Transcript for:
Slavery in the Antebellum South

foreign nickname for slavery in the Antebellum South was the peculiar institution so that's why I subtitled this The Peculiar institution and I want to start with cotton because um you can understand the importance of slavery economically and how it helped lead to the Civil War if you understand how important cotton was so by the time the Civil War happened began over half of the world's cotton was produced in the American South uh after 1840 cotton made up half of American exports and by 1860 it was three-fifths of All American exports so cotton was Central to the American economy and even more Central to the Southern economy uh in New England which you can't quite see on this map uh textile mills were the growing industry in the early 1800s they depended upon American South cotton to spin that into wool into yarn to make clothing um so in a sense you could say that the whole economy was directly or indirectly connected to slavery and connected to Cotton manufacturing even the world economy Britain which was the major industrial power in the world and which was uh its industry was based largely on textile mills also it used American cotton in those textile mills um in fact over one-fifth of American of British employment was related to the cotton industry and so it was indirectly uh related to slavery um and 80 of the cotton that it used came from the American South so that would help you understand uh one thing I'll just briefly mentioned on the eve of the sixth Civil War American Southerners who were pro-slavery who were defending slavery sometimes referred to King Cotton and their idea was that cotton was so powerful that it gave them um the freedom to consider seceding from the United States and there were some who even suspected that the north would never dare make war on the South if it seceded from the United States and if it did other countries like Great Britain would come to the South's Aid and help it uh secede help it win a war of succession and they were thinking all of this because they knew how important cotton was to the economy and they figured that would help them you know preserve their independence and of course they miscalculated so in the 1820s up until the 1820s cotton production was largely in South Carolina and Georgia but over the first half of the uh that century is spread West so actually in this top map you can see this is 1820 and areas of cotton production are here and the brown dots are slave distribution you can see the slaves are heavily uh in parts of Virginia but also in South Carolina and parts of Georgia but by 1860 cotton production has spread over the entire South and even into the eastern half of Texas and there are huge concentrations of slaves all over the entire South as well um during this time period about 1 million Slaves by 1820 to 1860 about 1 million slaves were sold from this part of the South Virginia area to the Lower South to the states like Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi and some people called this a wow an internal migration that's one of the largest internal migrations in human history as these people were transferred against their will of course South to work on these growing cotton plantations in these lower Southern States um I mentioned cotton giving Southern Planters a false sense of security about seceding and going to war um it also had a negative impact on the Southern economy even it was so big and it was so uh profitable that southerners who were plantation owners had no interest in diversifying their economy so on the eve of the Civil War compared to the north there were virtually no Industries in the South there were no banks in the South everything except the agriculture took place somewhere else in the north and they didn't realize what a how that would their economy when they seceded and when War Began but it did foreign a little bit about slave life um so the when when the first census was taken in 1790 there were 700 000 slaves in America that grew to 2 million in 1830 and 4 million by 1860. so on the eve of the Civil War about one-third of the population of the South was black and about 90 percent of them were slaves and two states blacks were the majority of the people Mississippi and South Carolina um slaves were expensive and grew more expensive on the eve of up until the Civil War in 1860 Southern slaves and their entirety were worth about two billion dollars and so this was the primary form of wealth in the South even more important I mean even more than the land itself the slaves were more valuable and this again helps you to understand the economic kind of backdrop to the Civil War uh some of these wealthy Planters who own maybe a hundred slaves thought to themselves if slavery were abolished then they would be wiped out financially that was where all their wealth was tied up in was human property um obviously that doesn't make it moral or ethical but they were but thinking purely in terms of greed that was a motivation for them uh in the 1850s a male field hand could be worth anywhere between a thousand dollars to eighteen hundred dollars a little bit about where slaves lived and worked um most slaves lived on plantations these were Estates with 20 or more slaves and three quarters of them were field workers mostly in Cotton Fields so I talked about the importance of cotton and the cotton business but also sugar plantations rice plantations and some about five percent worked in industry most slaves who worked on farms or plantations had Gardens or small farm plots to supplement their diets this uh and many of them were also allowed to work overtime for extra money has anyone seen a movie came out about 10 years ago now called 12 years of slave yeah only one person trooping great well someone has um it's a cloud it's a great movie uh it's hard to watch though but it's a great movie um one of the things about this movie which is a true story is that the uh guy who's the protagonist is a an accomplished violinist and in the movie he makes some extra money by playing at concerts and events uh in the South and that's true that's how that kind of system really worked if you had a good skill not just music but anything Brick Lane or carpentry or whatever then there were chances to make a little bit of extra money and on rare occasions even buy your own freedom in the south um as far as owning their own Gardens or small farm plots one thing I read that I thought was interesting is that uh the owners many owners figure it out right away that it was more economical to let slaves grow their own food and feed themselves than to buy food for them and also if you gave them just a tiny bit of of financial incentive or economic incentive a little tiny bit of a stake in their lives they're like having their own Gardens then they were less likely likely to run away so it wasn't so much so it wasn't at all out of kindness that the Masters let them have their own Gardens and so forth um and typically on these plantations where most slaves work Sunday was the only day off of work so the work schedule was typically sun up to sundown Monday through Saturday um on large plantations most slaves lived in two parent households on smaller plantations and Farms the spouses were often separated family headed families or female-headed families were common um and we think that up to about half of slave families were broken up by having one or the other sold away one or another spouse sold away and after emancipation in 1865 there was a great migration the great movement of slaves former slaves now looking for their wives and their husbands and children who they had sometimes been separated from for many years in the southern in the slave states uh slave codes were legal codes that regulated the lives of slaves and the content of these codes varied over the you know 250 years that slavery was legal um varied in how they were written and varied and how they were enforced but some of the characteristics of them were they might forbid slaves to own property they might forbid them to leave the Master's premises without permission to be out after dark and to congregate with other slaves except at church they were usually forbidden to testify in court against white people or to strike a white person even in self-defense now I say that things varied um for example I remember a case I don't remember the details of the names of the people but in Louisiana um a slave girl was acquitted of murder I got a white man tried to rape her and she killed him in self-defense and the jury which of course would have been all white uh acquitted of murder accepting her self-defense so it wasn't completely unheard of for slaves to have access to the courts um and as far as the others uh like not being allowed to be out after dark not being allowed to leave the premises without permission these were especially strictly enforced after rebellions and I'll talk about the Nat Turner rebellion in just a minute so outright rebellion was very rare uh I can there were only a handful of times uh where true rebellions really happened for the reason that there were mostly futile there were hopeless but there were different ways of fighting back or of um being rebellious you might say so slaves might work slowly and then efficiently because they had no economic incentive to work hard right so they would do as little as they could uh unless they were given an incentive to do better stealing Provisions was common sabotage was a way to strike back against uh harsh owners and probably most famous a form of kind of psychological or spiritual resistance religion became a very important way for slaves to express themselves and one sample of this that has carried down to today which are hopefully are all aware of are what we call Negro spirituals the songs that the slaves sang Some of which are very famous today like go down Moses Follow The Drinking Gourd and things like that now it says slave rebellions were fairly rare I'll give you three examples of slave rebellions the first was a guy named Gabriel Prosser in 1800. and this was a allegedly a conspiracy of about a thousand slaves in the area around Richmond Virginia and the idea that Gabriel Prosser had who organized this rebellion was that they would capture the state capital in Richmond and then they would negotiate for the freedom of all Virginia slaves by sort of holding the governor of Virginia hostage until they got what they wanted two slaves gave the plot away before it could be initiated and then the ring leaders like Professor were rounded up and either executed or sold away why do you think the two slaves gave the plot away they were afraid they were afraid right but it's I've heard accounts that they were afraid because they didn't want their masters to get killed right so they wanted to warn them but they didn't want to give up the plot but they gave up the plot we're gonna go through the psychological yes psychologically it's very complicated right another instance is Denmark VC in 1822 now here this is an interesting one Denmark VC was a free black man who lived near Charleston South Carolina and there were many free blacks in Charleston South Carolina there were a few places like Baltimore Richmond Charleston New Orleans where there are actually communities of free blacks that lived there for a long time so he was part of that community And he supposedly organized 9 000 slaves to Rebel and the plot again was given away I don't remember the details of how and word leaked out and the rebellion was stamped down now actually though historians are not sure there was ever any Rebellion at all there's a lot of thought that maybe the slave owners in Charleston were just really paranoid and sort of imagine the whole thing and that has been happening known to happen in other places and other times so this one the idea that there was really a conspiracy of 9 000 slaves uh historians kind of doubt now the next one Matt Turner in 1831 is undoubtedly real and this was the rare slave rebellion that actually happened so it wasn't just a plan it wasn't just a conspiracy it wasn't you know paranoia um here Denmark excuse me Nat Turner lived in Southampton County Virginia he was sort of a Preacher a religious figure and he claimed to see a vision of black and white Angels fighting in the sky and he interpreted this as a sign from God that it was time for him to lead a rebellion and he did and he and his followers killed about 60 uh white people in Virginia before they were finally defeated it took about 48 hours to overcome he and his followers him and his followers they were rounded up they were executed but even though the rebellion was over within two days it had a profound effect on American history it struck fear in the hearts of slave owners all over the South it led to a harsh uh Crackdown on slaves so things that I mentioned in the slave codes that might have not been strictly enforced were now strictly enforced like not being allowed to congregate in groups uh not being allowed to be out after dark not being allowed to leave the plantation or the premises without permission suddenly these things were strictly enforced um in fact give you one idea of something that was strictly enforced I remember looking at the Louisiana Slave Code and it was illegal and punishable by the death penalty for anyone white or black to teach a Slave how to read and because they were afraid that that led to things like this Rebellion um another thing just pops into my mind one of the reasons why they didn't want them to read the Abolitionist Movement was just getting started and abolitionists at one point tried to send anti-slavery literature through the southern males and this terrified the slave owners they thought as crazy as it sounds to you today that the slaves would be happy and content with their lives as slaves if they couldn't read the literature of abolitionists so if no one told them to be unhappy about slavery they wouldn't be and it was the literature the propaganda from the abolitionists that caused them to Rebel which you know sounds nuts but they kind of talked themselves into believing them so there was this Crackdown against anti-slavery literature and against you know the lives of slaves as well now I mentioned um that Denmark VC was one of many free blacks in the South so I want to take a second just to point that out that um there were thousands of uh black people in the South as well as in the north who were not slaves at all and might not have been slaves for Generations so in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War there were about a quarter of a million free blacks in the South and about a quarter of a million free blacks in the north so about half a million total but before the Civil War began states were cracking down on free blacks in the South they were forced to register with local authorities or to have white Guardians they had to carry papers on them at all time to prove that they were free they needed permission to move from one County to another they were not allowed to hold meetings or organizations and they were constantly at risk of being captured by slave catchers and enslaved illegally that's the plot of the movie 12 Years a Slave that I mentioned earlier the man who's a protagonist in the movie is a free black man from New York who's been his family has been free for Generations and he is traveling in a an area where slavery is legal he's actually in Washington DC and he's kidnapped and he has kind of smuggled into the Deep South Alabama I think Louisiana I think uh where you know illegally he is sold into slavery and that sort of thing uh was common so this map gives you a good little breakdown the circles are actually the uh proportions of white Southerners to enslaved Southern so in Texas for example about 30 percent of the people were slaves and Missouri about 10 percent and Louisiana about 47 but then the red slices of the pie are showing Which percentage of the population of that state was free blacks so three percent in Louisiana mostly in New Orleans uh uh one percent in South Carolina mostly in Charleston five percent Virginia mostly in Richmond and Maryland is two percent and that's mostly in Baltimore and I'll talk about all that in just a few minutes so southern white Society about this the breakdown here I just want you to understand like how many Southerners own slaves and how many didn't so what you can see from this chart is about 76 percent of white families not individuals families in the South did not own any slaves and about 20 to 25 percent owned some slaves or many slaves and if you look at the percentage by individuals I don't remember if I wrote it down but something like four percent of white Southerners own slaves four percent of white individuals about 20 to 25 percent of white families um now of the 20 to 25 percent who owned slaves usually they owned one to five one to ten slaves they weren't living on large plantations there were small farms or small plantations but there was a planter class and this is about four percent of white families and this class of people own 20 or more slaves and among this class there's a group that are large planters and we could decide we could Define them as people with 50 or more slaves this art suggests you know a tiny fraction people with a hundred or more slaves look at this part slave holders with 100 or more slaves are 0.1 percent of white Southern families but what's interesting is that this tiny fraction of the white population in the South had all the power economically politically socially they decided what the laws were and what the rules were and they pretty much controlled the southern Society and they owned half of all the slaves so almost all of the slaves and almost therefore all of the wealth of Southern Society was concentrated in a very very few hands is the main idea um the bulk the backbone of Southern Society for small farmers called Yeoman Farmers these were people who did not own slaves they owned their own land usually a few Acres um they grew their own food uh they lived off of cornbread and pork they had Hogs or cattle um they grew corn of course um mostly and they tended to be like I said not slave owners but not necessarily anti-seling just not slave owners themselves now I want to talk about a specific person because he wrote uh a narrative which he updated two or three times over the course of his life which is a fascinating look into the life of a slave in Maryland in the 1800s and of course he escaped at a young age and that allowed him the freedom to write about his experiences so Frederick Douglass was born around 1817 or so in Maryland he would go on I'm going to mention him in the next class but he would go on to escape from slavery as a Young Man and to become a famous writer and public speaker and one of the leading abolitionists of the age in fact he was such a good speaker that it was difficult for Northern audiences to believe he had ever been a Slave I'll give you an example of his writing at the end of the class and I'll ask you to remember that this is a guy who taught himself how to read and write when you when you see you know how well he can express himself so he was born into slavery in Talbot County Maryland this is a statue they have of him there he said I have no accurate knowledge of my age never having seen any authentic record containing it one historian suggested he was born in 1818 so sometime around 18 17 18. he celebrated uh February the 14th as his birthday because his mother had liked to call him her little Valentine but he didn't really know what day he was born on he was a mixed race on his mom's side he was African of course and Native American on his dad's side he was European in other words his dad was white and according to the rumors which he believed which were probably true his dad was the master the owner of the plantation so if you think about that for a second he talks about it in his biography and it's fascinating and you see stories kind of like this all through the history of slavery he grew up on his dad's Plantation but he was a slave and he knew who his dad was but he talked about how he could never address never spoke to him because he knew he would get in trouble if he did um so it's kind of weird right uh it reminds you of stories about the Jefferson family remember Jefferson uh his mistress who he bore three or four children with with several children with was not just his slave but his wife's sister right half-sister and so if you consider him and his wife and their children and the slave and he and their children I heard one historian say basically the Jefferson Plantation was a family but half of them were slaves and half of them were owners so it's just kind of messed up kind of weird and Douglas had the same situation or similar situation um his mother gave him his name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey and after he escaped to Freedom around the age of 20 years old he named himself Douglas after a family who helped him to escape he didn't have very many memories of his mother he said the the opinion was whispered that my master was my father but of the correctness of this opinion I know nothing my mother and I were separated when I was but an infant it is a common custom in the part of Maryland from which I ran away to part children from their mothers at a very early age I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day she was with me in the night she would lie down with me and get me to sleep but before I wake she was gone so he was separated from his mother on purpose to try to sever that Bond all right and he was sent to live with his grandmother his name was Betsy and who was also a Slave uh interestingly her husband his grandfather was a free black man so they were yet they were living together on the plantation um his mother was 12 miles away from him and she only had the opportunity to visit him at night he would say that he had three or four memories of her uh never during the daylight because she would do finish her work at the other Plantation walk 12 miles to see him and then walk back before Sun up the next day so she could be back at work when he was about uh eight years old he was sent to live with the family of Thomas old he was given actually to Lucretia old who was Thomas old's wife and um this was in Baltimore and what's interesting about that is in his biography Frederick Douglass said that looking back on it being sent to Baltimore was one of the luckiest events of his life and what he meant by that was if he had stayed on the plantation he would have much had much less opportunity to get to know free blacks there were lots of free black people in Baltimore and like they're like the other major cities of the South and he was kind of unnaturally intelligent anyway but he saw all these free black people around him even as a young child and it was a revelation to him he realized it was possible to be free that there was nothing inherent about him that made made him you know destined for slavery now Sophia ald was the let's see uh Lucretia ald gave him to uh her brother-in-law Hugh old and Sophia old was his wife so he was about 12 years old or so and he's living in the home of Sophia Alt and she begins to teach him the alphabet and according to him when he first got there she just she was really nice to him she would feed him properly she would clothe him properly she made sure he had you know good bedding and so forth and she took the time to show him to start teaching him how to read he described her as a kind and tender-hearted woman who treated him as she supposed one human being ought to treat another but her husband Hugh discovered that she was teaching him to read and he protested he threw a fit he said that if he learned how to read it that literacy encouraged slaves to desire freedom now remember he's a very unusually intelligent person he said he later referred to this as the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture he had ever ever heard very well thought I'd knowledge unfits a child to be a slave I instinctively ascended to the proposition and from that moment I understood the direct pathway From Slavery to Freedom in other words he's only 12. but when Hugh the master comes in sees her teaching him to read and says stop that that'll make him Want to Be Free he immediately understood this must be something I should I that will be valuable to me right he's trying to keep this away from me and that that reinforced to him the importance of so she obeyed her husband she stopped giving him lessons but he started on his own he would go play with the neighborhood boys who were all white and all in school and he would sort of arrange for them to give him little reading lessons he would just ask them what a letter sounded like what a word meant how to pronounce it and bit by bit by doing stuff like that he managed to complete his education and teach himself how to read eventually uh it didn't take them long I guess he was about 12 when he discovered a pamphlet or a book called The Colombian orator and this was a popular book that had it was an anthology of famous speeches and he read it and a lot of those speeches were about freedom about human rights there were speeches that dated back to the American Revolution so they had all the rhetoric about equality and freedom uh that came from the revolution and uh this helped him with his education and then I don't remember exactly at what age he was a teenager he was hired out to a plantation owner named William Freeland and by hiring out what I meant was it was like they would this was very common he was now the old family slave but they would hire him out to somebody else meaning that person would pay them for Douglas's work right and so they hired him out to the plantation he was supposed to go work on the plantation but he wouldn't get the money his uh the old family did and when he got there he rounded up the slaves and he started teaching them the New Testament on Sundays and when this local slaveholders found out that he was teaching the slaves how to read and teaching them the New Testament they bust in one burst in one Sunday morning with clubs and guns and broke up the meeting and didn't allow them to have any more church services or reading lessons again at one point now he's about 15 uh Thomas old sent him to work for a guy named Edward Covey Thomas old sent him to Covey because old had decided that Douglas needed to be disciplined and Covey was famous as a slave breaker and what that meant was he would basically brutalize and beat the slaves until they their rebelliousness rebelliousness was broken until their Spirit was broken and Covey whipped Douglas frequently until one day Douglas was now about 16. uh Douglas decided he couldn't take anymore I don't know if he decided but it was more instinctive he couldn't take any more Covey was beating him with a cane and he fought back and he said they fought for hours they just fought and fought until they were too exhausted to fight anymore and it kind of ended and he wasn't sure what was going to happen the next day he figured he'd get killed right he figured he was dead and then the next day Covey acted like nothing had happened and he discovered two really interesting things first he said he felt like a man for the first time in his life because he had fought for himself even though he knew it was at the risk of his own death he had finally fought for himself and he discovered also interestingly the Covey was more afraid of it being known that a slave had stood up to him then willing to punish him by having him executed for standing up to him and that taught him something interesting something psychological about how those things worked he had this phrase in in one of his books he said uh after his fight which was transforming he said you have seen how a man was made a slave you shall see how a slave was made a man he was back in Baltimore uh in 1837 and he was he had a great deal of uh free time he was working and I think if I remember correctly he was working on the docks loading and unloading ships and this was common for a slave in cities like Baltimore or New Orleans but he didn't get to keep his own wages they all had to go to his master or most of the witches he was probably allowed to keep some of it just for his living expenses but while he was there he met a woman named Anna Murray this is a picture of her but it's taken about 20 years later um and she was a free black woman they fell in love she decided they decided to that he would escape and that she would help him to escape and the plot was actually very simple what she did was she arranged for him to get the papers from a free slave who was a sailor on one of the ships coming and going from I'm in a free slip a free black man who was a sailor in one of the ships that was coming going from the harbor there in Baltimore uh so with this paper these papers he boarded a train and left Maryland just like that uh it worked uh people they they didn't suspect that he was uh the papers were fraudulent and he took the train to Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania he stayed with a family of uh uh people who later would be considered workers on the Underground Railroad people who hid slaves like him hid people like him who were freeing From Slavery um after staying for a little while in Pennsylvania in Philadelphia he continued on to New York City and from New York City I think he I think he ended up in Rhode Island and then eventually in Massachusetts where he settled and and so forth uh but when he got to New York he sent uh Murray had not accompanied him he sent word to her back in Baltimore that he had escaped and that he was now in New York she joined him and the first thing they did was they got married and this was an important psychological accomplishment for him because slaves were not allowed the legality and the formality of marriages and so this meant a lot to him to be able to formalize their relationship he said this he said I have often been asked how I felt when I first when first I found myself on Free Soil and my readers may share the same curiosity there's scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer a new world had opened upon me if light is more than breath and the quick round of blood I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life it was a time of joyous excitement which words can but teamly described in a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York I said I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions anguish and grief like darkness and Rain may be depicted but gladness and joy like the rainbow defy the skill of pen or pencil this is the home they lived in in Massachusetts after they got married they lived there for several years that's all for today I'll see y'all next