CHAPTER 11 The Peculiar Institution
This chapter explores the history of slavery in the Old South between 1800 and 1860. The chapter begins by
discussing the economic dominance of cotton in the South and how the northern and international textile industry
depended on the raw material. As the North industrialized, the South’s economy rested overwhelmingly on a cotton
cash crop. Next, the chapter describes different classes of southern whites and seeks to explain why non-
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Frederick Douglass
A. Douglass was a slave as a child.
B. He was a leader of the abolitionist movement, publishing his autobiography that condemned slavery and
racism.
II. The Old South
A. Cotton Is King
1. Cotton replaced sugar as the world’s major crop produced by slave labor in the nineteenth century.
2. The strength of American slavery rested on cotton.
3. Cotton industry
B. The Second Middle Passage
1. Although the African slave trade was prohibited, the sale and trade of slaves within the United States
flourished.
a. More than 2 million slaves sold from 1820 to 1860.
2. The main business districts of southern cities contained the offices of slave traders, and auctions took
place at public slave markets.
C. Slavery and the Nation
1. The North was not immune to slavery.
a. Slavery shaped the lives of all Americans.
b. Northern merchants and manufacturers participated in the slave economy and shared in its profits.
i. Ships, banks, insurers, and factories
D. The Southern Economy
1. Southern economic growth was different from northern.
a. There were few large cities in the South.
b. The cities were mainly centers for gathering and shipping cotton.
E. Plain Folk of the Old South
1. Three-fourths of white southerners did not own slaves.
2. Most white southerners lived on self-sufficient farms.
a. They were not integrated into the market economy.
b. This is the main reason that the South did not develop much industry.
3. Most whites supported slavery.
a. A few, like Andrew Johnson and Joseph Brown, spoke out against the planter elite.
b. Most white southerners supported the planter elite and slavery because of shared bonds of regional
loyalty, racism, and kinship ties.
F. The Planter Class
1. In 1850, most slaveholding families owned five or fewer slaves.
2. Fewer than 2,000 families owned 100 slaves or more.
3. Ownership of slaves provided the route to wealth, status, and influence.
4. Slavery was a profit-making system.
a. Men watched the world market for cotton, invested in infrastructure, and carefully managed every
G. The Paternalist Ethos
1. Southern slaveowners were committed to a hierarchical, agrarian society.
2. Paternalism was ingrained in slave society and enabled slaveowners to think of themselves as kind,
responsible masters even as they bought and sold their human property.
a. Reverend Charles C. Jones
H. The Code of Honor
1. Southern men sometimes dueled as part of a code of honor.
2. Southern women were often trapped in a “domestic circle” of loneliness.
I. The Proslavery Argument
1. By the 1830s, fewer southerners believed that slavery was a necessary evil; instead, they claimed it as
the basis for free institutions.
2. The proslavery argument rested on several pillars, including a commitment to white supremacy, biblical
sanction of slavery, and the historical precedent that slavery was essential to human progress.
Cuba and Brazil.
b. They used their power in the federal government to insist that American foreign policy promote the
interests of slavery throughout the hemisphere.
J. Abolition in the Americas
1. Between 1800 and 1840, slavery was abolished in most of Spanish America and the British empire.
K. Slavery and Liberty
1. White southerners declared themselves the true heirs of the American Revolution.
2. Proslavery arguments began to repudiate the ideas in the Declaration of Independence that equality and
freedom were universal entitlements.
a. John C. Calhoun believed that the language in the Declaration of Independence was indeed
dangerous.
3. Southern clergymen argued that submission of inferior to superior was a “fundamental law.”
L. Slavery and Civilization
1. George Fitzhugh, a Virginia writer, argued that “universal liberty” was the exception, not the rule, and
that slaves, because they were not burdened with financial concerns, were the happiest and freest people
in the world.
III. Life under Slavery
A. Slaves and the Law
1. Slaves were considered property and had few legal rights.
2. Slaves were not allowed to testify against a white person, carry a firearm, leave the plantation without
permission, learn how to read or write, or gather in a group without a white person present, although
some of these laws were not always vigorously enforced.
B. Conditions of Slave Life
1. Some laws protected slaves against mistreatment.
a. American slaves as compared to their counterparts in the West Indies and in Brazil enjoyed better
diets, lower infant mortality, and longer life expectancies.
b. Reasons for the above include the paternalistic ethos of the South, the lack of malaria and yellow
fever in the South, and the high costs of slaves.
2. Improvements in the slaves’ living conditions were meant to strengthen slavery, not undermine it.
3. Few slave societies in history have so systematically closed off all avenues to freedom as the Old South.
C. Free Blacks in the Old South
1. By 1860, there were nearly half a million free blacks in the United States, and most of them lived in the
South.
2. Free blacks were not all that free.
3. Unlike in Brazil or in the West Indies, there was little room for a mulatto group in the United States; the
result was that free blacks in the Old South enjoyed little respect or prosperity, with few exceptions.
D. The Upper and Lower South
1. Most free blacks who lived in the Lower South resided in cities like New Orleans and Charleston.
a. Some of mixed-race heritage became wealthy and owned slaves.
2. Most free blacks lived in the Upper South.
a. They were in rural areas, working for wages as farm laborers.
b. The few blacks who owned slaves were free men who had purchased their slave wives and children.
i. They could not liberate them because any slave who became free had to leave the state.
E. Slave Labor
1. Labor occupied most of a slave’s daily existence.
2. There were many types of jobs a slave might perform: cutting wood for fuel for steamboats, working in
mines, working on docks in seaports, laying railroad track, repairing bridges or roads, or working as a
skilled artisan.
F. Gang Labor and Task Labor
1. Most slaves worked in the fields.
a. It is estimated that 75 percent of the women and 90 percent of the men worked as field hands.
2. On large plantations, they worked in gangs under the direction of the overseer, a man who was
generally considered cruel by the slaves.
G. Slavery in the Cities
1. Most city slaves were servants, cooks, and other domestics.
2. Some city slaves were skilled artisans and occasionally lived on their own.
H. Maintaining Order
1. The system of maintaining order rested on force.
2. There were many tools a master had to maintain order, including whipping, exploiting divisions among
slaves, incentives, and the threat of sale.
IV. Slave Culture
A. The Slave Family
1. Slaves never abandoned their desire for freedom or determination to resist their bondage.
2. Slave culture was a new creation, shaped by African traditions and American values and experiences.
3. Despite the threat of sale and the fact that marriage between slaves was illegal, many slaves did marry
and create families.
B. The Threat of Sale
1. One slave marriage in three in some states was broken by sale.
2. Many children were separated from their families by sale.
a. Ten percent of the teenage slaves in the Upper South were sold in the interstate slave trade.
3. Slave traders paid little attention to preserving family ties.
C. Gender Roles among Slaves
1. Traditional gender roles were not followed in the fields, but during their own time, slaves did fall back
on traditional gender roles.
2. The family was vital to passing traditions from parent to child.
D. Slave Religion
1. Black Christianity was distinctive and offered hope to the slaves.
a. Almost every plantation had its own black preacher.
b. Slaves worshipped in biracial churches.
c. Free blacks established their own churches.
2. Some masters required services with white ministers who emphasized obedience.
E. The Gospel of Freedom
1. Slave culture rested on a sense of the injustice of bondage and the desire for freedom.
V. Resistance to Slavery
1. Because slaves were outnumbered, slave rebellions were rare, but many other forms of resistance
existed.
A. Forms of Resistance
1. The most common form of resistance was silent sabotage—the breaking of tools, feigning illness, doing
poor work.
2. Less common but more serious forms of resistance included poisoning the master, arson, and armed
assaults.
B. Fugitive Slaves
1. Slaves had to follow the North Star as their guide.
2. Of the estimated 1,000 slaves a year who escaped, most escaped from the Upper South.
3. In the Deep South, fugitive slaves often escaped to the southern cities to blend in with the free black
population.
C. The Underground Railroad
1. The Underground Railroad was a loose organization of abolitionists who helped slaves to escape.
2. Harriet Tubman was an escaped slave who in the 1850s rescued about seventy-five others from slavery.
3. Many slaves hid on boats, took an owner’s horse and carriages, and boarded trains to escape.
4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) highlights a piece by Joseph Taper (1840), who
escaped from Virginia to Canada.
D. The Amistad
F. Nat Turner’s Rebellion
1. Nat Turner was a slave preacher and religious mystic.
a. He believed God had chosen him to lead an uprising.
2. In 1831, Nat Turner and his followers marched through Virginia, attacking white farm families.
take that step.
b. Instead, Virginia tightened its grip on slavery through new laws further limiting slaves’ rights.
5. The year 1831 marked a turning point for the Old South as white southerners closed ranks and
defended slavery more strongly than ever.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• How did the North and South differ from each other? How was slavery the fundamental reason for these
differences? How did each region benefit from the other?
• What roles did families and religion play in the lives of slaves? What were some ways slaves were able to
maintain their families, even with the constant threat of being separated for life? How were slave families able
to maintain traditional gender roles?
• Although slave culture grew from a need to survive in the face of bondage, it continued after emancipation.
Explain why this was.
• What role did cotton play in the development of slavery over time?
• White society reacted strongly to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. What were their reactions, and what can those
reactions tell us about the stability of the peculiar institution in the South?
www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/aareligion.htm
This site takes you to African-American Christianity, Part I: To the Civil War. The National Humanities Center’s Teacher
Serve offers essays on religion and the national culture, the environment, and African-American literature and history. The
Toolbox Library offers a plethora of primary sources, discussion questions, additional online sources, and talking points.
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1609-1865/essays/aafamilies.htm
This page looks at how slavery affected African-American families.
Harriet Tubman
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1535.html
This PBS page has a short bio as part of the Africans in America website.
North American Slave Narratives
docsouth.unc.edu/neh
This University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill website offers all known published slave narratives up to 1920.
Edward Ayers: Slavery and the Early American Economy
https://vimeo.com/24520065
In this presentation for Gilder Lehrman, Edward Ayers, history professor and University of Richmond president, discusses
myths of slavery and how it became the peculiar institution and a significant part of the world economy in the early 1800s.
Slave Resistance
The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker, 2016, 2 hrs.)
The Nat Turner slave revolt of 1831 is the focus of this dramatic and historically accurate film.
Twelve Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013, 2 hrs., 15 mins.)
Solomon Northrup’s travail in the 1840s from free black northerner to a slave in the Deep South is detailed.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Bethel, Elizabeth Rauh. The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Free Antebellum Communities. New
York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997.
Breen, Patrick H. The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2016.
Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Cecelski, David. The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001.
Clarke, Erskine. “Communities in Revolt: A Symposium on Nat Turner’s Rebellion.” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (2007):
655–728.
———. Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
University Press, 1985.
Larson, Kate Clifford. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. New York: Ballantine
Books, 2003.
Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977.
Lichtenstein, Alex. “Coercion Had Its Limits.” Reviews in American History 23, no. 1 (1995): 20–25.
McLaurin, Melton. Celia: A Slave. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991.
Penningroth, Dylan C. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Williams, Heather Andrea. Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 2007.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Organize the class into a debate between John C. Calhoun, who argues that freedom in the United States cannot exist without
slavery, and Frederick Douglass, who argues that freedom can never exist in the United States as long as slavery exists. Select
two students to play Calhoun and Douglass. Divided the class into Douglass vs. Calhoun supporters. Ask each group to meet
and plan out ideas to give to their spokesperson. During the debate, encourage the students to provide oral remarks and further
information and ideas to their spokesperson. Take a poll of the students at the end of the debate to find out which side was the
most persuasive.
2. Create a dramatic-reading assignment in class by drawing upon selections of African-American ex-slave remembrances from
the WPA slave narrative collection. (One useful site is https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives–from-the-federal-