APUSH — Chapter 11: "The Peculiar Institution" — Period 4: 1800-1848

After abolition in the North, slavery became the "peculiar institution" of the South - an institution unique to southern society. The Mason-Dixon line between Maryland and Pennsylvania became the dividing line between slavery & freedom. Despite the hope of some founders that slavery might die out, the institution survived the American Revolution and rapidly expanded westward. The number of slaves and economic/political importance of slavery continued to grow. Due to the high rate of natural increase, there were now 4 million slaves in the United States... 1/3rd of the southern population and half the population of cotton producing states in the deep south. By 1850, slavery had crossed the Mississippi and was expanding rapidly in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.

In the 19th century, cotton replaced sugar as the world's major crop produced by slave labor. Slavery's abolition in the British Empire in 1833 made the United States the center of New World Slavery. The Old South was the largest, most powerful slave society the modern world has ever known. Its strength rested on a virtual monopoly of cotton, the south's "white gold". The South had an unprecedented role in the world economy by producing the most important commodity in international trade. The early industrial revolution centered on factories using cotton to make cloth. 3/4ths of the world's cotton supply came from the U.S. Cotton sales earned money from abroad that allowed the U.S. to pay for imported manufactured goods. In 1860, the economic investment represented by the slave population exceeded the value of the nation's factories, railroads and banks combined.

The Lords of the Loom were New England's early factory owners, relying on cotton supplied by the Lords of the Lash - southern slave owners. Northern merchants and manufacturers participated in the slavery economy and shared in its profits. Money earned from the cotton trade helped to finance industrial development & internal improvements in the North. Northern ships carried cotton to New York & Europe, northern bankers financed cotton plantations, northern companies insured slave property, and northern factories turned cotton into cloth. NYC's rise to commercial prominence depended on the establishment of shipping lines that gathered the south's cotton and transported it to Europe. Northern manufacturers supplied cheap fabrics to clothe slaves.

The second stage of the transatlantic slave trade was also called the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage was a horrifying experience for slaves headed to the Americas. Slaves were quartered on ships for up to two months and treated as cargo. They were often chained in shackles and kept below deck where they had to lay on top of each other because there was less than three feet of height. There was never enough food or fresh air for the slaves. Many of the slaves died of starvation and disease. Some were so tortured by the trip that they threw themselves overboard. Due to all of these and more circumstances there was an 11% mortality rate of slaves on these ships.

75% of white families did not own slaves. Since planters monopolized the best land, most small whit farmers lived outside the plantation belt in hilly areas unsuitable for cotton production. They worked the land using family labor rather than slaves or hired workers. Many southern farmers lived the lives of economic self-sufficiency remote fromt he market revolution. They raised livestock, grew their food and purchased few goods. Those residing on marginal land in isolated hilly areas and the Appalachian mountains were desperately poor and illiterate. Most Yeoman (modest farm) farmers, however, enjoyed a comfortable standard of living, many owned a slave or two. Even successful small farmers relied heavily on home production to supply their basic needs. Therefore, unlike Northern farmers, they did not produce a market for manufactured goods. Most white southerners supported the planter elite and slavery because they shared bonds of regional loyalty, racism and kinship ties.

Planter's values glorified a hierarchical, agrarian society in which slaveholding gentlemen took personal responsibility for the physical and moral wellbeing of their dependents - women, children and their slaves. This outlook, known as "paternalism", had become a feature of American slavery. Slaves had the right in the master - rights to protection, counsel, subsistence & care. Wealthy planter Charles C. Jones organized his neighbors to promote the religious instruction of slaves, improve slave housing, diet, and medical care, as well as discourage severe punishments.

In the thirty years before the outbreak of the Civil War, however, even as northern criticism of the "peculiar institution" began to deepen, proslavery thought came to dominate southern public life. Fewer and fewer, white southerners shared the view, common among the founding fathers that slavery was a "necessary evil." Even those who had no direct stake in slavery shared with planters a deep commitment to white supremacy. Indeed, racism - the belief that blacks were innately inferior to whites and therefore unsuited for life in any condition other than slavery - formed one pillar of the proslavery ideology. Others argued that slavery was essential to human progress. Without slavery, they believed, planters would be unable to cultivate the arts, sciences, and other civilized pursuits.

For slaves, the "peculiar institution" meant a life of incessant toil, brutal punishment, and the constant fear that their families would be destroyed by sale. Before the law, slaves were property. The few legal rights they did have were haphazardly enforced. Slaves could be sold or leased by their owners at will and lacked any voice in the governments that ruled over them. They could not testify in court against a white person, sign contracts, or acquire property, own firearms, hold meetings unless a white person was present, to leave the farm or plantation without the permission of their owner. By the 1830s, it was against the law to tech a slave to read or write.

The paternalistic outlook both masked and justified the brutal realities of slavery. It enabled slave owners to think of themselves as kind, responsible master's, downplaying the fact that they bought & sold humans as property. They were able to claim that slaves formed part of the master's "family". Some slave owners tried to reform the system to eliminate its most oppressive features. Slaves were seen as too "degraded"/lacking in moral/self discipline to be freed.

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Slaves never abandoned their desire for freedom or their determination to resist total white control over their lives. In the face of grim realities, they succeeded in forging a semi-independent culture, centered on the family and church. Slave culture drew on African heritage. African influences were evident in the Slave's music and dances, style of religious worship, and the use of herbs by slave healers to combat disease. Slave culture was a new creation, shaped by African traditions and American values and traditions.

A distinctive version of Christianity also offered solace to slaves in the face of hardship and hope for liberation from bondage. Some blacks, free and slave alike, had taken part in the Great Awakening of the colonial era, and even more were swept into the South's Baptist and Methodist churches during the religious revivals if the late 18th and early 19th centuries. To masters, Christianity offered another means of social control. Many required their slaves to to attend services conducted by white ministers who preached that theft was immoral and that the Bible required servants to obey their masters.

Confronted with federal, state, and local authorities committed to preserving slavery, and outnumbered within the South as a whole by the white population, slaves could only rarely express their desire for freedom by outright rebellion. Compared to Brazil and the West Indies, which experienced numerous uprisings involving hundreds or even thousands of slaves, revolts in the United States were much smaller and less frequent. Resistance to slavery took many forms in the Old South, from individual acts of defiance to occasional uprisings. These actions posed a constant challenge to the slaveholder's self image as benign paternalists and their belief that slaves were obedient subjects grateful for their owner's care.

The most widespread expression of hostility to slavery was the "day-to-day resistance" or "silent sabotage" - doing poor work, breaking tools, abusing animals and in other ways disrupting the plantation routine. Many slaves made believe that they were too ill in order to avoid work. Then there was theft of food, a form of resistance which was incredibly common. Less frequent, but more dangerous, were serious crimes committed by slaves, including arson, poisoning and armed assaults against individual whites.

The Underground Railroad, a loose organization of sympathetic abolitionists who hid fugitives in their homes and sent them from one "station" to the next, assisted some runaway slaves. However, most who managed to reach the North did so on their own initiative, sometimes showing remarkable ingenuity. William and Ellen Craft impersonated a sickly owner traveling with her slave. Henry "Box" Brown packed himself inside a crate and literally shipped himself from Georgia to freedom in the North.

A few courageous individuals made forays into the South to liberate slaves. Perhaps the best known was Harriet Tubman. Born in Maryland in 1820, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 and during the next decade risked her life by making some 20 trips back to her state of birth to lead relatives as well as other slaves to freedom.

A major conspiracy was organized in 1822 by Denmark Vesey, a slave carpenter in Charleston, South Carolina who had purchased his freedom. An outspoken, charismatic leader, Vesey took a leading role that slavery and bondage is against the Bible, and read to his fellow conspirators accounts of the successful slave revolution in Haiti. His plot was discovered before it could reach fruition. In the end, thirty-five slaves and free blacks, among them Vesey and three slaves belonging to the Governor of South Carolina, were executed and an equal number were banished from the state.

The best known of all slave rebels was 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 white inhabitants. Most victims were women and children. By the time the militia put down the uprising, about 80 slaves had joined Turner's band, and some 60 whites had been killed. Turner was subsequently captured and, with seventeen other rebels, condemned to die. Nat Turner's was the last large-scale rebellion in Southern history. It sent shock waves through the entire south, as a result, in the panic that followed the revolt, hundreds of innocent slaves were whipped and scores were executed. For one last time, Virginia's leaders openly debated whether steps ought to be taken to do away with the "Peculiar Institution" but the proposal failed to win legislative approval.

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