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
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
2. The strength of American slavery rested on cotton.
3. Cotton industry
a. Three–fourths of the world’s cotton supply came from the southern United States.
B. The Second Middle Passage
1. Although the African slave trade was prohibited, the sale and trade of slaves within the United States flourished.
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.
D. The Southern Economy
1. Southern economic growth was different from northern.
2. New Orleans was the only city of significant size in the South.
3. The region produced less than 10 percent of the nation’s manufactured goods.
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.
3. Most whites supported slavery.
a. A few, like Andrew Johnson and Joseph Brown, spoke out against the planter elite.
F. The Planter Class
2. Fewer than 2,000 families owned 100 slaves or more.
4. Slavery was a profit-making system.
a. Men watched the world market for cotton, invested in infrastructure, and carefully managed every detail of their
5. Southern slaveowners spent much of their money on material goods.
a. The wealthiest spent money on lavish entertainment, vacations, and elegant mansions.
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
H. The Code of Honor
2. Southern women were often trapped in a “domestic circle” of loneliness.
I. The Proslavery Argument
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.
4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes a proslavery selection from “Slavery and the Bible”
5. White southerners thought slavery was “modern,” in tune with the times.
a. Southern planters were hardly parochial. They felt a community of interest with slave owners in Cuba and Brazil.
J. Abolition in the Americas
1. Between 1800 and 1840, slavery was abolished in most of Spanish America and the British empire.
2. Abolition in the Americas influenced debates over slavery in the United States.
a. Proslavery advocates used the post-emancipation decline in sugar and other cash crops as evidence of British
3. By mid-century, New World slavery remained only in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the United States.
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
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
4. Trial of Celia: Celia killed her master while resisting a sexual assault.
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
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
2. Most free blacks lived in the Upper South.
a. They were in rural areas, working for wages as farm laborers.
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
2. On large plantations, they worked in gangs under the direction of the overseer, a man who was generally considered
cruel by the slaves.
a. Some of the harshest conditions were in Louisiana sugar fields.
G. Slavery in the Cities
1. Most city slaves were servants, cooks, and other domestics.
H. Maintaining Order
1. The system of maintaining order rested on force.
IV. Slave Culture
A. The Slave Family
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
2. Many children were separated from their families by sale.
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.
D. Slave Religion
1. Black Christianity was distinctive and offered hope to the slaves.
2. Some masters required services with white ministers who emphasized obedience.
E. The Gospel of Freedom
1. Slaves transformed Christianity, turning it to their own purposes.
2. Many biblical stories offered hope and solace to slaves, including Exodus, David and Goliath, and Jonah and the whale.
F. The Desire for Liberty
1. Slave culture rested on a sense of the injustice of bondage and the desire for freedom.
3. All slaves saw the injustice of slavery; the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence and rhetoric of freedom heard
around them only strengthened their 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
2. Less common but more serious forms of resistance included poisoning the master, arson, and armed assaults.
B. Fugitive Slaves
2. Of the estimated 1,000 slaves a year who escaped, most escaped from the Upper South.
C. The Underground Railroad
1. The Underground Railroad was a loose organization of abolitionists who helped slaves to escape.
3. Many slaves hid on boats, took an owner’s horse and carriages, and boarded trains to escape.
D. The Amistad
2. The U.S. Supreme Court accepted John Quincy Adams’s argument that the slaves had been illegally seized in Africa and
should be freed.
E. Slave Revolts
1. In 1811, an uprising on sugar plantations in Louisiana saw slaves marching toward New Orleans before the militia
captured them.
2. In 1822, Denmark Vesey was charged with conspiracy and executed in South Carolina.
F. Nat Turner’s Rebellion
1. Nat Turner was a slave preacher and religious mystic.
2. In 1831, Nat Turner and his followers marched through Virginia, attacking white farm families.
3. Turner’s was the last large-scale rebellion in the South.
4. Turner’s rebellion sent shock waves through the South.
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.
• Think back to previous discussions about the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the Constitution. Compare the meaning
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
African-American Religion
Africans in America
Amistad
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Harriet Tubman
North American Slave Narratives
Slave Resistance
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.
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 Freder-
ick Douglass, who argues that freedom can never exist in the United States as long as slavery exists. Select two students to play Calhoun and
2. Create a dramatic-reading assignment in class by drawing upon selections of African-American ex-slave remembrances from the WPA slave narra-
tive collection. (One useful site is https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936–to-1938/articles-and-