Week 11 Slavery Brutality Discussion From Module Week 11 and Chapter 11 of the text describe, analyze and explain two things that you learned that were dif

Week 11 Slavery Brutality Discussion From Module Week 11 and Chapter 11 of the text describe, analyze and explain two things that you learned that were different from your prior perspective or different from what you learned in K-12. Be thorough. Post should be in your own words. Direct quotations should be no longer than 1.5 lines.No more than 2 direct quotations per submission.No outside research is allowed.Use only content that is in the Module for Week 11 and the text.Show understanding and knowledge of the reading for Week 11 as you write your posts. bri38559_ch11_296-317.indd Page 296 9/13/08 9:37:43 AM user-s180
/Volumes/203/MHSF070/mhbri13%0/bri13ch11
Chapter 11
COTTON, SLAVERY, AND
THE OLD SOUTH
This painting, by an unidentified folk artist of the early nineteenth century, suggests the importance
of music in the lives of plantation slaves in America. The banjo, which the black musician at right is playing, was originally an
African instrument. (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, VA)
THE OLD PLANTATION
bri38559_ch11_296-317.indd Page 297 9/13/08 9:37:46 AM user-s180
T
/Volumes/203/MHSF070/mhbri13%0/bri13ch11
he South, like the North, experienced dramatic growth in the middle years
SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
of the nineteenth century. Southerners fanned out into the territories of
1800 ? Gabriel Prosser organizes unsuccessful slave revolt
in Virginia
1808 ? Importation of slaves to United States banned
1820s ? Prolonged depression in tobacco prices begins
? English market for cotton textiles boosts prices
and causes explosion in cotton production in
the Southwest
1822 ? Denmark Vesey thwarted in plans for slave
rebellion in Charleston
1831 ? Nat Turner slave rebellion breaks out in Virginia
1833 ? John Randolph of Roanoke frees 400 slaves
1837 ? Cotton prices plummet
1846 ? De Bow’s Review founded in New Orleans
1849 ? Rise in cotton prices spurs production boom
the Southwest and established new communities, new states, and new
markets. The southern agricultural economy grew increasingly productive
and increasingly prosperous. Trade in such staples as sugar, rice, tobacco, and
above all cotton made the South a major force in international commerce and
created substantial wealth within the region. It also tied the South securely to the
emerging capitalist world of the United States and its European trading partners.
Southern society, southern culture, southern politics—all changed in response
to these important demographic and economic changes. The South in the 1850s
was a very different place from the South of the first years of the century.
Yet for all the expansion and all the changes, the South experienced a
Growth Without
Development
much less fundamental transformation in these years
than did the North. It had begun the nineteenth
century a primarily agricultural region; it remained
overwhelmingly agrarian in 1860. It had begun the century with few important
cities and little industry; so it remained sixty years later. In 1800, a plantation
system dependent on slave labor had dominated the southern economy; by
1860, that system had only strengthened its grip on the region. One historian
has written, “The South grew, but it did not develop.” As a result, it became
increasingly unlike the North and increasingly sensitive to what it considered to
be threats to its distinctive way of life.
297
bri38559_ch11_296-317.indd Page 298 9/13/08 9:37:46 AM user-s180
/Volumes/203/MHSF070/mhbri13%0/bri13ch11
298 CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE COTTON ECONOMY
The most important economic development in the midnineteenth-century South was the shift of economic
power from the “upper South” (the original southern
states along the Atlantic coast) to the “lower South” (the
expanding agricultural regions in the new states of the
Southwest). That shift reflected above all the growing
dominance of cotton in the southern economy.
The Rise of King Cotton
Much of the upper South continued in the nineteenth
century to rely, as it always had, on the cultivation of
tobacco. But the market for that crop was notoriously
unstable.Tobacco prices were subject to frequent depressions, including a prolonged one that began in the 1820s
and extended into the 1850s.
Decline of the Tobacco
Tobacco also rapidly exhausted
Economy
the land on which it grew; it was
difficult for most growers to remain in business in the
same place for very long. By the 1830s, therefore, many
farmers in the old tobacco-growing regions of Virginia,
Maryland, and North Carolina were shifting to other
crops—notably wheat—while the center of tobacco cultivation was moving westward, into the Piedmont area.
The southern regions of the coastal South—South Carolina, Georgia, and parts of Florida—continued to rely on
the cultivation of rice, a more stable and lucrative crop.
Rice, however, demanded substantial irrigation and needed
an exceptionally long growing season (nine months), so
THE NEW ORLEANS COTTON EXCHANGE
Edgar Degas, the great French impressionist,
painted this scene of cotton traders
examining samples in the New Orleans
cotton exchange in 1873. By this time the
cotton trade was producing less impressive
profits than those that had made it the
driving force of the booming southern
economy of the 1850s. Degas’ mother
came from a Creole family of cotton brokers
in New Orleans, and two of the artist’s
brothers (depicted here reading a newspaper
and leaning against a window) joined the
business in America. (Giraudon/Art Resource)
cultivation of that staple remained restricted to a relatively
small area. Sugar growers along the Gulf Coast, similarly,
enjoyed a reasonably profitable market for their crop. But
sugar cultivation required intensive (and debilitating) labor
and a long growing time. Only relatively wealthy planters
could afford to engage in it, and they faced major competition from the great sugar plantations of the Caribbean.
Sugar cultivation, therefore, did not spread much beyond a
small area in southern Louisiana and eastern Texas. Longstaple (Sea Island) cotton was another lucrative crop, but
like rice and sugar, it could grow only in a limited area—
the coastal regions of the Southeast.
The decline of the tobacco economy in the upper
South, and the limits of the sugar, rice, and long-staple cotton economies farther south, might have forced the region
to shift its attention in the nineteenth century to other
nonagricultural pursuits, had it not been for the growing
importance of a new product
Short-Staple Cotton
that soon overshadowed all else:
short-staple cotton. This was a hardier and coarser strain
of cotton that could grow successfully in a variety of climates and in a variety of soils. It was harder to process
than the long-staple variety; its seeds were more difficult
to remove from the fiber. But the invention of the cotton
gin (see pp. 192–193) had largely solved that problem.
Demand for cotton was growing rapidly. The growth
of the textile industry in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s,
and in New England in the 1840s and 1850s, created an
enormous new demand for the crop. As a result, ambitious men and women rapidly moved into previously
uncultivated lands—many of them newly open to
bri38559_ch11_296-317.indd Page 299 9/13/08 9:37:47 AM user-s180
/Volumes/203/MHSF070/mhbri13%0/bri13ch11
COTTON, SLAVERY, AND THE OLD SOUTH 299
planter settlement after the relocation of the tribes in
the 1820s and 1830s—to establish new cotton-growing
regions.
Beginning in the 1820s, therefore, cotton production
spread rapidly. From the western areas of South Carolina
and Georgia, production moved steadily westward—first
into Alabama and Mississippi, then into northern Louisiana,
Texas, and Arkansas. By the 1850s, cotton had become
the linchpin of the southern
Spread of Cotton
economy. In 1820, the South had
Production
produced about 500,000 bales
of cotton. By 1850 it was producing nearly 3 million
bales a year, and by 1860 nearly 5 million. There were
periodic fluctuations in cotton prices, resulting generally
from overproduction; periods of boom frequently gave
way to abrupt busts. But the cotton economy continued
to grow, even if in fits and starts. By the time of the Civil
War, cotton constituted nearly two-thirds of the total
export trade of the United States and was bringing in
nearly $200 million a year. The annual value of the rice
crop, in contrast, was $2 million. It was little wonder
that southern politicians now proclaimed: “Cotton is
king!”
Cotton production dominated the more recently settled areas of what came to be known as the “lower
South” (or, in a later era, the “Deep South”). Many people
began to call this region the “Cotton Kingdom.” Settlement of the area resembled in some ways the rush of
gold seekers to a new strike. The prospect of tremendous profits from growing cotton drew white settlers to
the lower South by the thousands. Some were wealthy
planters from the older states who transferred their
assets and slaves to a cotton plantation. Most were small
slaveholders or slaveless farmers who hoped to move
into the planter class.
A similar shift, if an involuntary one, occurred in the
slave population. Between 1820
Expansion of Slavery
and 1860, the number of slaves
in Alabama leaped from 41,000 to 435,000, and in Mississippi from 32,000 to 436,000. In the same period, the
increase in Virginia was only from 425,000 to 490,000.
Between 1840 and 1860, according to some estimates,
410,000 slaves moved from the upper South to the cotton states—either accompanying masters who were
themselves migrating to the Southwest or (more often)
sold to planters already there. Indeed, the sale of slaves
to the Southwest became an important economic activity in the upper South and helped the troubled planters
of that region compensate for the declining value of
their crops.
Southern Trade and Industry
In the face of this booming agricultural expansion, other
forms of economic activity developed slowly in the South.
The business classes of the region—the manufacturers
and merchants—were not unimportant. There was growing activity in flour milling and in textile and iron manufacturing, particularly in the upper South. The Tredegar
Iron Works in Richmond, for example, compared favorably
with the best iron mills in the Northeast. But industry
remained an insignificant force in comparison with the
agricultural economy. The total value of southern textile
manufactures in 1860 was $4.5 million—a threefold
increase over the value of those
Weak Manufacturing
goods twenty years before, but
Sector
only about 2 percent of the value
of the raw cotton exported that year.
To the degree that the South developed a nonfarm
commercial sector, it was largely to serve the needs of
the plantation economy. Particularly important were the
brokers, or “factors,” who marketed the planters’ crops.
These merchants tended to live in such towns as New
Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, and Savannah, where they
worked to find buyers for cotton and other crops and
where they purchased goods for the planters they served.
The South had only a very rudimentary financial system,
and the factors often also served the planters as bankers,
providing them with credit. Planters frequently accumulated substantial debts, particularly during periods
when cotton prices were in decline; and the southern
merchant-bankers thus became figures of considerable
influence and importance in the region. There were also
substantial groups of professional people in the South—
lawyers, editors, doctors, and others. In most parts of the
region, however, they too were closely tied to and dependent on the plantation economy. However important
manufacturers, merchants, and professionals might have
been to southern society, they were relatively unimportant in comparison with the manufacturers, merchants,
and professionals of the North, on whom southerners
were coming more and more (and increasingly unhappily) to depend.
The primitive character of the region’s banking system matched a lack of developInadequate Regional
ment in other basic services and
Transportation System
structures necessary for industrial development. Perhaps most notable was the South’s
inadequate transportation system. In the North in the
antebellum period, enormous sums were invested in
roads, canals, and above all railroads to knit the region
together into an integrated market. In the South there
were no such investments. Canals were almost nonexistent; most roads were crude and unsuitable for heavy
transport; and railroads, although they expanded substantially in the 1840s and 1850s, failed to tie the region
together effectively. Such towns as Charleston, Atlanta,
Savannah, and Norfolk had direct connections with
Memphis, and thus with the Northwest; and Richmond
was connected, via the Virginia Central, with the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. In addition, several independent lines furnished a continuous connection between
bri38559_ch11_296-317.indd Page 300 10/15/08 11:33:57 AM user
/Volumes/203/MHSF070/mhbri13%0/bri13ch11
300 CHAPTER ELEVEN
MD.
N.J.
DEL.
VIRGINIA
Richmond
MISSOURI
TERRITORY
KENTUCKY
Nashville
Memphis
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
New Orleans
1820
Areas of cotton production
0
Slave distribution
(One dot approximates 200 slaves)
0
ILLINOIS
KANSAS TERRITORY
200
MD.
N.J.
DEL.
Richmond
Norfolk
Nashville
TENNESSEE
Chattanooga
NORTH CAROLINA
SOUTH
CAROLINA
Columbia
Atlanta
N
Birmingham
TO
OT
C
Charleston
D
AN
UPL
Wilmington
CO
TT
O
Little Rock
Vicksburg
Montgomery
Jackson
MISSISSIPPI
LOUISIANA
Savannah
GEORGIA
ALABAMA
Mobile
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
Jacksonville
New Orleans
1860
FLORIDA
Areas of cotton production
0
Slave distribution
(One dot approximates 200 slaves)
0
the Ohio River and New Orleans. Most of the South,
however, remained unconnected to the national railroad
system. Most lines in the region were short and local.
The principal means of transportation was water. Planters generally shipped their crops to market along rivers
or by sea; most manufacturing was in or near port
towns.
Perceptive southerners recognized the economic subordination of their region to the North. “From the rattle
with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in
the South to the shroud that covers the cold form of the
dead, everything comes to us from the North,” the Arkansas journalist Albert Pike lamented. Perhaps the most
PA.
OHI O
INDIANA
VIRGINIA
Memphis
TEXAS
400 km
KENTUCKY
ARKANSAS
INDIAN TERRITORY
FLORIDA
TERRITORY
200 mi
MISSOURI
Houston
Wilmington
N
AN
D
GEORGIA
ALABAMA
Mobile
LOUISIANA
San Antonio
San Antonio
AI
SL
Jackson
MISSISSIPPI
Houston
SOUTH
CAROLINA
Columbia
Atlanta
Birmingham
N
TO
OT
Charleston
C
D
AN
UPL
Montgomery
Savannah
SE
Vicksburg
MEXICO
(SPAIN)
NORTH CAROLINA
CO
TT
O
ARKANSAS TERRITORY
TENNESSEE
N
For an interactive version of this map, go to
www.mhhe.com/brinkley13ech11maps
ILLINOIS
OHIO
INDIANA
IS L
AN
D
two maps show the remarkable
spread of cotton cultivation in the
South in the decades before the
Civil War. Both maps show the
areas of cotton cultivation (the
green-colored areas) as well as
areas with large slave populations
(the brown-dotted areas). Note
how in the top map, which
represents 1820, cotton production
is concentrated largely in the
East, with a few areas scattered
among Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and Tennessee. Slavery
is concentrated along the Georgia
and South Carolina coast, areas
in which long-staple cotton was
grown, with only a few other areas
of highly dense slave populations.
By 1860, the South had changed
dramatically. Cotton production had
spread throughout the lower South,
from Texas to northern Florida,
and slavery had moved with it.
Slavery was also much denser in the
tobacco-growing regions of Virginia
and North Carolina, which had also
grown. ? How did this economic
shift affect the white South’s
commitment to slavery?
PA.
UNORGANIZED
TERRITORY
SEA
SLAVERY AND COTTON IN THE
SOUTH, 1820 AND 1860 These
200 mi
200
400 km
prominent advocate of southern economic independence
was James B. D. De Bow, a resiDe Bow’s Review
dent of New Orleans. He published a magazine advocating southern commercial and
agricultural expansion, De Bow’s Review, which survived
from its founding in 1846 until 1880. De Bow made his
journal into a tireless advocate of southern economic
independence from the North, warning constantly of the
dangers of the “colonial” relationship between the sections. One writer noted in the pages of his magazine: “I
think it would be safe to estimate the amount which is
lost to us annually by our vassalage to the North at
$100,000,000. Great God!”Yet De Bow’s Review was itself
bri38559_ch11_296-317.indd Page 301 9/13/08 9:37:53 AM user-s180
/Volumes/203/MHSF070/mhbri13%0/bri13ch11
COTTON, SLAVERY, AND THE OLD SOUTH 301
LOUISIANA
MISS.
To Baton Rouge
Baton Rouge
Duncan
Point
si
ss
ip
p
Lake
Pontchartrain
i R.
er
New Orleans
e
in
Ferry
Ba
yo
u
Pl
m
ue
aq
sippi
Riv
is
M
Plaquemine
Missis
Plaquemine
0
0
25 mi
25
Gulf of Mexico
50 km
Store
San Gabriel
Church
Long lot boundaries
Swamps
Flow of river
Town
Roads
Mississippi Rive
r
0
To New Orleans
0
5 mi
5
10 km
PLANTATIONS IN LOUISIANA, 1858 This map provides a detailed view of plantation lands along a stretch of the Mississippi River between New
Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Note the long, narrow shapes of these landholdings—known as “long lots.” This system was designed to give
as many planters as possible frontage on the river, which they needed to transport their crops to market and to receive goods in return. The river
also deposited rich soil on the lands near its banks, which made cultivation of crops easier. Note how towns, stores, and churches all are near the
riverbank, so planters and others living on plantations nearby could reach them easily by boat. ? How is this landscape different from that of
the newly opened federal lands in the West?
evidence of the dependency of the South on the North. It
was printed in New York, because no New Orleans printer
had facilities adequate for the task; it was filled with advertisements from northern manufacturing firms; and its circulation was always modest in comparison with those of
northern publications. In Charleston, for example, it sold
an average of 173 copies per issue; Harper’s Magazine of
New York, in contrast, regularly sold 1,500 copies to South
Carolinians.
Sources of Southern Difference
Despite this growing concern about the region’s “colonial
dependency,” the South made few serious efforts to build
an economy that might challenge its dependency. An
important question about antebellum southern history,
therefore, is why the region did so little to develop a
larger industrial and commercial economy of its own.
Why did it remain so different from the North?
Part of the reason was the great profitability of the
region’s agricultural system, particularly of cotton production. In the Northeast, many people had turned to manufacturing as the agricultural economy of the region
declined. In the South, the agriReasons for Colonial
cultural economy was booming,
Dependency
and ambitious people eager to
profit from the emerging capitalist economy had little
incentive to look beyond it. Another reason was that
wealthy southerners had so much capital invested in their
land and, particularly, their slaves that they had little left
for other investments. Some historians have suggested
that the southern climate—with its long, hot, steamy
summers—was less suitable for industrial development
than the climate of the North. Still others have gone so far
as to claim that southern work habits (perhaps a reflection of the debilitating effects of the climate) impeded
industrialization; some white southerners appeared—at
least to many northern observers—not to work very hard,
bri38559_ch11_296-317.indd Page 302 9/13/08 9:37:56 AM user-s180
/Volumes/203/MHSF070/mhbri13%0/bri13ch11
302 CHAPTER ELEVEN
to lack the strong work ethic that fueled northern economic development.
But the southern failure to create a flourishing commercial or industrial economy was also in part the result
of a set of values distinctive to the South that discouraged
the growth of cities and industry. Many white southerners
liked to think of themselves as repres…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment