1
CHAPTER 11
The South and Slavery
1800–1860
This chapter begins by discussing the characteristics that made the South distinct from the rest of the
nation, such as its climate, geography, and the slave plantation system. The chapter then analyzes the
CORE OBJECTIVES
1. Explain the various factors that made the South distinct from the rest of the United States during the
early nineteenth century.
2. Discuss the role that cotton production and slavery played in the South’s economic and social
development.
3. Distinguish among the major groups within southern white society, and explain why each group
supported the expansion of slavery.
4. Describe the impact of slavery on African Americans, both free and enslaved, throughout the South.
5. Analyze how enslaved peoples responded to the inhumanity of their situation.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
1. The Distinctiveness of the Old South
A. A Triracial Culture
B. Conflicting Myths
C. Several Souths
2. The Cotton Kingdom
A. Tobacco, Rice, Sugar, and Livestock
B. The Lower South
C. The Spreading Cotton Kingdom
2
3. Whites in the Old South
A. White Planters
B. The Plantation Mistress
C. Overseers and Drivers
D. “Plain White Folk”
E. “Poor Whites”
4. Black Society in the South
A. “Free Persons of Color”
B. The Trade in Slaves
C. Slavery as a Way of Life
D. Slave Women
5. Forging a Slave Community
A. The Slave Family
B. African American Religion
C. Slave Rebellions
i. Gabriel’s Rebellion
ii. German Coast Uprising
iii. Denmark Vesey Revolt
iv. Nat Turner Rebellion
D. The Lure of Freedom
E. The South—a Region Apart
LECTURE IDEAS
1. A lecture on society in the antebellum South will help students better understand the decisions made by
southern leaders as the country headed toward civil war. During this discussion, also include key topics
revolving around the antebellum South, such as the intellectual defense of slavery in the region. Use
Paul Finkelman’s Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South (2003) for its extended
essay and crucial documents. Also see the following:
3
2. Discuss how historians differ and how historical interpretations change through a lecture on slave
personality types. Start with Stanley Elkins’s classic Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and
Intellectual Life (1959), which argued that the great majority of plantation slaves were the loyal and
3. One interesting way to examine slave culture and its contribution to American society today is to
give a lecture on slave music, considering its African origins and American adaptations. Good
sources for this are Graham and Shane White’s The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American
4. A great way to examine slave resistance is to give a lecture on the Amistad incident of 1839, the most
celebrated uprising aboard a slave vessel. Use Howard Jones’s Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a
5. A lecture on free black society in the South will help explain complexities within the southern society
of antebellum America. Explain the relationship between white society and the free black community,
6. How did climate and geography shape the American South? Discuss multiple geographic factors,
including weather. natural disasters, vegetation, soil type, and topography. Elaborate on how these
factors influenced city location, agriculture, transportation, local economies, and development.
Relevant sources include:
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES / FLIPPED CLASSROOM SUGGESTIONS
1. Show your class a clip of Gone with the Wind (1939), a film that romanticizes the Old South. Then
2. Access the online version of Mary Norcott Bryan’s A Grandmother’s Recollections of Dixie
(http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/bryan/bryan.html). Bryan, who was from North Carolina, wrote this
4
3. Create a Venn Diagram on the board to compare and contrast the three distinct subsections of the Old
South. Divide the class into three groups and assign each a subsection of the Old South to research.
4. Play a selection of slave music for your class. Such songs can be accessed at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/
slavery/experience/education/feature.html, where you’ll find religious, work, and recreational songs.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What was more important in creating the distinctiveness of the Old South, its economics or its culture?
2. Given that there were relatively few free persons of color and few urban slaves when compared with
the vast majority of rural slaves, why is it important to understand their experiences?
3. Explain how slavery became such a powerful yet horrific engine of economic development in the
South. What made southerners so defiantly defensive about preserving this practice?
4. Mary Boykin Chesnut admitted, “There is no slave, after all, like a wife.” How can these words be
explained in relation to the hierarchal social and family structure seen on some plantations?
5. Why is it important to learn about slave rebellions in the Old South, because in the nineteenth century
there were only three major ones and none of them succeeded?
PRACTICING CITIZENSHIP
One interesting aspect of the antebellum period is the degree to which Christians took divergent positions
on slavery; abolitionists and southern apologists for slavery were often equally intense in their religious
devotion and opinion. Pick a currently controversial issue in American society, like income inequality,