Page 279 - American Stories, A History of the United States

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11.1

Learn about some key topics related to this chapter with the
11.2 MyHistoryLab Video Series: Key Topics in U.S. History.

1 of the American South’s economy, society, and geography
11.3 The Antebellum South: 1790–1860 The unique features
during the decades leading up to the American Civil War are
surveyed in this video. It focuses on the close interrelationship of cotton production and slavery as well
as the growing conflict between the rights of states and the federal government.

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codes, disrupted slaves’ social relations, as families could be broken up by the sale or forced removal of 2
Slave Life and Culture Many forces shaped slave life and culture, not least of which was the unrelenting
labor extracted from slaves by their masters. Their status as property, reinforced by repressive slave

parents, spouses, and children. Poor diet, inadequate housing, and physical punishments were constant
torments. Despite these and other obstacles arrayed against them, slaves often produced extensive
and supportive ties to kin and community, conducted a vibrant religious life, and challenged their
enslavement with everyday acts of resistance like running away and breaking tools, and, more rarely,
with direct and violent challenges to their enslavement.

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3 The Cotton Gin This video illustrates the role of cotton in the society and economy of the South.

Prior to the nineteenth century, cotton was not yet a viable cash crop because of its labor-intensive
production. With Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, a machine that separated the seeds from
cotton fibers, cotton production quickly expanded during the 1790s. The cotton gin, combined with the
manpower of slaves, soon made the American South the primary world supplier of cotton for clothing
and other textile products.
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for large numbers of slaves proved unsuccessful, including Nat Turner’s divinely inspired attempt to 4
Nat Turner Although infrequent, a legacy of rebellion existed throughout the South, and slaveholders’
fear of uprisings was even greater than their actual occurrence. Most of these efforts to win freedom

overthrow slavery in 1831. Yet Turner’s rebellion resulted in the deaths of many blacks and whites,
added a new element of insecurity for slaveholders, and contributed to Southern whites’ growing
antagonism toward free people of color and abolitionists.
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were suspected of complicity. Turner was the last to be captured. He went to the gallows unre-
pentant, convinced he had acted in accordance with God’s will.
After the initial panic and rumors of a wider insurrection had passed, white southerners went
about the grim business of ensuring such an incident would never happen again. The emergence
of a more militant northern abolitionism strengthened their anxiety and determination. just two
years after African American abolitionist David Walker published his Appeal to the Colored Citizens
of the World in 1829, calling for blacks to take up arms against slavery, William Lloyd Garrison
put out the first issue of his newspaper, The Liberator, the first publication by a white author to
demand immediate abolition of slavery rather than gradual emancipation. Southerners saw
Turner and Garrison as two prongs of a revolutionary attack on the southern way of life. Although
no evidence came to light that abolitionist propaganda had directly influenced Turner, many
whites believed that it must have or that future rebels might be. Consequently, they launched
a massive campaign to quarantine the slaves from exposure to antislavery ideas and attitudes.
New laws restricted the ability of slaves to move about, assemble without white supervision,
or learn to read and write. The repression did not stop at the color line; laws and the threat of mob
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