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23 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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The Peculiar South
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- Slaveholding states
- Chesapeake region to Missouri and Florida to Texas - Represent tradition, conservatism and family loyalty - “Peculiar” referred to slavery - Similarities with the North: Size, Revolutionary heritage, same language, some Protestant God, same Constitution, same nationalistic hold, power of states, same westward movement, expanding capitalist economy, uneven distribution of wealth, ruling classes, entrepreneurs - Did not have the same individual opportunity in the north - Slavery was a profitable labor system - Strong emphasis on agriculture and strong attachment to land - Strongly committed to church - Less developed schools, libraries, inns and restaurants and the north - Strongest investments were slaves - Largest industry was lumbering and factories were used to make cigars - Lagged behind North in industrial growth - Slavery slowed urban growth - Many evangelical Christians - Focused on personal behavior, not social reform - Defended slavery, leading to deep and abiding racism - In the 1830s, believed slavery was a positive good |
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James Henry Hammond
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- South Carolina
- In 1845, he argued that slaveholding was essentially a matter of property rights - Spoke for many southerners in his unwillingness to “Deal in abstractions” about the “right and wrong” of slavery: property was sacred and slaves were legal property |
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William Harper
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- Former U.S. senator
- South Carolina - In 1837 argued that Jefferson’s belief of the equality in the Declaration of Independence was no more than a “sentimental phrase” - “Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free than to command that no two men were ever born equal” - People were born to certain purposes in life |
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Paternalism
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- Belief of obligation of many slave-owners
- Belief that their ownership of people bound them to a set of paternal obligations - Saw themselves as guardians of a familial relationship between masters and slaves given to them by fate and heritage (similar to men/women relationships in the South) - Believed in the idea of the faithful, happy slave, despite slave resistance and escape - Justified how freedom of whites depended on slavery (connected with concern for profits; comfort) - Inspired racisms |
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“Dixie Difference”
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- Defining the south
- Americans have always been determined to define it - “The South is both American and something different. At times a mirror or magnifier of national traits and at other times a counterculture” - True especially before the Civil War |
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Manumissions
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- Freeing slaves through one’s will
- Free blacks of the Upper South wee usually descendants of men and women manumitted by their owners in the 1780s and 1790s - Many antimanumission laws were passed in the most southern states |
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“cotton snobs”
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- Newly rich planters of Alabama and Mississippi
- In contrast to the old Virginia and South Carolina families |
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William Faulkner
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- Author of Absalom, Absalom!
- 1936 - Novel told story of Thomas Sutpen who arrives in Mississippi and eventually becomes the pillar of the slaveholding class - Learns the wealth available in slavery and cotton - “You got to have land and niggers and a fine house” |
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Paul Carrington Cameron
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- North Carolina’s largest slaveholder
- Exemplified racism paternalism - “I fear the Negroes have suffered much from the want of proper attention and kindness under this late distemper . . . no love of lucre shall ever induce me to be cruel” - In response to period of sickness among his one thousand North Carolina slaves |
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The Ostrich Game
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- Wives had to play “the ostrich game”
- “A magnate who runs a hideous black harem poses as the mode of all human virtues to these poor women whom God and the laws have given him. From the height of his awful majesty, he scolds and thunders at them, as if he never did wrong in his life” |
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Southern Quarterly Review
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- Publication which declared “The proper place for a woman is at home. One of her highest privileges, to be politically merged in the existence of her husband”
- Showed sexism in the South - Articles written by men proclaiming that women should restrict their concerns to the home |
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Task System
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- Used by planters in South Carolina and Georgia low country
- Slaves were assigned measured amounts of work to be performed in a given amount of time - So much cotton on a daily basis was to be picked from a designated field; so many rows hoed or plowed in a particular slave’s specified section - Slaves and masters embraced it when it was functioning at its best - Demonstrated incentives used to promote labor and a strong master-slave relationship |
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Ralph Ellison
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- African American novelist
- 1967 - “A people is always more than the sum of its brutalization” |
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“Sorrow Songs”
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- Songs sung by slaves trying to impose order on the chaos of their lives
- Themes run through lyrics - Anticipate imminent rebirth - Sadness often immediately gave way to joy - Reached for a collective sense for hope in the black community as a whole |
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Brer Rabbit Folktales
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- Thousand variations
- Power and suicide could be reverses - Fashioned survival and resistance out of their won cultural imaginations |
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“Coffles”
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- Held slaves together in journeys to the southwestern markets
- Journeys were of many miles were made on foot |
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Harriet Jacobs
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- Spent much of her youth and early adult years dodging her owner’s relentless sexual pursuit
- Described experience as “the war of my life” - Asked “Why does the slave ever love? Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away by the hands of violence?” |
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Denmark Vessey
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- Free black
- Led conspiracy in Charleston in 1822 - One of the prominent whites’ most trusted slaves - Won a lottery of $1,500 in 1800 and his own freedom - Literate religious leader - Struck terror into South Carolina - Combined radical teachings with revolutionary, natural rights and theology to justify his conspiracy to overthrow the slaveholding regime - Plot begin in 1821 when white authorities closed a black church founded three years earlier - Rebellion unnerved official white South Carolina - 37 conspirators were executed and more than three dozen others were banished from the state |
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Nat Turner
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- Led rebellion in 1831
- Southampton County, Virginia - Precocious child - Become a preacher - Led a band of rebels from farm to farm on August 22, 1831 - Several limbs and crushed skulls and shot victims - In retaliation, whites killed slaves at random all over the region - Eventually caught and hanged - Interviewed by Thomas R. Gray for The Confessions of Nat Turner, which became a bestsellers - One of the most remarkable documents in the annals of American slavery - As a result of the uprising, many states passed stiffened legal codes against black education and religious practice - State of Virginia proposed gradual emancipation, but it lost in the House of Delegates |
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Dueling
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- Common Southern method of defending honor
- Samuel Fleming v. William Waightstill Avery - Not punished because of dueling nature of crime |
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Hinton R. Helper
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- Non-slaveholder
- Denounced the slave system - The Impending Crisis (1857) - Discerning planters feared the eruption of such controversial words in every southern state |
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“Damage Thesis”
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- Challenged by historians in the 1970s
- Revealed evidence of strong families during and after slavery - Showed that blacks nowadays have trouble maintaining families stemming from separation from families during the slave periods |
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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- Conducted a study that concluded that blacks had plunged into urban poverty because of a set of behaviors drawn from the past that eroded stable families
- “culture of poverty” - Thrives on the image of the black male adult’s absence from familial responsibilities - 1960s |
