I. “Cotton’s Is King!”

1. Before the 1793 invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin,
   slavery was a dying business, since the South was burdened with
   depressed prices, unmarketable goods, and over-cropped lands.
   • After the gin was invented, growing cotton became wildly profitable and easier, and more slaves were needed.
2. The North also transported the cotton to England and the rest of
   Europe, so they were in part responsible for the slave trade as well.
3. The South produced more than half the world’s supply of
   cotton, and held an advantage over countries like England, an
   industrial giant, which needed cotton to make cloth, etc…
4. The South believed that since England was so dependent on them
   that, if civil war was to ever break out, England would support the
   South that it so heavily depended on.

II. The Planter “Aristocracy”

1. In 1850, only 1733 families owned more than 100 slaves each, and
   they were the wealthy aristocracy of the South, with big houses and
   huge plantations.
2. The Southern aristocrats widened the gap between the rich and the
   poor and hampered public-funded education by sending their children to
   private schools.
   • Also, a favorite author among them was Sir Walter Scott, author of
     Ivanhoe, who helped them idealize a feudal society with them as the
     kings and queens and the slaves as their subjects.
3. The plantation system shaped the lives of southern women.
   • Mistresses of the house commanded a sizable household of mostly
     female slaves who cooked, sewed, cared for the children, and washed
     things.
   • Mistresses could be kind or cruel, but all of them did at one point
     or another abuse their slaves to some degree; there was no
     “perfect mistress.”

III. Slaves of the Slave System

1. Cotton production spoiled the earth, and even though profits were
   quick and high, the land was ruined, and cotton producers were always
   in need of new land.
2. The economic structure of the South became increasingly
   monopolistic because as land ran out, smaller farmers sold their land
   to the large estate owners.
3. Also, the temptation to over-speculate in land and in slaves caused many planters to plunge deep into debt.
   • Slaves were valuable, but they were also a gamble, since they might run away or be killed by disease.
4. The dominance of King Cotton likewise led to a one-crop economy whose price level was at the mercy of world conditions.
5. Southerners resented the Northerners who got rich at their expense
   while they were dependent on the North for clothing, food, and
   manufactured goods.
6. The South repelled immigrants from Europe, who went to the North, making it richer.

IV. The White Majority

1. Beneath the aristocracy were the whites that owned one or two, or a
   small family of slaves; they worked hard on the land with their slaves
   and the only difference between them and their northern neighbors was
   that there were slaves living with them.
2. Beneath these people were the slaveless whites (a full 3/4 of the
   white population) that raised corn and hogs, sneered at the rich cotton
   “snobocracy” and lived simply and poorly.
   • Some of the poorest were known as “poor white trash,”
     “hillbillies” and “clay-eaters” and were
     described as listless, shiftless, and misshapen.
   • It is now known that these people weren’t lazy, just sick,
     suffering from malnutrition and parasites like hookworm (which they got
     eating/chewing clay for minerals)
3. Even the slaveless whites defended the slavery system because they
   all hoped to own a slave or two some day, and they could take perverse
   pleasure in knowing that, no matter how bad they were, they always
   “outranked” Blacks.
4. Mountain whites, those who lived isolated in the wilderness under
   Spartan frontier conditions, hated white aristocrats and Blacks, and
   they were key in crippling the Southern secessionists during the Civil
   War.

V. Free Blacks: Slaves Without Masters

1. By 1860, free Blacks in the South numbered about 250,000.
2. In the upper South, these Blacks were descended from those freed by
   the idealism of the Revolutionary War (“all men were created
   equal”).
3. In the deep South, they were usually mulattoes (Black mother, White
   father who was usually a master) freed when their masters died.
4. Many owned property; a few owned slaves themselves.
5. Free Blacks were prohibited from working in certain occupations and
   forbidden from testifying against whites in court; and as examples of
   what slaves could be, Whites resented them.
6. In the North, free Blacks were also unpopular, as several states
   denied their entrance, most denied them the right to vote and most
   barred them from public schools.
7. Northern Blacks were especially hated by the Irish, with whom they competed for jobs.
8. Anti-black feeling was stronger in the North, where people liked
   the race but not the individual, than in the South, were people liked
   the individual (with whom they’d often grown up), but not the
   race.

VI. Plantation Slavery

1. Although slave importation was banned in 1808, smuggling of them
   continued due to their high demand and despite death sentences to
   smugglers
2. However, the slave increase (4 million by 1860) was mostly due to their natural reproduction.
3. Slaves were an investment, and thus were treated better and more
   kindly and were spared the most dangerous jobs, like putting a roof on
   a house, draining a swamp, or blasting caves.
   • Usually, Irishmen were used to do that sort of work.
4. Slavery also created majorities or near-majorities in the Deep
   South, and the states of South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama,
   and Louisiana accounted for half of all slaves in the South.
5. Breeding slaves was not encouraged, but thousands of slaves were “sold down the river” to toil as field-gang workers, and women who gave birth to many children were prized.
   • Some were promised freedom after ten children born.
6. Slave auctions were brutal, with slaves being inspected like
   animals and families often mercilessly separated; Harriet Beecher Stowe
   seized the emotional power of this scene in her Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

VII. Life Under the Lash

1. Slave life varied from place to place, but for slaves everywhere,
   life meant hard work, no civil or political rights, and whipping if
   orders weren’t followed.
2. Laws that tried to protect slaves were difficult to enforce.
3. Lash beatings weren’t that common, since a master could lower the value of his slave if he whipped him too much.
4. Forced separation of spouses, parents and children seem to have been more common in the upper South, among smaller plantations.
5. Still, most slaves were raised in stable two-parent households and
   continuity of family identity across generations was evidenced in the
   widespread practice of naming children for grandparents or adopting the
   surname of a forebear’s master.
6. In contrast to the White planters, Africans avoided marriage of first cousins.
7. Africans also mixed the Christian religion with their own native
   religion, and often, they sang Christian hymns as signals and codes for
   news of possible freedom; many of them sang songs that emphasize
   bondage. (“Let my people go.”)

VIII. The Burdens of Bondage

1. Slaves had no dignity, were illiterate, and had no chance of achieving the “American dream.”
2. They also devised countless ways to make trouble without getting punished too badly.
   • They worked as slowly as they could without getting lashed.
   • They stole food and sabotaged expensive equipment.
   • Occasionally, they poisoned their masters’ food.
3. Rebellions, such as the 1800 insurrection by a slave named Gabriel
   in Richmond, Virginia, and the 1822 Charleston rebellion led by Denmark
   Vesey, and the 1831 revolt semiliterate preacher Nat Turner, were never
   successful. However, they did scare the jeepers out of whites, which
   led to tightened rules.
4. 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.

IX. Early Abolitionism

1. In 1817, the American Colonization Society was founded for the
   purpose of transporting Blacks back to Africa, and in 1822, the
   Republic of Liberia was founded for Blacks to live.
   • Most Blacks had no wish to be transplanted into a strange civilization after having been partially Americanized.
   • By 1860, virtually all slaves were not Africans, but native-born African-Americans.
2. In the 1830s, abolitionism really took off, with the Second Great Awakening and other things providing support.
3. Theodore Dwight Weld was among those who were inflamed against slavery.
4. Inspired by Charles Grandison Finney, Weld preached against slavery and even wrote a pamphlet, American Slavery As It Is.

X. Radical Abolitionism

1. 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.
2. 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 wore cotton
   cloth, since both were made by slaves.
3. David Walker, a Black abolitionist, wrote Appeal to the Colored
   Citizens of the World in 1829 and advocated a bloody end to white
   supremacy.
4. Sojourner Truth, a freed Black woman who fought for black
   emancipation and women’s rights, and Martin Delaney, one of the
   few people who seriously reconsidered Black relocation to Africa, also
   fought for Black rights.
5. The greatest Black abolitionist was an escaped black, 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 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.
6. In the end, many abolitionists supported war as the price for emancipation.

XI. The South Lashes Back

1. In the South, abolitionist efforts increasingly came under attack and fire.
2. Southerners began to organize a campaign talking about
   slavery’s positive good, conveniently forgetting about how their
   previous doubts about “peculiar institution’s”
   (slavery’s) morality.
3. Southern slave supporters pointed out how masters taught their
   slaves religion, made them civilized, treated them well, and gave them
   “happy” lives.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Southerners also resented the flood of propaganda in the form of pamphlets, drawings, etc…

XII. The Abolitionist Impact in the North

1. For a long time, abolitionists like the extreme Garrisonians were
   unpopular, since many had been raised to believe the values of the
   slavery compromises in the Constitution.
   • Also, his secessionist talks contrasted against Webster’s cries for union.
2. The South owed the North $300 million by the late 1850s, and northern factories depended on southern cotton to make goods.
3. Many abolitionists’ speeches provoked violence and mob
   outbursts in the North, such as the 1834 trashing of Lewis
   Tappan’s New York House.
4. In 1835, Garrison miraculously escaped a mob that dragged him around the streets of Boston.
5. 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.
6. Yet by the 1850s, abolitionist outcries had been an impact on
   northern minds and were beginning to sway more and more toward their
   side.