economy became more and more dependent on slave-produced staples,
slavery became more central to the life of the South, to its culture and its
identity.
The Virginia Debate of 1832
At the time of the Revolution, the leading critics of
slavery had been southerners—Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Patrick Henry
among them. But beginning in the 1820s, in the wake of the controversy over
admitting Missouri as a slave state (see page 242), southern leaders became
less apologetic about slavery and more aggressive in defending it. The turning
point occurred in the early 1830s, when the South found itself increasingly
under attack. It was in 1831 that William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his
abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. In that year, too, Nat Turner launched
the revolt that frightened so many white southerners. In response to the Turner
insurrection, a number of Virginia's western counties, where there were few
slaves, petitioned the legislature to adopt a program for gradual emancipation.
Between January 16 and 25, 1832, the House of Delegates engaged in a remarkable
debate over the merits of slavery. In the end, however, the legislature
refused, by a vote of 73 to 58, to consider legislation to end slavery. The
debate marked the last significant attempt of white southerners to challenge
the peculiar institution. In its aftermath most felt that the subject was no
longer open to debate. Instead, during the 1830s and 1840s, southern leaders
defended slavery as a positive good, not just for white people but for black
people as well. As John C. Calhoun proclaimed in 1837, “I hold that in the
present state of civilization, where two races … distinguished by color and
other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the
relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two is, instead of
an evil, a good—a positive good.”
The Proslavery Argument
White southern leaders justified slavery in a variety of
ways. Ministers argued that none of the Biblical prophets or Christ himself had
ever condemned slavery. They also pointed out that classical Greece and Rome
depended on slavery. They even cited John Locke, that giant of the
Enlightenment, who had recognized slavery in the constitution he drafted for
the colony of Carolina. African Americans belonged to an intellectually and
emotionally inferior race, slavery's defenders argued, and therefore lacked the
ability to care for themselves and required white guardianship. Proslavery
writers sometimes argued that slaves in the South lived better than factory
workers in the North. Masters cared for slaves for life, whereas northern
workers had no claim on their employer when they were unemployed, old, or no
longer able to work. In advancing this argument, white southerners exaggerated
the material comforts of slavery and minimized the average worker's standard of
living—to say nothing of the psychological value of freedom. Still, to many
white southerners, slavery seemed a more humane system of labor relations. Defenders
of slavery did not really expect to influence public opinion in the North.
Their target was more often the slaveowners. As one southern editor explained:
“We must satisfy the consciences, we must allay the fears of our own people. We
must satisfy them that slavery is of itself right—that it is not a sin against
God—that it is not an evil, moral or political. In this way only,” he went on,
“can we prepare our own people to defend their institutions.”
Closing Ranks
Not all white southerners could quell their doubts.
Still, a striking change in southern opinion seems to have occurred in the
three decades before the Civil War. Outside the border states, few white
southerners after 1840 would admit even in private that slavery was wrong.
Those who continued to oppose slavery found themselves harassed, assaulted, and
driven into exile. Southern mobs destroyed the presses of antislavery papers
and threatened the editors into either keeping silent or leaving the state.
Southern mails were forcibly closed to abolitionist propaganda, and defenders
of the South's institutions carefully scrutinized textbooks and faculty members
in southern schools. Increasingly, too, the debate over slavery spread to the
national political arena. Before 1836 Andrew Jackson's enormous popularity in
the South blocked the formation of a competitive two-party system there. The
rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s, however, left many southerners
uneasy, and when the Democrats nominated the northerner Martin Van Buren in
1836, southern Whigs seized on the issue of the security of slavery and charged
that Van Buren could not be counted on to meet the abolitionist threat. The
Whigs made impressive gains in the South in 1836, carrying several states and
significantly narrowing the margin between the two parties. During the
Jacksonian era, most southern political battles did not revolve around slavery.
Even so, southern politicians in both parties had to be careful to avoid the
stigma of antislavery, since they were under mounting pressure from John
Calhoun and his followers. Frustrated in his presidential hopes by the
nullification crisis in 1832–1833 (pages 293–294), Calhoun sought to unite the
South behind his leadership by agitating the slavery issue, introducing
inflammatory resolutions in Congress, seizing on the abolitionist mailing
campaign to demand censorship of the mails, and insisting on a gag rule to
block antislavery petitions. During the 1830s and early 1840s few southern
politicians followed his lead, but they did become extremely careful about
being in the least critical of southern institutions. They knew quite well that
even if their constituents were not as fanatical as Calhoun, southern voters
overwhelmingly supported slavery. Two remarkable transformations were sweeping
the world in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first was a series
of political upheavals leading to increased democratic participation in many
nation-states. The second, the industrial revolution, applied machine labor and
technological innovation to commercial and agricultural economies.
Although it is common to identify the industrial
revolution with New England's factories and the North's cities, that revolution
transformed the rural South too. Cotton could not have become king without the
demand created by textile factories or without the ability to “gin” the seeds
out of cotton by Eli Whitney's invention. Nor could cotton production flourish
without industrial advances in transportation, which allowed raw materials to
be shipped worldwide. As for democratic change, the suffrage was extended in
Britain by the Reform Bill of 1832, and popular uprisings spread across Europe
in 1830 and 1848. In the United States white southerners and northerners
participated in the democratic reforms of the 1820s and 1830s. The industrial
and democratic revolutions thus transformed the South as well as the North,
though in different ways. Increasingly slavery became the focus of disputes
between the two sections. The industrial revolution's demand for cotton
increased the demand for slave labor and the profits to be gained from it. Yet
the spread of democratic ideology worldwide increased pressure to abolish
slavery. France and Britain had already done so. In eastern Europe the
near-slavery of feudal serfdom was being eliminated as well: in 1848 within the
Hapsburg empire; in 1861 in Russia; in 1864 in Romania. In the mid-1840s the
contradictory pressures of the industrial and democratic revolutions would
begin to sharpen, as the United States embarked on a new program of westward
expansion that thrust the slavery issue into the center of politics. Americans
were forced to debate how much of the newly won territory should be open to
slavery; and in doing so, some citizens began to question whether the Union
could permanently endure, half slave and half free.
Chapter Overview
|
|
|
|
|
Review Questions
1. The chapter introduction
tells the stories of four Southerners-Colonel Daniel Jordan, Octave Johnson,
Ferdinand Steel, and a nameless Texan-to make the point that:
A) the antebellum South was
marked by great diversity, but at its core was unified by its slave-based
agricultural economy.
B) the
antebellum South had the reputation for being unified in its views of slavery,
but actually only a few in the South actively supported the slave-based
agricultural economy.
C) the
South was unique among the sections of the U. S. because of racist attitudes
and the speculative approach to farming that characterized all classes of its
citizens.
D) the
South was not much different from other sections, except that the income of the
majority of southerners came from slave-grown cotton, while elsewhere the
majority of Americans grew corn or wheat with their own labor.
2. As the saying goes,
"Cotton was king in the Old South." Which statement about cotton is
true?
A) It
was grown primarily in the Upper South.
B) It
was grown only by the larger slave-owners.
C) It was the primary export and
the major source of southern wealth.
D) In
the South, acreage planted to cotton exceeded acreage devoted to any other
single crop.
3. Each of the following
caused damage to the Southern environment EXCEPT:
A) the
prevalence of single-crop agriculture.
B) the
deforestation of the Piedmont.
C) the
shift to wheat cultivation.
D) the population density of the
region.
4. Which statement best
summarizes the effects of slavery on the Southern economy?
A) Wealth
generated by slave labor transformed the South from a rural to an urban
economy.
B) Slavery
was not a very profitable system, but it did lead tidewater planters to
introduce new staple crops like indigo and rice.
C) Since
planters varied in their ability to manage and control slave labor, a few
became very wealthy, while most went into debt.
D) Slavery proved to be a highly
profitable investment that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of the
planter class.
5. The legendary "Old
South" was derived from the culture of:
A) the Chesapeake Tidewater
region and the South Carolina coast.
B) the
Black Belt region of Alabama and Georgia.
C) the
region surrounding New Orleans.
D) the
frontier regions of Mississippi and Arkansas.
6. As the story of James
Henry Hammond reveals, plantation masters:
A) could
ignore the needs of non-slaveholding whites.
B) subordinated
their interests to those of their wives.
C) operated
without any significant limits to their authority.
D) had to cultivate the loyalty
of poorer whites in the region in order to maintain their social and political
power.
7. The upper-class
plantation mistress:
A) endorsed
a sexual code that kept white women pure but tolerated sexual relations between
white men and slave women.
B) lived
lives of leisure centered around artistic and literary pursuits.
C) enjoyed
the unique luxury of criticizing their own role in society as well as the slave
system in general.
D) faced an unexpected variety
of burdensome managerial and service duties.
8. Yeoman farmers:
A) had
as many conveniences as their northern counterparts.
B) tried
to compete with planters in selling cash crops.
C) shared a social life similar
to their northern counterparts.
D) developed
a hostility toward the planter class.
9. Poor whites:
A) were
spread evenly throughout the South.
B) resented
planters more than they disliked slaves.
C) suffered from malnutrition
and illiteracy.
D) often
raised themselves into the planter class.
10. The slave's diet:
A) led
to malnutrition because of insufficient calorie intake.
B) was
one among several reasons for life expectancy lower than whites.
C) was
one among several reasons for a rate of population increase lower than whites.
D) would be supplemented by
gardens, hunting, and stealing.
11. Nat Turner:
A) became
a leading advocate of slavery as a "positive good. "
B) strongly
defended humane treatment of slaves as the slave-owner’s paternalistic
obligation.
C) led a slave revolt despite
enjoying relatively humane treatment by his master.
D) was
an escaped slave who returned to the South to lead other runaways to freedom.
12. Slave revolts were
rarer in the United States than in South and Central America because:
A) southern
slaves received better treatment than other slaves.
B) the
distances between plantations were too great to organize an uprising.
C) whites outnumbered blacks in
the South, while the opposite was true in other slave regions.
D) all
of the above.
13. What is NOT true of
slave religion?
A) It
was expressed in secret meetings beyond white supervision.
B) It
was central to the culture of most slave communities.
C) It
featured songs with both earthly and heavenly applications.
D) It remained largely
unaffected by Christianity until the 1850s.
14. The Virginia debate of
1832:
A) led
to a resolution declaring slavery was a positive good.
B)caused
the legislature to condemn slavery but adopt no program to deal with it.
C) led
to the adoption of a program of gradual emancipation.
D) was the last free discussion
of slavery in a southern legislature.
15. All of the following
are elements of the proslavery argument developed in the 1830s EXCEPT:
A) the
Bible accepted the enslavement of enemies of the ancient Israelites.
B) slavery was an unfortunate
legacy of earlier tyrannical acts of the English Parliament and northern
colonial merchants.
C) southern
slaves lived better lives than northern factory workers.
D) slaves
belonged to an inferior race.
16. Despite the unique character
of the South, southerners had much in common with northerners, including all
EXCEPT:
A) most
in each section were independent small farmers.
B) most
in each section were materialistic seekers after material wealth.
C) most in each section adhered
to a Protestant denomination that provided Biblical justifications for slavery.
D) most
in each section believed in equal political and economic opportunity for
whites.
Practice Test
1. Among the features of their religion,
American slaves:
A. were expected to worship in
black churches separate from whites.
B. had mostly converted to
Islam by the early nineteenth century.
C. were usually not allowed to
attend a church at all.
D. shunned Christianity in
favor of the polytheistic traditions of Africa.
E. often incorporated African features into their
Christianity.
2. Which of the following statements
regarding urban slavery is FALSE?
A. Some urban slaves were
skilled trade workers.
B. Urban slaves were prohibited from having contact with
free blacks.
C. Urban slaves were less
supervised than rural slaves.
D. Urban slaves had little
working competition from European immigrants.
E. The line between slavery
and freedom in cities was less distinct.
3. Although most whites did not own slaves,
most supported the plantation system because:
A. it controlled the slaves.
B. they had economic ties to
it.
C. slaveholders and
nonslaveholders were often related.
D. they identified with fierce
regional loyalties.
E. All these answers are correct.
4. Slave families:
A. consistently operated on the model of the "nuclear
family."
B. condemned premarital
pregnancies.
C. generally lived on a single
plantation.
D. did not place much emphasis
on extended kinship networks.
E. emulated white family
values.
5. African American religion:
A. was condoned by the
masters.
B. emphasized deliverance in
the next world.
C. sometimes combined Christianity with traditional African
religions.
D. primarily occurred under
the guidance of white ministers.
E. encouraged slave revolts.
6. The most important economic development in
the mid-nineteenth-century South was the:
A. invention of the cotton
gin.
B. shift of economic power from the "upper South"
to the "lower South."
C. increased agricultural
diversity of the region.
D. decline in the price of
slaves.
E. spread of railroads.
7. Most white southerners owned:
A. no slaves.
B. one slave.
C. two slaves.
D. three to five slaves.
E. six to ten slaves.
8. The central ideology of slavery, and the
vital instrument of white control, was:
A. fraternity.
B. maternalism.
C. paternalism.
D. sorority.
E. egalitarianism.
9. Slave resistance in the South often took
all of the following forms EXCEPT:
A. armed revolts.
B. petty thievery.
C. work slowdowns.
D. running away.
E. All these answers are
correct.
10. Perhaps the single strongest unifying
factor of pre-Civil War southern whites was their:
A. kinship relationships.
B. contempt of northern
capitalism.
C. perception of white racial superiority.
D. fear of federal authority.
E. intense national pride.
11. Slaves were expected by their owners to
attend church.
A. True
B. False
12. Slave codes prevented slaves from owning
property, but they encouraged slaves to marry.
A. True
B. False
13. The southern planter class exercised
power far in excess of its numbers.
A. True
B. False
14. Most often, resistance to slavery took
the form of open rebellion.
A. True
B. False
15. The nuclear family was the dominant
kinship model among the slaves of the South.
A. True
B. False
16. To the degree that the South developed a
nonfarm commercial sector, it was largely to serve the needs of the ________.
plantation economy
17. A major difference between slavery in
North America and Latin America is that in Latin America, ________ were much
more frequent.
revolts
18. The "peculiar institution" was
________.
slavery
19. The ________ system of social
stratification separated individuals by various distinctions, among them
heredity, rank, profession, wealth, and race.
caste
20. Within the slave community, ________
slaves sometimes deemed their color a badge of superiority.
light-skinned
21. ________ was the leader of an aborted
slave revolt in South Carolina in the early 1820s.
Denmark Vesey
22. Most often slave folktales used ________
as symbolic models for the predicaments in which slaves found themselves.
animals
23. Particularly disturbing to southerners
was the 1831 revolt led by the slave ________.
Nat Turner
24. In the organization of slave labor, under
the ________ system a specific assignment was given to each slave, with the
incentive that the workday was over when it was completed.
task
25. ________ was the major source of southern
wealth and the major stimulus to national economic growth.
Cotton
26. The politics of slavery in the South
meant that southern candidates had to be careful to avoid being seen as
________.
antislavery
27. Some defenders of slavery used the
paternalistic ideal, where a master cared for his slaves as if they were his
________.
Children
Chapter Test
1. Within the American South, the institution
of slavery:
A. isolated blacks and whites
from each other.
B. created a unique bond
between masters and slaves.
C. encouraged blacks to
develop a society and culture of their own.
D. created a unique bond between masters and slaves, while
isolating blacks and whites from each other and encouraging blacks to develop a
society and culture of their own.
E. None of these answers is
correct.
2. Slave families:
A. consistently operated on the model of the "nuclear
family."
B. condemned premarital
pregnancies.
C. generally lived on a single
plantation.
D. did not place much emphasis
on extended kinship networks.
E. emulated white family
values.
3. The South, like the North, changed from an
agricultural to an industrial economy during this period.
A. True
B. False
4. Ways in which slaves expressed elements of
their African heritage included:
A. singing songs and through stories such as folktales,
which used animals as symbolic models for their predicament. banjo.
B. keeping family diaries and
other written personal records.
C. wearing clothing that
incorporated traditional African designs or colors.
D. speaking in their native
African languages when out of the presence of whites.
E. celebrating traditional
African feasts and rites of passage, in defiance of white law.
5. During the first half of the nineteenth
century, the "Cotton Kingdom":
A. was already losing ground
to other staples, such as rice and tobacco.
B. saw wealthy planters
outnumber small planters.
C. did not rely on large
numbers of slaves imported directly from Africa.
D. was the dominant source of the income of the lower South.
E. still had not adopted the
cotton gin, despite the time and resources it saved.
6. Which of the following was NOT a condition
of slave life in the South?
A. an adequate if rough diet
B. hard work, even for women
and children
C. the freedom to use the time after work as they wished
D. isolation and control
E. the ability to keep their
families intact
7. The "peculiar institution" was a
southern reference to:
A. the plantation.
B. manufacturing.
C. capitalism.
D. slavery.
E. democracy.
8. Most southern whites who did not own
slaves opposed slavery and resented the planter class.
A. True
B. False
9. The typical white southerner was:
A. a planter with many slaves
and a lot of land.
B. a small-town merchant or
professional man.
C. extremely poor.
D. a modest yeoman farmer.
E. a hunter/trapper.
10. Prior to 1860, free blacks in the South:
A. were concentrated in the
Deep South.
B. were required by law to
leave the South.
C. increased in number in the
1850s as laws encouraged owners to free "surplus" slaves.
D. occasionally attained wealth and prominence and owned
slaves themselves.
E. avoided urban centers such
as New Orleans or Natchez where they might attract attention.
11. The expansion of southern agriculture
from 1820 to 1860 was due to the expanded cultivation of:
A. western rice.
B. tobacco in Kentucky.
C. Louisiana sugar.
D. short-staple cotton in the Black Belt.
E. long-staple cotton on the
Carolina-Georgia coast.
12. For the most part, slaves rejected
Christianity.
A. True
B. False
13. In the South, small farmers, often as
much as great planters, were committed to the plantation system.
A. True
B. False
14. The South had a "colonial"
economy in that:
A. most of its land was owned
by outside interests.
B. it employed slave labor.
C. it produced raw materials and purchased finished
products.
D. it had little political
power.
E. it was taxed without
representation.
15. Society in the antebellum South placed
the plantation owner at the top of the social order.
A. True
B. False
