Big Packet – Antebellum Econ and Social Changes and Life in

the South• Contents

– Econ / industrial changes

– Growth of Public Schools

– 2nd Great Awakening– Utopian Societies– Science and Medicine– Art and Architecture

– Literature– Reform Movements– Women’s Movement – Cotton Industry– Southern Society – Slavery

Key Supreme Court Cases of the Early 1800s

• John Marshall – (Federalist /

Nationalist)

• Marbury v. Madison • Gibbons v. Ogden• McCullogh v.

Maryland• Dartmouth v.

Woodward• Worcester v. Georgia

Clay and the American System

• Clay – The Great Compromiser

• War Hawk, Senator, Sec State, Prez Candidate

• Westerners – less sectional than others

• Interstate Infrastructure Projects

• The National Road

Calhoun and States Rights • War Hawk, Senator, Sec War,

Vice Prez, Senator • Early Nationalist – Later

Secessionist• Tariff of Abominations

– Helps north, hurts south– Southerners feeling vulnerable

• South Carolina Exposition • Nullification• Force Bill • States Rights –

– VA / KY Resolutions– SC Exposition– Civil War

2 Huge Changes in Manufacturing • Eli Whitney

– Interchangeable Parts – Cotton Gin

• Slater – Mills / Textile Factories

Early Transp / Econ Timeline • Cotton Gin / Interchangeable Parts (Whitney)

1790s • Cumberland Road / National Road 1806• Steamboat (Fulton / Clermont) 1807• Erie Canal (Clinton) 1825• Lowell Mills / Mill Girls1830s – Immigrants 1850s• Clipper Ships (McKay) 1840s• Telegraph / Cables (Morse) 1840s• Transcontinental RR 1869

Industrialism Impacts

• Growth of cities

• Reduced prices for goods

• Less self sufficiency

• Drives major change between north and south

• I would give my daughters every accomplishment which I thought proper, and to crown all, I would early accustom them to habits of industry, and order; . . . they should be enabled to procure for themselves the necessaries of life, independence should be placed within their grasp, and I would teach them to “reverence themselves.”

• [Judith Sargent Murray,] “The Gleaner No. XV,” Massachusetts Magazine 5 (August 1793): 461

“While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relation of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no… promise of voluntary obedience ……”

•1855 Wedding vow

The Country School, by Winslow Homer (1871)

Second Great Awakening

• Religious Revivalism• Proliferation of New

Denominations• Republican Virtue • Mormons

Utopian Ideas

• Brook Farm• Mormons• Shakers• Idealized Factory Towns• Oneida • Idealized Slave

Depictions• Simplicity• Idealization of the West

Science / Medicine

• Natural Studies• Elixirs• Medicine Shows• Laughing gas / ether

Art and Architecture

• Portraiture• Classical

References (Greek Revival)

• Landscapes / Romanticism– Hudson River

School

Literature• Romantics /

Transcendentalists • Romanticizing History

– Irving– Cooper– Hawthorne

• Transcendentalists– Emerson– Thoreau

• Poets– Whitman– Longfellow– Dickinson

• Romanticizing / Contemporary Life - Start of realism– Melville– Stowe

Antebellum Reform Movements

• Temperance, Education, Labor, Voting Rights

• Responses to changing society / Republican Virtue

• Dorothea Dix – Nursing– Treatment of the

Insane

Women’s Rights • Grows out of broader reform

movement• Republican Motherhood Idea /

Cult of Domesticity • Increasing middle class =

middle class women with leisure time to devote to cause

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton, • Susan B. Anthony• Seneca Falls Convention 1848• Movement was gathering

steam, but loses ground as slavery comes to dominate national attention

• Sojourner Truth – “Ain’t I a Woman?”

All the reform movements are eventually eclipsed by Abolition…

Sojourner Truth 1851

• That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Source: The Confessions of Nat Turner – as recorded by his lawyer Thomas Gray – Published 1831

• I saluted them on coming up, and asked Will how came he there; he answered, his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty as dear to him. I asked him if he thought to obtain it? He said he would, or lose his life. This was enough to put him in full con- fidence. Jack, I knew, was only a tool in the hands of Hark, it was quickly agreed we should commence at home (Mr. J. Travis') on that night, and until we had armed and equipped ourselves, and gathered sufficient force, neither age nor sex was to be spared, (which was invariably adhered to.) We remained at the feast until about two hours in the night, when we went to the house and found Austin; they all went to the cider press and drank, except myself. On returning to the house, Hark went to the door with an axe, for the purpose of breaking it open, as we knew we were strong enough to murder the family, if they were awaked by the noise; but reflecting that it might create an alarm in the neighborhood, we determined to enter the house secretly, and murder them whilst sleeping.

• Hark got a ladder and set it against the chimney, on which I ascended, and hoisting a window, entered and came down stairs, unbarred the door, and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. On which armed with a hatchet, and accompanied by Will, I entered my master's chamber; it being dark, I could not give a death blow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife, it was his last word. Will laid him dead, with a blow of his axe, and Mrs. Travis shared the same fate, as she lay in bed. The murder of this family five in number, was the work of a moment, not one of them awoke; there was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed it; we got here, four guns that would shoot, and several old muskets, with a pound or two of powder.

• We remained some time at the barn, where we paraded; I formed them in a line as soldiers, and after carrying them through all the manoeuvres I was master of, marched them off to Mr. Salathul Francis', about six hundred yards distant. Sam and Will went to the door and knocked. Mr. Francis asked who was there, Sam replied it was him, and he had a letter for him, on which he got up and came to the door; they immediately seized him, and dragging him out a little from the door, he was dispatched by repeated blows on the head; there was no other white person in the family.

•  

Frederick Douglass 1852

• What! Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the last, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No; I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply. ….

• What to the American slave is your Fourth of July I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy's thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

What makes the South different?

• 1831 – Nat Turner’s Rebellion

• Spreads fear in South

Cotton• Eli Whitney • What made cotton

explode?– Textile industry growth– Geographic conditions

are ideal– Can make money on

any scale– Works well in concert

with corn

• Creates social mobility in south

• What is picking cotton like?

2 SouthsUpper (Old) v. Deep (Southwest) South

• Most deep southerners are from the old south

• Slave criticisms lead to siege mentality throughout

• Internal slave trade binds them together

North v. South• Urban v. rural• Education Gap• Industry

– South has 1/3 of people 1/10 of factories

– Exceptions – Tregedar – Slavery in factories is used, but

sporadically – tweaks social relations

– Whites don’t want to work for whites in a slave society

• Capital as barrier to industry – Most wealthy southerners are

planters – keep wealth in slaves – Why cash in slaves on a risk?

• Many significant agric advancements

– Don’t confuse non-indus for non-progress

Who’s who in the White South?

• Planters <10%• Small Slaveowners

<20%• Yeomen – around

50%• Pine Barren Folk –

fewer than 10%

• 75% of southern families did not own slaves

• 1831 – 36%• 1850 – 31%• 1860 – 25%

Planters • THE slaveowner

stereotype• Most had little cash, kept

wealth in slaves, often borrowed

• Major social isolation – ½ absentee planters– Frequent long term guests

…. Southern hospitality

• Frequent infidelity by men (women too?)

Small Slaveowners

• 1/5 of the south• Many small

slaveowners were not farmers

• Very mobile group– Often bought out by

planters, take cash and move on

Yeomen Farmers

• The biggest group in south

• Main goal = self sufficiency (very 1776)

• More common in upper / older south

The Pine Barren Folk• Aka – mountain whites• Often didn’t own land –

squatters• Source of northern anti-

slave stereotypes• Still valued self sufficiency• Usually moved to region

by choice– Today’s leave it all behind

lifestyle?

Honor and Dueling Culturerevenge is a dish best served cold

• Don’t fly to rage, keep cool, bide time, then strike

• Is this really that absent from American culture today? – Pop culture value this

idea?

Life for Slaves – Some Numbers• 1820 = 1.5 Million slaves (.25

free blacks)• 1860 4 million slaves (.5 million

free) • 3 or less = • # of slaves most slaveowners

had• 0 = • # of slaves most southerners had• 75 % of slaves were owned by • 5% of southerners

Free Blacks

• 1860 – About 250,000 Free Blacks in South

• Often Bi-Racial • Manumission• Free Blacks v.

Immigrants – Job Competition

• North was Anti Slavery but also often anti Black

Plantations • Slave trade illegal after

1808 – Despite death penalty only 1 execution (1862)

• Slaves could be $1000 - $2000 (investments)

• Separations of families - breeding – “sold down the river”

• Plantation system stagnates economic growth

Slave Life

• Variations • Hard Work • Theoretical Protections –

No enforcement• Turner’s Rebellion –

Backlash• Beatings v. Value• Family Identities • Christian / African cultural

fusion • 90%+ Illiterate

Resistance

• Slowdowns• Food • Sabotage• Intentional injury • Runaways• Uprisings

Abolitionism• Early Gradualists • American Colonization Society • 2nd Great Awakening • After 1830s – Radical

Abolitionists• Garrison – The Liberator • Douglass – The North Star• Abolition in South 1831 turning

point• Slavery v. Wage Slaves • Violence of 1850s

– Lovejoy– Brown

Effect on Southern Whites

• Siege mentality• Making up reasons• Pseudo science• Biblical reasoning• Hypocrisy