1. US history survey
Slavery in 19th century
March 20, 2012

2. announcements
• Paper # 1 is due Tuesday, March 27.
• Late papers will be penalized.
• Please ask questions if instructions are not
clear.

3. closing of slave trade, 1808

5. Internal slave trade

6. slavery moves farther west
• With cotton boom, slavery expands into
Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas.
• Slave owners of upper south & Atlantic states
either move to new cotton areas, or sell their
excess slaves to those areas.
• 1 million slaves forcibly uprooted, 1820 – 1860
– more than total number of Africans
imported to US, 1619 – 1808 (400,000).

8. cotton states (dark red)

9. cotton slavery makes huge profits
• By 1860, cotton accounts for 60% of US exports.
• S economy is concentrated on plantation
agriculture, so urban & commercial development
are much slower than in N.
• S industrialized much more slowly. S capital tied
up in land & slaves.
• 1850 slave labor is primarily agricultural
– 55% cotton.
– 20% tobacco, rice, sugar, hemp.
– 15% domestic servants.
– 10% mining, lumbering, industry, construction.

12. Small elite group owned most slaves.
• Almost 2/3 white southerners owned 0
slaves.
• 2.5% white southerners owned
50 or more slaves, big plantations.
• Paternalistic.
• Saw their wealth & ownership as
a duty & a burden.

16. Slave life varied, but all enslaved.
• large or small plantation.
• type of crop.
• domestic servants, close contact with whites.
• urban slaves.
• Field laborers worked from “can” to “can’t.”
• Families & African-American Christianity
created culture of endurance & resistance.

18. Georgia

19. Alabama

20. South Carolina

22. Louisiana

25. survival
• Slave community acted as family.
• Fear of separation – 1/3 children sold away
from parents. Couples separated.
• Rough equality between women & men;
women not treated as weaker.
• African-American Christianity – a way to
express longings for freedom & justice.
• Daily resistance – working
slowly, sabotage, destruction of
tools, animals, crops.

26. Resistance & revolt
• Denmark Vesey (free man),
Charleston, 1822.
• Nat Turner, Virginia, 1831,
killed 55 whites.
• Both literate & preachers.
• Both executed.
• Result: tighter laws
prohibiting slaves from
learning to read.

28. Underground Railroad
• Harriet Tubman

31. • http://www.freedomcenter.org/visit-the-
center/
• National Underground Railroad Freedom
Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, on Ohio River

32. extension of slavery
• Missouri applied for admission to union as
slave state, 1819.
• Recall that Northwest Ordinance said
northwest states would be free.
• Equal number of slave & free states existed.
• Southerners believed slavery was property, so
a matter for state legislation, not federal.
• Slavery as a constitutional issue.

33. Missouri Compromise
• 1820, 1st extended debate in Congress over
slavery.
• Missouri Compromise, 1820 – Maine
admitted as free, Missouri as slave.
• Slavery prohibited north of 36 30 latitude line
(S boundary of Missouri).
• Most of Louisiana Territory would be free.
• Did not address future balance of slave/free
states.

36. announcements
• Paper # 1 is due Tuesday, March 27.
• Late papers will be penalized.
• Please ask questions if instructions are not
clear.

37. reading assignment for March 27
• Zinn & Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of
the US, 2nd ed. P. 153 – 166.
• War with Mexico