Notes on Slavery in the Antebellum South

Life of Enslaved People

The life of enslaved African Americans during the antebellum period (pre-Civil War) varied significantly depending on time and place.
While plantations are commonly associated with slavery, only a small percentage of slave owners (15-20%) owned large plantations.
Most slave owners (80-85%) owned only one or two slaves and worked alongside them on small farms.
Slaves also lived in urban environments.
Freedom for enslaved people meant having autonomy, such as engaging in their own economic activities.
- Some slaves hunted, trapped furs, and sold them.
- Others became artisans in cities.
The treatment of slaves also varied depending on the master, but there was no such thing as a "good" slave owner.

Southern White Society

Only about 25% of Southern whites owned slaves.
The other 75% were mostly yeoman farmers (subsistence farmers) who grew crops for their own survival.
Planters, defined as those owning 20 or more slaves, constituted less than 4% of the white population but held a disproportionate amount of wealth and political power (planter aristocracy).
Planter society shaped Southern culture, politics, and morals, including ideas of Southern chivalry.
- Chivalry is the code of conduct knights were meant to follow, like Honorable, defend
A small percentage of white population (about 1,700 families) owned 50 or more slaves.
Even non-slaveholding whites depended on slavery due to the prevailing white supremacy.
- Slavery ensured they were always a class above African Americans.
The planter class influenced everyone else in society, and the less wealthy wanted to imitate their lifestyle.
Planters influenced public policy, but they did not prioritize public education because they sent their children to boarding schools.

Plantation Life

Plantations were complex enterprises, like large corporations.
Running a plantation required knowledge of accounting, farming, and other areas.
Southern white women were heads of households and ran the extended household on plantations, overseeing domestic service, child-rearing, and sometimes accounting.
Women also educated their children until they were old enough to attend boarding school.
Planter sons pursued honorable professions such as law or military service, while daughters attended finishing schools to learn skills like playing the piano and speaking French in order to find a husband.

Slave Owners

80-88% of slave owners owned fewer than 20 slaves.
Many small slave owners worked alongside their slaves in the fields.
Southern society avidly defended slavery.

Paternalism

Paternalism described the relationship between slave and master.
Historian Ulrich Phillips wrote about paternalism in his book American Negro Slavery in the early 20th century.
Paternalism is linked with white supremacy and racism.
Planters saw themselves as benevolent parents to slaves, based on pseudoscientific ideas about African American inferiority.
The idea that African Americans were inferior justified slavery.
Masters sometimes cared for their slaves to some extent, but this varied.
For a first-hand account, it is recommended to read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass.
Slaves were considered property and capital investments.
In the 1850s, the price of a slave averaged about 1,500, comparable to the price of a modern-day car (25,000-$30,000).
Planters generally avoided extreme physical abuse and deprivation of their slaves, but this was not always the case.
Masters generally didn't have intimate relationships with all their slaves and primarily interacted with overseers and slave drivers.
The slave market demonstrated the limits of paternalism, families were broken up and sold at auction blocks.
Planters rented out or mortgaged slaves to cover debts.
Fear, not love or recognition, was the planters' greatest base of authority.

Non-Slave Holding Whites

The majority of southern white farmers did not own slaves.
These yeoman farmers worked alongside their families on the farm.
Women bore many children to provide labor for the fields.
They primarily grew subsistence crops and raised livestock to support themselves.
Mountain men were individualistic southerners who lived in the back country and worked in lumber or distilled whiskey.
Yeoman farmers generally did not support abolitionism.
They hoped to become wealthy enough to own slaves one day.
Slavery supported their role in a society divided by race, ensuring they were always above slaves in the social order.

Pro-Slavery Arguments

Plantation owners feared that non-slaveholders might turn against slavery.
They created a mood of impending catastrophe, especially after Nat Turner's rebellion.
The American Colonization Society was founded in 1817 to promote gradual, voluntary emancipation and deportation of freed slaves to Africa (Liberia).
The Virginia legislature debated gradual emancipation after Nat Turner's rebellion but ultimately rejected it.
The argument that slavery was a "positive good" was used to counter abolitionist charges that it was inherently evil.
The pro-slavery argument had three major tenets:
- Enslavement of African Americans was natural and proper.
  - This was supported by pseudosciences like phrenology to justify paternalism. Phrenology is BS study, that uses a skull to "scientifically" explain or prove that African Americans or other people cannot do math, or things like that.
- The Bible sanctioned slavery.
  - Ancient Hebrew slavery and the teachings of Saint Paul were used as defenses.
- Slavery was consistent with the humanitarian spirit of the 19th century.
  - African Americans were said to be naturally dependent and in need of guidance from benevolent masters.
Pro-slavery southerners made abolitionist writings illegal and prevented the spread of abolitionist newspapers.
More and more southerners supported nullifying the federal government, which meant seceding from the Union.

Economic Success and Slavery

The United States' economy was built on the backs of African American slaves.
The Southern economy was directly tied to slavery and cotton production.
The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s by Eli Whitney made cotton production economically viable.
The number of slaves in the South tripled between 1810 and 1860.
The Lower South was heavily dependent on slavery.
An internal slave trade developed as demand for slaves rose in the Upper South.
Slaveholders in Virginia and the Carolinas sold slaves to the Upper and Deep South.
About 600,000-700,000 slaves were sent Southwest between 1815 and 1860, splitting up families.
The Upper South experienced a decline in the importance of slave labor and more rapid urban and industrial development.
The Upper South became the border states during the Civil War because they were divided on whether to join the Confederacy or the Union.

Cotton and the Southern Economy

The cotton gin led to the rise of short-staple cotton as the main cash crop of the Deep South.
- Short-staple cotton was hardier and could be grown in more places but was difficult to process.
Large plantations could afford cotton gins, monopolize transportation, and control waterways, especially going down to New Orleans to float the goods.
It took a lot of investment capital to invest in theses machines.
Georgia and South Carolina were the first cotton-producing regions, followed by Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas.
British textile industry relied heavily on Southern cotton.
The American South produced a majority of the world's cotton supply.
By 1840, cotton made up more than half of all US exports.
By 1860, cotton made up 58% of all US exports.
The South was referred to as the "Cotton Kingdom".
The US dollar becomes valueless without cotton and the slave trade.
Slavery was fundamental to the world's economy.
By 1830, about a million people were growing cotton in the South, mostly enslaved.
The South was at the center of a transatlantic trade network.
Cotton did not represent the South's best bet for a profitable investment, but many invested heavily in cotton.
Planters had no incentive to seek alternatives to slavery.
By 1860, slavery was an economically sound system, with wealthy planters getting an 8-9% return on their capital invested.
Economic development only benefited those with money and who were white.
Putting all their economic eggs in the cotton basket was dangerous because they didn't diversify.
The South was underdeveloped and lacked infrastructure and public works.

Civil War

The institution of slavery was the main issue leading to secession and the Civil War.
Economics, expansion of territory, and the question of free vs. slave states all related to slavery.