APUSH Chapter 16: The South and The Slave Controversy

1. What is meant by "Cotton is King?" How did its sovereignty extend beyond the South? What implications did its rule have?

"Cotton was King" the gin was his throne, and the black bondsmen were his henchmen. If war should ever break out between North and South, northern warships would presumably cut off the outflow of cotton. Fiber-famished British factories would then close their gates, starving mobs would force the London government to break the blockade, and the South would triumph. Britain was then the most leading industrial power. It's most important single manufacture in the 1850s was cotton cloth, from which about one-fifth of its population, directly or indirectly, drew its livelihood. About 75% of this precious supply of fiber came from the white-carpeted acres of the South. (Pg. 530 & 531)

13. What do historians agree on about agree on about slavery? Disagree about?

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Abolition

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Chattel

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Chivalry

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Emancipate

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Natural increase

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One crop economy

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Overseer

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Peculiar Institution

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Wendell Phillips

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Yeoman Farmer

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Denmark Vesey

A free black led another ill-fated rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 (Pg. 362)

Sojourner Truth

A freed black woman in New York who fought tirelessly for black emancipation and women's rights (Pg. 365)

7. Give evidence to show that slaves developed a separate, unique culture. What circumstances made this possible.

A majority of blacks lived on plantations with communities of 20 or more slaves, where the family life of slaves tended to be relatively stable and a culture arose. Evidence of a unique culture was the practice of naming children for grandparents or adopting the surname of a forebear's master. Blacks also displayed their cultural roots when they avoided marriage between first cousins unlike the planter aristocracy. Also african roots were seen in their religious practices, a mixture of christian and African with responsorial style of preaching.

William Lloyd Garrison

A mild looking reformer, published in Boston the first issue of his militantly antislavery newspaper, The Liberator. With this mighty paper, Garrison triggered a thirty-year war of words and in a sense fired one of the opening barrages of the Civil War (Pg. 364)

Nat Turner

A visionary black preacher led an uprising that slaughtered about sixty Virginians, mostly women and children (Pg. 362)

11. How did the South defend itself against the attacks of abolitionist?

A way the south fought against abolitionists attacks was by claiming that slavery was supported by the Bible and wisdom of Aristotle. They claimed it was good for the Africans who were lifted from the barbarism of the jungle and clothed with the blessings of Christian civilization. It was pointed out that the relationships of master-slave really resembled those of a family. They also contradicted the happy servants to wage slaves in horrible factories with no breaks and it was argued that they were set adrift if they outlived their usefulness. (Pg. 367)

12. How did Northerners view Abolitionists? Did they have any success?

Abolitionists, especially the extremists were for a long time unpopular in the north. Northerners thought of slavery as a constitutional lasting bargain. The north had a heavy economic stake in the south so the north developed strong hostility towards abolitionists. The north had mobs and tongue lashings against the abolitionists, their property were damaged and some were killed. Politicians stayed away from them. They had some success, many citizens saw the south as the land of the unfree and became hateful of it. (Pg. 368)

"Sambo"

An image that slaves used to confound their masters without incurring punishment (Pg. 370)

Lawrence Levine

Argued that the Sambo character was an act, an image that slaves used to confound their masters without incurring punishment. Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977). (Pg. 370)

Eli Whitney

Created the cotton gin; Whitney's invention made possible the wide-scale cultivation of short-staple cotton (pg. 350)

The American Colonization Society

Founded in 1817, and in 1822 the Republic of Liberia, on the fever- stricken West African Coast, was established for former slaves (Pg. 363)

5. Would it have been better to be a free black in the North or South? Explain.

Free slave in the North because even though slaves were still unpopular, they were only denied the right to vote and some were barred from public schools. While in the South they were considered a kind of "thick race." They were prohibited from working in certain occupations and forbidden from testifying against whites in court. They were also always vulnerable to being hijacked back into slavery. (Pg. 356)

10. How were the attitudes of William Llyod Garrison and Frederick Douglass different? When dealing with an issue that is moral and political, how rigid should a person be?

Garrison was stern and uncompromising and he was harsh and he published newspapers, writing. Douglass was more of an orator. Douglass was as flexibly practical as Garrison was stubbornly principled. Garrison often seemed more interested in his own righteousness than the substance of slavery evil itself. Douglass increasingly looked to politics to end slavery and were pacifistic. (Pg. 365 & 366)

Eugene Genovese

Genovese conceded that slavery embraced a strange form of paternalism, a system that reflected not the benevolence of southern slaveholders, but their need to control and coax work out of their reluctant and often recalcitrant "investments" (Pg. 370)

Frederick Douglass

Greatest black abolitionist, published his classic autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. It depicted his remarkable origins as the son of a black slave woman and a white father, his struggle to learn to read and write and his eventual escape to the North (Pg. 365)

Theodore Weld

Had been evangelized by Charles Grandison Finney in New York's Burned-Over District in the 1820s. Self-educated and simple in manner and speech, Weld appealed with special power and directness to his rural audiences of untutored farmers. (Pg. 364)

Arthur and Lewis Tappan

I'm 1832 they paid his way to Lane Theological Seminary in Cincimnati, Ohio (Pg. 364)

Mulattoes

In the deeper South, many free blacks were mulattoes, usually the emancipated children of a white planter and his black mistress. Mixed people. (Pg. 356)

David Walker

Incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) advocates a bloody end to white supremacy (Pg. 365)

Ulrich B. Phillips

Landmark study, American Negro Slavery (1918). Phillips made three key arguments. First, he claimed that slavery was a dying economic institution, unprofitable to the slaveowner and an obstacle to the economic development of the South as a whole. Second, he contended that slavery was a rather benign institution and that the planters, contrary to abolitionist charges of ruthless exploitation, treated their chattels with kindly paternalism. Third, he reflected the dominant racial attitudes of his time in his belief that blacks were inferior and submissive by nature and did not abhor the institution that enslaved them. (Pg. 369)

Gabriel Prosser

Led an armed insurrection in Richmond, Virginia, was foiled by informers, and its leaders were hanged (Pg. 362)

Old South

Life was rough and raw and in general the lot of the slave was harder here than in the more settled areas of the Old South (Pg. 360)

4. Why did many whites who did not own slaves support slavery?

Many of the poorer whites were hardly better off economically than the slaves; some, indeed, we're not so well-off. But even the most wretched whites could take perverse comfort from the knowledge that they outranked someone in status: the still more wretched African American slave. (Pg. 356)

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Most effective abolitionist tracts and Uncle Tom's Cabin (Pg. 364)

Deep South

Most slaves were concentrated in the "black belt" of the Deep South that stretched from South Carolina and Georgia into the new southwest states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Blacks accounted for more than 75 percent of the population. (Pg. 360 & 361)

2. In what ways was the south "basically undemocratic?"

Oligarchy-- or a government by the few In 1850 only 1,733 families owned more than 100 slaves each, and this select group provided the cream of the political and social leadership of the section and nation. It widened the gap between rich and poor. It hampered tax-supported public education, because the rich planters could and did send their children to private institutions. (Pg. 351)

9. Describe some of the early abolitionist.

Quakers, Monroe, who founded the Am Colonization Society. Weld who appealed to rural farmers. Arthur and Lewis, brothers who supported weld. Lyman Beecher. Harriet Beecher Stowe, catherine Beecher and Henry Ward Beecher.

3. What were the weaknesses of the South's dependence on cotton?

Quick profits led to excessive cultivation, or "land butchery" which in turn caused a heavy leakage of population to the West and Northwest. Dominance by King Cotton likewise led to a dangerous dependence on a one-crop economy, whose price level was at the mercy of world conditions. The whole system discouraged a healthy diversification of agricultural and particularly of manufacturing. (Pg. 352 & 353)

Kenneth Stampp

Rejecting the Sambo stereotype, stressed the frequency and variety of slave resistance both mild and militant (Pg. 370)

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Seized the emotional power of this theme by putting it at the heart of the plot of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Pg. 359)

6. "...planters regarded slaves as investments [like a mule]...." Explain what was positive and what was negative about this situation for slaves.

Slaves were the primary form of wealth in the South, and as such they were cared for as any asset is cared for by a prudent capitalist. If a neck was going to be broken, the master preferred it to be that of a wage-earning Irish laborer rather than that of a prime field hand, worth $1,800 by 1860 (a price that had quintupled since 1800). (Pg. 358)

Hillbilly

Some of the least prosperous non slaveholding whites were scorned even by slaves as "poor white trash." Known also as "hillbillies," "crackers," or "clay eaters." (Pg. 354 & 355)

Breaker

Strong willed slaves were sometimes sent to "breakers," whose technique consisted mostly in lavish laying on the lash. (Pg. 360)

8. Thomas Jefferson once said that having slaves was like holding a wolf by the ears, you didn't like it but you couldn't let go. How does this section help to explain this statement?

This means that even though slavery is really bad, it's helping to maintain the economy and that it's a necessary evil, yes it was immoral but it was necessary for the economy of both the north and the south. Also, it made the south into a reactionary backwater in an era of progress.

Cotton gin

Whitney's invention made possible the wide-scale cultivation of short-staple cotton. The white fiber rapidly became the dominant southern crop, eclipsing tobacco, rice, and sugar. (Pg. 350)

Stanley Elkin

Wrote Slavery (1959) went so far to compare the "peculiar institution" to the Nazi concentration camps of the World War 2. Elkins accepted Phillips portrait of the slave as a childlike "Sambo" but saw it as a consequence of slavery rather than a congenital attribute of African Americans (Pg. 369 & 370)