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Final Chapter 11

Final Chapter 11

Frederick Douglass

Born into slavery in 1818.
Became a major figure in the crusade for abolition.
Played a significant role in the drama of emancipation.
Contributed to the effort during Reconstruction to give meaning to Black freedom.
Son of a slave mother and an unidentified white man.
Learned to read and write in violation of Maryland law.
- Initially with the assistance of his owner's wife.
- Later with the help of local white children after her husband forbade her to continue.
Experienced slavery in various forms.
- House servant.
- Skilled craftsman in a Baltimore shipyard.
- Plantation field hand.
At fifteen, his owner sent him to a "slave breaker" to curb his independent spirit.
Defiantly refused to be disciplined after numerous whippings.
- This was the turning point in his career as a slave.
- It rekindled his desire for freedom.
Escaped to the North in 1838 by borrowing the free papers of a Black sailor.
Became the most influential African American of the nineteenth century.
Preeminent advocate of racial equality.
Lectured against slavery throughout the North and the British Isles.
Edited a succession of antislavery publications.
Published a widely read autobiography.
- Offered an eloquent condemnation of slavery and racism.
Accomplishments testified to the incorrectness of prevailing ideas about Blacks' inborn inferiority.
Active in other reform movements, including women's rights.
Advised Abraham Lincoln on the employment of Black soldiers during the Civil War.
Advocated giving the right to vote to the emancipated slaves.
Died in 1895 as a new system of white supremacy based on segregation and disenfranchisement was being fastened upon the South.
Insisted that slavery could only be overthrown by continuous resistance.

Chronology

1791-1804: Haitian Revolution
1800: Gabriel's Rebellion
1811: Slave revolt in Louisiana
1822: Denmark Vesey's slave conspiracy
1830s: States legislate against teaching slaves to read or write
1831: William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator debuts
1831: Nat Turner's Rebellion
1831-1832: Slave revolt in Jamaica
1832: Virginia laws tighten the slave system
1833: British Parliament mandates emancipation
1838: Great Britain abolishes slavery within its empire
1838: Frederick Douglass escapes slavery
1839: Slaves take control of the Amistad
1841: Slave uprising on the Creole
1849: Harriet Tubman escapes slavery
1855: Trial of Celia

The Old South

Slavery was already an old institution in America when Frederick Douglass was born.
After abolition in the North, slavery had become the "peculiar institution" of the South-that is, an institution unique to southern society.
The Mason-Dixon Line became the dividing line between slavery and freedom.
Despite the hope of some of the founders that slavery might die out, in fact the institution survived the crisis of the American Revolution and rapidly expanded westward.
On the eve of the Civil War, the enslaved population had risen to nearly 4 million.
- Its high rate of natural increase more than making up for the prohibition in 1808 of further slave imports from Africa.
In the South as a whole, slaves made up one-third of the total population, and in the cotton-producing states of the Lower South, around half.
By the 1850s, slavery had crossed the Mississippi River and was expanding rapidly in Arkansas, Louisiana, and eastern Texas. In 1860, one-third of the nation's cotton crop was grown west of the Mississippi.

Cotton Is King

In the nineteenth century, cotton replaced sugar as the world's major crop produced by slave labor.
Although slavery survived in Brazil and the Spanish and French Caribbean, its abolition in the British empire in 1833 made the United States indisputably the center of slavery in the Americas.
The Old South was the largest and most powerful slave society the modern world has known.
- Its strength rested on a virtual monopoly of cotton, the South's "white gold."
In the nineteenth century, cotton assumed an unprecedented role in the world economy because the early industrial revolution centered on factories using cotton as the raw material to manufacture cloth.
Three-fourths of the world's cotton supply came from the southern United States.
Textile manufacturers in places as far-flung as Massachusetts, Lancashire in Great Britain, Normandy in France, and suburbs of Moscow depended on a regular supply of American cotton.
Cotton sales earned the money from abroad that allowed the United States for imported manufactured goods.
On the eve of the Civil War, cotton represented well over half of the total value of American exports.
In 1860, the economic investment represented by the slave population exceeded the value of the nation's factories, railroads, and banks combined.

The Second Middle Passage

To replace the slave trade from Africa, which had been prohibited by Congress in 1808, a massive trade in slaves developed within the United States.
More than 2 million slaves were sold between 1820 and 1860.
- A majority to local buyers but hundreds of thousands from older states to "importing" states of the Lower South, resulting in what came to be known as the Second Middle Passage.
Slave trading was a visible, established business.
- The main commercial districts of southern cities contained the offices of slave traders, complete with signs reading "Negro Sales" or "Negroes Bought Here."
Auctions of slaves took place at public slave markets, as in New Orleans, or at courthouses.
Southern newspapers carried advertisements for slave sales, southern banks financed slave trading, southern ships and railroads carried enslaved men, women, and children from buyers to sellers, and southern states and municipalities earned revenue by taxing the sale of slaves.
The Cotton Kingdom could not have arisen without the internal slave trade, and the economies of older states like Virginia came increasingly to rely on the sale of slaves.

Slavery and the Nation

Slavery, Henry Clay proclaimed in 1816, "forms an exception… to the general liberty prevailing in the United States."
The "free states" had ended slavery, but they were hardly unaffected by it.
- The Constitution enhanced the power of the South in the House of Representatives and electoral college and required all states to return fugitives from bondage.
Slavery shaped the lives of all Americans, white as well as Black.
- It helped to determine where they lived, how they worked, and under what conditions they could exercise their freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press.
Northern merchants and manufacturers participated in the slave economy and shared in its profits.
- Money earned in the cotton trade helped to finance industrial development and internal improvements in the North.
- Northern ships carried cotton to New York and Europe, northern bankers financed cotton plantations, northern companies insured slave property, and northern factories turned cotton into cloth.
New York City's rise to commercial prominence depended as much on the establishment of shipping lines that gathered the South's cotton and transported it to Europe as on the Erie Canal.
The Lords of the Loom (New England's early factory owners) relied on cotton supplied by the Lords of the Lash (southern slaveowners).
Northern manufacturers like Brooks Brothers supplied cheap fabrics (called "Negro cloth") to clothe the South's slaves.

The Southern Economy

There was no single South before the Civil War.
- In the eight slave states of the Upper South, slaves and slaveowners made up a smaller percentage of the total population than in the seven Lower South states that stretched from South Carolina west to Texas.
- The Upper South had major centers of industry in Baltimore, Richmond, and St. Louis, and its economy was more diversified than that of the Lower South, which was heavily dependent on cotton.
- During the secession crisis of 1860-1861, the Lower South states were the first to leave the Union.
Slavery led the South down a very different path of economic development than the North's, limiting the growth of industry, discouraging immigrants from entering the region, and inhibiting technological progress.
The South did not share in the urban growth experienced by the rest of the country.
- Most southern cities were located on the region's periphery and served mainly as centers for gathering and shipping cotton.
- Southern banks existed primarily to help finance the plantations.
  - They loaned money for the purchase of land and slaves, not manufacturing development.
- Southern railroads mostly consisted of short lines that brought cotton from the interior to coastal ports.
In the Cotton Kingdom, the only city of significant size was New Orleans.
- With a population of 168,000 in 1860, New Orleans ranked as the nation's sixth-largest city.
- As the gathering point for cotton grown along the Mississippi River and sugar from the plantations of southeastern Louisiana, it was the world's leading exporter of slave-grown crops.
- New Orleans also attracted large numbers of European immigrants.
  - In 1860, 40 percent of its population was foreign-born.
- New Orleans's rich French heritage and close connections with the Caribbean produced a local culture quite different from that of the rest of the United States, reflected in the city's distinctive music, dance, religion, and cuisine.
In 1860, the South produced less than 10 percent of the nation's manufactured goods. Many northerners viewed slavery as an obstacle to American economic progress.
The southern economy was hardly stagnant, and slavery proved compatible with economic growth.
Some defenders of slavery insisted that American foreign policy promote the interests of slavery throughout the hemisphere.
Other defenders of slavery insisted that the institution guaranteed equality for whites by preventing the growth of a class doomed to a life of unskilled labor.
- Slavery for Blacks was the surest guarantee of "perfect equality" among whites, liberating them from the "low, menial" jobs like factory labor and domestic service performed by wage laborers in the North.
- Slavery made possible the considerable degree of economic autonomy enjoyed not only by planters but also by non-slaveholding whites.
- Because independence was necessary for citizenship, slavery was the "cornerstone of our republican edifice."

Size of Slaveholdings, 1860

Most southern slaveholders owned fewer than five slaves.
The largest plantations were concentrated in coastal South Carolina and along the Mississippi River.

Abolition in the Americas

American slaveowners were well aware of developments in slave systems elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.
White southerners observed carefully the results of the wave of emancipations that swept the hemisphere in the first four decades of the century.
- In these years, slavery was abolished in of Spanish America and in the British empire.
In most Latin American nations, the end of slavery followed the pattern established earlier in the northern United States-gradual emancipation accompanied by some kind of recognition of the owners' legal right to property in slaves.
Abolition was far swifter in the British empire, where Parliament in 1833 mandated almost immediate emancipation, with a transitional period of "apprenticeship."
- The law appropriated 20 million pounds to compensate the owners.
The experience of emancipation in other parts of the hemisphere strongly affected debates over slavery in the United States.
- Southern slaveowners judged the vitality of the Caribbean economy by how much sugar and other crops it produced for the world market.
- Since many former slaves preferred to grow food for their own families, defenders of slavery in the United States charged that British emancipation had been a failure, as sugar production declined.
- Abolitionists disagreed, pointing to the rising standard of living of freed slaves, the spread of education among them, and other improvements in their lives.
By 1840, slavery had been outlawed in Mexico, Central America, and Chile, and only small numbers of aging slaves remained in Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru.
During the European revolutions of 1848, France and Denmark emancipated their colonial slaves.
At mid-century, significant New World slave systems remained only in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil-and the United States.
Because of the rapid growth of the slave population in the Old South, there were more slaves in the hemisphere in 1860 than at any earlier point.

Slavery and Liberty

Many white southerners declared themselves the true heirs of the American Revolution.
- They claimed to be inspired by "the same spirit of freedom and independence" that motivated the founding generation.
- Their political language was filled with contrasts between liberty and slavery and complaints that outsiders proposed to reduce them to "slaves" by interfering with their local institutions.
Southern state constitutions enshrined the idea of equal rights for free men, and the South participated fully in the movement toward political democracy for whites.
Beginning in the 1830s, however, proslavery writers began to question the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy so widely shared elsewhere in the nation.
South Carolina became the home of an aggressive defense of slavery that repudiated the idea that freedom and equality were universal entitlements.
The insistence of the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal and entitled to liberty was "the most false and dangerous of all political errors," insisted John C. Calhoun.
As the sectional controversy intensified after 1830, a number of southern writers and politicians came to defend slavery less as the basis of equality for whites than as the foundation of an organic, hierarchical society.
Inequality and hence the submission of inferior to superior-Black to white, female to male, lower classes to upper classes-was a "fundamental law" of human existence.
A hierarchy of "ranks and orders in human society," insisted John B. Alger, a Presbyterian minister in South Carolina, formed part of the "divine arrangement" of the world.

Slavery and Civilization

George Fitzhugh took the argument to its most radical conclusion.
- Far from being the natural condition of mankind, "universal liberty" was the exception, an experiment carried on "for a little while" in "a corner of Europe" and the northern United States.
- Taking the world and its history as a whole, slavery, "without regard to race and color," was "the general,… normal, natural" basis of "civilized society."
- Slaveowners and slaves shared a "community of interest" unknown in "free society."
- Since they lacked economic cares, "the Negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some degree, the freest people in the world."
- White workers in both the North and South would fare better having individual owners, rather than living as "slaves" of the economic marketplace.
Abraham Lincoln observed that the essential function of the proslavery argument was to serve the interests of those who benefited from a system of extreme inequality.
After 1830, southern writers, newspaper editors, politicians, and clergymen increasingly devoted themselves to spreading the defense of slavery.
The majority of white southerners came to believe that freedom for whites rested on the power to command the labor of Blacks.
In the words of the Richmond Enquirer, "freedom is not possible without slavery."

Glossary

"Peculiar institution": A phrase used by whites in the antebellum South to refer to slavery without using 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 phrase 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.

Life Under Slavery

Slaves and the Law

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.
Under the law, slaves were property.
Slaves had a few legal rights, but these were haphazardly enforced.
- All states made it illegal to kill a slave except in self-defense.
- Slaves accused of serious crimes were entitled to their day in court, before all-white judges and juries.
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, or leave the farm or plantation without the permission of their owner.
By the 1830s, it was against the law to teach a slave to read or write.
The slave, declared a Louisiana law, "owes to his master… a respect without bounds, and an absolute obedience."
The entire system of southern justice, from the state militia and courts down to armed patrols in each locality, was designed to enforce the master's control over the person and labor of his slaves.
In one famous case, a Missouri court considered the case of Celia, a slave who had killed her owner in 1855 while resisting a sexual assault.
- She was sentenced to death, but her execution was postponed until after she gave birth. This way the owner's heirs would not be deprived of their property rights.

Conditions of Slave Life

As the nineteenth century progressed, some southern states enacted laws to prevent the mistreatment of slaves, and their material living conditions improved.
Compared with their counterparts in the West Indies and Brazil, American slaves enjoyed better diets, lower rates of infant mortality, and longer life expectancies.
Even as the material lives of the majority of slaves improved, the South drew tighter and tighter the chains of bondage.
Few slave societies in history have so systematically closed all avenues to freedom as the Old South.

Free Blacks in the Old South

The existence of slavery helped to define the status of those Blacks who did enjoy freedom.
On the eve of the Civil War, nearly half a million free Blacks lived in the United States, a majority in the South.
Among Blacks, "the distinction between the slave and the free is not great."
Free Blacks in the South could legally own property and marry and, of course, could not be bought and sold.
Many regulations restricting the lives of slaves also applied to free blacks.
Free Blacks had no voice in selecting public officials.
Like slaves, they were prohibited from owning dogs, firearms, or liquor, and they could not strike a white person, even in self-defense.
They were not allowed to testify in court against whites or serve on juries, and they had to carry at all times a certificate of freedom.
In the United States, a society that equated "Black" and "slave" and left little room for a mixed-race group between them, free Blacks were increasingly considered undesirable, a potential danger to the slave system.
By the 1850s, most southern states prohibited free Blacks from entering their territory, and a few states even moved to expel them altogether, offering the choice of enslavement or departure.
A few free Blacks managed to prosper within slave society.

The Upper and Lower South

Very few free Blacks lived in the Lower South in 1860.
Like William Johnson, a majority of them resided in cities.
In New Orleans and Charleston, relatively prosperous free Black communities developed, mostly composed of descendants of unions between white men and slave women.
In the Upper South, where the large majority of southern free Blacks lived, they generally worked for wages as farm laborers.
Free Blacks in Virginia and Maryland were closely tied to the slave community and often had relatives in bondage.
Overall, in the words of Willis A. Hodges, a member of a free Virginia family that helped runaways to reach the North, free Blacks and slaves were "one man of sorrow."

Voices of Freedom

Joseph Taper's letter from Canada expresses contentment with liberty and condemns Southern laws equating humans with brutes.
He highlights the benefits of education in Canada and contrasts it with the oppression of slavery.
De Bow's Review argues that the Bible sanctions slavery and that it has existed throughout history without condemnation from sacred writers.
They emphasize the importance of showing that the Bible supports slavery.
Taper and De Bow have contrasting views on the relationship between slavery and Christianity. Taper sees slavery as incompatible with Christian principles, while De Bow argues for its biblical justification.

Slave Labor

Slavery was primarily a system of labor.
Large plantations were diversified communities where slaves performed various jobs.

Major Crops of the South, 1860

Slaves engaged in various activities to include cutting wood, working in mines, manning docks, laying railroad tracks and constructing and repairing bridges, roads, and other facilities.
By 1860 some 200,000 worked in industry, especially in the ironworks and tobacco factories of the Upper South.

Gang Labor and Task Labor

The precise organization of labor varied according to the crop and size of the holding.
The largest concentration of slaves lived and worked on plantations in the Cotton Belt, where men, women, and children labored in gangs, often under the direction of an overseer and perhaps a slave "driver" who assisted him.
On the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia, the system of task labor, which had originated in the colonial era, prevailed.

Slavery in the Cities

Skilled urban craftsmen also enjoyed considerable autonomy.
Most city slaves were servants, cooks, and other domestic laborers.

Maintaining Order

Slaveowners employed a variety of means in their attempts to maintain order and discipline among their human property and persuade them to labor productively.

Glossary

Land of liberty: The Taper family fled to Canada to avoid being sent back to enslavement in the South.
Molest [us]: Here Mr. Taper is using the word to describe being physically harmed or forced into bondage.
Most obt: "Most obt" is an abbreviated form of "most obedient [servant]," which was a common salutation at the time and does not refer to the Taper family's previous enslavement.
Party: Here the author means group, rather than a political party. Both the Whigs and Democrats had northern and southern wings at this time.
No deduction from general principles can make it wrong: Here the writer is exalting the Bible over any moral appeals and even over the Constitution and laws of the United States.
It existed in every country known: This is an exaggeration, and in city-states and other countries, enslavement was not racialized, but rather, it was a consequence of a loss in a battle or war. Enslavement in history was part of warfare, and in many places, the generation that was captured was the only generation that was enslaved-unlike in the United States where the children of enslaved mothers were enslaved in perpetuity.

Slave Culture

Slaves never abandoned their desire for freedom or their determination to resist total white control over their lives.
They succeeded in forging a semi-independent culture, centered on the family and church.
Slave culture drew on the African heritage.
Unlike the plantation regions of the Caribbean and Brazil, where the African slave trade continued into the nineteenth century and the Black population far outnumbered the white, most slaves in the United States were American-born and lived amid a white majority.
Slave culture was a new creation, shaped by African traditions and American values and experiences.

The Slave Family

At the center of the slave community stood the family.
The United States had an even male-female ratio, making the creation of families far more possible.
The law did not recognize the legality of slave marriages.
Most adult slaves married, and their unions, when not disrupted by sale, typically lasted for a lifetime.
To solidify a sense of family continuity, slaves frequently named children after cousins, uncles, grandparents, and other relatives.
The slave community had a significantly higher number of female-headed households than among whites, as well as families in which grandparents, other relatives, or even non-kin assumed responsibility for raising children.

The Threat of Sale

The threat of sale, which disrupted family ties, was perhaps the most powerful disciplinary weapon slaveholders possessed.
Fear of sale permeated slave life, especially in the Upper South.

Gender Roles among Slaves

Slave men and women experienced, in a sense, the equality of powerlessness.
The nineteenth century's "cult of domesticity," which defined the home as a woman's proper sphere, did not apply to slave women, who regularly worked in the fields.
Enslaved men could not act as the economic providers for their families.
When slaves worked "on their own time," however, more conventional gender roles prevailed.

Slave Religion

A distinctive version of Christianity also offered solace to slaves in the face of hardship and hope for liberation from bondage.
Even though the law prohibited slaves from gathering without a white person present, every plantation, it seemed, had its own Black preacher.
Owners required slaves to attend services conducted by white ministers, who preached that theft was immoral and that the Bible required servants to obey their masters.
The slaves transformed the Christianity they had embraced, turning it to their own purposes.
- A blend of African traditions and Christian belief, slave religion was practiced in secret nighttime gatherings on plantations and in "praise meetings" replete with shouts, dances, and frequent emotional interchanges between the preacher and the congregation.

The Gospel of Freedom

The biblical story of Exodus played a central role in Black Christianity.

The Desire for Liberty

Slave culture rested on a conviction of the unjustness of bondage and the desire for freedom.
Slaves' folklore glorified the weak hare who outwitted stronger foes like the bear and fox, rather than challenging them directly.
Even the most ignorant slave could not "fail to observe the difference between their own condition and the meanest white man's, and to realize the injustice of laws which place it within [the owner's] power not only to appropriate the profits of their industry, but to subject them to unmediated and unprovoked punishment without remedy."

Resistance To Slavery

Slaves could only rarely express their desire for freedom by outright rebellion.
Resistance to slavery took many forms in the Old South, from individual acts of defiance to occasional uprisings.

Forms of Resistance

The most widespread expression of hostility to slave was "day-to-day resistance" or "silent sabotage"-doing poor work, breaking tools, abusing animals, and in other ways disrupting the plantation routine.

Fugitive Slaves

Even more threatening to the stability of the slave system were slaves who ran away.
Slaves had little or no knowledge of geography, apart from understanding that following the North Star led to freedom.

The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad, a loose organization of sympathetic abolitionists who hid fugitives in their homes and sent them on to the next "station," assisted some runaway slaves.
Rather than a single, centralized system with tunnels, codes, and clearly defined routes/stations, the Underground Railroad was a series of interlocking local networks involving Black and white abolitionists.

The Amistad

Large groups of slaves collectively seized their freedom. The most celebrated instance involved fifty-three slaves who in 1839 took control of the Amistad, a ship transporting them from one port in Cuba to another, and tried to force the navigator to steer it to Africa.

Slave Revolts

The four largest conspiracies in American history occurred within the space of thirty-one years in the early nineteenth century.
In 1811, an uprising on sugar plantations upriver from New Orleans occurred.

The South's Great Reaction

Garrison's abolitionist journal, The Liberator, suggested that American slavery faced enemies both within and outside the South.

Glossary

Fugitive Slave Act: 1850 law that gave the federal government authority in cases involving runaway slaves; aroused considerable opposition in the North.
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.
Tubman, Harriet: Abolitionist who was born a slave, escaped to the North, and then returned to the South nineteen times and guided 300 slaves to freedom.
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 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: An 1831 insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, led by an enslaved preacher, resulting in the death of about sixty white persons.