hey everybody welcome back to history 1301 the first half of US History uh today we are going to be talking about chapter 11 The Peculiar institution as Eric foner calls it in the textbook but what this title actually specifically refers to is slavery so this is going to be a pretty I guess you could say miserable or very sad uh very depressing sort of um chapter but we need to talk about these things in America's history so that we can move forward and try to make sure that things like this never happen again and also realize why America is the way that it is today now the reason why slavery was known as The Peculiar institution was because slavery actually was a very unique and very strange institution found in the American South not only did slavery make the South very distinctive it was also the source of massive agricultural wealth in that region slavery was so deeply embedded in the American South that when many people began to question in the mid 1800s why slavery could still be a thing in a nation like America why human beings could own other human beings and when people tried to reconcile the fact that slavery this institution which relied upon such cruelty and human exploitation could still exist and nation that particularly boasted of its unique and widespread freedoms white leadership in the American South began to react to some of these attacks or questions on slavery by trying to defend the institution even more vigilantly this guarded defense of slavery in the American South in the mid 1800s reinforced a growing sense of sectionalism amongst white Southerners white people living in the South began to feel personally attacked by their fellow citizens living in the North and the belief that their values in the South were the cause of a Great Divide in the United States started to become a much more recurrent problem now by the 186s The South was almost uniformly completely dedicated to growing one cash crop and that crop was cotton cotton was King and the Deep South is actually often referred to at this particular time as the cotton Kingdom But Not only was the South increasingly finding itself divided from the American North also within the South itself differences were beginning to emerge between different regions within that specific area in the south in the so-called Lower South or Deep South as you may have heard it called before the link to Cotton and slavery was incredibly strong and undeniable but in the states that that were part of the so-called upper South slavery was already relatively less important to their economy and overall life and the economy in the so-called upper south or Border South as you sometimes might hear it called was a bit more Diversified people living in the lower south felt that they could not live their lives without having access to the institution of slavery but to people living in the upper South well those people were a little bit more open to the idea of getting rid of slavery and very much felt like they could actually exist without slavery if need be so this is specifically what we're going to be talking about for the rest of this chapter even in the early Decades of the 1800s slavery was already a pretty old institution in the United States of America with abolition sort of serving as the norm in northern states the peculiar institution of slavery became unique and indeed peculiar to the American South the old Mason Dixon line which you may have heard of before as a line that demarcates the north from the South had originally been drawn by two surveyors back in the 1700s to settle a boundary dispute between the states of Maryland and Pennsylvania and in the 1800s the Mason Dixon line eventually became a dividing line between slavery in America and freedom in America and by the time we get to the Civil War the enslaved population in the United States had massively increased to nearly 4 million people and the practice of slavery had spread to States like Arkansas Louisiana and was particularly pla practiced in the Eastern portion of the State of Texas slaves made up more than onethird of the South's whole entire population and slaves were actually half or more than half of the overall population in some of the cotton growing states of the Deep South and slavery's expansion in these areas was actually due to the growth of cotton production which started to replace sugar as the world's number one most profitable major slave crop though slavery did persist in nations in the western hemisphere in Brazil and in some of the sugar islands of the West Indies Great Britain's abolition of the practice of slavery within its whole entire worldwide Empire back in the year 1833 left the United States's of United States of America as the center of the practice of slavery in the Western Hemisphere and the American Old South as it's sometimes known eventually became the largest and most powerful slave owning Society in history based on that Region's virtual worldwide Monopoly on growing cotton and Cotton's use in industrial textile manufacturing made cotton a central element of the worldwide Industrial Revolution which started originally over in Great Britain spread through Europe and then came to America and was by the time we get into the 1800s the most important commodity in terms of international trade in fact by the year 1803 even cotton was already America's most important export good by 1860 in fact the year before the Civil War started Investments of money in the value of slaves actually exceeded the value of the worth of every single one of the rest of America's factories railroads and Banks combined together think about that but the profitability of slavery ultimately Rel relied upon the constant demand for cotton outside of the American South and this grew at an annual rate of about 5% every year more more demand for cotton every single year between 1800 and 1850 now for the most part British textile mills were the largest market the largest buyers of southern grown cotton and the South actually produced or provided the nation of Great Britain with about 77% of all of the raw cotton it used in its factories and the South also produced other European countries like France with about 90% of the cotton that they used in their factories Southern law in America specifically defined enslaved people as what is known as chatt chatt specifically means that something is the personal property of their owners and slaves who were defined as chatt were not legally considered to be human beings now the international or transatlantic slave trade had been banned in America ever since 1808 but slave owners living in the South before the ban was implemented knew that this ban was coming eventually and so between the time of the writing in the ratification of the American Constitution in 1788 and the year 1808 American slave owners tried to import to America as many slaves from Africa as they possibly could could in an effort to get as many slaves into America before that International Trade ban took Force but from that point on from 1808 on slavery began to increase naturally meaning that enslaved people are going to start having children and their population increase was actually natural so to replace the international slave trade that was banned in the United States in 1808 immediately A Massive Internal slave trade within the United States itself did develop more than 2 million enslaved people were sold inside of the United United States between the years 1820 and 1860 and many of those enslaved people were transported down into the states of the Deep South to start working on new cotton plantations slave Traders though did not hesitate to split apart entire slave families and in fact about half of all slave sales in the American South in one way or another separated slave families virtually every single slave owner in the American South at one point or another had to buy or sell slaves over the course of their life and even if a person did not personally own any slaves almost everyone who lived in the south in one way or another as long as you were white ended up benefiting from the practice of slavery overall for example Southern newspapers made money by advertising slave sales southern Banks helped to finance the internal slave trade that developed and people who worked on and financed Southern shipping and railroads uh made money by carrying and transporting slaves throughout the southern states and even individual state governments and municipalities made money every time a slave was sold through taxation what developed as the cotton Kingdom in the South would never have developed without the internal American slave trade and part of the reason why slaves were being traded into the deep south at this time was because plantations on older uh slave plantations on the East Coast started to eventually depend on the sale of their of their slaves to plantations in the Deep South simply to make a livelihood the plantation owners of the Lower South very much resisted urbanization and industrialization because the growth of cities and the growth of factories were perceived by those slave owners as threats to the Contin ation of slavery now it's not necessarily that these slave owners were opposed to Innovation or new technologies they especially were interested in new technologies that might help them increase their profits but these slave owners were worried that all of the social changes that usually happened when urbanization and industrialization happened might eventually come to threaten the stability of slavery as an institution in the South and as a result the American South did not end up creating very many big urban areas it did serve the purposes of Slavery to keep most expansive areas where agriculture was being performed for money to keep those areas incredibly rural um it also served the purposes of slavery and slave owners to use the most land possible for planting your cash crops and to keep your slaves working constantly around the clock and for furthermore isolated from outside groups most slave owners suspected very deeply that urbanized environments ultimately weakened the institution of slavery but this is not to say that slaves did not exist in the few Urban environments that were in the south at the time because they absolutely did um slaves who lived in urban areas of the South were usually Artisans semiskilled workers or domestic workers some Urban slaves even worked inside of their masters or their owners uh craft-based workshop and helped them run the store some Urban slaves even lived completely separately from their owners and had a slightly more um tangible availability of individual Freedom living in a city but the bottom line here is that the authority of the slave owner was perceived as much less clearcut in a city area than it was in a rural country setting and eventually over time Urban slavery declined pretty precipitously between the years 1820 and 1860 and there were some slaves very few slaves but they did actually work in some of the few factories that existed down in the South but no more than 5% of all slaves living in the Lower South ever actually worked in any sort of industrialized factories and industrialized factories just as a reminder were few and far between and there really weren't any outside of urbanized areas throughout the rest of most of the South leev James cranstone an English artist created this painting in 1862 which was titled slave auction Virginia cranston's rendering of the Interior world of the auction house here highlights the commercial and economic base upon which the institution of slavery rested and I want you to take note of people's faces in this particular painting uh people who were being sold at auction at auctions like this that's be that's depicted in this picture people were actually being bought and sold like property at slave auctions and slaves again were legally defined as chatt a word which is defined in law as a quote movable article of personal property any article of tangible property other than land or buildings A Slave and look at how uh the prospective slave owner in the center of the picture in that sort of pink jacket is inspecting the people that he might potentially end up buying and look at the humiliation on the face of the woman on the far left of the image in the red and white stripe dress who is currently at the time being auctioned off this map shows that rather than being thoroughly and evenly distributed all throughout the South slave populations were actually highly concentrated usually in areas with the most fertile soil and the easiest access to National and international markets uh this map of the southeastern United States shows what the slave population was in various places in the year 1860 notice that the highest concentration of enslaved people was in the state of South Carolina and then all along the Atlantic Coastline up to Northern North Carolina Virginia and Maryland other High concentrations of slave populations occurred all along the Mississippi River in the middle parts of Alabama and Georgia and in parts of Tennessee and Kentucky as well and this chart shows the slave population in America from the years 1790 to 1860 the number of slaves in America in those 70 years grew from under 1 million people about 695,000 people to almost 4 m million enslaved people in that brief little window of time and this is a photograph of a man named Frederick Douglas Frederick was born as a slave in the year 1818 to an enslaved mother and a still unidentified white father implying that he was probably born as the result of a coerced or forced sexual Arrangement between his mother and the man who turned out to be his father but Frederick Douglas later on when he became an adult ended up being a major figure in the American abolition movement now as an enslaved child Frederick Douglas actually learned to read and write which was technically against the law in his home state of Maryland it was his owner's wife that actually became his first teacher but when her husband Frederick's owner found out about the reading and writing lessons he beat Frederick and then forbade any further lessons so from there on Young Frederick Douglas finished up his education and learned a little bit more from local white children who lived in the area and then at the age of 15 after a number of particularly brutal whippings Frederick decided from that moment on that he would no longer allow any further physical punishments a few years later he managed to borrow the identification papers of a free black Sailor and he used those papers to escape to freedom in the year 1838 once Frederick Douglas was free he became a massive Advocate not only of the abolition of slavery but he also was one of the first American people to call for complete Racial equality later on Frederick Douglas went on speaking tours all throughout the American North and over in Great Britain and other places in Europe speaking out as vifly as he possibly could against the American practice of slavery and as it turns out Frederick Douglas was a very convincing and charisma atic speaker and his accomplishments went completely against the popular theory that many white people held at the time that black people were born naturally inferior to all white people and during the fighting of the Civil War Frederick dougas even personally advised President Abraham Lincoln actually suggesting to President Lincoln that the US should start allowing black soldiers to serve and he specifically mentioned to President Lincoln in what capacities those black soldiers should serve and even after President Lincoln's assassination he later advised on black voting rights in this country although northern states in America abolished the practice of slavery years ago the practice of slavery in the South still affected them nonetheless the American Constitution did give disproportionate power to Southern States in both the House of Representatives and the Electoral College and on top of that the document known as the American Constitution furthermore required all states to work to return runaway or fugitive slaves if they managed to escape from their plantations or from their owners and slavery did actually end up touching the lives of every single person living in America at the time for example Northern merchants and Northern manufacturers did actually end up participating in the slave-based economy and made massive profits from it even if they themselves never personally owned a Slave at any point in their life and cotton trade profits throughout the nation helped to finance Industrial Development and internal improvements produ projects in the north as well Northern owned ships would carry cotton Northern Banks would provide financing and loans and credit for southern plantations and Northern companies provided the very first kinds of ins insurance that we have reference to on slave property human property that's actually where the modern-day insurance industry gets its start providing insurance for human property for slave owners and then also Northern factories were the places that turned raw cotton produced by slaves in the South into thread and bolts of cloth and clothing and textiles so in reality the so-called Lords of the Loom referring to to New England's Factory owners very much relied upon cotton provided by the so-called Lords of the Lash referring to Southern slave owners it was a symbiotic relationship I suppose you could say now while slavery defined and dominated the American South whole entire economy the South overall was actually a fairly diverse region especially when you consider the so-called upper south region in the upper South these are states that share border with a free state somewhere in the middle of the country in the upper South free uh sorry slaves and slave owners were overall a much smaller percentage of the overall population especially when compared to Deep South states that stretched all the way from South Carolina on the East Coast all the way over to the state of Texas in states that were part of the upper or so-called Border South the decline of slavery was most apparent in the early 1800s the upper South actually acted as a slave exporter to Lower South States and that only helped to serve to accelerate the decline of slavery as it was practiced in the upper South Region and crop diversification also happened in the upper South which did not happen in the Lower South crop diversification very much contributed to the eventual decline of the practice of slavery in the up upper South as did the cheap and availability of free wage labor workers who were willing to do jobs on farms and on plantations in the upper South for a wage Urban manufacturers and Factory owners furthermore wanted to be able to hire and fire their workers at a moment's notice and that's not really possible if you're using an enslaved Workforce you can't really fire a slave and the upper South started to slowly but surely become very very different and distinguishable from the so-called Deep South for example the upper South had definitive centers of manufacturing while the Deep South had almost no factories and depended almost entirely on the agricultural production of cotton plants yet slavery did cause the South to have a very different kind of Economic Development than what took place in northern states in fact the practice of slavery in the South overall inhibited industrial growth it discour enaged immigration because think about it why on Earth would an immigrant Who's Coming to America choose to move to a Southern state where there were few jobs available and for jobs that might actually be available a worker might find themselves competing with the labor of a slave which doesn't cost a slave owner anything and so in reality there wasn't much competition and also slavery tended to slow technological progress as well the Deep South did not never really develop larger diverse cities like what regularly happened in the northern states of America with One Singular exception the City of New Orleans New Orleans was by far the largest city in the American South in the 1800s but do keep in mind New Orleans was already a huge bustling urban area well before Louisiana and the City of New Orleans even became a part of the United States of America so it was was almost like a pre-made City an already developed City that just happened to become a part of the us and also Banks and railroad lines that did exist in the South seemed to only serve massive Plantation areas and didn't really offer M many services to any other spots in the south at all now while many people living in the north thought that slavery actually inhibited economic growth in the South slavery in fact was very very profitable and did overall expand the capacity of the Southern economy over time but at this point it is very important to note that most southern white families did not actually own slaves because wealthy plantation owners had access to the best most fertile land most independent small white farming families lived well outside of the plantation belt in areas that were overall pretty suitable for growing crops like cotton most Southerners overall were independent farmers who worked on their own land using family labor for assistance and did not use slaves or wage workers simply because most of those white Southern families were too poor to ever buy slaves or higher wage workers they had to rely upon their own family members to keep their Farms functioning most of these individual white farmers were completely self-sufficient and and also lived in very rural areas that were very very distant from open marketplaces but independent white farmers in the South jealously guarded their independence independent Farmers so very much wanted to ever avoid becoming even in the slightest way dependent upon another person for a livelihood that these southern white people often times forwent or passed up the opportunity to own slaves and instead simply preferred to focus on working to grow food crops to Simply feed themselves and to feed their families around 15% of Southern rural white families furthermore didn't even own their own land and did not ever own any slaves these people were usually referred to as quote unquote poor whites and they were deeply stigmatized by both abolitionists from the north and slave owning plantation owners in the South being called regularly lazy and shiftless Farmers abolitionists considered poor white people in the South to be a kind of lowest of the lowest class of white people that only served to prove that slavery in the South caused the degradation of free wage workers and led many white people in the South they said to shun work and eventually lapse into poverty but Southern plantation owners on the other hand very much complained that poor landless white people actually ended up demoralizing their slave Workforce by kind of showing simply by existing that human beings could live decent regular lives without having to perform daily backbreaking physically punishing work some poor white people in the South did occasionally swap and trade with slaves and occasionally poor white people in the South and enslaved people socially intermingled on the fringes of Plantation lands now white people in the South overall were far more often desperately poor just barely scraping by and were far more often illiterate and uneducated when compared to Northern Farmers this is because most southern states even halfway into the 1800s completely lacked any kind of free public school system in part because these Farmers did not actually have enough money to provide a Marketplace for manufactured goods the South never ended up really developing any kind of factory based industry if the South did have factories and they were churning out all of these manufactured products there was only a small teeny tiny population of wealthy plantation owners who could even afford to buy those products so as a result of most of the white population in the South being too poor to afford manufactured products the South never really developed much factory-based industry now while some poor white people in turn resented plantation owners just as much as plantation owners resented poor white people poor whites very much resented wealthy plantation owners economic and political power and most of these poor white people though did go out of their way to typically accommodate plantation owners and still considered that despite everything else despite their economic situations that at least poor White people and white southern plantation owners shared a common racial identity occasionally did business with each other they shared a common political American culture and sometimes poor white people had kinship or Family Ties distant Family Ties usually with wealthier slave owning families constant clashes between small independent white farmers and Wealthy plantation owners generally happened over economic issues including access to Banks and credit both groups Rich plantation owners and poor white Farmers sought to protect their own particular property rights from any kind of interference and both groups wanted very much to maintain a strict system of racial control and hierarchy and they very much had an interest in maintaining the ideology of white supremacy in which white people's Liberty was felt to ultimately rest upon the constant degradation of black people in the same area now many white small farming families believed that their economic and personal freedom completely rested on the continuation of the practice of slavery even if they themselves as poor white Farmers never owned a single slave now non-slave holder non-slave holders were actually a growing majority that lived in the few Southern cities that existed and increasingly immigrants and people born in the north did eventually start to slowly trickle down through immigration into the big Southern cities like New Orleans or like the much much much smaller City of Charleston South Carolina to sometimes find work in the very few number of non-slave based workplaces in the South they were looking for work on the ducks in port cities like Charleston or Savannah Georgia or they were looking for work in various jobs that could be done in any City at the time free wage workers especially Irish and German immigrants began to increasingly replace slave workers in southern Urban labor markets though over time but these white people eventually started to bitterly resent that they were forced to compete with slaves for certain jobs in the south in the year 1850 most southern slave owning families actually owned five or fewer slaves it it was only a very small number overall of white families in the South that ever at any point owned more than 20 slaves and even fewer still ever owned more than 100 slaves like the Jefferson family did up in Virginia back at the start of this nation's lifespan in 1860 though the wealthiest southern plantation owners those who owned 50 or more slaves at any given time actually made up less than 1% overall of southern white families plantation owners slave property provided them with wealth status and influence usually southern plantation owners had access to the best most fertile land had the highest incomes of all people living in the South and furthermore completely dominated and expected to rule over state and local politics and government but within those wealthy Plantation and slave owning families the wives of Plantation owners were usually expected to help supervise slave workers and to help run the plantations overall Plantation Mistresses as these women were known enjoyed the same level of wealth and status that their husbands had and that kind of power and wealth was completely unknown to the wide variety the huge population of southern white women and as a result of this since they were actually so rare these women only very very rarely questioned white supremacy or the institution of slavery at all in fact many white plantation owners wives deepest anger when it came to the practice of slavery ultimately came from the deep sense of humiliation that they felt when their husbands started to keep slave Mistresses or started to regularly sexually abuse slave women but even amongst white people living in the South who did own slaves most slave owners in the South did not at any time own one of those big stereotypical gigantic antibellum Southern mansions that you might see in movies or TV or in other kinds of pop culture in fact most plantation owners actually lived in relatively drab fairly small log cabins with five or fewer slaves smaller slave owners were generally younger than big plantation owners and were quite diverse in terms of their backgrounds and gender usually smaller slave owners in the South had very little Economic Security but ultimately owning slaves was seen as the ultimate precondition to any kind of upward socioeconomic mobility in the South and as such every single small slave owner in the South very much across the board all aspired to someday become big wealthy plantation owners like the people that they saw in uh living in in those big ostentatious Plantation houses now despite the fact that the majority of white Southerners in the south in the year 1860 actually three out of every four white families 75% that is of southern white families actually owned no slaves at all but slavery still powerfully shaped them and the old south southern plantations were actually part of a worldwide market and plantation owners worked to try to accumulate more land more slaves and greater and greater profits some of which over time they did eventually invest in things like railroads and banks in the South but overwhelmingly most southern plantation owners celebrated not a competitive or truly Fair form of capitalism but instead preferred a hierarchical agrarian society in which slave owning gentlemen such as themselves would ultimately take what they perceived as personal responsibility for the quote unquote well-being of all of the dependence in their lives including their wives their children and even their slaves this kind of Outlook which is known as paternalism had for a very long time been a highlighted feature of the practice of American slavery but paternalism actually began to deepen once the end of the international slave trade started in 1808 weight which very much closed down the cultural gap between enslaved people and their owners and most southern slave owners actually lived daytoday on their own plantations and they lived in very close physical proximity to their slaves but paternalism often times obscured and sometimes even Justified the horrible violent brutality of slavery in fact some slave owners thought of themselves as being being kind and responsible even while they were buying selling or physically punishing their slaves over time Southern values began to greatly diverge from the North's culture of egalitarianism competition and individualism in the American South for example white men from all social classes were expected to follow a strict code of personal honor in which men were expected to defend the reput of themselves and their whole entire extended family units using violence and challenging people to duels or killing people who bmer merged their families if necessary dueling while very much illegal in all Southern States was not at all uncommon in the first part of the 1800s in the American South and also southern white women were even more confined to the home and domestic space and the domestic ideal than Northern women were under the prevailing Cult of Domesticity in the 30 years or so before the start of the American Civil War pro-slavery thought started to dominate Southern intellectual and cultural life white mobs emerged almost always to stifle any kind of opposition to the practice of slavery that was sometimes voiced in the South and many white Southerners began to de develop their own unique and varied defenses for the practice of slavery up in the north abolitionists charged that slavery was ultimately a moral and religious Abomination but down in the South religious leaders started to come up with their own biblically based defenses of the practice of slavery to try to counter these abolitionist claims far fewer southern white people felt as had many of America's framers and Founders that slavery was a bad thing a taboo subject a necessary evil in fact in the runup to the American Civil War more and more southern white people started to actually argue that slavery was a positive good for civilization overall now racism which refers to the more modern belief that some racial groups and in this particular situation black people were naturally inferior to whites and thus were suited for slavery completely framed cled the pro-slavery argument at the time slave owners also found justification they thought for the practice of slavery by going back to ancient history and reading even the words of the Bible Evangelical Christian religious leaders sometimes led the march of the defense of the practice of slavery and actually started to see slavery as a positive good so in the minds of many southern people far from being a moral curse slavery was actually seen as a part of God's overall plan to maybe someday and this is a very specious kind of reasoning here to eventually christianize an allegedly inferior race through introducing them to Christianity via slavery now some Southerners actually went so far to argue that slavery for black people actually guaranteed equality for All American white people by preventing the growth of a gigantic white work working class in the South slavery these white Southerners argued provided the economic autonomy and Independence that the North's industrial Factory workers did not have it all and which ultimately formed the basis of the American Republic some Defenders of slavery even argued that wage workers up in northern states could only someday wish to be as lucky as a slave working in the South because these people argued slave owners owners treated their slaves much better than Northern Factory owners treated their workers but again this was an incredibly hypocritical kind of argument to make free Factory workers were actually the Bastion of Freedom when compared to Southern slaves if a factory worker in the north didn't like their job or if they were mistreated or injured or uh thought they might be injured in the future on their job they were perfectly free to leave that job to move around the country to try to find work and they also could keep their families together and didn't have the risk of you know waking up one day and your children had been sold to a different Plantation down the river and then religion starts to get even more embroiled in this slavery argument in fact in the year 1837 the Presbyterian Church in America split apart over arguments concerning slavery in the year 1844 the Methodist Episcopal Church which at the time was American America's largest Christian denomination split into northern and southern versions of the church as well all over the issue of slavery and abolition in fact the Baptist Church as we still know it today in America split into the northern and southern baptist churches in the year 1845 over an argument concerning slavery this is actually why we still to this day have an institution known as the Southern Baptist Church that church actually split from the National Baptist Church in America all in an effort to try to adamantly defend the practice of slavery within the confines of the Baptist Church but much more common than biblical or religious defenses of slavery was the racial argument that many white people felt that black people were naturally for whatever reason unfit for American freedom in this particular train of thought white people felt that black people were naturally lazy and thus inferior to white people white people began to think that if black people were ever freed from slavery in America at least the argument went that African-American people would then naturally turn to crime and start robbing from and assaulting white people especially white women so under these kinds of arguments only by practicing slavery in the South enabled the races to peacefully somewhat coexist in the American South and there's also another egalitarian argument uh that popped up at this time was that slavery actually spared the non-slave owning majority from having to work in some of the hardest and most difficult menial tasks on plantations and Southern slave owners knew whenever emancipation happened in various parts of the world southern slave owners for example very much knew about the Haitian revolution they knew about slave slave rebellions whenever they popped up in other parts of the world and they did also very much know that the British Empire had completely abolished the practice of slavery in its whole worldwide Empire back in 1833 emancipation throughout the rest of the Americas in North America Central America and South America and uh ended up sharply shaping debates about slavery and its future in the United States at the time while white American slave owners argued that emancipation had been a huge disaster and a failure for the British Empire many Northern abolitionists completely disagreed and said that the British Empire was still thriving and that they didn't actually need slavery to continue to Exist by the time we get to the year 1850 slave systems only remained in the western hemisphere in four places and those four places were Cuba Puerto Rico Brazil but also the United States of America so the United States of America's continuation of the practice of slavery started over time to more and more make America look like a very different place from all other civilized Nations on earth now at this time many white Southerners claimed that they and they alone were the true inheritors of the American revolution's Legacy and they began to freely used the language of Liberty to contrast their condition with the condition of slavery usually these people complained that any kind of government interference with the Southern economy would actually threaten to quote unquote enslave them but nobody really stood up and pointed out to these Southerners that this kind of statement was hypocritical because even the poorest white man in the South still lived a vastly Freer life than any enslaved person did Southern state constitutions did acknowledge equal rights for free white men but in the 1830s some pro-slavery Southern writers began to argue that maybe Liberty equality and democracy were not actually good or beneficial things for the American South South Carolina in particular was home to many people who argued that freedom and equality were not and should not be Universal entitlements even for all white people when sectionalism between the North and the South began to rapidly intensify particularly after the year 1830 even more Southern writers and philosophers and politicians started to vehemently defend slavery not as an institution that ensured equality between white people in the South but as the whole entire basis of an organic hierarchical Southern society in which white wealthy plantation owners should should rule over lesser white people and slaves Southern writers newspaper editors politicians and even clergymen increasingly began to devote themselves to spreading this particular defense of the institution of slavery and one Virginia writer named George fitzu actually took this kind of argument to its most extreme actually going so far as to repudiate Jeffersonian ideals and the IDE a of America having a mission to spread Freedom all around the world Fitz Hugh even argued that slavery and not Liberty was the usual normal basis of civilizations throughout world history he then argued that slaves were actually happy and contented in the American South and he even suggested that white Factory workers in the north should only be should be lucky or would be lucky to have paternalistic white own who cared for them the way that slave owners cared for their slaves rather than being themselves enslaved by capitalist markers markets and employers for those who were enslaved slavery usually meant constant incessant toil harsh physical punishment and living with the constant fear that your family could be torn apart by sale slaves again were legally considered the property of their owner owners and the very few legal rights that slaves might have had access to were very rarely enforced in the South slaves could be bought and sold by their owners at will and slaves had absolutely no voice in the governments that ruled over them in every single Southern state slave codes were passed and these codes were actually sets of laws that precisely Define the status of slaves and the rights of slave owners over those slaves state laws in the South legally defined slaves as pieces of property and then specified the exact legal powers that slave owners had over their slave property for example slaves could not legally own their own property they could not sign or make contracts they could not possess guns or alcohol or dogs slaves could not legally marry in any part of the South with a very small exception for Louisiana slaves could not leave their owner's Plantation without Express written permission slaves were not allowed to hold meetings of more than three black people without having white supervision present and enslaved people could not testify against any white person in a court of law in fact by the time we get to the 1830s it was additionally illegal in all southern states to teach slaves how to read and write and although these laws were not always enforced 100% the whole entire Southern legal and governmental system was originally designed to ultimately enforce the slave owners control over their slave properties bodies and labor now about 4 million or so enslaved people lived in the American South in the year before the American Civil War started this was actually a fivefold increase in the enslaved population since the time of the ratification of the Constitution and almost every single one of the Southern slaves living in 1860 had been born in America and would spend the rest of their lives in this country control over slaves was actually seriously tightened up in the mid 1800s and individual southern states started to pass laws that made it harder for owners to free individual slaves and made it nearly impossible for slaves to buy their own freedom and paternalism as an ethos very much contributed to slight material improvements for slaves over time the reason for this is because the price for slaves actually increased over time and the higher price of buying slaves eventually encoura encouraged slave owners to start caring for their slaves most basic well-being most slave owners eventually started to realize that it only made good business sense not to beat your slaves too severely or to kill a slave they cost a lot of money to own in the first place after all it probably should have made good business sense to many slave owners furthermore to adequately feed clothe and house their slaves and to keep them in good working order but unfortunately many southern plantation owners simply provided their slaves with only the bare necessities of life the average slave diet consisted of two ingredients a bag of cornmeal and a slab of salt pork and overall these two items were nutritionally deficient in a number of ways sure there were plenty of calories in a in a diet based off of cornmeal and salted pork fat but there was never enough vitamins or minerals to keep slaves very healthy at any point in their lives slaves often times usually received only two sets of coarse clothes clothing one set for Summer and One set for winter and usually lived in very small cramped cabins many slaves though eventually began to supplement the food that their owners provided to them by raising their own crops and livestock and also Gathering wild fruits and vegetables and sometimes hunting or fishing while This Is Not Great by any stretch of the imagination slaves living in the American South did have better diets and had a better and longer life expectancy than enslaved individuals who are working at the same time in the West Indies or down in Brazilian sugar plantations but slaves in America worked from sun up to sun down six days a week with no allowances during the day for breaks sick days or vacation time by any stretch of the imagination the institution of slavery also helped to define the actual status of free black people who happen to live in both the South and in the north every African-American person living in the American South was usually generally assumed to be a Slave at first glance so free African-American people literally had to carry identification papers that marked them as free people and carry those papers on their persons at all times or else they might risk being arrested or even sold into slavery if they didn't have their documents easily accessible and by the time of the start of the American Civil War in 1861 half a million free black people lived in the United States overall and a majority of those half a million people lived in the American South while white Americans tended to Define their freedom according to their distance from slavery free black people were not all that radically different from enslaved black people and most of the northern states free black people could not vote and had very few economic opportunities and down in the South free black people could own their own property they could legally get married and they could not legally be bought or sold as slaves but other than that they had virtually no other rights in southern Society free black people could not own guns dogs or liquor could not strike a white person even if it was in self-defense and had to again carry constant proof of their free status with them and on top of that most jobs in the American South were completely closed off to free black people as well but every single slave owning State completely forbade the future entry of any black people into their borders and every single City Town County and so on had rules and regulations that forced free black people that might actually be living in those states to live constantly as second class citizens more than 80% of free African-American people actually lived in states that were part of the upper South and one-third of those free African-American people lived in cities but most of these free African-American people in the South were very much confined to the lowest level lowest paying jobs less than 2% of black people in the lower or Deep South were actually free by the time we get to the year 1860 and free black people who lived in the Lower South were much more likely to have some kind of marketable job skill than free black people living in the upper South and most of these skilled workers who happen to be black lived in cities like Charleston or New Orleans for the most part the reason for this is that cities offered free black people not just jobs but also Alo the proper social space to create their own unique communities free Urban African-American citizens furthermore work to develop their own free black communities based usually around their Church institutions and mutual Aid associations and church was often the center of most free Urban black communities and Sunday schools and bible study groups were very popular places where free black people living in the C South were able to gain some kind of basic education learning how to read or write so education was very highly regarded in southern free black communities and another thing that distinguished upper south from Lower South were climate and geography at the very very top point of the upper South to the north of land that was really good for growing cotton were the states that were known as the border south or the upper South just to list these states out for you the Border South states include Delaware Maryland Kentucky and Missouri and every single one of these so-called border or upper South States shared at least one border with a free state but slavy was still ingrained in these states but it wasn't nearly as crucial to the overall economies of these states as it was further down into the deep south during the early period of the American cotton boot the upper South was also going through an economic slump and eventual transformation in the 182s and 1830s the upper South states were mostly characterized by depleted exhausted agricultural fields and actual depopulation the reason for this is that the soil in the upper South had been consistently depleted by years and years and generations of tobacco planting tobacco plants actually Leach a lot of nutrients out of the soil and by the time we get into the mid 1800s the soil in the upper South was almost completely depleted of any kind of nutrition even in places in the upper South where the soil was still even a little bit fertile the farmers in the upper South could never really directly compete with the huge massive plantation owners that existed down in the Deep South but in the upper South we are going to eventually see crop diversification and crop diversification is going to help revive the upper South's economy now in the upper South since they couldn't really grow tons and tons of tobacco there anymore and they couldn't really compete with the massive plantations of the Deep South That Grew things like cotton Farmers living in the upper South started to experiment with growing a whole variety of different crops and that eventually ended up providing support for the growth of an agricultural economy in the upper South that did not rely on One Singular cash crop and another thing that differentiated the upper South and the Lower South is that urbanization did happen in the upper South it was still much less than what was happening in northern states in America but it was much much greater than what was happening in the Lower South you could also occasionally find canals and railroads that linked the few cities and the countryside together much more often in the upper South than you ever could in the Lower South and in the 1850s as racial ideas which supported the growth of slavery grew in popularity in the South calls began for reins slaving all free black people living in the South it was only the opposition of non-slave owners who heavily depended upon the cheap labor provided to them by free African-American people that was ever able to defeat such proposals from actually becoming a law in the American South in the run up to the American Civil War slavery above all else was ultimately a labor system a labor system in which work occupied the entirety of enslaved people's time except for very brief allowances for sleeping and eating on particularly large Plantation enslaved workers could perform all kinds of jobs from laboring in the fields to doing skilled jobs like carpentry engineering or shoeing even approximately 15 to 20% of enslaved people worked as servants or as skilled Craftsmen and these slaves typically worked slightly lighter workloads than slaves who worked in the fields slaves also could be found in the American South working on steamboats in coal mines on sea ports loading and unloading ships and at the few railroad stations that existed in the South loading and unloading railroad cars local authorities throughout the South would use slave workforces to build roads and other facilities and even the federal government used slaves to build forts and other public buildings did you know for example that the White House was actually built by slaves after it was burned down by the British in 184 a lot of the of the buildings that we know on in the landscape of our nation's capital of Washington DC were actually crafted originally by enslaved workers so in addition to the federal government professionals sometimes people like merchants or lawyers or other kinds of businessmen would use slaves as well and by the time the civil war starts in 1861 it's estimated that about 200,000 enslaved people worked in the industries such as Iron Works and tobacco factories that were slowly slowly starting to develop in the American South in the small handful of Southern cities in America at the time slaves were frequently used as unskilled laborers and occasionally as skilled Artisans and a few slaves living in cities in the South were eventually entrusted with huge responsibilities such as supervising other slaves selling Goods or handling money in their owner shops or stores about 5 to 10% of enslaved people were not at any point attached to a farm or a large Plantation these slaves typically work worked in jobs though that no white person in the South wanted to do such as the hottest and dirtiest stinkiest sweatiest jobs in agricultural fields or in coal mining or even in shoveling coal into furnaces on steamboats but overall about 75% of enslaved people living in the United States worked on plantations or on medium-sized Farms about 90% of all American cotton production relied exclusively upon slave labor and most slaves perhaps as many as 70 75% of enslaved women and 90% of enslaved men worked in agricultural Fields but as you know the organization of work done by slaves could vary according to the crop and the size of the landholding that they were working on on small farms for example slaves frequently worked right alongside their owners and their owner family in the fields and the largest concentration of enslaved workers worked on plantations that existed in what is known as the Cotton Belt working in slave gangs usually directed by a violent white person known as an overseer overseers were given the job of producing large crops and oftentimes these overseers could be viciously brutal to enslaved workers on Plantation settings cotton was usually produced produced in massive numbers plantations could produce cotton much more efficiently than small individual farms and if a plantation had 20 or more slaves a plantation owner usually used a gang system to produce their crops more efficiently the gang system refers to the organization and strict supervision of slave field workers into different working groups known as gangs where their labor was then separated into different specific tasks and teams of field workers usually included both slave men and slave women and both groups had to work at a very steady rigid Pace or else they would face severe physical punishment it didn't matter if an enslaved worker was sick or injured or if they were in the process of dying in the middle of the field if they did not keep up the pace with the rest of the workers in their gang the overseer would immediately come over to their area and then start whipping or beating that slave until they started to catch up or else died slaves though who worked on sugar cane plantations in Southern Louisiana also tended to work in gangs it wasn't just cotton plantations that used the gang system but sugar cane plantations usually provided the worst most terrible harshest working conditions to be found anywhere in America at the time even in the South now there were some slaves who worked on Rice plantations particularly in South Carolina and in Georgia and those enslaved workers frequently engaged in what is known as the task labor system these slaves usually worked without direct white supervision and occasionally would have time at the end of the day if they manage to finish their daily tasks early from an enslaved person's perspective slavery in different regions of the American South could be worse in some respects or better in others for example slaves who worked in rice fields faced really harsh environmental conditions but they overall generally had a bit more Independence than slaves working on other kinds of plantations because of the implementation of the task labor system and the usually usually the absence of a large directly supervising white population in the area slaves who worked in cities could sometimes work as Craftsman semiskilled workers or domestic servants and some Urban workers worked alongside their owners in their Master shops some Urban slaves even had the ability to live completely separately from their owners and in general had a bit more individual freedom than slaves anywhere else in the South basically the authority of a slave owner was much less clearcut in a city setting than it was out in the countryside skilled Urban slave Craftsmen also sometimes had great autonomy and Independence and could sometimes even hire themselves out for side jobs and sometimes were even allowed to keep some of their earnings this is the way in which the very few slaves who managed to buy their own Freedom ever earned any money to potentially save up to buy their freedom in the first place many Urban slaves even lived completely by themselves but Urban slavery as a practice began to precipitously decline between the years 1820 and 1860 by the time we get to the 1850s most slave owners began actively removing urban-based slaves back to the countryside because they were afraid that a developing Independence amongst Urban slaves was starting to erode the relationship between the slave owner and the enslaved worker But ultimately slavery always in all cases was based on force and slave owners used a whole variety of different methods of coercion to try to maintain order and discipline and tried to force slaves to work more productively faster harder better stronger slave owners were legally allowed to inflict almost any kind of physical punishment that you could think of on their slaves and it was actually very rare to ever encounter an enslaved person who was not whipped or severely beaten at some some point in his or her life even the most minor infractions could invite a serious whipping from a slave owner owners also used much more subtle methods of control over their slaves too for example slave owners frequently exploited internal divisions among slave populations especially trying to create animosity between slaves who had to work as field hands and slaves who worked in the slave owning family's house sometimes slave owners would create incentives for particularly hard work from slaves such as offering time off or sometimes even cash payments for who could bring in the most cotton or who could work for the longest time without taking a rest but ultimately the threat of being sold was the most powerful weapon that slave owners had above everything else since slave sales usually broke up and completely destroyed slave families and slave communities enslaved people though never gave up their hope for eventual Freedom or their will to resist total and complete white control over them slaves did succeed in creating a semi-independent culture which ultimately centered around the family and the church which did enable some slaves to survive the experience of bondage without having to completely abandon their own self-esteem and allowed some slave communities to pass on to Future Generations values that might conflict with the values of their white owners for example African Traditions were very much kept alive through folklore and oral history telling slave culture ultimately Drew upon the heritage of Africa and African influence appeared in the styles of dance and music forms of religious worship and even the practice of slave medicine on plantations the end of the international foreign slave trade did help to Foster the growth of a particularly new African and American culture that was shaped by both American and African traditions and values over time ultimately the family was the center of most slave communities and despite the various horrible obstacles slaves were able to create lasting family relationships and created a supportive moral code for their families because of a natural increase in the slave population in the United States there was an equal ratio of male and female slaves which allowed for the creation of enslaved families and while most slave marriages were not legally recognized by the state or national government slave owners also had to consent to these marriages before they occurred and marriage ceremonies were usually often significant events whenever they occurred on plantations and once married most slave couples stayed married for the rest of their lives if they weren't disrupted by sale and families typically had two parents present although the sale of male slaves over time did end up creating a much higher number of female-headed families amongst slave populations compared to white families at the same time almost onethird of all slave marriages were eventually broken up by sales and again the threat of being sold and and thus having your family torn apart was the slave owner's greatest weapon that he could wield over his slaves and the fear of someday being sold away from your family pervaded all aspects of slave life both parents were present for life in about two-thirds of slave families but the sale of a spouse or a child was always a looming threat so extensive extended family and kinship time helped support slave families in the case of a sale for example if separated from a parent an enslaved child could still turn to relatives cousins second cousins aunts uncles great-grandparents and the like or in general just the larger slave Community for help and assistance many men and children were indeed separated from their families by sale but so were women in these same families some slave owners actually ended up simply ignoring the fact that slave families even existed when they made decisions about which slaves to sell and to whom in some ways gender roles for enslaved people were actually very different than those in the larger American society slave men and slave women were equally powerless in their life conditions The Cult of Domesticity which relegated most American women to the space of the family home did not not actually apply to enslaved women slave men furthermore could not provide economically for their families they could not protect their wives or their children from physical or sexual abuse by owners and overseers and they also could not choose how or when their children might end up going to work however whenever enslaved individuals were working quote unquote on their own time and weren't working in the fields or weren't working uh you know in the domestic space of the SL SL owner's home then and only then traditional gender roles did begin to Prevail for example slave men would frequently work Outdoors while slave women were expected to care for the children and cook and clean and do all those kinds of domestic duties the slave family remained Central to American slave culture and also allowed enslaved people to transmit their values and traditions and strategies for survival from one generation to the next and also a very distinctive form of Christianity also helps some slaves survive and resist their bondage slaves actually did participate in the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening and almost every southern plantation seemed to have at least one slave preacher this was usually a black man who was enslaved who often had very little formal education but who almost always had considerable oratorical skills and a very definitive knowledge of the content of the Bible urban-based slaves often were able to establish their own church communities as well but unfortunately white slave owners sometimes Ed the Christian religion as one more means of trying to control and discipline their slaves some slave owners actually required their slaves to attend sermons where preachers would constantly remind slaves that theft was immoral that they were property and that if they ever ran away that was technically th theft and that servants should obey their masters occasionally slave religion was based on African traditions and in some parts of the new world no more than 30% of enslaved people ever ended up converting to the Christian religion but once more slaves began to openly convert to Christianity in the late 19th century those enslaved people tended to blend their beliefs into a uniquely African style of Christianity the first exposure that many enslaved people had to the Christian religion came from the religious revival meetings held by Evangelical Christians in particular the Baptists and the methodists who did not mind proz and preaching to enslave people and as a result many slaves who did manage to convert to the Christian faith typically converted to either the Baptist or the Methodist faiths the Evangelical Christian Mission or message of every person on Earth being equal in the eyes of God particularly as I'm sure you can imagine appealed to enslaved people but African tradition did sometimes combine together with Christian beliefs and a new unique style of slave religion was sometimes practiced completely in secret at night or even Al out in the open during the day these religious meetings though were frequently very interactive and emotionally charged even though law specifically prohibited slaves from gathering together in numbers larger than three without having a white person present to supervise again almost every southern plantation had at least one black self-taught preacher and amongst Christian Believers on plantations the biblical stories of Exodus and which God specifically chose Moses to lead the enslaved to lead the enslaved Jewish people out of Egypt and to the promised land of Freedom were huge stories that became Central to Black practices of Christianity slaves tended to see themselves as a new chosen people who one day would eventually be delivered from their bondage the message of Jesus Christ as a redeemer who cared for oppressed people was also very important and other heroes from Bible stories included Jonah who was able to escape from the belly of a whale David who was able to defeat the much more powerful Goliath and the story of Daniel who managed to to escape from the Lion's Den with God's help but ultimately the Christian message of Brotherhood and equality of all people in the eyes of the Creator seemed to repudiate the practice of slavery and slave culture ultimately rested on enslaved people's belief that slavery as an institution was unjust and their common yearnings for Freedom someday despite the development of pro-slavery arguments in the South slaves believed that they were actually being deprived of the fruits of their own labor by lazy Idol plantation owners who lived in the lap of luxury While most enslaved people knew that it was futile and impossible to try to directly combat their condition as slaves this did not prevent those slaves from still Desiring Freedom someday slaves constantly talked and dreamed of someday being free and their actions during and after the American Civil War usually flowed directly from their experiences of slavery and their constant hopes of someday escaping it so perceiving that they were outnumbered by wise and facing constant federal state and local authorities who were dedicated ultimately to preserving the institution of slavery slaves in America very rarely rebelled now compared to Caribbean or Latin American style slavery where slaves were far more numerous and much more often directly imported from Africa slave rebellions in the United States were typically and comparatively smaller and less frequent now this does not mean that slaves in America simply submitted or gave in to their condition slaves did frequently resist their condition as slaves but resistance to slavery could take on many different shapes and forms ranging from Individual acts of Disobedience to the actual occasional armed Uprising by far the most common form of slave opposition was known as day-to-day resistance or silent sabotage which basically meant doing your job very poorly on purpose breaking tools so that jobs couldn't be completed um or simply trying to disrupt daily Plantation routine some slaves might occasionally fake illness or find other ways to avoid having to report for work and some slaves would steal food and you know try to just make life on the plantation a little bit harder for white people but far less frequent and far more dangerous were actual direct physical assaults against white people which could range from Arson and poisoning all the way up to Armed rebellions and attacks now while these subversive acts never really truly challenged the overall system of slavery itself the fact that they happened however occasionally did help enslaved people to maintain a sense of dignity and self-respect escaping from slavery was actually a serious threat to the stability of the institution of slavery but most slaves who ever ran away would only run away and simply leave their Plantation footprint for maybe a day or two simply sometimes to just frustrate their owners but almost always would end up returning after a few days a much smaller number overall of escaped fugitive slaves who attempted to permanently escape slavery usually faced considerable obstacles to their freedom usually runaway slaves had very little or no knowledge of the geography of the land beyond the footprint of their Plantation other than knowing that heading in the northern direction if you went far enough could mean Freedom it's actually estimated that perhaps SE 1,000 slaves reached the northern states of America or Canada every single year when slavery was in practice but most people who were Runaway slaves who managed to permanently Escape actually escaped from upper South states where enslaved people could much more easily reach the north because Northern free states were much closer to Upper South States than they were to the Deep South in the Lower South though fugitive slaves often times tried to go to cities where they might be able to blend in with the small free black communities in those spaces but actual permanent escape to Freedom was very very rare now occasionally a runaway slave might be able to reach Canada or a free state or maybe even Mexico in places like Texas from places like Texas but these cases were very few and very far between an institution known as the Underground Railroad which was a secret network of way stations or safe houses that was originally organized by Quakers and both white and black black free uh or anti-slavery activists did actually help Many runaway slaves to permanently Escape in this situation sympathetic abolitionists would hide fugitive slaves in their homes or in their Barns and would then help those runaway slaves get to the next station until they eventually ended up reaching a free space but these people who managed to escape even through the Underground Railroad represented a very small proportion of the total slave population of the American South there were some Brave individuals who dared to venture into the South to help to liberate slaves perhaps one of the best known of such an individual was a woman named Harriet Tubman who was herself born as a slave but ended up escaping in 1849 then numerous times over the course of the rest of her life Harriet Tubman made trips back down into the slave owning state of Maryland to lead family members and other slaves to freedom eventually but most enslaved people who managed to successfully Escape did so completely on their own without any outside help for example the married couple William and Ellen craft managed to Escape From Slavery by pretending to be a sick owner traveling with her slave Henry Box Brown actually made an international name for himself by packing himself into a wooden crate and and then literally mailing himself from Georgia to Chicago Illinois but again these cases were very few and far between in a very small number of cases sometimes large groups of rebellious slaves did manage to gain their freedom perhaps the most famous such case involved slaves who were aboard the ship known as the Amistad the Amistad was a slave transport ship that was sailing off of the Cuban Coast in the year 1839 after they rose up and seized control of the ship the enslaved men who were being transported on that boat then tried to sail the ship up the American Coastline until eventually the American Navy realized that there was a boat that was kind of Meandering off of the east coast and it was eventually seized when President Martin Van be at the time found out about this ship filled with slaves who had overthrown their captors President Van Bern immediately wanted to return those enslaved men to Cuba but at this point abolitionists in America stepped in and helped those enslaved men sue for their freedom in the American legal system eventually this case made its way in front of the American Supreme Court and at this point former President John Quincy Adams stepped forward and volunteered to defend the men who were captured aboard the Amistad John Quincy Adams Then argued in front of the Supreme Court that since these enslaved men had been brought directly from Africa in a massive violation of a slew of international laws and treaties that banned the international slave trade that these men should be freed after he made this argument it turns out the Supreme Court argument was moved by such an argument and they ended up agreeing and as such most of all of the men on board the Amistad were granted their freed freedom and most of these freed men voluntarily immigrated back to Africa but while the Amistad case is interesting it did have no expansive legal bearing on slaves that already existed in the United States but this case may have inspired later revolts that did start happening on slave ships slaves very very very rarely tried to mount organized armed rebellions within the United States of America but we do have some evidence of a tiny number of organized Rebellion attempts in fact the four largest slave-based conspiracies that happened in American history happened in a very small window of time between the years 1800 and 1831 the reason why open uh armed resistance was very rare was that open armed resistance to slavery was perceived as ultimately futile and every single attempted slave rebellion that tried to get started in America ultimately ended up failing and on top of that if you were a slave who was known to your owner to be persistently disobedient or marked as rebellious you would often times be sold to harsher slave owners in other parts of the country and occasionally in some extreme cases you might even be murdered by your owner so even though slave plots for Rebellion were very rare some did actually happen the very first major Rebellion to take place on American soil regarding slaves was Gabriel PR's Rebellion back in 1800 we've already talked about this in another chapter but we but I'll go back over it just to remind you uh in this situation Gabriel proser an enslaved preacher and blacksmith tried to organize over a thousand slaves for an arm attack on the city of Richmond Virginia in the year 1800 But ultimately the plot was not successful State authorities in Virginia ended up capturing and then executing Gabriel prer and 25 of his followers in the events aftermath the next big slave rebellion Rebellion that we have evidence for happened in 1811 in January of 1811 several hundred slaves living in the state of Louisiana got together and tried to march on the City of New Orleans in their own personal bid for freedom but these slaves turned out to be very poorly armed and very disorganized and eventually the US Army that was called in to disperse the group ended up killing over 100 of these enslaved men then the most well-organized slave rebellion plot to ever form in America was probably the incident known as Denmark vessie conspiracy in 1822 a man named Denmark vessie a man who had been a slave in Charleston South Carolina but who managed to buy his own Freedom when he bought a winning lottery ticket he tried to organize a slave rebellion Denmark vessie would quote the Bible and even use excerpts from the Declaration of Independence to justify his planned armed resistance and rebels in this case plan to seize control of the City of Charleston South Carolina then commandeer a ship and hopefully escape to freedom in the nation of Haiti which again was a free black Republic in the Caribbean but unfortunately these enslaved people were ultimately betrayed by other slaves and eventually 35 conspirators including Denmark vessie ended up being executed but perhaps the most well-known American slave Rebel was a man named Nat Turner a slave preacher and Mystic who came from Virginia who believed that God had personally appointed him to lead a black Rebellion though Nat Turner originally wanted to launch his Uprising on July 4th 1831 it had to be delayed until August of that year but then Nat Turner led a small handful of followers from Farm to farm in his area killing white families along the way Nat Turner's Rebellion ended up killing about 60 or so white people but eventually an enraged posy of white men managed to get together and then capture and brutally kill most of the rebelling slaves including even Nat Turner himself the fact that Nat Turner's Rebellion even happened shocked the American South and furthermore caus slave owners throughout the South to start punishing and sometimes even murdering recalcitrant or suspicious slaves in the aftermath of n Turner's Rebellion as well the state of Virginia started to pass harsh laws that further restricted slave activities and even restricted the rights of free black people in Virginia other Southern States quickly followed suit and began to tighten up on the activities and restraints of the enslaved populations in their own borders but Nat Turner's Rebellion also inspired a growing movement of abolitionists in northern states to start demanding the immediate abolition of slavery which then sparked an immediate reaction in the South against the abolition movement and civil liberties that will eventually intensify sectional hostility in this country in some ways the year 1831 marked a turning point in the Old South that year British Parliament launched a program to consider abolition throughout the worldwide British Empire which underscored the growing isolation of slavery in the American South also in that year a man named William Lloyd Garrison an Ardent abolitionists began to argue that slavery faced enemies from within and outside of the South the pro-slavery argument in the South however increasingly began to permeate all aspects of Southern society and abolitionists and their ideas were seen as increasingly unwelcome with some abolitionists even facing violent reprisals as reform movements started to happen in the north more frequently and those movements began to assertively condemn the practice of slavery none more so than the Abolitionist Movement the South closed in closed in and came together in defense of the institution now this is a really depressing chapter overall it's really hard to look back on the history of a country like ours and try to explain the actions or glorify the history of a Nation when atrocities like slavery were allowed to take place for so long and so viciously but fortunately in the next chapter we are going to go a little bit lighter in our discussions and we're going to start talking about reform movements of the mid 19th century all of which do try to make America a better place overall