Chapter 11 Terms

Nat Turner

A slave preacher and religious mystic in Southampton County, Virginia, who came to believe that God had chosen him to lead a black uprising. On August 22, he and a handful of followers marched from farm to farm assaulting the white inhabitants.

gang labor

A system where planters organized their slaves into gangs, supervised them closely, and had them work in the fields all day.

Cotton Kingdom

Areas in the south where cotton farming developed because of the high demand for cotton. In the nineteenth century, cotton replaced sugar as the world's major crop produced by slave labor.

necessary evil

Initially slavery was thought to be this. It was the idea that although it is morally wrong, it is necessary to the way of life.

neighborhood networks

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Underground Railroad

A loose organization of sympathetic abolitionists who hid fugitives in their homes and sent them on to the next "station".

Second Middle Passage

A massive trade in slaves that developed within the United States after the African slave trade was prohibited. More than 2 million slaves were sold between 1820 and 1860.

paternalism

A policy of treating subject people as if they were children, providing for their needs, but not giving them rights. This outlook both masked and justified the brutal reality of slavery. It enabled slaveowners to think of themselves as kind, responsible masters even as they bought and sold their human property.

John C. Calhoun

Believed that slavery was the "most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world."

hire their own time

Slaves could make work arrangements individually with employers, with most of the wages going to the slave's owner

task labor

Slaves were assigned daily tasks and allowed to set their own pace of work. Once a slave's task had been completed, he or she could spend the rest of the day hunting, fishing, or cultivating garden crops.