"silent sabotage" can be defined as when slaves:

Foner Ch 11 Slavery

An American Slave Market

*

Click image to launch video

Q: The history of slavery and emancipation has a strong transnational dimension. In Chapter 11 you write that in the first four decades of the nineteenth century slavery was abolished in most of Spanish America and the British empire. What impact did these emancipations have on the end of slavery in the United States?

A: Slavery of course was a global institution; it existed in Africa, it existed in the Middle East, and of course it was a Western Hemisphere institution that existed all up and down North and South America and in the Caribbean. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the Spanish areas after they became independent set in motion the abolition of slavery, and of course the British abolished slavery in the 1830s in their colonies in the Caribbean. This had a tremendous effect in the United States; slave owners felt they were a shrinking minority even though slavery in the United States was by far the largest slave system in the Western Hemisphere. Still it’s becoming more and more isolated as slavery is abolished in other places. The abolition of slavery in these other places, first of all, created a precedent for how slavery might be abolished here. It was generally done in a gradual manner not as an immediate act, even though in the British colonies, it only took about five years to abolish it. In Spanish America it was through this very long gradual process of emancipation. 

So many people in the United States, including Abraham Lincoln, for many years thought that this gradual method probably was the best; it was a peaceful method that led to less disruption of the society, and that was the way the United States should get rid of slavery—over a long, slow period of abolition. Of course, it didn’t work out that way in this country, but that model affected how Americans began to think of the possibility of getting rid of slavery. On the other hand, it also stimulated a big debate in the United States: what was the consequence of emancipation in these other places? Many southern slave owners said it was a failure—sugar production fell in the West Indies after slavery, because the former slaves wanted to grow food for themselves rather than sugar for the world market. So a big debate took place about whether the aftermath of emancipation proved that slavery actually was a better economic institution than free labor. So certainly the main point is Americans watched what happened in other countries, debated what happened in other countries, and were influenced by the ending of slavery in other countries.

*

Click image to launch video

Q: How do you assess the significance of Frederick Douglass as an anti-slavery leader and in other ways?

A: Frederick Douglass was really one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century American history. Of course, his own life career is remarkable. He was born a slave, he lived as a slave until he was a young man, he escaped from slavery, he later became a very prominent abolitionist and women's rights advocate, etc. He became one of the great orators of the reform world, both in America and in Europe. He edited several newspapers, he was an extremely eloquent writer, and he really became by far the most prominent black American in the nineteenth century. So Douglass is a remarkable figure if you consider how far he rose in the society and the talent that he demonstrated, and Douglass put forward a powerful critique of slavery. He was unremitting in his denunciation of slavery and of American society for tolerating it, but at the same time he in a sense tried to hold onto American values. He said that liberty, equality, these were our values and slavery violated them. The slave was actually more true to American values in his desire for freedom than the slaveowner was. The role of the abolitionist, he said, was to make America live up to its professed values, which it was violating every day.

*

Click image to launch video

Q: How were slaves able to create a community life even under the constraints of the slave system?

A: Slavery was a violent, brutal, and oppressive system, and one cannot sugarcoat that or mitigate it. On the other hand, it was a functioning social order. People were born, lived, and died within the slave system, both master and slave. In order for the system to function, slaves had to be given a certain amount of autonomy within it. You couldn't have an overseer with a gun forcing every slave to work everyday. That's not a very efficient way of getting labor done. Slaves found openings or niches in the system where they could create their own culture somewhat independent of that of the master. They created their own family lives. They kind of created a religion, which was Christian but not the same as white Christianity. They had secret religious meetings, secret preachers who preached about the evil of slavery. The white Christianity said, Look, slavery is supported by the Bible and it's a divinely inspired institution. Slaves didn't believe that for a minute, so they created their own community, but always within this larger power structure. One should not exaggerate the mitigating power of the creation of the slave community, but it did enable many to survive the institution of slavery without surrendering their own dignity, their own sense of themselves, and without accepting the legitimacy of slavery, which was something they never did.

*

Click image to launch video

Q: How did American slavery differ from earlier slave societies in other parts of the world?

A: Slavery in the New World, including the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean, was quite different from slavery as it had existed in other periods of history. Slavery, sad to say, has always existed in human history; there is even slavery today in some parts of the world. Slavery, traditionally, had been a household institution. That is, the average owner would have one or two slaves work in the home or maybe in the fields with the owner, and very often there was very little physical difference between slaves and owners. In Africa there was slavery, but there was no physical difference between all the Africans. In the Roman Empire white people were slaves, but in the United States slavery had two characteristics that made it very different. First, it was plantation slavery, which was based on the large-scale agricultural unit producing goods for the world market. That meant that in the slave areas the slaves greatly outnumbered the whites, and therefore the rigidity of the system, the policing of the system, had to be extremely severe. The danger of revolt was always there. Second, slavery in the Western Hemisphere was racial slavery: there was this physical difference between master and slave, so that race and slavery came to reinforce each other. Slavery helped to promote this racist ideology that justified it, so therefore the black person always bore on his self the mark of slavery. Even when he became free, he still carried the mark of slavery. In the Roman Empire, when a slave became free, he just melted into the society. You didn't know who was an ex-slave. In Africa slaves could marry into the free society and become free and they didn't look any different than anyone else, but in the United States prejudice against blacks was the carryover of the prejudice of slavery, and it exists long after slavery, of course, was abolished.

*

Click image to launch video

Q: How were Americans able to reconcile the persistence of slavery in a land of freedom? What role did racism play in this?

A: The South in the nineteenth century developed a number of intellectual defenses of slavery. Southerners had to justify the systems of slavery in a country that talked about liberty all the time, and they developed a number of different kinds of defenses. Probably the most prominent one was simply racism. Blacks, they said, were simply not equal to whites. They were uncivilized, barbaric, and they could not survive in a free society. They could not produce civilization in a free society. It was better for them and it was better for the whole society for them to be enslaved. There were other arguments, there were religious arguments; slavery existed in the Bible, so it was divinely ordained, they said. There was an argument put forward by John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, and others that slavery was actually the best condition for labor of all kinds. In the North, people were the slaves of the marketplace, southerners said. At least a slave didn't lose his job in old age, a slave was never out of work, and at least the slave didn't have to worry where his next meal was coming from, so they said that the free marketplace was actually more oppressive to laborers than slavery was. So all of those arguments were used to justify what seems to be a contradiction: slavery in a land of liberty.

*

Click image to launch video

Q: How did the abolitionist movement and the actions of crowds in government against them contribute specifically to ideas of freedom of speech?

A: When the abolitionists, in the 1830s, started trying to address public opinion in the North, they did it in all sorts of ways. They published newspapers, they circulated petitions, and they sent speakers out into local communities in order to try to have meetings and to stimulate people to speak out against slavery. There was a lot of proslavery sentiment, not only in the South but in the North. There were many, many Northerners who were economically connected with the slave South, there were many Northerners who feared that, if slavery was abolished, black people would move up to the North, there were those who feared what they called miscegenation, that is, interracial marriage between black and white, and many of the early abolitionist meetings were broken up by mobs; groups would not let them speak. 

The most famous incident came in 1837 in Illinois where Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist editor in Alton, Illinois, was killed by a mob that was attacking his printing establishment, breaking up his printing press, and when he tried to defend it, he was shot and killed. Now, the breaking up of abolitionist meetings and the killing of Lovejoy alarmed many people in the North who were not abolitionists, because it seemed that freedom of speech and freedom of the press were under assault, and many people came to the defense of abolitionists' right to speak. They said: we may not agree with what these guys are saying, but here's an example of how slavery is actually interfering with white people's liberty. Slavery is hostile to basic liberties that we take for granted, so the very issue of civil liberties which arises in conjunction with the abolitionist movement actually eventually brings more Northerners into the antislavery realm because they begin to think and to defend our own liberties; we've got to restrict the power of slavery.

*

Click image to launch video

Q: Who were Angelina and Sarah Grimke, and how did they support the participation of women in public political debate?

A: Angelina and Sarah Grimke were the daughters of a prominent slave-owning family in South Carolina. In the 1830s, they were sent to Philadelphia for education. In Philadelphia, which of course was a center of Quakerism—Quakers were among the earliest abolitionists—they came into contact with antislavery people and became converted to Quakerism and abolitionism. Now, it was rather unusual to have Southerners involved as abolitionist spokesmen. They had grown up in a slave society, they had grown up in a slave household, they knew slavery from personal experience, and they began speaking about their experiences observing slavery. 

Now, at that time, it was considered quite inappropriate for women to speak to mixed, male-female audiences. Women were supposed to speak to women; there were female antislavery societies. Now what happened was, when the Grimkes began speaking, men started sneaking into their lectures because they wanted to hear what they had to say, and eventually they started saying, look, our job is to spread the word of abolitionism, we should speak to as many people as we can, and they began speaking to mixed audiences. Well, this led to a lot of controversy. The Massachusetts Congregational clergy issued a statement denouncing them for stepping outside the proper sphere of womanhood, and that led the Grimkes to defend the right of women to speak in public, to move beyond the question of slavery to whether women had the same rights in the public sphere as men did. 

Then Sarah Grimke published this wonderful set of essays, published under Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, 1837 I think it was, maybe 1838, in which she claimed all the rights for women that men enjoyed: the right to education, the right to employment, the right to speak out in the public sphere. She didn't really say much about the right to vote, but all these other rights that were restricted for women and that men enjoyed, Grimke said, look, women are equal creatures, they're created by God, they have the same soul, they have the same aptitude. The Grimkes really launched, in many ways, the public demand for full equality for women in American society.

*

Introduction: Frederick Douglass

Slave as a child

Leader of abolitionist movement,

published autobiography that condemned slavery and racism

Photograph of Frederick Douglass

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.

*

The Old South

Cotton Is King

Cotton replaced sugar as the world’s major crop produced by slave labor in the nineteenth century.

The strength of American slavery rested on cotton.

Cotton industry

Three-fourths of the world’s cotton supply came from the southern United States.

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.

*

The Old South

Cotton Is King

Cotton industry

Cotton supplied textile mills in the North and in Great Britain.

As early as 1803, cotton represented America’s most important export.

The Second Middle Passage

Although the African slave trade was prohibited, the sale and trade of slaves within the United States flourished.

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 slaveowner 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.

*

Map 11.1 Slave Population, 1860

The Old South

Main business districts of southern cities contained the offices of slave traders, and auctions took place at public slave markets.

North was not immune to slavery.

Northern merchants and manufacturers participated in the slave economy and shared in its profits.

Slavery shaped the lives of all Americans.

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.

*

Old South: The Southern Economy

Southern economic growth was different from northern growth.

There were few large cities in the South.

The cities were mainly centers for gathering and shipping cotton.

New Orleans was the only city of significant size in the South.

The region produced less than 10 percent of the nation’s manufactured goods.

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 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.

*

This 1860 view of New Orleans captures the size

*

The Old South

“Plain Folk” of the Old South

Three-fourths of white southerners did not own slaves.

Most white southerners lived on self-sufficient farms.

Most whites supported slavery.

A few, like Andrew Johnson and Joseph Brown, spoke out against the planter elite.

Most white southerners supported planter elite and slavery because of regional loyalty, racism, and kinship ties.

Three-fourths of white southerners 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 wage-workers. 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.

*

An upcountry family, dressed in homespun

The Planter Class

In 1850, the majority of slaveholding families owned five or fewer slaves.

Fewer than 2,000 families owned 100 slaves or more.

Ownership of slaves provided wealth, status, and influence.

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.

*

The Planter Class

Slavery was a profit-making system.

Men watched the world market for cotton, invested in infrastructure, and managed their plantations.

Plantation mistresses cared for sick slaves, oversaw the domestic servants, and supervised the plantation when the master was away.

Southern slave owners spent much of their money on material goods.

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.

*

The Paternalist Ethos

Southern slave owners were committed to a hierarchical, agrarian society.

Paternalism was ingrained in slave society and enabled slave owners

to think of themselves as kind, responsible masters even as they bought and sold their human property.

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.

*

Table 11.2 Slave Holding, 1850

(in round numbers)

The Proslavery Argument

By the 1830s, fewer white southerners believed that slavery was a necessary evil.

Proslavery argument rested on a number of pillars, including a commitment to white supremacy, the biblical sanction of slavery, and the historical precedent that slavery was essential to human progress.

Another proslavery argument held that slavery guaranteed equality for whites.

In the thirty years before the Civil War, proslavery thought came to dominate southern intellectual and cultural life. Fewer southern whites felt, as had many 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.

*

Map 11.2 Size of Slaveholdings, 1860

Abolition in the Americas

Abolition in the Americas influenced debates over slavery in the United States.

Proslavery advocates used post emancipation decline in sugar and in other cash crops as evidence of British abolitionism’s failure.

Abolitionists argued that the former slaves’ rising living standards (and similar improvements) showed that emancipation had succeeded.

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.

*

Abolition in the Americas

By mid-century, New World slavery remained only in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the United States.

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 heirs 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.

*

A plate manufactured in England to celebrate

emancipation

Slavery and Liberty?

White southerners declared themselves the true heirs of the American Revolution.

By 1830 proslavery arguments begin to repudiate the ideas in the Declaration of Independence that equality and freedom were universal entitlements.

John C. Calhoun believed that the language in the Declaration of Independence was dangerous.

Southern state constitutions acknowledged equal rights for free white men. But in the 1830s, some proslavery 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.

*

Life under Slavery

Slaves and the Law

Slaves were not allowed to:

Testify against a white person

Carry a firearm

Leave the plantation without permission

Learn how to read or write

Gather in a group without a white person present

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.