Chapter 16 Notes Thanks to the American Industrial Revolution hundreds of plantation owners began to plant cotton, quickly populating

the previously deserted gulf states; the cotton plantations were always profitable, so long as the soil remained fertile, and more plantation owners in never-ending quests to become more profitable began to buy more slaves to work on their plantations. Northern shippers also reaped large profits as they transported huge loads of cotton from southern plantations to northern textile mills, or to England where cotton was exchanged for sterling silver or valuable industrial goods. In this manner both the North and the South were largely dependant on the industry of slavery, and by 1840 cotton accounted for more than half of all American exports (the south was producing more than half of the worlds cotton). Interestingly, this forced Britain to ally itself with the U.S. because one fifth of its citizens depended on the textile industry for their livelihood and 75% of the cotton used in their textiles came from the South. In the eyes of the southern planters cotton was powerful because of the international influence it wielded: in their eyes, any war with the North would cut the cotton supply to Britain which would be forced by jobless textile workers to defend the South. Before the civil war the South was effectively an oligarchy ruled by a few highly influential plantation owners, nicknamed the cottonocracy (only 1,733 families owned more than 100 slaves per family in 1850), who were the political and social elite of the South. These families often provided their children with the best educations (northern or foreign) and had time to practice intellectual pursuits which led to many of these elitists desiring to serve the public, usually as politicians (many of the best politicians of the time were from the south). However, as these rich became richer they widened the wealth gap between the rich and the poor which served to hamper taxsupported public education (the rich only used private education) and other public projects. Interestingly, a British author, Walter Scott, idealized southern society as a form of noble feudal society popularizing the notion in Britain. Elite southern women also commanded a virtual army of female slaves and servants with each mistress treating their slaves according to their own consciences (although many of these women, because of their status, were adamantly anti-abolitionist). However, the cotton industry was extremely wasteful: cotton quickly rendered soil unfertile and quick production of cotton often led to soil becoming unfertile (known as land butchery) which prompted mass immigration to the West and Northwest; as these rich plantation owners looked for new land they gradually bought their neighbors land, by the civil war many of the southern plantations were owned by an elite few. Plantation owners were also harmed as well as the value of cotton prompted many of these plantation owners to over speculate in land and slaves (notably Andrew Jackson) who, being extremely valuable (often $1,200 apiece),would be a grievous loss to the slave owner if they ran away, were injured, or died (often from disease). This system also discouraged crop diversification and the south became over dependant on a single crop which was not only dependant on market conditions, but left them largely dependant on the North for shipping and refinement of their cotton (which made many northerners rich, to the annoyance of southern plantation owners). This elitist society also discouraged immigration, because immigrants often did not have enough capital to

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begin their own cotton productions (land was expensive) and outmoded by relatively cheap slave labor (Europeans also did not know how to grow cotton very well). By 1850 more than 345,000 families owned fewer than 100 slaves (with two thirds of them owning less than 10 slaves) although only one fourth of the total white population in the south actually owned slaves; although the small slave owners did not own the majority of the slaves they were the white majority of the south, although their lifestyle resembled that of the northern farmers than that of the southern elitists. This meant that by 1850 three fourths (6,120,825 families) of the south did not own slaves at all and these families often resented the slave owning southerners, particularly the elitist families. These farmers were primarily subsistence farmers raising corn, pigs, and wheat living in largely isolated communities and only occasionally gathering at mass religious ceremonies/revivals. Although these non-slave owners often resented their slave owning betters they stoutly defended slavery because there was always the possibility that they would eventually own a slave and begin to economically better themselves; southern white farmers were also extremely proud of their racial superiority: even white trash was socially higher than blacks (so economics and racism worked together to support slavery). There were also poor white farmers who lived in isolated mountainous areas (notably the Appalachian mountains) who disdained all slave holders and viewed the tensions between the north and the south as the beginnings of a war for the rich that they as the poor would have to fight in (notably Andrew Johnson from Tennessee); these abolitionist southerners played a crucial role in the civil war, essentially becoming a forward base for the Union army to enter the South. By 1860 there were about 250,000 so called free blacks who mostly resided in the upper southern states, or the mulattos (children of blacks and southern slave owners who were freed) as well as a scattering of black slaves who were able to purchase their freedom. Many of these free blacks owned property, some of them even owned slaves (such as William T. Johnson of New Orleans). These free blacks were essentially a third race because they were bound by many black social constraints but were not actually slaves, and many were abolitionists. There were also approximately 250,000 free blacks living in the North although they were so unpopular that some states prevented free blacks from entering their borders, and blacks were especially hated by Irish immigrants with whom they competed for work (this racist hatred in the North actually served to bring about the abolitionist movement, not any humanitarianism). Interestingly, southern slave owners (often raised by black nurses) often hated blacks as a race, but like a select few, whereas in the North it was opposite (as seen by the repeated beating of Frederick Douglass, a black abolitionist and self educated lecturer, by rowdy northerners). By 1860 there were nearly 4 million slaves in the South, their numbers having quadrupled since 1800 largely due to the great demand for slave labor to produce cotton; although legal importation of slaves into the U.S. ended in 1808 a black market for slave trade smuggled in thousands of black slaves from Africa until the civil war, despite a death penalty for slavers (although if they were ever captured in the South they were often acquitted and only one slave trader was ever executed in New York). However, this massive spike in slave population came not only from slave importation

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but from natural reproduction (which made the U.S. unique among slave owning countries of the time): most plantation owners regarded their slaves as investments and so attempted to prolong their lives and allow them to have as many children as possible (by 1860 all the slaves in the South were worth $2 billion, the largest wealth investment of the time); ironically, many of the more dangerous tasks were often performed by Irish laborers who earned menial wages rather than valuable slaves. Slaves were gradually sucked down to the Deep South states (Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina) for cotton production, and these states owned more than half of the slaves in the South; this included many slaves who were sold to South cotton plantation owners by tobacco farmers who had exhausted their land and were then used as breeding chattel with women having as many as fourteen children (with many white masters forcing themselves on their slaves). As such slave auctions, although extremely brutal, were common sights in the South where blacks were sold alongside horses and raw goods; families were often separated when a master went bankrupt, one of the main complaints of the abolitionist movement and a central theme of Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin. The actual conditions that slaves lived in varied by region and household, although some overarching themes were hard work, ignorance, and oppression; both male and female slaves often worked from dawn to dusk under the threat of harsh punishment if they did not work. Slaves had no political or civil rights and were totally at the mercy of their masters, although some states banned the separation of children under 10 from their mothers (although this law was difficult to enforce as slaves were forbidden from testifying in court and their marriages were not legally recognized). Whipping was the primary form of slave control and strong willed slaves were often sent to breakers who whipped them to near death, although this was an uncommon practice as a near dead slave was a worthless slave and few planters wanted to harm their investments. The majority of the slaves in the deep south actually had harder times then the slaves in the already established south as life on the frontier was difficult for everyone; in this Deep South some plantations owned as many as twenty extended slave families and along the Mississippi river as much as 75% of town populations were composed of slaves. This led to the creation of a distinctive slave culture in which slaves cared for each other and family life was generally stable: the majority of the family separations were happening in smaller plantations in the northern South; yet, even despite these separations some slaves managed to maintain family relations and children were often named after grandparents and adopted the surname of their grandparents masters. Interestingly, slaves often avoided intermarriage while it was common in elitist white society. These slaves also preserved their roots by passing on their local religions, despite aggressive attempts at Christianization by white plantation owners, through songs and stories and by the combination of local religions and Christianization; blacks also developed a responsorial style of worship in which the audience responds to the remarks made by the preacher. Slavery also degraded the personality of slaves by depriving them of the ability to make their own choices, denying them education (with many states forbidding their education, leading to only 10% of the black population being literate by the Civil War) which could lead to discontent, and denying them the right to make themselves better

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through hard work. Due to a lack of work incentive many slaves attempted to hinder the carrying out of their masters wishes by performing only the minimum amount of work required of them, stealing food (and sometimes goods) whenever possible, sabotaging plantation equipment, and sometimes even poisoning their masters. Many slaves became runaways, often seeking for lost family members, while other slaves planned rebellions (notably rebellions in 1800 in Virginia, another in 1822 in Charlestown, and one in 1831 in Virginia that killed 60 Virginians) although these were often put down with brutal swiftness. The early abolitionist movement began around the time of the Revolution and started among the Quakers, who often wanted to send blacks back to Africa because they were so loathed in the colonies (The American Colonization Society 1817) which helped form the Republic of Liberia in 1822 (a haven for runaway slaves). However, not all slaves wanted to be transported out of the U.S. because by 1860 a large number of slaves were second generation Americans and retained few (if any) ties to their homelands traditions/language. By the 1830s, when the British abolished slavery in the West Indies (1833) and following the Second Great Awakening, the American abolitionist movement began to gain a decent following; a notable abolitionist was Theodore Dwight Weld, who campaigned for abolition until 1832 when he was able to obtain funds to go to college (where he was summarily expelled for his abolitionist views). After this expulsion, Weld and several abolitionist friends went across the country and preached an anti-slavery gospel, as well as writing the pamphlet American Slavery As It Is (which is often compared to Uncle Toms Cabin). William Lloyd Garrison, who was a fervent abolitionist and a product of the Second Great Awakening, established the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in December 1831 (he was only 26 at the time). Garrison campaigned fervently against slavery, stating that he intended to utterly destroy the institution, and went on to found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833; prominent members of this institution included Wendell Phillips (who refused to use any products made with slave labor), David Walker (a black abolitionist whose book Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World called for a bloody war to end slavery), Sojourner Truth (who campaigned for both female suffrage and black rights), Martin Delaney (one of the few black abolitionist leaders of the time to seriously consider the re-colonization effort), and Frederick Douglas. Douglas escaped slavery in 1838, at the age of 21, who worked with the abolitionist movement and gave his first public address in 1841 in Massachusetts; Douglas went on to lecture around the country (despite several public assaults), and wrote an autobiography The Life of Frederick Douglass. Garrison, advocated for secession, publicly burning a copy of the Constitution in 1854 when he saw no political means to make this happen, although he never stated how secession would abolish slavery in the South (another case of someone identifying a problem, but not offering a remedy). Douglas, however, looked to politics to resolve the slavery issue and formed the Liberty party in 1840 and the Free Soil Party in 1848, eventually joining with the Republican party in 1850; most abolitionists, even the pacifist Garrison, eventually came to support Douglas belief that a bloody war was necessary to abolish slavery.

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By the 1820s there were more abolitionist movements south of the MasonDixon line (an extension of the southern Pennsylvanian border) although by 1832 the southern abolitionist movement had been largely defeated when emancipation proposals were defeated in the Virginia legislature; this led to many southern states creating stricter slave codes and preemptively blocking possible legal emancipation of slaves. Following Nat Turners rebellion (1831) the South became increasingly paranoid and Georgia actually offered a $5,000 bounty for the arrest and conviction of William Garrison, calling Garrison a terrorist and an inciter of murder. The nullification crisis of 1832 made southern planters even more paranoid, and they began to respond with jailing, beatings, and even lynching. Proslavery whites also launched a massive propaganda effort that purported slavery as sanctioned by the Bible as well as Aristotle, stating that slaves were lifted from a state of barbarianism and Christianized; they also reinforced their argument by stating that slaves were like members of an extended family, an argument which was debatably true on certain plantations. They also pointed out that their slaves actually worked in better conditions than the wage slaves of the North who worked in factories, that their slaves had constant employment, and that they were provided for in old age and sickness by a primitive form of what would later become Social Security. These arguments widened the ideological gap between the north and the south and caused southerners to become increasingly intolerable of any questioning of the institution of slavery; this almost led to the death of freedom of speech when the South forced the Gag Resolution through Congress in 1836 which required all anti-slavery appeals to be rejected by Congress (although this was defeated 8 years later by Representative John Quincy Adams). Plantation owners also hated abolitionist propaganda and actually looted and burned a post office in Charlestown in 1835, causing the federal government grudgingly order postmasters to destroy all abolitionist propaganda and sanctioning their arrest if they refused to comply. Abolitionism, especially by extremists, was unpopular for a long time in the Northern states where citizens had been brought up to respect the entire constitution, including the clauses that allowed slavery to still exist; furthermore, they had been educated that the Union must be preserved at all costs and so they hated any talks of secession. Southern plantation owners also approximately $300 million to Northern creditors who stood to lose their money if the Union was ever dissolved (which they later did); not to mention that the northern factories were supplied with cotton by the plantation owners of the south and so were hostile to any ideas that might disrupt their businesses. In 1834 a gang broke into Lewis Tappans New York house and destroyed the interior, in 1835 Garrison was led around Boston, after being bound with a rope, by the Broadcloth Mob, and Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy was killed by a mob in 1837 after having his printing press destroyed 4 times because of his repeated criticism of southern slavery (as well as printed doubts about the chastity of Catholic women); such as the anti-abolitionist sentiment in the North that even Lincoln avoided becoming associated too closely with the movement. However, by the 1850s the resounding abolitionist call had made headway and many northerners began to view the south as an unfair and unjust society of oppression. Although few northerners were prepared to completely abolish slavery, several (such as Lincoln) opposed the addition of more slave states to the Union and became known as free soilers (gaining strength until the Civil War finally erupted).

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