Exploring the Institution of Slavery

Hi everyone and welcome to week 11, lecture one on the institution of slavery. We spoke about the romantic and transcendentalist movement that led to an increase in abolitionist ideology in the United States, but we haven't spoken much about what exactly it was about the South and slavery that was causing such intense emotions. So in terms of lecture direction for the next couple of weeks, we're splintering off about two topics that coincide. This week we'll be talking about slavery as an institution, and then next week we'll be talking about the crisis of the union and all the conflict over slavery and its expansion brings. If you have your PowerPoint presentation open, will be starting on slide two or content slide one. Slide two. From the romantic and transcendentalist movement, you started to get people trying their own hand at writing, but many of them weren't trying to be artistic. They were trying to be factual and persuasive. Due to these attempts, you begin to see a slew of abolitionist pamphlets circulating. Not everyone in the United States lived near slavery. Many people understood the institution from word of mouth. These abolitionist writers told people about slave auctions, whippings, rape, and many other human abuses. One prominently well-known author did decide to write a fictional account of slavery based on the abolitionist pamphlets she had read. Of course, we're speaking of the book Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beatrice Stowe, published in 1852. The story follows a slave named Uncle Tom who is eventually sold to a brutal slave owner named Simon Legree. Legree also purchases a female slave to use as a sex slave. The book had an incredible impact on Americans, selling 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year. Doe was the daughter of a Calvinist minister. She eventually married a professor of biblical literature, and the two of them supported the Underground Railroad by temporarily housing many fugitive runaway slaves in their home. Ultimately, her and her husband had... a somewhat troubled marriage wherein they spent many years separated and only communicated by writing letters. Their children went long periods of time in the care of one parent or the other. But whether you read the abolitionist pamphlets or Uncle Tom's Cabin, it was clear to readers that slave owners viewed and treated their slaves as nothing more than livestock. So even though some of these writers, even in their time, were controversial, their literature spoke for itself. Some writers even told of how slave owners were forcing their slaves to breed. Rape was common in slavery, but these owners were selecting their largest, strongest male slaves and forcing them. to rape enslaved women until they conceived. In this way, slave owners hoped to produce more large, strong slaves. This was, of course, terrible and brutal for the female slaves, but the male slaves were forced to rape. Sometimes the men were married. Sometimes they raped women they were close to or even related to. And if they refused, their family members, their mothers, wives, or children would be whipped. The entire system was beyond cruel. The pamphlets and Uncle Tom's Cabin pulled of the sorrow of slave auctions, where nude slaves chained together were paraded through crowds to auction blocks. Family members clung to each other to the last moment, knowing that the family was not alone. this might be the last they ever saw of each other. Mothers held their children and begged potential buyers to purchase them together. The inhumanity and sorrow was so overwhelming that few beyond regulars to auctions could endure them without being brought to tears themselves. Slide three. In the last 20 years there has been considerable debate among historians and the general public concerning the financial profitability of slavery. Some claimed that slave owners were actually benevolent in keeping slaves because the institution did not produce profits owing to the cost of upkeep. This myth mainly comes from the fact that Thomas Jefferson died in heavy debt. Jefferson did live an opulent life as did most planters and he did buy in debt. But he didn't die in debt because of his own lifestyle. Jefferson had co-signed a large loan for a young man he knew, believing the young man would repay, but the man did not. And Jefferson became financially responsible for a large debt that he did not pay in his lifetime. When Jefferson died, the debt was collected from his estate. Jefferson did not die in debt because... cost of slavery, and neither did any other slave owner. Records clearly show that owners enjoyed at least a 10% annual return on the purchase cost of each slave. So a slave would pay for themselves in 10 years. That didn't calculate the immediate profit of children born. Enslaved women, on average, produced a child every two years. Slavery did absolutely bring enormous wealth. However, there existed very few giant plantations like you see in films. Sometimes people try to console me when they find out what I do for a living about all the destruction of plantations and the loss of history. In fact, many of the major plantations of the 19th century still exist as museums and preserved historic sites. The problem is that people imagine that the South must have had those huge opulent plantations everywhere, and they didn't. Remember, the soil is ruining underneath these planters with slave lands. So, Most planters wouldn't have spent the time or the money to build a permanent estate when they knew that within 10 to 15 years they would have to move their entire endeavor westward. And that's why you really don't see as many of those giant plantations as people would expect. That said, the owners of those large, opulent plantations did set the social and political tone of the South. The very wealthy planters were usually politicians too. So what's the difference between a plantation and a farm? First, a plantation has a planter master and a farm has a farmer slaveholder. To be a planter required the ownership of 20 slaves, not 19, 20. Masters had large parties when they purchased or acquired through birth their 20th slave. Slide four. Planters hired slave managers called overseers to punish and drive their slaves. Farming slaveholders owned anything under 20 slaves and were generally dedicated to the idea of attaining 20 slaves. though very few ever did, just due to the cost of acquisition. On farms, slaves and their master worked side by side. Those slaves did the harder, more dangerous labor. Students also usually ask me what a typical slave was like and who would have been a typical master. I'm uncomfortable. trying to describe any person in typical terms. And here it is particularly complicated because we're talking about millions of unique individuals that were enslaved. But I can give you statistics. The average enslaved woman would give birth to nine to ten children each. 50% of babies born into slavery would die before their first birthday due to malnutrition, disease, or exposure. That said, the enslaved population as a whole was very young, with 33% being under the age of 18. That's because the average life expectancy of a slave was between 21 and 22 years of age. Only 10% of slaves lived to the age of 50. Three and a half percent of slaves would live to 60. So when you look at slave owners, the average age of a white master is in the 40s. So we have several factors in terms of power dynamics at play here. Masters are owners. They control punishments like whippings or sales and rewards like clothing, food, and shelter. They are also considerably older than the people that they own on average. Slide five. In the slaveholding South, slave ownership was less common than people expect. 75% of... white families owned no slaves. There was a total of 20,700 planters prior to the Civil War, slaveholders owning 20 slaves or more. Fewer than 11,000 Southern men held 50 slaves or more. Only 2,300 planters held over 100 slaves. And that's about... the size of plantation people are imagining when they look at books or movies about antebellum plantations. Only 11 planters held over 500 slaves. That's more than Jefferson. We're talking about astronomical wealth here that would have taken generations to create through strategic marriages. There is only one known planter to hold a thousand slaves, a man named Stephen Duncan. Looking at those numbers, you're probably wondering how a civil war broke out at all. If only 20,700 people were really considered planters, how could we end up in a war that killed 620,000 people? The answer lies in Southern dreams. While most white Southerners did not own slaves. They wanted to and hoped they could become planters one day. If slavery was eradicated, that dream would disappear, not only for those that had attained it, but for those that sought it generation after generation. Slide six. If you were a slave, the truth is that for most of American history, your. quality of life depended entirely on who owns you. There was no such thing as a good slave owner. These were all people that were comfortable and proud to own other people, use their labor while keeping them uneducated and in poor living conditions, weak from low rations, and to sell families apart. We could argue. that it was not uncommon, but I don't think that we can argue that such behavior in any time period could be described as good. That said, how physically harsh or sexually abusive a master was varied greatly. There were slave codes in every southern state that were generally the same. They held curfews for slaves, and if a slave was caught out after dark, outside of their master's property, it could be very dangerous. Slaves were not allowed to be educated to read in any state for fear that slaves would communicate to start a rebellion or contact northern abolitionist groups. If a slave was found to be able to read, the state would execute the slave and not reimburse the master. If a master allowed you to marry a slave, from another nearby plantation or to go visit family members nearby on Sunday depended on the master. As far as sexual conduct on a slave-holding farm or plantation was concerned, there was clear double standards for white men and women. White Southern women were supposed to be highly moral and chaste in their sexual behavior, whereas white Southern men were known to self-indulge in prostitution and the rape of enslaved women. The truth is that everyone, women, children, and slaves, were considered the property of the white male. You might also imagine that if a plantation mistress knew her husband was raping an enslaved woman, she might try to help the victims. But there was no such sorority among women. Plantation mistresses often saw light-skinned enslaved children. that closely resembled their own and knew the reality but because they were jealous of the victimized slaves they took their anger out on them by having them brutally punished for minor errors. Plantation mistresses might also try to get their husbands to sell such women often unsuccessfully. When they could do nothing else they were sometimes known to pay other slaves to attack and mutilate the women their husband had sex with by cutting their faces. When the master left for business, such women really had to worry, as the mistress may decide to have them whipped daily, deny them food for long periods of time. In one well-recorded case, the plantation mistress had a young teenage girl that her husband frequently raped. whipped, starved, and chained in a meat smokehouse until she died. Plantation mistresses could not take their anger out on their husbands who actually deserved it and could only direct it at someone more vulnerable than themselves. Slide seven. So you will clearly understand why slaveholders, both farmers and planters, would not want the institution of slavery to die. But what about the 75% of white Southerners that didn't own slaves? What else drove them to fight for the Confederacy than the dream of maybe one day becoming a slave owner? Why trade death today for a dream tomorrow? The answer was the middling farmers, landowners. but not slave owners, worried that if slaves were freed, they'd go into agriculture, the only trade most slaves knew, and become economic competition. So the institution of slavery limited competition for poor whites, though they were landless, without slaves, and severely uneducated. They still wanted the institution of slavery to survive so that there was some class of people beneath them. They may be poor whites, but they weren't slaves. Without slavery, poor, uneducated whites may end up being beneath industrious former slaves. Slide eight. There were always free blacks in America. Ever since that Dutch ship dropped off African slaves in Jamestown in the 17th century, over time, as race-based slavery emerged, free Blacks held a very uncertain status and were subject to racist legal restrictions state to state. Free Blacks had a curfew, just like slaves did, though no free whites had a curfew. Free Blacks had to buy licenses to work in certain industries that whites did not have to buy. Free Blacks could not own farmland in Virginia or urban property in Maryland. There were lots of controlling rules meant to restrict movement and opportunities for success. How did free Blacks become free if they weren't born free? There were actually several possible avenues. Some slaves that lived to older age. were able to be bought from slavery because their physical capacity had decayed. If someone offered to purchase an older or injured slave from a planter, they'd usually accept and take the money to invest in a new younger slave. In some instances, slaves were granted their freedom for fighting in military engagements more often than any other avenue, a slave owner decided to free one or more of his slaves for some act of high merit, like saving the life of a white family member. Other masters became conscientious due to religious or abolitionist arguments and decided to free their slaves immediately or upon their death. In 1860, there was a reported 390,000. free Blacks living in the United States. Slide nine. Looking at this map, you can see where free Blacks lived in 1850, according to the census. Maryland has the highest population of free Blacks. You might notice areas in the slaveholding South where free Blacks lived, and you might be wondering why they wouldn't. immediately relocate to the north. It could be complicated by family that remained in nearby bondage or the fact that free Blacks were most protected by white families that knew them. If white people knew you were born free, that was better than being in a new area and being suspected of being a runaway slave. Slide 10. It is an often ignored truth that free Black men did sometimes own slaves. In the 1830 census, it shows 3,775 Black men own 12,760 other people as slaves. That was a tiny minority of the free Black population, around 2%. But it is still significant in the 1830 census. currents. Most of the slaves owned by other Black people were not actually treated as true slaves. Many times, free Blacks bought other slaves for humanitarian purposes, like allowing someone to be freed and work to repay them. Until the debt was repaid, the person would be considered a slave, even if they did not live as a slave. Most of these people were actually family members that had been purchased out of slavery, but the family had not then gone to a lawyer to convert the deed to freedom papers. That cost money, and often families didn't see it as necessary, especially if they were still saving up money to buy other family members out of slavery. It was, however, a very dangerous, risky thing to do, because if the owner were to die... and the other people were considered property, the state could determine that without a new rightful owner, the property would be auctioned back into slavery, and the state would absorb the profit. Remember that in 1808, Jefferson outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. So after 1808, with only a small amount of human smuggling in South Carolina, the number of slaves increased due to the only to natural increase, which matched the reproduction rate of white Americans, even with a much higher mortality rate due to a higher overall birth rate. As we discussed when we spoke about the Jeffersonian era, the fact that the number of slaves became limited caused the value of slaves to increase, but that didn't usually translate to better treatment as a result of the decline of the slave market. one might expect. Okay, let's take a break here and we will come back in our second video lecture and continue this topic. For now, you guys work on clarifying your notes and go get a snack and relax for a few minutes. And whenever you're ready to finish this lecture series, I will see you in our next video lecture.

This week we'll be talking about slavery as an institution, and then next week we'll be talking about the crisis of the union and all the conflict over slavery and its expansion brings. If you have your PowerPoint presentation open, will be starting on slide two or content slide one. Slide two.

From the romantic and transcendentalist movement, you started to get people trying their own hand at writing, but many of them weren't trying to be artistic. They were trying to be factual and persuasive. Due to these attempts, you begin to see a slew of abolitionist pamphlets circulating. Not everyone in the United States lived near slavery.

Many people understood the institution from word of mouth. These abolitionist writers told people about slave auctions, whippings, rape, and many other human abuses. One prominently well-known author did decide to write a fictional account of slavery based on the abolitionist pamphlets she had read.

Of course, we're speaking of the book Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beatrice Stowe, published in 1852. The story follows a slave named Uncle Tom who is eventually sold to a brutal slave owner named Simon Legree. Legree also purchases a female slave to use as a sex slave. The book had an incredible impact on Americans, selling 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year.

Doe was the daughter of a Calvinist minister. She eventually married a professor of biblical literature, and the two of them supported the Underground Railroad by temporarily housing many fugitive runaway slaves in their home. Ultimately, her and her husband had... a somewhat troubled marriage wherein they spent many years separated and only communicated by writing letters.

Their children went long periods of time in the care of one parent or the other. But whether you read the abolitionist pamphlets or Uncle Tom's Cabin, it was clear to readers that slave owners viewed and treated their slaves as nothing more than livestock. So even though some of these writers, even in their time, were controversial, their literature spoke for itself.

Some writers even told of how slave owners were forcing their slaves to breed. Rape was common in slavery, but these owners were selecting their largest, strongest male slaves and forcing them. to rape enslaved women until they conceived.

In this way, slave owners hoped to produce more large, strong slaves. This was, of course, terrible and brutal for the female slaves, but the male slaves were forced to rape. Sometimes the men were married.

Sometimes they raped women they were close to or even related to. And if they refused, their family members, their mothers, wives, or children would be whipped. The entire system was beyond cruel. The pamphlets and Uncle Tom's Cabin pulled of the sorrow of slave auctions, where nude slaves chained together were paraded through crowds to auction blocks.

Family members clung to each other to the last moment, knowing that the family was not alone. this might be the last they ever saw of each other. Mothers held their children and begged potential buyers to purchase them together. The inhumanity and sorrow was so overwhelming that few beyond regulars to auctions could endure them without being brought to tears themselves.

Slide three. In the last 20 years there has been considerable debate among historians and the general public concerning the financial profitability of slavery. Some claimed that slave owners were actually benevolent in keeping slaves because the institution did not produce profits owing to the cost of upkeep. This myth mainly comes from the fact that Thomas Jefferson died in heavy debt.

Jefferson did live an opulent life as did most planters and he did buy in debt. But he didn't die in debt because of his own lifestyle. Jefferson had co-signed a large loan for a young man he knew, believing the young man would repay, but the man did not. And Jefferson became financially responsible for a large debt that he did not pay in his lifetime. When Jefferson died, the debt was collected from his estate.

Jefferson did not die in debt because... cost of slavery, and neither did any other slave owner. Records clearly show that owners enjoyed at least a 10% annual return on the purchase cost of each slave. So a slave would pay for themselves in 10 years.

That didn't calculate the immediate profit of children born. Enslaved women, on average, produced a child every two years. Slavery did absolutely bring enormous wealth.

However, there existed very few giant plantations like you see in films. Sometimes people try to console me when they find out what I do for a living about all the destruction of plantations and the loss of history. In fact, many of the major plantations of the 19th century still exist as museums and preserved historic sites. The problem is that people imagine that the South must have had those huge opulent plantations everywhere, and they didn't. Remember, the soil is ruining underneath these planters with slave lands.

So, Most planters wouldn't have spent the time or the money to build a permanent estate when they knew that within 10 to 15 years they would have to move their entire endeavor westward. And that's why you really don't see as many of those giant plantations as people would expect. That said, the owners of those large, opulent plantations did set the social and political tone of the South.

The very wealthy planters were usually politicians too. So what's the difference between a plantation and a farm? First, a plantation has a planter master and a farm has a farmer slaveholder.

To be a planter required the ownership of 20 slaves, not 19, 20. Masters had large parties when they purchased or acquired through birth their 20th slave. Slide four. Planters hired slave managers called overseers to punish and drive their slaves. Farming slaveholders owned anything under 20 slaves and were generally dedicated to the idea of attaining 20 slaves. though very few ever did, just due to the cost of acquisition.

On farms, slaves and their master worked side by side. Those slaves did the harder, more dangerous labor. Students also usually ask me what a typical slave was like and who would have been a typical master. I'm uncomfortable. trying to describe any person in typical terms.

And here it is particularly complicated because we're talking about millions of unique individuals that were enslaved. But I can give you statistics. The average enslaved woman would give birth to nine to ten children each.

50% of babies born into slavery would die before their first birthday due to malnutrition, disease, or exposure. That said, the enslaved population as a whole was very young, with 33% being under the age of 18. That's because the average life expectancy of a slave was between 21 and 22 years of age. Only 10% of slaves lived to the age of 50. Three and a half percent of slaves would live to 60. So when you look at slave owners, the average age of a white master is in the 40s.

So we have several factors in terms of power dynamics at play here. Masters are owners. They control punishments like whippings or sales and rewards like clothing, food, and shelter. They are also considerably older than the people that they own on average.

Slide five. In the slaveholding South, slave ownership was less common than people expect. 75% of... white families owned no slaves. There was a total of 20,700 planters prior to the Civil War, slaveholders owning 20 slaves or more.

Fewer than 11,000 Southern men held 50 slaves or more. Only 2,300 planters held over 100 slaves. And that's about... the size of plantation people are imagining when they look at books or movies about antebellum plantations. Only 11 planters held over 500 slaves.

That's more than Jefferson. We're talking about astronomical wealth here that would have taken generations to create through strategic marriages. There is only one known planter to hold a thousand slaves, a man named Stephen Duncan.

Looking at those numbers, you're probably wondering how a civil war broke out at all. If only 20,700 people were really considered planters, how could we end up in a war that killed 620,000 people? The answer lies in Southern dreams.

While most white Southerners did not own slaves. They wanted to and hoped they could become planters one day. If slavery was eradicated, that dream would disappear, not only for those that had attained it, but for those that sought it generation after generation.

Slide six. If you were a slave, the truth is that for most of American history, your. quality of life depended entirely on who owns you.

There was no such thing as a good slave owner. These were all people that were comfortable and proud to own other people, use their labor while keeping them uneducated and in poor living conditions, weak from low rations, and to sell families apart. We could argue. that it was not uncommon, but I don't think that we can argue that such behavior in any time period could be described as good.

That said, how physically harsh or sexually abusive a master was varied greatly. There were slave codes in every southern state that were generally the same. They held curfews for slaves, and if a slave was caught out after dark, outside of their master's property, it could be very dangerous.

Slaves were not allowed to be educated to read in any state for fear that slaves would communicate to start a rebellion or contact northern abolitionist groups. If a slave was found to be able to read, the state would execute the slave and not reimburse the master. If a master allowed you to marry a slave, from another nearby plantation or to go visit family members nearby on Sunday depended on the master. As far as sexual conduct on a slave-holding farm or plantation was concerned, there was clear double standards for white men and women. White Southern women were supposed to be highly moral and chaste in their sexual behavior, whereas white Southern men were known to self-indulge in prostitution and the rape of enslaved women.

The truth is that everyone, women, children, and slaves, were considered the property of the white male. You might also imagine that if a plantation mistress knew her husband was raping an enslaved woman, she might try to help the victims. But there was no such sorority among women. Plantation mistresses often saw light-skinned enslaved children.

that closely resembled their own and knew the reality but because they were jealous of the victimized slaves they took their anger out on them by having them brutally punished for minor errors. Plantation mistresses might also try to get their husbands to sell such women often unsuccessfully. When they could do nothing else they were sometimes known to pay other slaves to attack and mutilate the women their husband had sex with by cutting their faces.

When the master left for business, such women really had to worry, as the mistress may decide to have them whipped daily, deny them food for long periods of time. In one well-recorded case, the plantation mistress had a young teenage girl that her husband frequently raped. whipped, starved, and chained in a meat smokehouse until she died. Plantation mistresses could not take their anger out on their husbands who actually deserved it and could only direct it at someone more vulnerable than themselves. Slide seven.

So you will clearly understand why slaveholders, both farmers and planters, would not want the institution of slavery to die. But what about the 75% of white Southerners that didn't own slaves? What else drove them to fight for the Confederacy than the dream of maybe one day becoming a slave owner? Why trade death today for a dream tomorrow? The answer was the middling farmers, landowners.

but not slave owners, worried that if slaves were freed, they'd go into agriculture, the only trade most slaves knew, and become economic competition. So the institution of slavery limited competition for poor whites, though they were landless, without slaves, and severely uneducated. They still wanted the institution of slavery to survive so that there was some class of people beneath them. They may be poor whites, but they weren't slaves. Without slavery, poor, uneducated whites may end up being beneath industrious former slaves.

Slide eight. There were always free blacks in America. Ever since that Dutch ship dropped off African slaves in Jamestown in the 17th century, over time, as race-based slavery emerged, free Blacks held a very uncertain status and were subject to racist legal restrictions state to state.

Free Blacks had a curfew, just like slaves did, though no free whites had a curfew. Free Blacks had to buy licenses to work in certain industries that whites did not have to buy. Free Blacks could not own farmland in Virginia or urban property in Maryland.

There were lots of controlling rules meant to restrict movement and opportunities for success. How did free Blacks become free if they weren't born free? There were actually several possible avenues. Some slaves that lived to older age. were able to be bought from slavery because their physical capacity had decayed.

If someone offered to purchase an older or injured slave from a planter, they'd usually accept and take the money to invest in a new younger slave. In some instances, slaves were granted their freedom for fighting in military engagements more often than any other avenue, a slave owner decided to free one or more of his slaves for some act of high merit, like saving the life of a white family member. Other masters became conscientious due to religious or abolitionist arguments and decided to free their slaves immediately or upon their death.

In 1860, there was a reported 390,000. free Blacks living in the United States. Slide nine.

Looking at this map, you can see where free Blacks lived in 1850, according to the census. Maryland has the highest population of free Blacks. You might notice areas in the slaveholding South where free Blacks lived, and you might be wondering why they wouldn't. immediately relocate to the north. It could be complicated by family that remained in nearby bondage or the fact that free Blacks were most protected by white families that knew them.

If white people knew you were born free, that was better than being in a new area and being suspected of being a runaway slave. Slide 10. It is an often ignored truth that free Black men did sometimes own slaves. In the 1830 census, it shows 3,775 Black men own 12,760 other people as slaves. That was a tiny minority of the free Black population, around 2%. But it is still significant in the 1830 census.

currents. Most of the slaves owned by other Black people were not actually treated as true slaves. Many times, free Blacks bought other slaves for humanitarian purposes, like allowing someone to be freed and work to repay them.

Until the debt was repaid, the person would be considered a slave, even if they did not live as a slave. Most of these people were actually family members that had been purchased out of slavery, but the family had not then gone to a lawyer to convert the deed to freedom papers. That cost money, and often families didn't see it as necessary, especially if they were still saving up money to buy other family members out of slavery.

It was, however, a very dangerous, risky thing to do, because if the owner were to die... and the other people were considered property, the state could determine that without a new rightful owner, the property would be auctioned back into slavery, and the state would absorb the profit. Remember that in 1808, Jefferson outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. So after 1808, with only a small amount of human smuggling in South Carolina, the number of slaves increased due to the only to natural increase, which matched the reproduction rate of white Americans, even with a much higher mortality rate due to a higher overall birth rate. As we discussed when we spoke about the Jeffersonian era, the fact that the number of slaves became limited caused the value of slaves to increase, but that didn't usually translate to better treatment as a result of the decline of the slave market.

one might expect. Okay, let's take a break here and we will come back in our second video lecture and continue this topic. For now, you guys work on clarifying your notes and go get a snack and relax for a few minutes. And whenever you're ready to finish this lecture series, I will see you in our next video lecture.

Transcript for:Exploring the Institution of Slavery

Transcript for:
Exploring the Institution of Slavery