This is lecture 27, I believe.
We’re going to talk about the Antebellum South.
You can break the Latin phrase in two; ‘ante’ meaning before, ‘bellum’, of course, refers
to war.
This is the slave South before the American Civil War.
I want to characterize – I guess I should first tell you why the Antebellum South is
significant.
If you want to attach one significance to this, it would be, not the creation so much,
but the ongoing existence of a slave society in the United States, which of course, was
founded as a republic.
Let’s characterize the old South.
Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, that is the great plantation owners and slave
owners.
Cotton is the commodity crop which sustains the society.
This is a fairly simple, or primitive, society as far as its demographics are concerned.
You have a very small group at the top – slave owners or the great plantation owners, the
planters; you have white yeoman farmers; and then you have slaves.
Let me further characterize it by saying that cotton itself is a very rapacious crop.
It leaches the nutrients from the soil, and you have to move cotton to new fields to cultivate
on a regular basis because the soil is depleted.
So cotton is an aggressive and expansive crop.
You need new lands for it.
We just discussed the Cherokee and the Georgia farmers craving for Cherokee lands to continue
their cotton cultivation.
Remember that cotton is a commodity crop, that is a crop sold in large scale; agriculture
for profit.
Remember that the South is considered by economic historians as a colonial economy, that is,
an economy dependent upon one major commodity crop.
Now I want to talk about modes of slave resistance here.
We have a few million African-American slaves living in the South, and we have discovered
in the past few generations – historians and other scholars – that contrary to what
we use to think about slavery and that slaves were utterly dominated by whites, that in
fact, slaves exercised agency, they had the will and the capacity to act.
So let’s look at this in a little more detail.
Probably the most dramatic way that a slave could exercise agency would be to simply kill
the master.
This, of course, is an extreme act and it rarely occurs, but it does give you one very
visible visceral way of exercising agency.
Slaves could run away, that’s obviously having the will and the capacity to act on
their own.
Slaves could slow down work and impede profits.
Slaves could sabotage farm tools, hobble an animal that’s necessary for a job.
Slaves could fake sickness to get out of work, just like you do to get out of school.
Slaves could revolt.
Slave revolts are rare, probably the 2 most famous – the Stono Rebellion in 1739 in
South Carolina and then one we’re going to talk about in more detail here, the Nat
Turner Rebellion of 1831.
These are probably the 2 most famous slave revolts; again, these are quite rare.
Since I just mentioned Nat Turner, I want to mention slave façades.
A façade, of course, is a fake front, right?
So historians have identified 2 particular slave façades designed to get the slaves
out of work.
The first slave façade is the Nat Turner façade.
Nat Turner, of course, led a particularly bloody revolt in Southern Virginia in the
early 1830s, where a number of white people – men, women, and children and the elderly
– were killed by a band of slaves seeking to go South and find freedom in Florida, in
St. Augustine, where the Spanish, of course, had outlawed slavery.
So the Nat Turner façade, for the slave, would be to act so aggressively, so hostile,
so menacingly, that the white slave master or the overseer will find somebody else to
do this job, not having to want to deal with this particular slave’s aggressive attitude;
this might be a way of getting out of work.
Now, in opposition to that, there is what is called the Sambo façade, here the slave
acts so lethargic, so stupid, so incapable of working, that the white overseer will bypass
him and find somebody else to do this job.
Again, these are simply 2 ways for slaves to escape work by pretending to be lazy and
stupid or overly aggressive and hostile.
But, like I said, we’ll talk about Nat Turner in the next lecture so I’m not going to
talk about it here.
I will say a couple of words though about the Stono Rebellion.
The Stono Rebellion, of course, is a colonial rebellion taking place in 1739, outside of
Charleston.
Here slaves break into a store; they take farm implements, tools, weapons, and begin
making their way south as well.
Word gets out quickly.
Local militia confront them and shoot them down.
To deter future rebellions, slaves’ heads are cut off and stuck on pikes, which are
then stuck along the main roadways in and out of Charleston.
South Carolina passed laws after the Stono Rebellion prohibiting the gathering of more
than a few slaves in the city.
One law that I found very interesting was that white men were required now, after Stono,
to bring their rifles or shotguns to church with them on Sunday morning.
This, of course, was to provide the whites with an instant militia should there be a
rebellion.
And of course, Sunday morning when all the whites are at church would be an opportune
time to launch a slave rebellion.
Let’s continue with our modes of slave resistance.
Slaves, of course, have families and family provides a way for a slave to be something
other than a slave.
Think about the African-American male slave, who goes to the slave quarters at night after
work, for a few brief hours he can be a father, he can be a husband.
So there’s a sense here of escaping the status of slave, at least for a brief time.
Slaves could learn to read, become literate.
White masters are of a couple of different schools on this.
Some whites, some paternalists, will say ‘yes’ that it’s fine for the slaves to read, provided
their reading is confined to the Bible.
As a paternal slave master, it’s my duty to bring Christian salvation to the slaves
and to help them in their literacy with reading scripture.
Other slave masters say, absolutely not.
If you allow slaves to become literate, that allows them to become more like us; that diminishes
the dividing line between free and slave, and they want no part of it.
How else can a slave exercise agency?
Well, converting to Christianity is a way of doing this.
And like I said, the paternalists, many paternalists are not going to object to slave conversions
to Christianity.
Slave marriages, this is another way of exercising agency, isn’t it?
Being a father, being a husband.
But remember, always, slave marriages are not recognized in law.
How did the marriage vow go?
‘Til death or distance do you part.
Slaves are property and the master’s pursuit of profit cannot be impeded by something as
sentimental as a slave marriage.
Let me say a couple of more words here about paternalism.
I mentioned earlier that white paternalism argues that an African-American slave on a
plantation in Alabama is better off there than he would be as a free man back in his
country of origin somewhere in West Africa.
We can take this further and say that the paternalist believes – and this argument
is made in the historiography, 19th century historiography, of slavery – that the plantation
should be viewed as a sort of university, a place where slaves learn to learn responsibility,
learn Christianity, and become increasingly civilized.
So the plantation is not a place of cruel oppression, it is a place of learning and
it’s an uplifting place.
Again, these are paternalistic ideas and you can see how dangerous they are.
Let me say another word about literacy here.
Again, there are many paternalists who think it’s fine for slaves to become literate
in order to read the Bible.
But, of course, there are some slaves who will take this literacy, and this growing
expertise in Christianity, to levels unanticipated by the whites, and you’ll see this when
we get to Nat Turner, who is a literate slave and who preached to his fellow slaves before
convincing them to join him in a murderous spree across Southern Virginia in the early
1830s.
I want to make a brief word here about the cotton gin, introduced in the South in the
late 18th century.
The cotton gin took what had become an increasingly moribund institution of slavery and reenergized
it.
The cotton gin separated that seed from the cotton fiber, previously this had been a tedious
job that took time to do, and now the cotton gin made this much simpler and much quicker.
Suddenly we can put much more land under cotton cultivation, therefore we need more slaves.
You’ll also find in the Antebellum South that the importation of more and more slaves
becomes less and less necessary as the slaves replicate; they have children.
And these children, of course, will become the slaves of the master’s children, his
sons and daughters.
There’s another question here that’s worth contemplating.
Some people have asked, why didn’t the poor, illiterate, hook-wormed whites, people with
virtually no future to look forward to, why didn’t they join with the slaves to overthrow
this unjust slave society.
The answer is remarkably simple I think.
I think it was C. Van Woodward who made this argument that – for the lack of a better
word – for the ‘white trash’ of the old South, no matter how illiterate, no matter
how poor, without shoes, no matter how bad their diet, no matter how hopeless their future,
that the poor whites of the old South could always point to the African-American slaves
and know that there was an entire class of people beneath them.
So instead of sympathizing with the slaves or seeking some sort of political alliance
with the slaves, or an economic alliance, the poor whites emulated their betters, the
slave masters and the wealthier whites.
Again, no matter how low they sink, there’s always an entire class of millions of people
who are lower than they are on the hierarchy.
So in conclusion, I want to emphasize that cotton is linked to the Western settlement
of the United States.
There’s a huge demand for cotton in England as the Industrial Revolution is rolling into
full swing, and the British are making clothing out of Southern cotton.
So you can think of the Industrial Revolution as a context for the Antebellum South as well.
Remember that word we used last time, sectionalism?
Again, cotton as a commodity crop based on the use of African-American slaves makes the
South distinctly different from the rest of the country.
As we go forward, we’re going to talk about the attempts to limit slavery.
And of course, these attempts to limit slavery are going to bring on the American Civil War
in 1860-1861, and we’ll pick up that later.
Thank you.