HIS 105 Temple University History of the USA Civil War Essay History 105 Essay. You must respond to the question below in essay form. Your response shoul

HIS 105 Temple University History of the USA Civil War Essay History 105 Essay. You must respond to the question below in essay form. Your response should be detailed and use specific material from all parts of our class to support your answer. A typical response is usually at least 4-5 full pages, double-spaced (1200-1500 words and a normal times new roman 12-point font with regular margins), but you may have a longer answer. A paper shorter than 3 pages needs to be very, very good to get a passing grade. Again…Be sure to use specific examples from the readings and class when answering the essay question. But do not use outside sources and just use material from part 3 of the class (Chapters 11 through 14). From the 1830s to the 1860s, differing meanings of freedom tore the nation apart. Race, gender, other minorities, politics at the federal and state levels, culture, economics, and more, it seemed as if the nation had two opposing views on these topics. The end result of this divide was the Civil War. Explain how and why sectional differences widened from the 1830s through the 1860s to the point of conflict. During the Civil War, did one way of thinking and living win over the other? Explain. Chapter 11: The Peculiar Institution
Sample Lecture
By 1820, slavery was an old institution in America. With abolition in the northern
states, the “peculiar institution” of slavery became unique to the South. By the Civil
War, the slave population had increased to nearly 4 million and slavery had spread
to Arkansas, Louisiana, and eastern Texas. Slaves were one-third of the South’s
entire population and half of the population in the cotton states of the Deep South.
Slavery’s expansion was due to the growth of cotton production, which replaced
sugar as the world’s major slave crop. Though slavery persisted in Brazil and the
Caribbean, Britain’s abolition of slavery within its empire in 1833 made the United
States slavery’s center in the hemisphere. The Old South was the largest and most
powerful slave society in history, based on the region’s virtual monopoly on cotton.
Cotton’s use in textile manufacturing made it central to the Industrial Revolution in
Europe and America and the most important commodity in international trade. By
1803, cotton was America’s most important export. By 1860, investments in slaves
exceeded in value the worth of all of the nation’s factories, railroads, and banks
combined.
To replace the foreign slave trade that had been banned in the United States in 1808,
a massive internal slave trade developed. More than 2 million slaves were sold
between 1820 and 1860, many of whom were transported to the Deep South to new
cotton plantations. Virtually every slave owner at some point bought and sold
slaves. The Cotton Kingdom could not have developed without the internal slave
trade, and older slave states in the East came to depend on the sale of their slaves.
Although the northern states abolished slavery, slavery affected them, nonetheless.
The Constitution gave disproportionate power to southern states in the House of
Representatives and electoral college and required all states to return fugitive
slaves. Slavery touched the lives of all Americans. Northern merchants and
manufacturers participated in the slave economy and profited from it. Cotton trade
profits helped finance industrial development and internal improvements in the
North. Northern ships carried cotton, northern banks financed plantations, northern
companies insured slave property, and northern factories turned cotton into
clothing.
While slavery defined and dominated the South’s economy, the South was a diverse
region. In the Upper South, slaves and slave owners were a much smaller percentage
of the population, compared to Deep South states stretching from South Carolina to
Texas. The Upper South had centers of manufacturing, while the Deep South
depended entirely on cotton. Yet slavery caused the South to have a very different
economic development than the North. Slavery inhibited industrial growth,
discouraged immigration, and slowed technological progress. It did not have large
and diverse cities like the North, except for New Orleans. Banks and railroad lines
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served plantations and little else. While many in the North thought slavery
prevented economic growth, slavery in fact was very profitable and expanded the
southern economy.
Slavery influenced all spheres of life in the South, despite the fact that 75 percent of
southern white families did not own slaves. Because planters had the best land,
most small white farmers lived outside the plantation belt in areas unsuitable for
cotton. They worked the land with the labor of family members, not slaves or wageworkers. Many were self-sufficient and remote from markets. They were often
desperately poor and more often illiterate than northern farmers, since most
southern states lacked free public schools. In part, because these farmers did not
provide a market for manufactured goods, the South did not develop industry. While
some poor whites resented the planters’ economic and political power, most
accommodated the planters and shared with them a common racial identity,
business ties, common political culture, and kinship ties. Many small white farmers
believed their economic and personal freedom rested on slavery.
Most slave owners did not own large plantations. In 1850, most slaveholding
families owned 5 or fewer slaves. Only a small number of families owned more than
20 slaves; even fewer owned more than 100 slaves. Planters’ slave property
provided wealth, status, and influence. They held the best land, had the highest
incomes, and dominated local and state politics and government. Small slave owners
aspired to become large planters. Planters owned slaves to make huge profits, and
they used those profits for the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods, creating
an aristocratic material life sharply at odds with life for most northerners.
Plantations were part of a world market, and planters worked to accumulate land,
slaves, and great profits, some of which they invested in railroads and banks. But
planters celebrated, not competitive capitalism but a hierarchical, agrarian society
in which slaveholding gentlemen took personal responsibility for the well-being of
their dependent women, children, and slaves. This outlook of “paternalism” had long
been a feature of American slavery, but it deepened with the end of the African slave
trade, which closed the cultural gap between slaves and owners. And most southern
slave owners lived on their own plantations, close to their slaves. Paternalism
obscured and justified slavery’s brutality. Owners thought themselves kind and
responsible even while they bought, sold, and punished their slaves.
Over time, southern values diverged from the North’s culture of egalitarianism,
competition, and individualism. In the South, men of all classes followed a code of
personal honor, in which they were expected to defend the reputation of themselves
and their families, with violence if necessary. Dueling, while illegal, was not
uncommon. Southern white women were even more confined to the home and the
domestic ideal than northern women.
In the thirty years before the Civil War, pro-slavery thought came to dominate
southern intellectual and cultural life. Fewer southern whites felt, as had many
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founding fathers, that slavery was a necessary evil, and more started to argue it was
a positive good. Racism—the belief that blacks were innately inferior to whites and
suited for slavery—framed the proslavery argument. Slave owners also found
justification for slavery in ancient history and the Bible. Some southerners argued
that black slavery guaranteed equality for whites by preventing the growth of a
white working class in the South. Slavery, they argued, provided the economic
autonomy and independence that the North’s industrial workers lacked and which
formed the basis of the republic.
Southern slaveholders knew of the Haitian Revolution, other slave rebellions, and
British abolition. Emancipation throughout the Americas strongly shaped debates
about slavery and its future in the United States. While American slave owners
argued that emancipation had been a failure, abolitionists disagreed. By 1850, slave
systems remained in the western hemisphere only in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and
the United States.
Many white southerners claimed they were the true inheritors of the Revolution’s
legacy, and they freely used the language of liberty to contrast their condition with
slavery. They complained that government interference with their economy
threatened to “enslave” them. Southern state constitutions acknowledged equal
rights for free white men. But in the 1830s, some pro-slavery writers began to argue
that liberty, equality, and democracy were not necessarily beneficial to the South.
South Carolina in particular was home to many who argued that freedom and
equality were not universal entitlements, even for all whites. When sectionalism
intensified after 1830, more southern writers and politicians came to defend slavery
not as ensuring equality between whites, but as the basis of an organic, hierarchical
society in which white large planters ruled over lesser whites and slaves.
Virginian George Fitzhugh took this argument to the extreme, repudiating
Jeffersonian ideals and the idea of America’s world mission to spread freedom. He
argued that slavery, not liberty, was the normal basis of civilization in world history.
He argued that slaves were happy and contented. He suggested that white workers
in the North and South should have paternal white owners to care for them, rather
than be enslaved by capitalist markets and employers.
For slaves, slavery meant incessant toil, harsh punishment, and constant fear that
that their families would be destroyed by sale. Slaves were the legal property of
their owners. Their few legal rights were rarely enforced. Slaves could be bought
and sold by their owners at will and had no voice in the governments that ruled over
them. They could not testify in court against whites, sign contracts or buy property,
own firearms, hold meetings apart from whites, or leave a farm or plantation
without permission. By the 1830s, it was illegal to teach slaves how to read and
write. Although these laws were not always enforced, the entire southern legal and
governmental system was designed to enforce the slave masters’ control over the
slaves’ bodies and labor.
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During the early nineteenth century, some southern states passed laws to prevent
slave mistreatment, and their material conditions did improve. Many slaves
supplemented the food owners provided by raising crops and livestock, gathering,
and hunting. They had better diets than slaves in the West Indies and Brazil.
Paternalism contributed to slaves’ material improvements over time. And the
increasing price of slaves encouraged planters to care for their slaves’ basic wellbeing. Yet slavery was tightened in this period, and states passed laws making it
harder for owners to free their slaves and for slaves to buy their own freedom.
Slavery helped define the status of free blacks. By the Civil War, half a million free
blacks lived in the United States, the majority in the South. While whites defined
their freedom by their distance from slavery, free blacks were not radically different
than enslaved blacks. In most of the North, free blacks could not vote and had few
economic opportunities. In the South, free blacks could own their own property,
could marry, and could not be bought or sold as slaves. But they had virtually no
other rights in southern society. They could not own dogs, guns, or liquor; could not
strike whites, even in self-defense; and had to carry proof of their free status. In
other American slave societies, where racial identity was less sharply distinguished,
free blacks amassed property and prestige. In the United States, the sharp racial
distinction between black and white left little room for a mulatto class to emerge.
By 1860, very few of the South’s free blacks lived in the Lower South, and those who
did were mostly in cities. In New Orleans and Charleston, however, large free black
communities existed, and while most were craftsmen, a few became quite wealthy.
They established their own churches and schools. In the Upper South, where most
southern free blacks lived, they worked mostly for wages as farm labor. Some free
blacks here even owned slaves.
Slavery was above all a labor system, in which work occupied the entirety of slaves’
time, except for brief meals. On large plantations, slaves performed all kinds of
work, from labor in the fields to skilled labor like carpentry, engineering, and
shoemaking. Slaves also worked on steamboats, in mines, in seaports, and on
railroads. Local authorities used them to build roads and other facilities, and the
federal government used them to build forts and other public buildings.
Professionals such as merchants, lawyers, and businessmen used slaves, and by the
Civil War, 200,000 slaves worked in industries such as ironworks and tobacco
factories. In southern cities, slaves were used as unskilled labor and skilled artisans.
A few slaves were entrusted with great responsibilities, such as supervising other
slaves, selling goods, or handling money.
Most slaves, perhaps as many as 75 percent of women and 90 percent of men,
worked in the fields. The organization of their work varied according to the crop
and the size of the holding. On small farms, slaves worked alongside their owner.
The largest concentration of slaves worked on plantations in the Cotton Belt in
gangs, directed by an overseer and maybe a slave “driver.” Overseers, tasked with
producing large crops, were often brutal. Slaves who worked sugarcane in southern
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Louisiana also worked in gangs, in the harshest working conditions in the South.
Slaves who worked on rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia engaged in
task labor, without supervision, and had free time for the day if they finished their
daily task.
From the slaves’ perspective, slavery in different regions of the South could be
“worse” in some respects and “better” in others. Slaves in rice fields faced harsh
conditions but had more independence than other slaves because of task labor and
the absence of a large white population. Skilled urban slave craftsmen had great
autonomy and often could hire themselves out and sometimes even keep their
earnings. Many urban slaves even lived by themselves. By the 1850s, most slave
owners began to remove urban slaves to the country, fearing their independence
was eroding the relationship between master and slave.
Slavery was based on force. Slave owners used a variety of methods to maintain
order and discipline and persuade slaves to work productively. Masters could inflict
almost any kind of punishment, and it was the rare slave who was not whipped at
some point in his or her life. Even minor infractions invited whipping. Owners used
subtler methods, too. They exploited divisions among the slaves, especially between
field hands and house servants. They created incentives for hard work, such as time
off or even cash payments. The threat of sale was the most powerful weapon owners
had, since sale disrupted families and slave communities.
Slaves never gave up their hope for freedom or their will to resist total white control
over them. They succeeded in creating a semi-independent culture centered on the
family and church, which enabled them to survive the experience of bondage
without abandoning their self-esteem and to pass on to other generations values
that conflicted with those of their masters. Slave culture drew on the heritage of
Africa. African influence appeared in dance and music, forms of religious worship,
and slave medicine. The end of the foreign slave trade helped foster a particularly
new African-American culture, shaped by American and African traditions and
values.
The family was the center of slave community. Because of a natural increase of the
slave population, in the United States there was an equal ratio of male and female
slaves, allowing for the creation of families. While slave marriages were not legally
recognized, masters had to consent to them and marriages were often significant
events on plantations. Most slaves stayed married for life, if not disrupted by sale,
and families typically had two parents, although the sale of male slaves created a
higher number of female-headed families than in white families. The threat of being
sold, and thus disrupting families, was the slave owners’ greatest weapon, and fear
of being sold pervaded slave life. Many men and children were separated from
families by sale, but so were women. Some masters simply ignored slave families
when making decisions about selling slaves.
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In some ways, gender roles for slaves were very different than those in the larger
society. Slave men and women were equally powerless. The cult of domesticity,
relegating women to the home, did not apply to slave women. Slave men could not
provide for their families, protect wives from physical or sexual abuse by owners
and overseers, or choose when and how their children might work. However, when
slaves worked “on their own time,” traditional gender roles prevailed. Slave men
worked outdoors while slave women cared for children and cooked. The slave
family remained central to slave culture and allowed slaves to transmit their values
and traditions and strategies for survival from generation to generation.
A distinctive form of Christianity also helped slaves survive and resist bondage.
Slaves participated in the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening. Every
plantation seemed to have a slave preacher, often with little education but
considerable oratorical skill and knowledge of the Bible. Urban slaves often
established their own churches. But masters used Christianity as another means of
control and discipline. Some required their slaves to attend sermons reminding
slaves that theft was immoral and that servants should obey their masters.
Slaves transformed Christianity and turned it to their own purposes. Blending
African tradition and Christian beliefs, slave religion was practiced at night in secret
or in open during the day. These meetings were frequently interactive and
emotional. The biblical story of Exodus in which God chooses Moses to lead the
enslaved Jews of Egypt to the promised land of freedom, was central to black
Christianity. Slaves saw themselves as a chosen people whom would one day deliver
from bondage. Christ as a redeemer who cared for the oppressed was important.
Other heroes from the Bible included Jonah, who escaped from the whale; David,
who bested the more powerful Goliath; and Daniel, who escaped from the lion’s den.
The Christian message of brotherhood and equality of all before the Creator seemed
to repudiate slavery.
Slave culture rested on slaves’ belief that slavery was unjust and their yearnings for
freedom. Despite pro-slavery arguments, slaves believed they were being deprived
of the fruits of their labor by idle planters living lives of luxury. While most slaves
knew it was impossible to directly combat their condition, this did not prevent them
from desiring freedom. Slaves constantly talked and dreamed of liberty, and their
actions during and after the Civil War flowed from their experience of slavery and
their hope of escaping it.
Outnumbered by whites and facing federal, state, and local authorities dedicated to
preserving slavery, slaves only rarely rebelled. Compared to Caribbean or Latin
American slavery, where slaves were more numerous and more often imported
directly from Africa, slave rebellions in the United States were smaller and less
frequent. This does not mean that slaves simply submitted to their condition.
Resistance to slavery took many forms, from individual acts of disobedience to the
occasional uprising. The most common form of slave opposition was “day-to-day
resistance” or “silent sabotage”: doing poor work, breaking tools, abusing animals,
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and simply disrupting plantation routine. Slaves faked illness or found other ways
to avoid reporting to work. Many slaves stole food, but less frequent and more
dangerous were assaults against whites, from arson and poisoning to armed attacks.
Escape was a serious threat to slavery’s stability. Most slaves who ran away would
leave the plantation for a day or two, simply to frustrate owners, but would return.
The smaller number of fugitive slaves who attempted to permanently escape faced
considerable obstacles to freedom. They often had little or no knowledge of
geography beyond the plantation, other than to know that them north meant
freedom. Perhaps 1,000 slaves reached the North or Canada each year. Most fugitive
slaves escaped from Upper South states, where they could more easily reach the
North. In the Deep South, fugitive slaves often went to cities where they could blend
in with free black communitie…
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