Question

b. How might antebellum plantations have organized enslaved laborers to intensify output? Why??

Answer 1

In the American South, antebellum plantations were centered on a "plantation house", the residence of the owner, where important business was conducted. Slavery and plantations had different characteristics in different regions of the South. As the Upper south of the Chesapeake Bay colonies developed first, historians of the antebellum South defined planters as those who held 20 enslaved people. Major planters held many more, especially in the Deep South as it developed. The majority of the slaveholders held 10 or fewer enslaved people, often to labor domestically. By the late 18th century, most planters in the Upper South has switched from exclusive tobacco cultivation to mixed-crop production, both because tobacco had exhauted the soil and because of changing markets. The shift away from tobacco meant they had slaves in excess of the number needed for labor, and they began to sell them in the internal slave trade.

There was a vareity of domestic architecture on plantations. The largest and wealthiest planter familities, for instance, those with estates fronting on the James River in Virginia, constructed mansions in brick and Georgian style, e.g Shirley Plantation. Common or smaller in the late 18th and 19th century had more modest wood frame buildings, such as Southall Plantation in Charles City County.

In the Lowcounty of South Carolina, by contrast, even before the American Revolution planters holding large rice plantations typically owned hundreds of enslaved people. In Charleston and Savannah, the elite also held numerous enslaved people to work as household servants. The 19th century development of the Deep South for cotton cultivation depended on large plantations with much more acreage than was typical of the Upper South; and for labor, planters held hundreds of enslaved people.

Until December 1865 slavery was legal in parts of the United States. Most enslaved people labored in agricultural production, and planter was a term commonly used to describe a farmer with many enslaved humans.

The term planter has no universally accepted defintion, but academic historians have defined it to identify the elite class, "a landowning farmer of substantial means". In the "Black Belt" countries of Alabama and Mississippi, the terms "planter" and "farmer" were often synonymous. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman define large planters as owning over 50 enslaved people, and medium planters as owning between 16 and 50 enslaved humans.

In the early 19th century, most enslaved men and women worked on large agricultural plantations as house servants or field hands. Life for enslaved men and women was brutal;as they were subject to repression, harsh punishment, and strict racial policing. Enslaved people adopted a vareity of ,mechanisms to cope with the degrading realities of life on the plantation. They resisted slavery through everyday acts, while also occasionally plotting large-scale revolts.

Life of most enslaved men and women was brutal and harsh. They were frequently separated from their family members because most slaveowners had no compunction about splitting up families in order ti improve their own financial situation.

Despite all the precautions that white Southerners took to prevent slave rebellions, they did sometimes occur. In 1831, for instance, Nat Turner, an enslaved Virginia man whose owner had taught him to read and who was viewed as a prophet by the other enslaved men and women, organised an insurrection. The uprising began with the killing of Turner's owner and within 24 hours, the enslaved rebels managed to kill 60 white people. Thr revolt was ultimately crushed by law enforcement, and Turner and 13 other slaves were executed. The insurrection terrified white Southerners and resulted in the formulation of even more stringent legal codes governing the behavior of enslaved people.