AP U.S. History

Chapter 16:The South and the Slavery Controversy: 1793-1860

Focus Question

Analyze the economic, social, and political motives for the creation and maintenance of slavery in America?

Learning Objectives

  • Describe the economic strengths and weaknesses of the Cotton Kingdom and its central role in the prosperity of Britain as well as the United States.
  • Outline the hierarchical social structure of the South, from the planter aristocracy to African American slaves.
  • Describe the nonslaveholding white majority of the South, and explain why most poorer whites supported slavery even though they owned no slaves.
  • Describe the workings of the peculiar institution of slavery, including the role of the domestic slave trade after the outlawing of international slave trading.
  • Describe African American life under slavery, including the role of the family and religion.
  • Describe the rise of abolitionism in both the United States and Britain, and explain why it was initially so unpopular in the North.
  • Describe the fierce southern resistance to abolitionism, and explain why southerners increasingly portrayed slavery as a positive good.

Questions

  1. How did the introduction of the cotton gin upset previous calculations about the future of slavery in the United States?

"Cotton is King!"(338)

  1. What factors demonstrated the importance of the Cotton Kingdom to the overall American economy?

The Planter Aristocracy (339)

  1. How did members of the planter aristocracy dominate society and politics in the South?
  2. How did the plantation system shape the lives of plantation mistresses?

Slaves of the Slave System(340)

  1. In what ways was plantation agriculture wasteful?In what ways did the plantation system of the Cotton South become increasingly monopolistic?
  2. What were the weaknesses of the slave plantation system?What factors discouraged European immigration to the South?

The White Majority(341)

  1. Why did the majority of southern whites own no slaves?
  2. What percentage of white southerners owned slaves or belonged to a slaveholding family?
  3. Why did Ralph Waldo Emerson say,"I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom"?
  4. What percentage of white southerners were subsistence farmers? How did they make their living?
  5. How did slaves regarded the least prosperous, nonslaveholding whites?
  6. Why were mountain whites the most pro-Union of the white southerners?

Free Blacks: Slaves Without Masters (344)

  1. In what ways did some southern slaves gain their freedom?
  2. What factors characterized the lives of free blacks living in the North? How did the lives of free blacks in the North differ from those in the South? How were they similar?
  3. In what way were the attitudes of northern whites toward blacks exactly the opposite of the attitudes of southern whites?

Plantation Slavery(344)

  1. How many black human chattels lived in society's basement in the South of 1860?
  2. What was the most important factor in the great increase of the slave population in the first half of the nineteenth century?
  3. Why were slaves sometimes spared dangerous work?
  4. How did the profitable southern slave system hobble the economic development of the region as a whole?
  5. What was slavery's greatest psychological horror? Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe make the breakup of slave families a central element of Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Life Under the Lash(346)

  1. What factors characterized the work environment, legal status, and cultural life of slaves in the mid-nineteenth century United States?
  2. What incentive did slaveowners most often use as a substitute for the wage-incentive system?
  3. Why, by 1860, was life for slaves most difficult in thestates of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana?
  4. Where, by 1860, were most slaves concentrated? In what family environment were most slaves raised?
  5. Where in the South were forced separation of spouses, parents, and children most common?
  6. Why, by the mid-nineteenth century, did most slaves live on large plantations?
  7. Why did the family life of slaves tend to be relatively stable in some counties of the deep South, especially along the lower Mississippi River?

The Burdens of Bondage(348)

  1. Why were almost all slaves denied an education?
  2. In what ways did slaves fight the system of slavery?
  3. Why, in the pre-Civil War South, was armed insurrection the most uncommon and least successful form of slave resistance?
  4. How did John Quincy Adams figure in one of the rare successes of a slave insurrection?
  5. What factors led white southerners to develop a theory of biological racial superiority?

Early Abolitionism (349)

  1. What factors lay behind the idea of recolonizing blacks back to Africa? Who were notable supporters of this movement?

Radical Abolitionism (350)

  1. What were the most notable publications of the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Dwight Weld, Frederick Douglass, and David Walker?
  2. What events led to the founding of the American Colonization Society, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the Liberty party?
  3. What did Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Elijah P. Lovejoy, and William Lloyd Garrison do to advance the cause of ending slavery?
  4. Why did many abolitionists turned to political action in 1840, and what political parties did they back over the next two decades?

Examining the Evidence (351)

The South Lashes Back(353)

  1. Why, after about 1830, did the voice of white southern abolitionism fall silent?
  2. What were the arguments that proslavery whites used to defend the institution of slavery?
  3. How, after 1830, did white southerners place themselves in opposition to much of the rest of the Western world?

The Abolitionist Impact in the North(356)

  1. Why did many northerners oppose the abolitionists?

Varying Viewpoints (357)

  1. What were the major claims that Ulrich B. Phillips made about slavery? In what ways was Phillips a product of his times? With what arguments have subsequent historians responded to Phillips' conclusions?