hi friends we are here to talk about global slavery and also Regional slavery within the United States so it's always important to keep in mind especially as we are moving towards the Civil War and thinking about region in United States history so talked a lot about the Northeast which benefits from slavery because it takes the cotton produces it into uh cloth and sells it throughout the world the South benefits from slavery because that they produce the cotton they are picking the cotton they are sending it not only to the northern United States but also throughout the world Britain is actually going to be the biggest economic engine for the price of cotton in the world we also have the West because as the United States moves further west and more States want to join the union the question is always going to be is slavery going to be allowed and under what conditions so in thinking regionally too we should always think about the cotton gin uh and how technology allows uh products to reach Market faster and with more profit so the cotton Jin is able to clean cotton cotton is actually extremely difficult to pick but also to pull apart and to make useful the cotton gin makes it much more efficient to do so and you can see post 1793 you can just grow a whole lot more cotton than you ever had before in the north just as a reminder slavery is gradually phased out state by state the US Constitution had outlawed the international slave trade by 1808 but individual states still took a long time uh even where slavery wasn't popularly practiced for people to no longer be enslaved so some states outlawed it or said nobody can be enslaved after this date and it slowly phased out that way now with the end of the uh International slave trade and 1808 we should say the legal slave trade because people uh Pirates and it's uh funny is probably the wrong word but it is different maybe to think about Pirates trafficking in human beings and bringing them from the Caribbean and from Africa and secretly selling them in American ports but more frequently it is folks uh who are buying enslaved people in Virginia or Georgia or sorry in Virginia North Carolina and selling them further down south so into Mississippi Alabama Georgia Texas and other places where there are more plantations where there are larger tracks of land under cultivation and with dozens or even hundreds of enslaved people working there by 1850 uh there are 3.2 million enslaved people and uh 1.8 produce cotton so you can see how cotton dominates the Southern economy which as discussed before has a huge effect on the northern economy the British economy and thus the global economy now two-thirds of white households did not own enslaved people and this is a question that often comes up is why would they support the South or why would they support slavery uh it's because they're seen as a pillar of the economic community and what would happen if the labor market suddenly dried up or became considerably more expensive now again we don't like thinking this way but in order to Think Through why folks would have acted this way it would have been an enormous change and an enormous rupture to the economy to end slavery there's also the idea that if you did not own slaves you would want to own slaves um because they would be able to produce for you they would make your life a whole lot easier but as you can imagine with two-third of white households not owning uh workers the distrib of wealth is pretty Stark and wide so a really wide spectrum between poor and wealthy and uh who owns most of the capital in the United States um and throughout the world are going to be those top 10% of income earners now again the regions are connected you have enslaved labor in the South and unskilled labor in the north again I don't really like the term unskilled labor all labor takes skill but in thinking about turning cotton into cloth folks can do it at home in What's called the cottage industry but also in places like New York Boston Philadelphia low Massachusetts they're creating factories where people are starting to work by the hour so they get paid an hourly wage to spin cotton into cloth and so what do New Orleans and New York have in common a few things one they're both major ports so lots of boats going in and out to their heavy industrial s so uh New Orleans New York it's easier and cheaper to produce uh secondary products with cotton light cloth and immediately put it on a ship rather than um transport it somewhere else to be able to take the second is that both major cities rely on slavery for their economies now it may be more direct like New Orleans or indirect like New York in that there aren't a lot of enslaved people in New York but slavery is still the glue in a lot of ways that is holding the American economy together and how this happens at least on a federal level because there are always people who want to end slavery as long as there has been slavery there have been people speaking out against it and in Congress there's what is called the gag rule or the idea that if somebody brings up slavery they will immediately be gagged or be required not to speak anymore face censure face penalties for bringing up uh the end of slavery or the abolition of slavery on a federal level now for northerners slavery is happening largely out of sight they don't have to see enslave people every day and so it becomes much more of an intellectual problem of abolition or Freedom or slavery or human rights uh in a way that uh again not proud of this but as an American I'm not always thinking about what is going on in Sudan or Yemen or Ukraine or um Any Nation throughout the world where I don't have direct eyes on the situation all day every day now for southerners slavery seen as natural it's this idea that oh of course there's a separation between races um they're going to lean on uh an interpretation of Genesis 9 and the sons of Noah that we're going to uh discuss in coming weeks but above all northern and southern folks can agree that black people are not equal to whites and again that doesn't feel great to say but racism is the accepted um is the accept way of doing things and also sort of racial Power Rankings with white people on top and the fastest way to become white or to gain the access to what all white people have access to or white men have access to is to be as far away from Blackness or what black folks are perceived to be um that's the fastest way to gain credibility to gain wealth and power is to separate yourself from black folks and Blackness now religion of course has uh played a role in anti-slavery I love Frederick Douglas in talking about this he says must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and SED with pollution is wrong no I will not meaning it is so obvious to him that he does not even feel the need to respond to it what then remains to be argued is it that slavery is not Divine that God did not establish it that our doctors of divinity are mistaken there is blasphemy in the thought that which is inhuman cannot be divine at the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil religious liberty and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its Chief significance and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness now frederck Douglas is playing a lot into the ethics of Christianity here you'll note that he is not citing Biblical verses in particular but that he is drawing on the ethics of Christianity that all people are children of God um but also in American documents uh talking about the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty but pointing out the hypocrisy of uh loving the Constitution Loving to quote the do the Declaration of Independence but not living by it now for proslavery uh the Only Rule of judgment is the written word of God the church knows nothing of the intuitions of reason or the deductions of philosophy except those reproduced in the sacred Canon she has a positive constitution in the Holy scriptures and has no right to utter a single syllable upon any sub except as the Lord puts word in her mouth so because slavery is Justified in both the Old Testament and the New Testament uh a lot of American Christians are going to say it's in the Bible a lot of folks are Protestants so you remember solos scriptura we can only go by what's in the Bible and so from a strict textual reading they can say oh well slavery is approved both in the Old Law and in the new so it's something that we can continue with now again in this speech do the scriptures directly or indirectly condemn slavery as a sin if they do not the dispute is ended for The Church Without forfeiting her character dares not go beyond them so in the Bible it does not say um slavery is bad do not practice slavery there are enslaved people in the Bible uh slavery certainly takes place in the olden New Testaments but it says to be a good master or to be um a good owner of enslaved people and there's difference between being a good owner and saying that slavery is something that can never be practiced then later on again in this speech this is from James Henry thornwell shall we be branded with the stigma of reproach because we cannot consent to corrupt the word of God to suit the intentions of an Infidel philosophy essentially saying we will not make compromises just because people are reading religion um in a way that we disagree with now for thinking about the global politics there's the American Colonization Society which is established in 1816 which uh tries to fundraise to send uh enslaved people people to Africa as free people now there are two major appeals here one is the burden is on individuals to end slavery to emancipate or to allow the purchasing of the freedom of their enslaved people rather than the government to make uh a big push to be able um to end slavery at the federal level which because of the gag rule and because of a fear of disunion and of Civil War uh is not forthcoming at least before 1861 and this also makes segregation the ideal non integration the idea that black people cannot just be freed and integrated into white Society but that they should be sent to Africa rather than having to integrate them into a society that is biracial and so it's never very uh successful in that it doesn't have a ton of folks who actually go and live in Africa so between 1821 and 1867 approximately 10,000 um formerly enslave folks are um given passage to go live in Liberia in Africa but 10,000 over 46 years is really not a ton in the grand scheme of things so again it's always a an interesting idea and something that is popularly brought up but that does not have a lot of practical consideration now for Global economics because the US South is producing so much cotton um it gives the us a a lot of power on the world stage so there's no direct way really of saying this um the best comparison that I can come up with is like the internet if the United States had two-thirds of the internet Broadband capabilities and everyone had to rely on the United States to provide internet it would have an outsized importance even more than it already does in the global economy and you can see over time how much cotton is being produced that um people who oversee plantations and other areas where cotton is produced find more and more ways uh to provide efficiency from their workers and from the land so in 1800 there is it not even a million pounds of cotton is produced in Mississippi and by 1859 5351 million pounds of cotton now cotton is not heavy um I would encourage you to Google a piece of cotton but you can only imagine how many cotton plants are actually in the ground in that harvested to reach 535.148 sort of middleman oras the the region that um spins the the plant into cloth and then Britain is able to sell that cloth throughout the world or the North can sell raw cotton to Britain and then they sell it throughout the world um within its Empire remember the the sun is never setting on the British Empire um they are all over the world they have an enormous Market to be able to tap into and to be able to sell the products at at a high profit now also with business and politics so nearly four million Britain work in Cotton textiles so that means they are in some way connected to the cotton trade but cotton is not grown in Britain okay so you can imagine just how much Britain's rely on the south and why it is so important to them to be able to continue to get cotton is because something like 20% of the English population relies on Cotton for their living cotton also allows the United States to borrow government abroad or sorry to borrow money as a government abroad because it has cotton cotton works as the collateral so not gold not silver but cotton is this economic engine for the globalization of the world economy and so cotton unites the states because the North and the South recognize that they have to work together to be able to uh plant Harvest and then make money from the plant and then they both share in the profits as it spread throughout the world so hope you all enjoyed this wish we could discuss this in class if you have questions please send them to me look forward to seeing you all next week