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Slavery and the Old South: An American Tragedy |
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Slavery and the Old South: An American Tragedy |
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Instructor's Introduction:
Historian Carl Degler wrote that the slave experience made livestock of human beings. Slaves did the work so others wouldn't have to, to produce the huge profits that supported the southern "plantation" economic system. The ante-bellum South was an agricultural society, and a feudal one. By 1860, one out of three people in the North lived in cities; in the South, however, urban dwellers numbered only one in fourteen. The region was heavily dependent on foreign investors, slave labor and cash crops, especially cotton. The cotton was sent to northern factories and factories in England, France and Holland. Southerners, then, were heavily dependent upon others for their livelihood and their lifestyle.
At the root of the southern system was a belief in racial inequality - the notion that black people were created inferior and needed whites to care for them. The South would eventually fight and lose a devastating war to defend this belief. But before this war, a massive system of human and economic exploitation was nurtured and defended by a decent, God-fearing people, a people trapped in a net of their own making. The United States was the only country on the planet to profess a belief in equality, on the one hand, and allowed the ownership of millions of black people as property, or "chattel", on the other. It is, as Joseph Ellis has written, the "central dilemma of American History." It was also this nation's greatest human tragedy, one which affects us all to this day.
Reading Assignments:
Flyover History Text, Chapters 34, 36, 38, 41, 42 + Web Sites
Internet Required: (A), (E), plus TWO other activities.
(A) Online Lecture: Black Slavery, the Peculiar Institution
(B) Ristance to Slavery: Nat Turner and Fanny Kemble
Chapter 36 of Flyover History, Children of Darkness.
The Marriage of Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler: The marriage of ardent abolitionist Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler, heir to one of the largest slaveholding plantations in the nation, mirrored the unhappy union between southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Answer in ONE Essay:
(C) Abolitionists
Abolitionists were People AGAINST the practice of slavery, and took direct action against it. A number are still well-known: Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips, among many others. Usually white and middle-to-upper class, they believed that slavery was a sin against God, and that it had to be removed at ANY cost. We could easily liken these crusaders of the nineteenth century with our present-day pro-life activists. BOTH saw themselves as doing God's work, rooting out a moral wrong sanctioned by the law; BOTH faced enormous criticism by the majority in society; BOTH would use any means they thought necessary to achieve their goals. The abolitionist movement, like the anti-abortion crusade of our own time, was rooted in the powerful religious beliefs of the time. Religion was the source, the seed-bed of the anti-slavery crusade. In the end, it would triumph. Do a Google search on the following: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown.
Requirements: An essay on EACH of these individuals. Possible questions to answer include 1. What motivated each of these people? 2. How did each practice his/her beliefs? 3. Discuss events that included these individuals. 4. How successful were they? Why? Use direct quotations from Primary Sources to illustrate your ideas. Good source of digitized primary sources: Information on Abolitionists
(D) Bitter Harvest:
In many, many ways. Here are just a few examples of how ALL of us benefits from slavery RIGHT NOW: Chocolate. Cotton. Coffee. Tea. Tobacco. Sugar. Tomatoes. Oranges. Clothing. Sneakers. Gold. Diamonds. Cell Phones. Do I need to continue? Slavery is illegal everywhere in the world. But surprisingly, slavery is MORE common now than it was before the Civil War. Yes. An Estimated 27 million people are enslaved around the world today, including most states here in America. This is twice the number of Africans enslaved during the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. It is estimated that 50,000 people are forced to work as slaves in the United States today.*
Slaves are cheap Careful, this is a very sad story.
In her article, Bittter Harvest, Kimberly French writes that "we are all complicit." How? What does the average American do to encourage the modern slave trade? Read her article Bitter Harvest, and answer the following questions in ONE essay:
* These statistics come from the article Bitter Harvest, by Kimberly French, published in the UU World, a non-profit publication of the Unitarian Universalist Church, Boston, Massachusetts.
(E) Complete the Quiz for Theme Twelve
NOT REQUIRED:
Youtube: Amistad This film concerns the fate of a group of slaves who took over a slave ship, were caught, then put on trial in America. True Story.
The Day My God Died: A Film About The Slave Trade of Young Women In India
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