Question

1. Explain the importance of slavery in the American South in the period from 1815 to1860. Your answer should take into account topics such as

• The class structure of the South, including different social groups and their relationship to slavery
• Variations in slavery depending on local conditions and economic activities
• Differing status among slaves on plantations
• Ways slaves resisted their oppression
• Slave culture, including slave families, songs & stories, and religion
• The defense of slavery as a positive good that southerners constructed from the 1820s, and especially 1830s onward.

Answer 1

Slavery was so important because you had King Cotton. Tthe south basically had two Classes of societies. The rich land owners and the rest of ther prople. The cotton gin had barelyh been invented so they needed a lot of production and what other better way than to have a human being that you can treat like an animal, work from sun up to sun down, and not have to pay him. Good idea financially but they were human beings. And without this free labor the aristocrates of the southy would not survive.

With cash crops of tobacco, cotton and sugar cane, America's southern states become the economi engine of the burgeoning nation. Their fuel of choice - Human slavery.

If the conferacxy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world at the start of the Civil War. The slave economy had been very good to American prosperity. By the start of the war, thesouth was producing 75 percent of the world's cotton and creating more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. Slaves represented southern planters' most significant investment - and the bulk of their wealthy.

Building a commercial enterprise out of the wilderness required labor and lots of it. For much of the 1700s the American colonies operated as agricuturalo economies, dirven largely by indentured servitude. Most workers were poor unemployed laborers from Africa and Europe who like others hadf travelled to North America for a new life. In exchange for their work, they received food and shelter, a redimentqary education and sometimes a trade.

With ideal climate and available land, property owners in sourthern colonies began establishing plantion farms for cash crops like rice, tobacco,l and sugar cane - enterprises that required increasing amounts of labor. To meet the need we4althy planters turned to slave traders, who imported ever more human thattel to the colonies, the vast majority from West Africa. As more slaves were imported and an upsure in slave fertility rates expanded the "inventry", a new industry was born: the slave auction: These open markets where humans were inspeced like animals and bought and sold to the highest bidder proved an increasinglyu lucrative enterprise. In the 17th century slaves would fetch between five and ten dollars. But by the mid-19 centuray an able-bodied slave tetched an average price between $1,200 - $ 1,500

By 1800 or so however, African American slavery was once again a triving institution expecially in the southern Unites States. One of the primary reasons for the reinvigoration of slavery was the invention and rapid widespread aoption of the collon gin.

Slave labor had become so entrenched in the Southen economy that nothing not even the belief that all men were created equal - would dislodge it. When delegtes to the constitutional convention met in Philadelphhia in the summer of 1787, they were split on the moral queestion of human bondage and man's inhumanity to man, but not on its economic necessity.

Due to slavery, America's economy began to prosper. Slaves were used to pick and cleaning cotton involved a labour intensive process that stowed production and limited supply. Manualoly one slave could pick the seeds out of 10 pounds of cotton in a day. The cotton gin could process 100 pounds in the same time.

South was poised to expand its cotton based economy with more land needed for cultivation, the number of plantations expanded in South and moved west into new territory. Production exploded Between 1801 and 1835 alone, the US cotton exports grew from 100,000 bales to more than a million, comprising half of all U.S. exports. The upshot: As cotton became the backbone of the Southern economy, slavery drove impressive profits.

The revolt that most terrified white slaveholders was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton Country, Virgina, in august 1831. Turner's group which eventually numbered around 75 blacks murdered some 60 whites in two days before armed resistance from local whites and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government's right to restrict slavery over Missouri's application for statehood ended in a compromise. Massouri was admitted to teh Union as slave state. Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri's southern border were to be free soil.

Slave Family:

Slave marriages and family ties were not recognised byh American law. Any owner was free to sell husbands from wives, parents from children, and brothers from sisters. Many large slaveholders had numerous plantations and frequently shifted slaves, spliting familities in the process. In large plantations one slave father in three had a different owner than his wife, and could visit his family only at his master's discretion.

Songs and stories of Slaves

A spiritual is a type of religious folksong that is most closely accociated with the enslavement of African people in the american south. The songs proliferated in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading upto the aboloishement of legalized slavery in the 1860s. The African Americal spiritual (also called the Negro Spiritual) constitures one of the largest and most significant form of American Folksongs.

Slave Culture

The institution of slavery usually trieed to deny its victims their native cultural identity. Torn out of their own cultural milieus, they were expected to abandon their heritage and to adopt at least part of their enslavers' culture. Nonetheless, studues have shown that there were aspects of slave culture that differed from the master culture. Some of these have been interpreted as a form of resistance to oppression, while other aspects were clearly survivals of a native culture in the new society. Slaver culture was probably very different on large plantations from what it was on small farms or in urban households, where slave culture and especially, Creole slave culture could harly have avoided being very similar to the mastere culture.

Slave religions usually had a supreme being and a host of lesser spirits brought from Africa, borrowed from the Amerindians, and created in response to local conditions. There were no firm boundaries between the secular and the sacred, which infused all things and activities. At least initially African slaves universally beliefved that posthumously they woulod return to their lands and rejoin their friends

Black slaves preserved some of their culture in the New World. African medikcine was practiced in America by slaves. The poisoning of masters and other hated indivuduals was a particulary African method of copying with evil. Throughout the circum-Caribbean world slaves and free blacks had electoral procedures, adapted from West African customs, to choose governors, sheriffs, and judsges to maintain order among themselves. Objects of material cujlture, such as rugs, mats, baskets, thatched roofs, and walking canes, were modeled on African examples.

Slavery was a necessary evil

Many argue the slavery was indispensable to the peace and happiness of both, whites and blacks. It claims tht instead of an evil, slavery is "a good - a positive good" .

Calhoun asserted that slavery rather than being a necessary eveil was a positive good benefiting both slaves and slave owneres. To protect minority rights against majority rule, he called for a concurrent majority whereby the minority could sometimes block proposals that it felt infringed on their liberties.