Assignment: For those of you who want to acquire more knowledge and understanding of this chapter, you can complete the following assignment below:
Step #1: Read the Chapter Themes and Chapter Summary below.
Chapter Themes
Theme: The explosion of cotton production fastened the slave system deeply upon the South, creating a complex, hierarchical racial and social order that deeply affected whites as well as blacks.
Theme: The economic benefits of an increasing production of cotton due to the cotton gin and slavery was shared between the South, the North, and Britain. The economics of cotton and slavery also led to bigger and bigger plantations, since they could afford the heavy investment of human capital.
Theme: The emergence of a small but energetic radical abolitionist movement caused a fierce proslavery backlash in the South and a slow but steady growth of moderate antislavery sentiment in the North.
Chapter Summary
Whitney’s cotton gin made cotton production enormously profitable, and created an ever-increasing demand for slave labor. The South’s dependence on cotton production tied it economically to the plantation system and racially to white supremacy. The cultural gentility and political domination of the relatively small plantation aristocracy concealed slavery’s great social and economic costs for whites as well as blacks.
Most slaves were held by a few large planters. But most slaveowners had few slaves, and most southern whites had no slaves at all. Nevertheless, except for a few mountain whites, the majority of southern whites strongly supported slavery and racial supremacy because they cherished the hope of becoming slaveowners themselves, and because white racial identity gave them a sense of superiority to the blacks.
The treatment of the economically valuable slaves varied considerably. Within the bounds of the cruel system, slaves yearned for freedom and struggled to maintain their humanity, including family life.
The older black colonization movement was largely replaced in the 1830s by a radical Garrisonian abolitionism demanding an immediate end to slavery. Abolitionism and the Nat Turner rebellion caused a strong backlash in the South, which increasingly defended slavery as a positive good and turned its back on many of the liberal political and social ideas gaining strength in the North.
Most northerners were hostile to radical abolitionism, and respected the Constitution’s evident protection of slavery where it existed. But many also gradually came to see the South as a land of oppression, and any attempt to extend slavery as a threat to free society.
Step #2: Choose and answer one of the following assignments. You may use valid and credible websites for your research. Extra points will be given for students who use and cite primary source documents. Write your answer in a post. Be sure to link the websites you used in your research.
1. Analyze the complex relations among the different elements of southern society: planter-aristocrats, small planters, poor whites, slaves, and free blacks. Contrast the dominant slaveholding elite with the mass of poorer whites who nevertheless supported slavery.
2. Examine the nature of slavery. Explain how slavery was both an economic institution and a social system that shaped whites and blacks alike, including their social and family life.
3. Describe the lives of blacks under slavery. Show both the burdens of the system and the slaves’ struggles to survive and maintain their humanity.
4. Explain the various responses to slavery, from radical abolitionism to the defense of slavery as a positive good, and why the abolitionists had such a great impact even though they were an unpopular minority.
5. Describe the operation of a typical large plantation or the working life of a typical large-plantation owner, including relations with overseers and slaves.
6. Examine the black family and black religion. Consider how slavery affected both white and black views of women, family, and sexuality.
7. Examine the paradox that slavery often involved intimate and personal relationships between individual whites and blacks (exemplified by the photo of the slave nurse with white child), even while it maintained a strict and often violent system of control over the slaves as a group. Ask why this “paternalistic” element of American slaveholding was so important to southerners’ self-justification of slavery.
8. Review the creation of the Republic of Liberia. Determine if the colonization or relocation concept would have worked at any point in pre-Civil War America.
9. Explore the British efforts to free slaves in the West Indies. Why was Britain successful in 1833 in ending slavery in the West Indies when it was still going strong in the United States?
10. Discuss the northern debate over the means of ending slavery by contrasting Garrison’s radical abolitionism with the moderate “no-expansion” position of a politician like Lincoln.
Step #3: Respond to a student's post. Add thoughtful questions comments or questions. Students must cite their sources at the end of their post. Students must post their replies in 10 point, Verdanna font. All work must reflect detailed research, a complete answer to the prompt, and a very analytical response to another student's post.
Evaluation: Students will receive 70 points for writing a detailed answer to the topic of their choice and 30 points for a response to another student's post.
