this is the first of two lectures that looks at slavery in america this lecture looks at the institution of slavery and its effects on those who were enslaved the next lecture for next week we'll look at efforts to end slavery in america the rise of the abolition movement these themes and terms focus on the south's embrace of slavery at the same time the south feared slavery and slaves themselves worked in ways small and large to resist their enslavement this slide reminds you of the changes to the economy that we went over with respect to the northern region and the west that was the lecture for monday now we're concentrating in this slide on the south and the decision that the south makes to double down on agriculture that requires labor-intensive cultivation rather than going technological the south doubles down on the need for more workers to help produce cotton harvest the technology that the south does embrace the cotton gin allowed a machine to separate the seeds from the cotton ball in the past that had been a time-consuming laborious task it had limited the ability of farms to produce cotton there was only so much you could do if you had to spend a lot of time separating the cotton from the seed now that a machine could do it you could expand the land under plow because you had a fast way to get the cotton from the field through the cotton gin and then bailed and sold but even in the south there were regional differences or intra-southern regional differences the lower south is what we come to know as the cotton kingdom where cotton is intensively produced and the wealth of the south is grounded we're talking about the states of georgia alabama louisiana and texas the northern region of the south the northern states the carolinas virginia that area is more diversified in its economy even in its agricultural production the farms tend to be not as large as the what we think of as the typical southern plantation and in reality the southern plantation is not the majority of farm farm land or farm holding in the south there are still lots of family farms and smaller smaller agricultural farms which points to divisions in wealth the south is very wealthy because of cotton overall but that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small elite across the population there was a small elite strata who were large landowners who got to dominate the economics politics and culture society in the south they were the ones who owned large numbers of slaves and as you can see there only a fraction of the southern white population owned slaves and only a fraction of that fraction owned slaves in large numbers representing membership in that elite category you owned a lot of land you owned a lot of slaves the white south was full of yeoman farmers who maybe owned a slave or two or rented them from the elite landowner at harvest time or just operated with family labor and no slaves at all there were also landless whites of poor poor whites who themselves had no resources owned no land they were hired hands in their own right but it didn't matter that slave ownership was narrowly constricted to a specific group the entire southern culture and society accepted the institution of slavery and so it remained it was promoted even if you did not own a slave you bought into a society in which race differentiated different kinds of people even if you were the poorest white that there was in the south you could still feel some power or you could be at a level above someone who was not white enslaved designation to be defined as a slave meant that you were to be black non-white and you could have the tiniest fraction of non-white blood lineage and you could still be categorized as non-white there's a small free population of blacks in the south and so they lived in this interim world in which they were not technically owned by someone but they were not even on the same level as the poorest white and that was because of their color here you see the distribution of slaves across the south as a percentage of the total population it really will matter that in some locations in the south the slave population exceeded the white population this had ramifications for rules and regulations and ways of intimidating slaves bred of fear that you owned individuals who outnumbered you slave owners in particular and whites in general in the south were frightened by the large number of slaves in the south it's an irony that you needed this large population to make the economy work at the same time that the numbers were frightening that you were at times in the minority in a world surrounded by slaves particularly in south carolina and mississippi where the number of slaves outnumbered the whites in those states population south carolina was 57 percent slave while mississippi 55 most of the lower south was in the 40 percent range of population being non-white the smallest population of non-white was in the very northern edge of the south maryland's population was only 13 percent slave regardless of where you were white society owners in particular developed ways to keep their slaves in line to prevent aggression against them to prevent the loss of slaves from the farms where they were working there's physical intimidation and psychological intimidation and they reinforced each other for example you could beat someone who broke the rules in some way that served as a lesson to the rest of the slaves so the physical intimidation of the one became the psychological intimidation of all restricted movement made it impossible for slaves to contemplate running away because they didn't know where to go or how to get there their world was artificially constrained to the farm or plantation where they lived and the exhausting sun up to sundown six and a half day a week schedule made it almost impossible to think about doing anything to gain one's freedom psychological intimidation was particularly effective with female slaves who believed if they towed the line if they did what their masters told them perhaps their families would remain intact their children would not be sold away psychological intimidation also came in the form of lack of access to things that could empower you in particular the ability to read and write and to read and write the bible to interpret the relig to interpret the religion in your own way those two things education and religious services would by law be denied to slaves by the 1840s throughout the south finally alcohol was considered a beneficence a gift to the slaves at special holiday times but there was a double intention beyond the largesse of giving your slaves a banquet and all the liquor they wanted at christmas time it kept them under control they didn't spend that time griping nor did they spend that time plotting how to get away from slavery it's a testament to their spirit that slaves somehow found ways to preserve their heritage to continue family arrangements and to resist in subtle ways the domination of their owners back before the cotton gin the organization of work had been more along task lines you had a task to do and you when you finished it the remaining time could be your own at that point slaves began to cultivate their own patches of ground that outside their slave cabins even when the cotton gin came in and the idea was that you worked time available it was never ending rather than task oriented there was still this emphasis or this holding on to some level of production on your own time it may be only that half day you have once a week or very early in the morning or even after dark that you tended your own props and oftentimes your master might even let you sell them on your day off slaves with skills could also negotiate with their masters to be hired out if you were a carpenter or a blacksmith your services might be valuable to others in the community and you could negotiate with your master to make money that way of course the master would always take a cut inside the slave community on the farms and plantations itself it is remarkable how strong the sense of community would be now it wouldn't mirror the middle class nuclear family it could not owners didn't really allow that to happen but what you do find is that there are familial arrangements that even if your birth parent is no longer there there will be other adults who will care for you and and there are a community of caregivers so in the slave community you had family but it was a more extensive kin network than the middle class uh the in white society where the emphasis was on that very tight nuclear family in the slave community overall the relationships between people was much more egalitarian men and women didn't practice the kinds of gender distinctions that you saw in the white community they couldn't afford to they did the same kind of jobs so they treated each other the same way they kept their religious independence as well in the evenings holding secret religious services that represented their way of worshipping often times very emotive very movement oriented because you are constrained to do what someone else wants you to do with your body during the day you let it fly free during your own religious experience and you emphasized different stories in the bible than your white master might emphasize your white master might point you to the passages where it says obey your master whereas the black church services the slave services would emphasize moses freeing the israelites taking them back to israel from egypt finally historians have uncovered patterns of what they call subtle but systematic resistance to slave owners you couldn't rebel outright for fear of being beaten or killed but you could do things that showed you were resisting control you could work more slowly and it played into stereotypes that the masters had of you masters presumed that slaves were not too bright that slaves were kind of slow so they didn't move too fast they were derogatory stereotypes the slaves realized them and played them up in order to lessen their labor or to grab some semblance of control from their master another example might be the master says to the slave the wagon's broken yeah i know sir well you should fix it yes i will sir what the master doesn't know is a you broke it in the first place and b you're going to take your sweet time fixing that thing what's the master going to think about that to an extent he's going to chalk it up to my slave is not too bright i urge you to watch the video that's appended separately to this to this lecture it's up on blackboard as its own item it talks about life for a slave the culture that's imposed on him by the master and the culture that he attempts to preserve for himself his own sense of identity despite all the intimidation and restrictions some slaves did plot organized rebellion we're going to look at three of them the first was gabriel prosser in richmond virginia in 1800 the second will be the denmark vc conspiracy south carolina in 1822. these two rebellions do not get beyond the plotting stage for different reasons they are uncovered before the rebellions can actually take place in some ways that's kind of immaterial because it inspired fear among the white population anyway that slaves could have some in some coordinated fashion attempted a rebellion gabriel prosser was a skilled blacksmith he had been accused about a year before he began planning for the rebellion of stealing a pig which he vehemently denied he attacked his accuser who was white for that reason he was beaten and branded he vowed to engineer a slave rebellion in his area and they would he would arm his fellow slaves they would rise up and they would move to the west he said the only whites he would leave alone were quakers and methodists that was because both of them were anti-slavery groups he spent a year in secret recruiting members and on his off time when his owner wasn't aware making weaponry in his blacksmith shop i it was sad that the plot was foiled probably by a hurricane in august the date set for the rebellion came the weather was horrific gabriel had to call it off to push it forward a few days in that window of waiting two of the slaves were forced to confess to the plot the owners in the area had gotten wind that something was going on and they wanted to know what it was so they put the screws to two slaves on a particular farm they confessed prosser was arrested and as it says there he and other organizers were hung as an example in a newspaper accounting of his execution it was asked if he had anything to say he invoked the memory of the founders george washington in particular and the idea of inalienable rights and that is what he had been pursuing now denmark vici was a former slave who had gotten his freedom and was part of a small black population in the south he was actually in charleston south carolina it was his free black church where the organizing for a rebellion was taking place the objective was to free the slaves in the area to take control of several ships in the charleston harbor and to sail to haiti where slaves had over turned or overthrown their french rulers at the end of the 1700s that never took place the bessie conspiracy again was dipped before it could take place he and others are hung the free black church is shut down the vc plot hatched by free blacks in a religious location inspires slave owners in future to demand that slaves be denied religious activity on their own the only kind of religion they should be able to get would be sanctioned by their white owners what you see here is a drawing a rendering of what gabriel prosser might have looked like we don't know for sure and then there's a statue in charleston south carolina commemorating the efforts of denmark vesey to free the slaves of south carolina matt turner's rebellion was the most frightening one for the white community and generated a backlash of brutal behavior against slaves and additional legislation clamping down on slave restrictions nat turner his inspiration came from the second great awakening in many ways he was a slave preacher self-taught and he believed in the message of individual empowerment and taking control of one's own salvation for 48 hours turner and his followers rose up on plantations across virginia attacking the owners and their families indiscriminately and then moving on to the next plantation to free another group of slaves the rebellion itself was put down fairly quickly but as i said it left a legacy of determination the white society in the south was determined to enhance its control over its slave population this slide details the harsh response by whites to the non-white population throughout the south state legislatures everywhere reasserted their fugitive slave laws in other words the laws on the books that allowed state owners in southern states to recover escaped slaves in other parts of the country but there were also new laws passed and there were laws passed regarding slaves as well as the free black population the free black population loses what we would consider to be some very basic citizenship rights the right to make your own decisions about where you live and what kind of job you hold and who you associate with the free black codes basically shut down all of those freedoms for non-whites who were not slaves in the south authorities moved beyond just regulating the non-white population in the south they aggressively moved to counter the growing movement outside the south against slavery in our next lecture we're going to look very closely at the rise of the abolition movement but in this lecture my point is that the south sees a need not just to regulate within itself but to offset to shut down growing arguments against slavery the two ways of doing this are creating your own narrative about the value and acceptability of slavery as at the same time that you assault you take on the arguments of the organized abolition movement and beat them back the south acts affirmatively to defend slavery not just to defend slavery but to offer a counter narrative about the value of slavery so it counters the abolition movement but it also says if slavery expands it should be protected within the united states because it is really a good thing the south comes up with a variety of theoretical defenses about what is good about the institution of slavery and why it should continue with protections the one of the arguments is the historical argument that every civilized society has had slavery in some form or another it slides this argument slides by the distinction of slavery in the united states that it is purely racial and it is generational rather than the result of a war one group against another which historically had been the way in which one became a slave and it did not move from generation to generation the south could point to the economic argument which you've already seen in a variety of different ways in looking at the southern economy and the importance of slavery to it and since the southern economy at the moment in the first half of the 19th century was very important overall to american economic growth that argument seemed to have some resonance there's also the uh tautology argument slavery should be legal because the law says slavery is legal now how did we make it legal we passed laws to make it legal so that's kind of a silly argument we have laws on the books that make slavery legal but nonetheless they made it anyway they got more creative with their religious and scientific arguments they pointed to those places in the bible that talked about following authority and one's master and not challenging that authority and that there were slaves held by groups in the bible the other aspect of religious justification was christianizing the slave that it was a good thing that slavery allowed for the christianizing of this population that had been without god before the owners brought christianity to the slaves it's in the scientific area where defenders of slavery become most creative they also attempt to wrap themselves in the veneer of real science the ideas are not provable but couched in language of science using science terms they seemed to have weight one of the biggest arguments was what were termed biological deficiencies differences in the development in particular of the size of the brain and that's sort of what the image on the slide is getting at there was a quasi science of the period called phrenology where one purported to be able to tell how smart what skills someone might have by analyzing the size and of one's head and the bumps on one's head the contours of one's head over time phrenology was proven to be just a silly idea by the end of the 19th century it becomes no more than a parlor game people would play the let me read your bumps phrenology game when they came together with their friends in the evenings but at the time medical so-called experts were printing papers that made it seem as though there were scientific justifications for slavery science also masked behaviors that owners didn't like rather than look at a slave and try to understand why he would want to run away it couldn't be the behavior that he endured while he was a slave no it had to be a disease specific only to non-whites drapedomania the slave running away disease that you didn't that that it wasn't you who wanted to run away but you came down with this illness that forced you to run away all told the affirmative defense of slavery was in high gear by the 1840s and 1850s