ch. 11 history

The “Peculiar Institution”

A phrase used by whites in the antebellum South to refer to slaver without the word “slavery.”

Second Middle Passage

The massive trade of slaves from the upper South (Virginia and the Chesapeake) to the lower South (the Gulf states) that took place between 1820 and 1860.

“Cotton is King”

Phrase from Senator James Henry Hammond's speech extolling the virtues of cotton, and, implicitly, the slave system of production that led to its bounty for the South. "King Cotton" became a shorthand for Southern political and economic power.

Paternalism

A moral position developed during the first half of the nineteenth century which claimed that slaves were deprived of liberty for their own "good." Such a rationalization was adopted by some slaveowners to justify slavery.

Proslavery Argument

The series of arguments defending the institution of slavery in the South as a positive good, not a necessary evil. The arguments included the racist belief that black people were inherently inferior to white people, as well as the belief that slavery, in creating a permanent underclass of laborers, made freedom possible for whites. Other elements of the argument included biblical citations.

Fugitive slaves

Slaves who escaped from their owners

Underground Railroad

Operating in the decades before the Civil War, a clandestine system of routes and safehouses through which slaves were led to freedom in the North.

Harriet Tubman

Abolitionist who was born a slave, escaped to the North, and then returned to the South nineteen times and guided 300 slaves to freedom.

La Amistad

Ship that transported slaves from one port in Cuba to another, seized by the slaves in 1839. They made their way northward to the United States, where the status of the slaves became the subject of a celebrated court case; eventually most were able to return to Africa.

Denmark’s Vesey’s Conspiracy

An 1822 failed slave uprising in Charleston, South Carolina, purported to have been led by Denmark Vesey, a free black man.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion

Most important slave uprising in nineteenth-century America, led by a slave preacher who, with his followers, killed about sixty white persons in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.

Henry “Box” Brown

an enslaved man who escaped slavery in 1849 by mailing himself in a wooden box from Virginia to Philadelphia, a free state. He later became an abolitionist and traveled around speaking against slavery.