What did slavery in the early republic look like for slaves? For slaveowners? How do Johnson and McCurry differ in their analyses of American slavery? Which do you find more convincing?
Life for slaves in the early republic was characterized by coercion, both physical and psychological. After all, these men and women were the “property” of their white owners, and these men could do as they pleased with their property. Daily life consisted of hard work, with grueling conditions and hours. The threat of the whip constantly was constantly breathing down their necks, as was the threat of sale. Salve families were constantly at the mercy of their master and his financial needs. Mothers were separated from their offspring and couples commonly were ripped from one another’s arms in order to make ends meet for their master. According to Walter Johnson, “Of the two thirds of a million slaves sold…twenty five percent involved the destruction of a first marriage and fifty percent destroyed a nuclear family.” The threat of physical punishment was often not as potent in the minds of slaves as the threat of sale. Life for slave owners in the early republic was quite different as you can imagine from that of their slaves. Although most did not reach the status of “planter” (one who owns twenty or more slaves) even the most modest owners enjoyed economic comfort. According to Stephanie McCurry, “southern men established their independence and status as citizens in the public sphere through the command of dependents in their households.” Rank in the slave owner society was determined by the number of slaves one owned, illustrating the fact that not even these facet of society was exempt from a form of social hierarchy. Johnson and McCurry differ in their analysis of slavery in the sense that Johnson examines the slaves themselves, while McCurry looks at South Carolina and the justification of slavery in the south. I think Johnson’s insight and his first hand accounts of slaves themselves offer the reader a fresh and more convincing look on slavery. He describes the way slave children are brought up to view their bodies through two scopes, that of their master and that of themselves. A slave’s physical attributes often determined his price, for example John Brown who recalled, “I would be strong and stout one day,” after the size of his feat were indicated to a slave owner. It was everyday trials such as these that slaves faced and often what was viewed as a great characteristic to whites, was a slaves greatest downfall, because it accelerated them to the trading block and away from their family. Johnson goes on to state that the entire economy of the antebellum South was constructed upon the idea that the bodies of the enslaved had a measurable monetary value, therefore enveloping themselves in the practice of slave trade. McCurry on the other hand stresses the fact that proslavery republicanism had become the state religion of South Carolina. Proslavery ideologists such as John Adger explained that not all Christians (men and women) had the same rights, and therefore justifying the titles master and slave do not carry the same rights. They only have the specific rights that are attached to their role in society. McCurry has a good argument, however I think this issue has been expressed by others, unlike the fresh insight provided by Johnson.
Slavery in the early republic was very brutal, exhausting and terrifying work. In the 1780s-1790s thousands of slaves were manumitted due to the surplus of slaves for working relatively easy fields of tobacco and grain. At the turn of the nineteenth century and up to the Civil War slaves were constantly working in the cotton fields form sunrise to sunset creating profits for their masters as cotton emerged as the south’s most lucrative and valuable cash crop for both domestic and overseas markets. This progression of cotton being king in the south in effect due to the 1793 invention of the cotton gin that now allowed slaves to pick through 50 pounds of cotton a day, a huge explosion from the previous years of cotton production and picking. Often times masters would use violence to demonstrate their superiority over their human “property,” would sell away family members or loved ones if a slave had misbehaved or gone against the will of their master, and in many cases slaves were murdered by their masters. Slavery was an awfully inhumane institution but it was the chief labor of the south’s commercial wealth and without slavery who knows what shape and form the south would have taken in the early republic. The debate of the morality and justice of slavery in the early republic comes up time and time again as shown through documents 9 and 10, in 9 where the VA Legislature debates ending slavery or not and in 10 where Thomas Dew defends the institution of slavery in America. By this time, America had by far the most raw numbers of slaves in the world out of all countries and majority of these slaves worked on large plantations of wealthy high class southern elite. Historians Walter Johnson and Stephanie McCurry both bring up very interesting ideas and principles of how the institution of slavery shaped southern society and ideals. Johnson points out the chattel principle that slaves were economically moving property of who ever owned these human beings. Johnson writes, “Like a disease that attacks the body through its own immune system, slaveholders used the enslaved families and communities that usually insulated slaves from racism and brutality as an instrument of coercion, to discipline their slaves.” Here, Johnson expresses the extreme importance slave owners place on the institution of slavery not only as means of their economic lives but also socially and politically. Also Johnson points out how New Orleans was the extreme national hub for slave trade in America. McCurry in her essay she brings up the very interesting perspective that slavery, gender, and the political ideology of republicanism drastically influenced southern society in every aspect of life in the early republic. McCurry’s arguments are much more believable in my opinion as she writes, “Not only was the great majority of the population- slaves and women- propertyless and disenfranchised, and the political culture thereby defined principally in terms of whom it excluded; but the concentration of wealth in land and slaves was so advanced that it gave decisive shape to relations between yeoman and planters as well as masters and slaves.” This interaction between yeoman and planter, master and slave dominated the social connections and interactions of early republic south and McCurry points this out throughout her essay.
Slavery in the early republic was by no means completely consistent or the same for every slave or every slave owner. For a slave, depending on where you were and by whom you were own by determined what your experiences would be like. But for the most part, the one consistent fact that transcended all slavery was the fact that the master could do whatever he wanted to you whenever and however he liked. Therefore, the nature of the slaveowner greatly determined the slave’s experience. Slaves had strict schedules. The overseer for the master worked them hard. They had rules to follow. They had to be up at a certain time, had to do a certain amount of work by a certain amount of time, they had to obey the overseer or master totally, had to keep themselves relatively healthy and steer away from danger. If a slave violated any of these rules he or she would most likely face physical punishment. However, an overseer was not to whip or beat too harshly, for it would degrade the value of the owner’s “property.” For some slaves, one he or she got sick he or she was able to take some time off. Pregnant slaves had limited schedules when closer to birth giving. Older slaves were given tasks suited to their physical abilities. Slaves in the upper south mostly worked tobacco and grain farms, in the deep south mostly rice and cotton, and in lousianna also sugar. The slave also had the constant fear of being sold linger over his or her head. Families would be destroyed by such sales, and this was used as a threat to slaves to get their obedience. Slaveowners also had unique experiences. Most slave owners were small time with one or two slaves. These people were small farmers or professionals. However, most slaves were owned by planters (defined by owning 20 or more slaves). Slaveowners who used their slaves for business profit (the planters) had to protect their investment. Without their slaves they did not have the ability to produce as much of whatever crop they sold for profit. This meant a consciousness over the healthy and status of their slaves. They also had to make sure that their slaves were obedient. Some owners professed the nature of “paternalism,” that they were father figures for their slaves, since blacks were of an inferior race. Therefore, masters were protectors and provides for their inferior slaves. Smaller slave owners would use their slaves for subsistence and maybe a little bit of crop for profit. Slave owners used their slaves differently depending on where they lived: upper south vs. lower south, country vs. city, etc. Johnson and McCurry seem to interpret antebellum slavery in the early republic in different ways. Johnson evaluates slavery purely in the context of the men who bought and sold the slaves. He also evaluates the slaves lives as fearing sale, and the tactics they would use (including running away) to be sold away. He argues that slaves actually had a degree, even though small, of say over the nature of their contracts. McCurry provides a more comprehensive analysis of slavery, and frames the who system within the greater context of southern men’s construction of power. Men maintained power over women, children and slaves. Slavery was consistent with other measures and means for those white men to assert and maintain their power. She says that peoples’ roles determined the amount of freedom that they had, but ultimately it was all a matter of degree of freedom. Slaves were at the bottom of a totem pole, but women and children were on the same totem pole, even if they were higher up. I think I tend to agree with McCurry’s analysis. No doubt slavery was a product of power dynamics and hierarchies. Men in the South asserted their power over slaves, and they asserted their power over any and every other thing they could. Therefore, slavery seems to fall into the same vein of the greater phenomenon of demonstration of white men’s power and authority over everything that was less than them.
This week’s reading completely reinforced the knowledge I have gained from my Antebellum South Class I am taking this semester. The primary sources give a good description of the terror slaves went through daily. James Henry Hammond is one basterd of man, not only was he a pedophile but he, along with most southern planters (owning at least 20 or more slaves) lived in a bubble and had every justification ever thought of for slavery. He is most famous with his “Cotton is King” speech, where he asked America, mainly directed towards abolitionist in the north, “What would England do if we did not tend or export cotton for three days?” He proclaimed that they would falter and the commerce of most of the world would follow. He explained how if the south did not have slaves; there would be no economy for America. Since “Cotton is King” than the justification of slavery in planter’s minds was legitimate. James Henry Hammond instruct his overseer to man the plantation as if was a well made machine and the only way to do that was to have complete control over your slaves and prove superiority. He strategized each scenario for the slaves and established ground rule for the slaves and they were expected to know what to do at all time during each given situation. One scenario I felt totally summed up James Hammond’s compassion for slavery was the sickness rule, where no sick slave could remain at his OWN house because of the fear he or she would infect more slaves. Lizzie Williams gives a great description of what slave life was actually like. There were many attempts to end slavery and Virginia was no different. Virginia becomes a middle state really during the revolutionary war. They were dependent on slavery because of the enormous amounts of tobacco being exported however that faltered and their dependence on slavery grew weaker. Cotton was not a major crop in Virginia and they didn’t need slaves like the south. Of course there is always a counter argument and Thomas Roderick Dew defends slavery in 1832. Their again another southerner brings in Christianity to defend slavery. He knows that slavery is religiously wrong but it is crazy how they alter their beliefs to make it justifiable. Historian Walter Johnson provides a great of how slave owners used the slave’s families as as leverage to make the slaves do work. With the Louisiana Purchase and the spread of cotton, New Orleans established itself as the hub for slave trade, even though the international slave trade was banned in 1808, this did not stop the massive spread and growth of slavery. The female historian, Stephanie McCurry talks about the social implications that followed the southern states and in particular South Carolina. I thought it was interesting how McCurry brings up marriage as a metaphor for slavery, “No other relation was more universally embraced as both natural and divine” (pg.238) I tend to agree with McCurry’s idea of slavery because it was such a natural relationship in the south.
Slavery obviously is first and foremost a system for the subjugation of other humans beings. This distasteful reality of the antebellum South was given a unique character by the influence of the domestic market on slaves and slave masters. The purpose of subjugating and purchasing slaves back then was to compel labor from them , so it is hardly surprising that physical violence was an acceptable tactic through which to do this. Slaves apparently labored in fear of whippings and punishment for not meeting work quotas or for being perceived as not laboring their hardest. They were more than forced labor to masters, however, as the domestic slave market brought home the reality that they were commodities that could be assigned a value and traded as such. Accompanying their fear of physical punishment was the more insidious and subtle threat of selling off a slave or their family members, a tactic testified to in several of the readings as the by far the most coercive and effective action available to masters to control their slaves. Clearly the constant threat of being beaten, separated from your family or sold to a harsher life down South made for a life of suffering for slaves. Slaveowners largely were divorced from their slaves in any personal sense it seems, viewing them as profits and investments. They left the more uncomfortable aspects of trading and selling their slaves to slave traders, whom owners summarily blamed for the separations inflicted on slave families, though of greater concern to owners were the supposedly deceptive methods of selling sick and unruly slaves to unsuspecting owners at a higher price than would otherwise be justified. While slaves worried about what their masters would do to them, owners worried about what they could get from their slaves through their forced labor and sale on the open market or as collateral in any number of transactions. Johnson interprets slavery in the South as being heavily influenced by the market, from the threats issued to slaves to the interests of the master. Interestingly, he also offers an explanation for why masters and slaves couched these transactions in different terms, as slaves supposedly resisted through striking at the precepts of paternalism owners allegedly held dear while owners bemoaned the deceitful slave trader in attempt to paper over their own role in causing such suffering amongst their slaves. For him the market played a dominant role in how slavery proceeded in the South, as decisions made by masters always took into account some influence the market exerted over their slave’s values. McMurry takes a much more comprehensive view of slavery in the South, couching it in among the overall understanding of power relations in the South that put white men on top and everyone else in their own subordinate roles. No doubt class relations were crucial to how this society functioned, and defining “class” is crucial to understanding how these relations worked. McMurry argues that by espousing that the subordination of women and slaves to white and men helped bridge the gap yawning inequality between the yeoman and planter, uniting them in support of a relational system in which slaves and women were largely disenfranchised. White men’s control was key for her.
As Johnson writes, slaves lived and worked by the “chattel” principle that rooted itself in the intrinsic value of a human being’s potential for work and the manipulation of that potential. While there is really no way to describe the “typical” slave experience, the primary documents provide several different facets of slave life. First, Hammond’s instructions to his overseer illustrate that slaves were often not trusted by their masters; even though Hammond’s slaves were given a weekly allowance, the master’s reason for doing so was to ensure that they did not waste their money, causing them to steal. Hammond warned his overseer to keep an extraordinarily close eye on his slaves, even forbidding them from going outside after dark or socializing with slaves from other plantations. Solomon Northup’s recollection of life as a slave is especially telling, as he says that “the lash is flying from morning until night, the whole day long;” this statement is an interesting contrast to Hammond’s instructions to his overseer that punishment should be “calm” and “deliberate” and never excessive. Northup’s testimony also reaffirms the chattel principle – that a slave’s identity and purpose was rooted in his or her potential to work. Northup writes that on a slave’s first day, he or she is whipped first and then forced to pick cotton as fast as he or she possibly can; at the end of the day, the amount he or she picked is weighed, and if the slave does not meet that threshold in the ensuing days then he or she will be punished accordingly. According to Northup’s experience, slaves were well aware of this concept, contrary to what many slave owners believed. While the primary documents do not detail the everyday lives of slaveholders, once can infer their complacency toward slavery and their separation from reality. Because slaveholders were often far removed from the brutal realities of slavery, they could make statements such as that slaves were “blessed with a measure of happiness” equal to or greater than that of a European free laborer, saying that slaves’ conditions “weren’t so bad.” In the last primary document, Dew even compares slave owners to their biblical and historic counterparts who also possessed slaves, even going so far as to say that slaves were their masters’ “warmest and most devoted friends.” Thus, while slaves were constantly reminded of their value as an agent of work, slave owners were deluded into thinking that their role as master was justified and even natural. Johnson’s article deals almost exclusively with this idea of value in terms of potential labor and the ways in which masters held a slave’s value over his or her head. He writes that slaves were bred for their labor and were constantly reminded of it. However, he also writes that a slave’s life was centered around the possibility of being “sold south,” but his argument essentially stops there. McCurry goes a bit deeper and places slavery in a larger social context. Particularly, many would attempt to justify slavery through religion, citing the fact that the verbiage associated with masters and slaves was often the same as was given to husbands and wives, respectively. Furthermore, many argued that universal equality was a nice idea on paper, but in practice it was not feasible to assume that everyone possesses equal rights but that each individual possesses equal rights of their station. For instance, William Harper argues that women may be just as rational as men are, but because they are of a different societal “order” than men, they are not expected to possess the same rights; thus, using his logic, slaves overall deserved the treatment they received. Because McCurry’s argument is broader and more comprehensive than Johnson’s is, her argument carries more weight and provides a more complex understanding of slavery as a mechanism of southern society.
Slaves in the early republic faced a variety of different levels of slavery and oppression. On average, they were treated as subordinate to just about every other group in society. They constantly lived in fear of being sold away from their friends, family, and life. To be a slave in the early republic meant to be the subordinate of every other group in society, and to have no true sense of personal security. At the same time, slave owners were fully supported by many facets of society. The paternalistic culture of the South supported the elevation of the station of the ranking male in a household. This further obscured the idea of slavery as a charity to the slaves. Masked in charity, these same men were fully supported by corrupt theology in multiple southern colleges. Since the Bible outlined acceptance of authority within God's plan, it was widely accepted that the Bible and slavery coincided--in the South, that is. Going even further, the states supported the institution of slavery [even in some state constitutions]. These facets gave incentives to own and keep slaves as laborers in Southern society. With slaves being the equivalent of oil prices today, it was a financially intelligent investment. Essentially, it was economic utopia for slave owners.Johnson's analysis in "The Chattel Principle," largely focuses on how Southern culture hid slavery's brutal effects by alienating it's victims and most prominent maintainers of the institution [slave traders]. He introduces the common greatest fear of slaves: being sold. By explaining how many people would refer to traders as "Southern Yankee" or "Negro Jockey" in order to marginalize them, Johnson sets up the common slave trader as someone falsely set aside from society. Overall, Johnson's analysis is surrounding slavery as an effect of a form of capitalism. Contrasting greatly from this, McCurry maintains the notion that the source is more cultural. By comparing the paternalistic yeoman republican philosophy to the lifestyle of the slave owner, the two are very similar. Personally, I find Johnson's argument much more convincing. It gives much more insight on the slave trade as an effect in a cause-and-effect relationship. The cause being uncontrolled capitalism. Whereas, McCurry suggests the cause is the culture itself that causes slavery, yet her argument is still blurry when brought to a more specific comparison with Southern slave owning individuals.
A slave’s life in the early republic was surrounded by fear and violence. I couldn’t imagine getting married and waking up every day having to remind myself not to mess up or make the master mad because if I did the master might sell me or my wife as punishment. The bond between husband and wife is strong but the bond between mother and child is strongest bond in the world. Mothers that were also slaves during the Early Republic must have been the least free group of people in the history of the world. The fear of being separated from their children by sale directed their actions every second of every day. Mothers would be easily coerced into performing any duty that would keep their children close by. I wonder if some mothers were forced to extinguish the natural bond between mother and child to protect themselves from the pain of separation. If a mother rejected that natural bond mother and child then they would not have to fear their children being sold as punishment. Slaves that were mothers would have probably wished to not be mothers under the rule of a ruthless master because they would only have to worry about physical punishment and not the torment of watching their children being taken away. The pain resulting from a lashing may have lasted a few days but the pain of losing a child would last forever. Through the punishment of sale and breaking the bonds of friendship, family, and marriage I wonder if some slaves were forced into isolating themselves from these bonds by rejecting one of the greatest human compassions know as love. For slave holders during the Early Republic life was a constant balancing act. Slave holders had to develop a complex system of ruling their slaves so that they could extract the most profit from them property without damaging them. Slave holders had to figure out exactly how much food should be given to slaves to keep them healthy so that too much money would not be spent. Slave holders had to plan out every aspect of their slaves’ lives in such a way that they would maximize profits and keep slaves happy enough to keep them from revolting. I personally do not understand the benefits of slavery and I think that the emergence of capitalism and industry would have ended slavery. From a business standpoint I do not understand why would someone want to have to upkeep their workers, fear being killed in a revolt, or come up with the complex systems of labor division. The daily wages paid in a free labor system could not be as much as providing a slave with food, shelter, medical care, clothes, etc. Especially with the invention of time saving devices like the cotton gin, it would have to be easier to hire daily workers instead of having to spend all the money to keep up slaves. Slavery probably would have ended much sooner in the south if immigrants would have not stayed in the north. If immigrants would have flooded the south, the labor pool would have increased dramatically and it would have been cheaper for a slave holder to pay a starving immigrant that did not care about what job they were performing as long as they were getting the money to sustain themselves and their families. The free labor system would be much more beneficial to a person looking to maximize profits because the employer would not have to worry about the well being of their employees because the employer could just fire a person and replace them.
Slavery in the Early Republic was a life filled with oppression. This oppression came in many different forms, and planters and slaveholders used this mental and physical oppression to try to control their slaves. The daily life of a slave was made up of backbreaking work, and daily threat of punishment if his or her work was not considered fast enough as seen in document 3. Along with backbreaking work slaves also faced the likelihood that their master would use the threat of sale to keep his slaves in line. As William Johnson states, “Master used to say if we didn’t suit him he would put us in his pocket quick – meaning he would sell us.” This is an example of the psychological oppression employed by masters to make sure that their slaves maintained discipline. It is hard to characterize slave life in the Early Republic with just one story because it varied quite distinctly, but it would be safe to assume that slaves were at the whims of their masters. Slavery in the Early Republic was quite different for the slave-owners. Slavery to many planters was about making a lot of money, and they wanted to protect their investment in their slaves. This is evident in document 1 when the writer states, “Never require of your slaves too much—treat them with kindness, chastise them well for disobedience and refractory conduct—keep a clear conscience on these matters.” Slave-owners were also concerned with the number of slaves they owned because it represented a status symbol, and the more slaves you owned the higher you were in society. Johnson and McCurry seem to interpret slavery in different ways. Johnson seems to analyze slavery through the slave market and the buying and selling of slaves. While McCurry examines slavery through the lens of the slaveholders and his standing within southern society. Her analysis is much more convincing because it outlines the complex relationships involved within slavery. Johnson seems to just focus on the slave markets and his argument is much less convincing because he focuses on one aspect of the complex slave society within the South. Johnson states that, “Nearly all of them (sales) involved the dissolution of previously existing community. And those are only the interstate sales.” Johnson’s argument is not convincing because he just focuses on slave trade, and he refuses to see the bigger picture in his argument. McCurry’ argument is much more convincing because she examines the complex relationships involved within the slave system. She examines how slavery helped the slaveholder describe his manliness. She states, “For southern men like other republicans, established their independence and status as citizens in the public sphere through the command of dependents in their household.” McCurry also addresses the relationship between the planter and the smaller farmer and supports your point from lecture that these middling farmers sought to become planters because owning a lot of slaves provided a southern man with a sense of worth. Slavery in the early republic was a peculiar institution indeed.
Slavery in the early republic was a constant struggle between those in control and those being controlled. This system of labor and social stratification affected everyone involved—slaveholders and, of course, the slaves themselves—differently, and the South’s “peculiar institution” seemed to vary from household to household. Large slaveholders like James Henry Hammond attempted to control nearly every aspect of his slaves’ lives to demonstrate his dominating power on his plantation. Hammond meticulously developed and enforced (with the help of overseers) rules and regulations regarding the work schedule of the old and sickly, standard work hours, marriage, church, visiting, and rewards and punishments. These regulations were meant to isolate Hammond’s slaves from any sense of community outside of the plantation; Hammond, who, like other slaveholders, lived in almost constant fear of slave rebellions and unrest, did not want anything to distract his slaves from their daily work or from his supreme authority. From the slave’s perspective, Hammond’s strict leadership and list of rules forced them to create strong black communities on the plantation which they could depend on for support. Solomon Northup, a former slave, described his life under slavery and attacked Southerners’ argument that slaves were generally content being bound to their master: “Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not […] discourse flippanly from arm chairs of the pleasures of slave life, but let them toil with him in the field—sleep with him in the cabin—feed him on husks; let them behold him scourged, hunted, trampled on, and they will come back with another story in their mouths” (Wilentz 219). Northup’s account discredits the idea that slaves in their downtrodden state of existence were too ignorant or confined to the system of slavery to understand freedom, much less want it.
Walter Johnson and Stephanie McCurry have both examined the effects of American slavery from two varying view points. Walter Johnson has looked at the issue of slavery in the early republic and shaped his focus of study around the slave trade and the subsequent effects that separating slave families had on those involved. Slaveholders, he argues, did not see slaves as people with familial relationships, however. Rather, they viewed them as commodities who were incapable of real emotions and opinions: “Everyday all over the antebellum South, slaveholders’ relations to one another—their promises, obligations, and settlements—were backed by the idea of a market in slaves, the idea that people had a value that could be abstracted from their bodies and cashed in when the occasion arose” (Wilentz 234). This perspective allowed slaveholders and traders to distance themselves from the slave trade which continued to flourish in the South as the need for slave labor persisted. Stephanie McCurry takes a different and more convincing approach to slavery than Johnson, and instead of focusing on a single relationship (Johnson’s analysis of the relationship between slaveholder and slave), she looks at the ideology of the Old South as a whole and explains why even non-slaveholders supported the institution of slavery. “They [the aristocracy] repeatedly reminded white southerners of all classes that slavery could not be disentangled from other relations of power and privilege and that it represented simply the most extreme and absolute form of the legal and customary dependencies that characterized the Old South—and their own households” (Wilentz 238). The underlying issue at work here was racism, and slavery was a tool that kept all whites, even the poor, above the status of a slave. It empowered white men, in particular, and became a part of the natural social stratification of the time. As McCurry argues, slavery was embedded in Southern ideology.
The overwhelming discrepancy between the experiences of slaveholders and slaves themselves plays out quite vividly throughout chapter eight. For instance, both selections three and five each give first person accounts of the horrible physical and psychological torments that slaves were forced to endure during plantation life. Solomon Northup’s account stands out for not only its contrast with what Thomas Roderick Dew writes later, but also for the acute sense of hopelessness from degradation that plays out in the slave experience. The first two sources give a great sense of just how fixed slaveholders were to the system. The first source relates the advice and pride that a slaveholding father conveys to his son upon the latter assuming control of the family estate. It would be inconceivable for the father to not imagine the estate not including slaves. Source two is a very well known source, written by a very well known man. John Henry Hammond, former Senator from South Carolina, is famous to this day for the massive estate he controlled and foremost for his “cotton is king” speech. The long list of instructions given here by him to his overseer display to what extent planters sought to control life on the plantation. One wonders what Hammond would have thought had he realized that his slaves had dug a tunnel underneath his house to access his wine seller, what better way to illustrate the hypocrisy of southern planters than to compare the “wine tunnel” against Hammond’s controlling quest? Both sources four and six further drive home the utter brutality of slavery in the Old South. Overseer George Skipwith considers the slave “Robert” to be a rascal for daring to assert his will for liberty even in the face of the lash. However, as Walter Johnson asserts later in his article at the end of the chapter, it was the slave trade, not the whip that was perhaps the greatest weapon the master/overseer possessed over their slaves as source six illustrates. The trap of southern slavery and racism did not end once a person of color was manumitted. Source seven presents the struggle of freed slaves to procure public education in Virginia, the introduction to the chapter mentions that to no surprise the struggle was unsuccessful. Source eight presents the reader with the rare occasion to feel good about what they are reading in this chapter; the transcript of Nat Turner initiating his “rebellion” by slaughtering the people who were the agents of his oppression. Unfortunately, Turner relied quite heavily on religious “signs” and verbiage. Because of Turner’s assertion that the cause of his rebellion rested on fervent religiosity, it made it all the more easy for proslavery writers to dismiss his rebellion as a result of religious madness as Thomas Roderick Dew does in source ten. Source nine presents a surprising revelation that the abolition of slavery was seriously debated in at least one of the soon-to-be succeeded states. What is clear from the debates in the Virginia legislature, however, is that this debate was overwhelmingly geographically based and did not center on the immorality of slavery as an institution. Beyond any doubt, source ten is the most stunning piece of source material in this collection. Although I have read some of the works of proslavery southern “intellectuals” such as James Henley Thornwell, Thomas Roderick Dew makes some of the most outlandish claims. How anyone could actually believe that most, or even a substantial minority, of slaves had deep affection towards their masters is truly beyond the realm of logic based reality. Dew’s assertions only speak to the obtuseness and desperation of southern thinkers to legitimize slavery and fend off any attacks upon it.
In Walter Johnson’s essay “The Chattel Principle” he makes a convincing argument that a central component of the control/punishment of slaves on behalf of masters was undoubtedly the slave’s fear of being sold and the master’s ability to sell. Johnson’s argument is extremely convincing, after all what deeper connection does one feel in their life than to their family? The fear of being taken away from one’s family explains a great deal about master/slave relations in the antebellum south. Stephanie McCurry argues that the connection between the uses of Scottish natural philosophy on behalf of southern proslavery intellectuals such as Thornwell laid heavily on the sexism inherent in southern culture. Thus the connection between the “natural” relationships of husband/wife and man/woman became mirrored in the defense of slavery as the relationship between master/slave and vice-versa.
Slavery was an institution which historically defined the South in Early America. To be a slave meant a fragile existence with a life revolving around labor and being absolutely controlled by their owners.
Walter Johnson's argument about slaves being a commodity and able to be controlled by the threat of sale is extremely compelling. While life as a slave was difficult, they had ties to their homes and families just as any other person did. However unlike their white counterparts, they did not control their fate. Frequently owners were able to control their slaves simply by the threat of selling them "down south".
Seperation from their loved ones was not the only thing slaves had to fear when being sold. Working conditions could be very harsh in the deep south. Labor conditions in Louisiana swamps shortened life expectancies by a great deal. Sweltering heat and diseases made the threat of sale a powerful threat against any slave who might show rebelliousness.
Stephanie McCurry frames slavery in gender terms. Inequality was a way of life in the south. Masters ruled over their families and their slaves. Women were expected to be subservient and this paternalism worked its way into political idealogy. Paternalism was further reinforced by southern evangelicals as discussed with our Second Great Awakening readings and it reinforced slavery as an important part of southern culture.
Slaves in the early republic had very few prospects to look forward to in life. As slaves became old enough to work, they were expected to work as hard as possible every minute or they could expect physical and psychological abuse. Slaves were expected to work hard, if they were found to be laggard they would receive the lash and be “whipped up smartly” (p.218). Kidnap victim Solomon Northup recalled his life under slavery in 1853, “In fact, the lash is flying from morning until night, the whole day long”. Fear of being sold down South and being separated from their families was also another punishment slaveholders held over the heads of their property. This threat of sale was used to govern the slaves in the early republic. Such sales routinely and indiscriminately separated parents from children, husbands from wives, and broke families apart. Walter Johnson describes this separation that the domestic slave trade produced was a form of social death (p.232). Slaves being shipped to the Deep South like Louisiana, Alabama, and other places could expect isolation from anyone they used to know, hard labor, and a short life. Many slaves simply ran away. Patrollers, or those who checked slaves for permission to travel between plantations and farms, were ruthless with those they found to be trying to escape. Slaves did not have a desirable position in American society for much of the nineteenth-century, and the slaveholding members in the early republic did many things to defend and perpetuate the cycle of oppression and exploitation. Slaveholders, with the advent of the market revolution and recent improvements in technology, saw slaves as many things. First and foremost, slaves were a source of labor and a commodity which was as good as cash for their owners. The cotton gin, a ready supply of slaves in the Old South and some northern states, and recently de-populated lands to the west, drew many ambitious men and families to carve out a piece of America for themselves. Farmers in the early republic increasingly turned to cultivating cash crops such as cotton and sugar to sell on growing domestic and international markets. High prices of cotton and a ready supply of slaves in other parts of the country helped establish a domestic slave trade which was fueled by cultural, political, and mercantile interests of the South as well as the North.
In his essay Walter Johnson explains how the constant fear of harsh punishment and threat of sale kept the slaveholding society of the South very much entrenched and protected against its critics. Johnson explains the vilification and marginalization of the slave traders as just another mechanism to veil the institution of slavery. “By embodying the economy in people in the stigmatized figure of the trader, slaveholding commonplaces attempted to maintain an artificial and ideological separation of “slavery” from “the market” (p.233). Southern society and the economy present in the South during the nineteenth-century were overwhelmingly reliant on the institution of slavery. Those who bought, sold, and relied on the labor of slaves had a keen interest to see their unique institution survive and thrive. In her essay, Stephanie McCurry finds that republicanism in the early republic was used by Southern proslavery advocates to perpetuate and defend the institution of slavery. In the South she argues, “Proslavery republicanism had become the state religion” (p.237). Slaveholders here used Biblical, political, and social arguments to defend the institution. The institution of slavery in the South was so engrained in the daily lives of almost every member of Southern society that trying to exterminate it would have been near impossible. Politicians, largely the wealthiest and most prominent planters, had no inclination to see slavery slow down because in doing so their economic and political wellbeing would be severely damaged. McCurry attempts to explain how republicanism and slavery have become central to the understanding of the defense and rhetoric of proslavery advocates. Politicians were “acutely aware” of the social breadth of proslavery arguments. By distancing themselves from theories of egalitarianism and natural rights, proslavery advocates were able to “bind nonslaveholders and small slaveholders of planters within a common system of meanings and values” (p.238) Whereas McCurry uses republicanism to explain the roots for proslavery advocates and their rhetoric, Johnson uses the Chattel principle to explain the critical role the slave market played in the slave system as a whole. I find Walter Johnson’s view easier to adopt for a variety of reasons. Without an extensive and durable market for slaves, the institution of slavery would have not grown to such a huge economic force and some future problems could have potentially been avoided or reduced. An absence of such a market would have stopped cotton from becoming king in the South potentially and would have eased tensions between the northern and southern states. McCurry also put forward a convincing argument. Ideology, in this case republicanism juxtaposed on top of slavery, allowed slaveholders to justify their actions to themselves and their society. This is compelling because ideology is the root for many of a person’s decisions and the lens through which they view the world. An absence of an ideology would have created a different outcome possibly, but the institution of slavery was already a large part of society and the lives of Americans. The market for slavery, as Johnson explains it, is more convincing to me because it is the practice of slavery within the institution of slavery, rather than just the theory. By studying how this slave trade was plied and how Southern slaveholders defended themselves and their livelihoods, Johnson was able to tell the tragic story of slavery while at the same time explain the necessity of it to the Southern way of life and living.
Slavery in the early republic was dependent on the slaveholder and how they believed in treating their slaves. It ranged from very brutal to somewhat moral treatment. It really varied on whether the holders viewed their slaves as property or human beings with a soul. Slavery was consistent on the fact that the slaveholders had absolute and complete control over their slaves or property. They were worked very hard from the time they woke up from the time they woke up till nighttime depending on the type of work they were placed in. If they were cotton picking slaves they were overseen all the time and if they screwed up were liable to be beaten or whipped back into submission. Slavery in the upper south mostly consisted of working tobacco and grain farms. The Deep South had mostly rice and cotton, and in Louisiana there was sugar. The slave also had the constant fear of being sold linger over his or her head. Families would be destroyed by such sales, and this was used as a threat to slaves to get their obedience. Slave owners however wanted to protect their commodities if they were worth is so if the slaves were to act up they were beaten but not to harshly to the point were they were made unable to work. Johnson and McCurry differ in their annalists in multiple ways. Johnson focused on how slaves were treated and their lives. His main point of focus was a thing called the chattel principle. It was the way the slaves were made into slaves. The way their bodies were sculpted into slavery and how their growth was tracked with their personal value. They had to appear like they were valuable enough to sell in appearance. He talked about how the process by which children were made into slaves was horrible and very scaring. He also talk about the permanent disappearance of people through either trade or running away. Families were spilt up often with no warning and were never heard or seen from again and were virtually dead. Slave holders were apparently “honorable men” and considered to be fairly normal men. He also talked about how very few slaves’ rand a way for fear of what would happen to them if they were caught. But if they were desperate enough to escape brutal masters then they took the chance and left without hesitation. McCurry approached her segment through the description of pro slavery and gender in South Carolina. South Carolina slavery was different in many aspects. There were a vast number of wealthy slave owners due to the rich climate. Many men were established citizens in their towns. Racism in South Carolina was very prominent and socially very seen. There was also a very strong biblical defense of slavery that was the center of society in South Carolina. South Carolina was had very strong Republicanism values and that pro slavery was rooted in republicanism in this part of the south. I found them both convincing because I feel like the both touched on different issues and gave a very good overview of slavery in the south.
What surprised me most in this week's readings is how slavery was constantly presented not as a paternalism means of keeping slaves in their proper place but as a form of business, pure and simple. The slave narrative of Solomon Northup discusses how beatings were a constant reality, how there were differences between cruel and decent masters, and how "ninety-nine out of every hundred (slaves) are intelligent enough to understand their situation, and to cherish in their bosoms the love of freedom." (219) For slaves, the question of whether slavery was a capitalism system was irrelevant. Lizzie Williams, like Northup, ignores the business aspect of slavery because she knows nothing about it; all she can testify to is the strict control masters exercised over their slaves. The sources from white authors focus almost exclusively on the economic realities of slavery. Slaveowners like the Louisiana planter St. John Richardson Liddell and John Henry Hammond thought of slaves as a commodity that should be managed extremely well; Liddell told his son to "Never require of your Slaves too much" (212) and Hammond let him overseer know that "Much whipping indicates a bad tempered, or inattentive manager." (213) Source 4, a letter sent from an overseer to his absent master, confirms the impression of a system carefully designed to control and manage the daily labor of slaves, and Source 6 offers slaves for auction not as human beings, but as house servants, laborers, and nurses. The advertisement proudly declares "Also for Sale, at Eleven o' Clock, Fine Rice, Gram, Paddy, Books, Muslins, Needles, Pins, Ribbons &c. &c." (222) Slaveowners reduced human labor into another commodity, to be bought and sold in a single auction. The terrifying rebellion of Nat Turner (Source 8) and the quasi-Christian justification for slavery (Source 10) only disguised the daily reality of a cruel system of forced labor. Johnson and McCurry differ in their analysis of slavery in that Johnson condemns the institution of slavery in strong terms through the narrative of William Johnson (could the historian be a descendent?) and by demonstrating how slave-owners attempted to disassociate themselves from the actual business of slave trading, while McCurry attempts to connect the inequality of women with the inequality of slaves. Johnson's argument is much more convincing because he reinforces it with quotes from slaveowners denigrating the slavetraders and quotes from slaves discussing the horror of being sold "down the river." McCurry includes a few quotes to substantiate her argument, but her claim that proslavery ideologues "reminded white southerners of all classes that slavery could not be disentangled from other relations of power and privilege" (238)- namely, the right of a husband over his wife- goes in the face of evidence presented in Source 9 that there were genuine divides in Southern society, and that many white Southerners believed the evils slavery inflicted on poor white men could be separated from the patriarchal system within the household.
There is no one-way to describe how masters treated their slaves because each master treated them differently. Solomon Northup in document three describes this best, describing that some masters are more humane than others. The one thing that slaves did share in common was that they were only objects to the planter class and a means to an end: money. When James Henry Hammond of document two mentions slaves in the beginning of the instructions, he lists them with “land, mules, stock, fences, ditches, farming utensils” as objects that should be taken care of so they do not depreciate in value. Document two probably best describes the routines of a slave and why the slave masters set the system up like that. Almost everything is taken into account for, including an okay to marriage because it will keep the slaves content, when to feed the slaves what to keep them working, ect. Documents two and four show that the slave master did not want the slave to be treated poorly unless absolutely necessary as a punishment, though what can lead a punishment varied. I found it intriguing that the overseer from document four had spelling as bad if not worse than the slaves. This shows that all southerners of the time were not the planter stereotype that Hollywood drives into our skulls. One of the most shocking pieces was Nat Turner’s confession, going so far as to kill in order to achieve his freedom from their domination. Some slave owners wanted to treat the slaves well enough so they could produce to the best of their abilities, not really as a sign of compassion. Document ten gives slave owner’s reasons why slavery is okay, all of which basically can be boiled down to blacks not knowing what is best for themselves so we have to guide them to the light. These seem flimsy, as all the slave owners really cared about was a cheap labor source. Lizzie Wiliams from document five shows a spectrum of white treatment towards blacks. The oddest part about this one is that she claims to be more treated like a white woman than the other slaves, and even looks down on the others by calling them a racial slur. Historian Walter Johnson describes how slaves were only treated as objects that could be raised to do labor for the master or sold to make a profit. He emphasizes great fear of being sold and separated from those that he knew. Historian Stephanie McCurry, however, describes the alternative reasons for slavery and discusses the fact that slaves were not the only one oppressed at the time. I find Johnson’s argument more convincing, as it gives many examples of slaves’ stories. He’s view makes more sense to me in the beginning, as it was the preconception I had of slavery going into this class. However even with his examples, these are only a few slaves and slave owners during the period. You cannot assume every slave lived like the accounts described. As Solomon Northup stated, every slave owner is different.
Johnson’s The Chattel Principle explores the psychological bondage of slavery: the effect of knowing that one’s entire life could be uprooted at the whim of commerce. Johnson points out the devastating effect that the slave market could have on the individual and he presents the threat of sale as the most coercive mechanism of control that a slave owner possessed. The concept of Chattel examines the commoditization of human beings. These slaves were collateral and wealth no matter how far away from the market they were and slaves were one of the most portable and liquidable assets that Southern land owners possessed.
McCurry’s essay focuses on the Republican idealism, social caste system, and religious rhetoric that were used to justify and reinforce the institution. McCurry’s argument, that social order was the most central defense of slavery, is certainly well supported. And, her argument about Gender roles and the social implications that Slavery and Gender shared and were interconnected (deliberately as a means of indoctrination) is certainly a dynamic approach to the topic. But, her essay does much less to capture the experience, the social ideas, and the real impact of Slavery. Johnson’s article explains the situation from a perspective that satisfies more curiosity and aligns closer to our primary sources.
The primary sources completely express the true commoditization of human beings that occurred (so well that Johnson’s essay is superfluous and redundant to the most part). From the slave owner’s perspective Slaves were thought of as animals: valued highly, taken care of with great attention and careful design, disciplined and conditioned to produce reliable and useful results and generally disregarded as HUMAN BEINGS.
From the slave perspective there seems to have been no safe refuge. Family life was threatened by separation and there was no real society to speak of. Anyone can assume that slavery was stifling and unjust and that individuals suffered immensely most days of their lives, but it is hard to accept or to understand the fact that there was no hope and there was no sense of security.
The Justifications of slavery sound like preaching to the converted, reassuring the already enthusiastic supporters. Who could be convinced that slavery was morally acceptable or justified by any prescident? Who would accept that economy and “tradition” are more important than Human Rights? Enlightened people, who fought against the TYRANY of British Rule and whose economy was meant to free man from feudal limitations, could not possibly believe in the paternalism that people like Thomas Roderick Dew use to justify slavery. But, it is very interesting to see the arguments constructed…often they boil down to a complete lack of logic and evidence.
Slavery in the early republic was an institution of inexcusable and immeasurable pain for those caught in its web. Because the pain was not merely physical, but the mental and emotional effects of being owned, and that one’s children were to be owned and traded as a commodity was terribly cruel, and can not be aptly described by anyone who did not undergo this inhumane treatment. Slavery was an institution and culture largely defined by fear and control from both parties. Slaves feared the whip and control of the whole life of the master while non-slave culture was in constant fear of slave uprisings, causing them to clamp down even harder on their slaves. As Solomon Northup detailed, learning the heart of the enslaved population was the critical aspect of beginning to understand the far reaches of the suffering. Northup described the brutal process of making new slaves pick cotton as fast as possible on the first day of their arrival so that a large quota could be set for them. This quota wasn’t met “it is considered evidence that he has been laggard, and a greater or less number of lashes is the penalty. . .” Strong slaves were able to pick as much as fifty pounds of cotton per day because of the advent of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. It should be noted, however, that slavery was by no means a homogeneous creation across the landscape. As Seth Rockman wrote, slavery was often took urban form in places like early Baltimore. As one travelled further into the belly of the South, slavery took the more brutal and agrarian form that was primarily described in this week’s reading. It was quite interesting to read the writings of the two historians in succession, because they described different aspects of the institution. In his writing “The Chattel Principle,” Walter Johnson described the potential value of work that was, in his opinion, at the heart of slavery. This economic outlook related how much this principle could be molded and shaped to squeeze maximum value out of each slave. By reminding the slaves of this point, as well as utilizing the aforementioned “fear principle” of sale, Johnson dealt primarily with how each party manipulated situations for their advantage, such as slaves who ran away or slave holders who threatened to separate families. McCurry’s more broad view of slavery in terms of a social institution in the South provided a different perspective on slavery. McCurry detailed the culture battle that kept slavery in place, and the repetitive cycle of fear that ensued. By holding a clamp on slaves in their religious and social lives, masters were able to “conjoin all domestic relations of domination” to their slaves and even made a connection to other “natural” orders, such as the relationship of men and women. I did not necessarily prefer one article over the other, as they both simply examined slavery under different lenses. I thought they were both well articulated, describing not often considered aspects of slavery to their audiences.
The peculiar institution that had existed since the dawn of civilization had one of its last strongholds in a new country that was founded on equality. Slavery’s days were numbered and this was obvious from days of the American Revolution. How could such a practice exist in a country that had just seceded from tyranny? Many two hundred years ago thought the same thing. A delusional protective mentality surrounded prominent Southerners into a “positive good” attitude about the issue. That along with the fact that it was so extremely vital to the Southern way of life and economy forced the abolitionists of the North to pressure Southern society into defending the issue even harder. The documents in the reader provide fascinating firsthand accounts of slavery in the early republic. Documents 1 and 2 typify the way that slaves were viewed. J.H. Hammond’s (the infamous South Carolina planter) instructions to his overseer seem that the sociology behind slavery is not to provide food, shelter, and amenities to the slaves for their own pleasure but to encourage their good work and loyalty to the master, thereby bringing in more capital for Hammond so he can buy more land and more slaves. The system seemed only to be bound by geographical restrictions. The abolition movement in the South is evidenced by document 9 where the end of slavery is debated in the Virginia legislature. The argument here is not that it is demeaning to blacks but because it is “ruinous to the whites—retards improvement—roots out an industrious population---banishes the yeomanry of the country.” Then at the end of that same paragraph the author (Mr. Thomas Marshall I presume) makes a statement that seems very Jeffersonian in nature. “If cultivated by free labor, the soil of Virginia is capable of sustaining a dense population, among whom labour be honorable….” This could be a quote from any loyal Jeffersonian republican. Marshall’s statement coincides well with what McCurry talks about in her essay. As she explains about gender roles and how that paternalistic mindset shaped the proslavery movement it reminds me about what she calls proslavery republicanism. The same idea of republicanism that Jefferson and Thomas Marshall used to explain how the South is a yeoman’s paradise is used by many in the South (as explained by McCurry) is no longer the same republicanism that Jefferson envisioned. The yeoman farmers are obligated to their families the same way that slaveholders are obligated to their families and to the slaves. Everywhere in the South small yeomen made up the majority of the white population. Yet, only a generation removed from the Revolutionary movements of abolition, these yeomen are becoming more and more proslavery. That is because they see the system that they partake in with their families (men being at the head and the wife and children being obedient and sharing mandatory domestic responsibilities) is so similar to the way that the slave system works (masters being the head and the slaves being obedient and fulfilling their mandatory duties) that the white population becomes tied together in ways that are hard to comprehend. To back up my claim I cite McCurry’s last paragraph “proslavery ideologues and politicians attempted to endow slavery with the legitimacy of the family and especially marriage.”
Slavery in the early republic was to say the least a grueling enterprise, one that attacked not just the slave himself but the nuclear family unit thereof. The constant threat of rape, beatings, or of being sold in either the international or domestic slave trade would have produced a grating, will braking feeling of hopelessness. Completely dependant on their masters for subsistence, blacks in the Americas faced a life expectancy considerably shorter than their white counterparts. For Slaves, their was relatively little hope of ever bettering themselves or educating their children. Contrasting this, slave owners typically expected a life of relative ease; their ranking in the social hierarchy would be tied even to the number of slaves they held. The cotton boom along with the ever expanding Western frontier would allow white Southerners, not just the planter elite, the opportunity to make their fortune and cement a way of life, one stratified primarily by race- as to be black meant inclusion only into the lowest caste. Turning to the reading, Johnson presents a much more individualized look at slavery, taking more of a sociological approach, and studying the discourse between master and slave/slave familial relationships. McCurry focused on the big picture and Southern justification on a broad scale. I prefer McCurry’s point of view, because it delved into Southern hierarchy not just between black and white, but on how coerced labor effected the relationships between big and small planters, rich and poor populations. The civil war was fought by poor people protecting the rights of the rich, and McCurry’s article helps us to understand a seemingly backwards alliance between yeoman farmers and planter elites.
Life for slaves in the early republic was characterized by coercion, both physical and psychological. After all, these men and women were the “property” of their white owners, and these men could do as they pleased with their property. Daily life consisted of hard work, with grueling conditions and hours. The threat of the whip constantly was constantly breathing down their necks, as was the threat of sale. Salve families were constantly at the mercy of their master and his financial needs. Mothers were separated from their offspring and couples commonly were ripped from one another’s arms in order to make ends meet for their master. According to Walter Johnson, “Of the two thirds of a million slaves sold…twenty five percent involved the destruction of a first marriage and fifty percent destroyed a nuclear family.” The threat of physical punishment was often not as potent in the minds of slaves as the threat of sale.
ReplyDeleteLife for slave owners in the early republic was quite different as you can imagine from that of their slaves. Although most did not reach the status of “planter” (one who owns twenty or more slaves) even the most modest owners enjoyed economic comfort. According to Stephanie McCurry, “southern men established their independence and status as citizens in the public sphere through the command of dependents in their households.” Rank in the slave owner society was determined by the number of slaves one owned, illustrating the fact that not even these facet of society was exempt from a form of social hierarchy.
Johnson and McCurry differ in their analysis of slavery in the sense that Johnson examines the slaves themselves, while McCurry looks at South Carolina and the justification of slavery in the south. I think Johnson’s insight and his first hand accounts of slaves themselves offer the reader a fresh and more convincing look on slavery. He describes the way slave children are brought up to view their bodies through two scopes, that of their master and that of themselves. A slave’s physical attributes often determined his price, for example John Brown who recalled, “I would be strong and stout one day,” after the size of his feat were indicated to a slave owner. It was everyday trials such as these that slaves faced and often what was viewed as a great characteristic to whites, was a slaves greatest downfall, because it accelerated them to the trading block and away from their family. Johnson goes on to state that the entire economy of the antebellum South was constructed upon the idea that the bodies of the enslaved had a measurable monetary value, therefore enveloping themselves in the practice of slave trade.
McCurry on the other hand stresses the fact that proslavery republicanism had become the state religion of South Carolina. Proslavery ideologists such as John Adger explained that not all Christians (men and women) had the same rights, and therefore justifying the titles master and slave do not carry the same rights. They only have the specific rights that are attached to their role in society. McCurry has a good argument, however I think this issue has been expressed by others, unlike the fresh insight provided by Johnson.
Slavery in the early republic was very brutal, exhausting and terrifying work. In the 1780s-1790s thousands of slaves were manumitted due to the surplus of slaves for working relatively easy fields of tobacco and grain. At the turn of the nineteenth century and up to the Civil War slaves were constantly working in the cotton fields form sunrise to sunset creating profits for their masters as cotton emerged as the south’s most lucrative and valuable cash crop for both domestic and overseas markets. This progression of cotton being king in the south in effect due to the 1793 invention of the cotton gin that now allowed slaves to pick through 50 pounds of cotton a day, a huge explosion from the previous years of cotton production and picking. Often times masters would use violence to demonstrate their superiority over their human “property,” would sell away family members or loved ones if a slave had misbehaved or gone against the will of their master, and in many cases slaves were murdered by their masters. Slavery was an awfully inhumane institution but it was the chief labor of the south’s commercial wealth and without slavery who knows what shape and form the south would have taken in the early republic. The debate of the morality and justice of slavery in the early republic comes up time and time again as shown through documents 9 and 10, in 9 where the VA Legislature debates ending slavery or not and in 10 where Thomas Dew defends the institution of slavery in America. By this time, America had by far the most raw numbers of slaves in the world out of all countries and majority of these slaves worked on large plantations of wealthy high class southern elite.
ReplyDeleteHistorians Walter Johnson and Stephanie McCurry both bring up very interesting ideas and principles of how the institution of slavery shaped southern society and ideals. Johnson points out the chattel principle that slaves were economically moving property of who ever owned these human beings. Johnson writes, “Like a disease that attacks the body through its own immune system, slaveholders used the enslaved families and communities that usually insulated slaves from racism and brutality as an instrument of coercion, to discipline their slaves.” Here, Johnson expresses the extreme importance slave owners place on the institution of slavery not only as means of their economic lives but also socially and politically. Also Johnson points out how New Orleans was the extreme national hub for slave trade in America. McCurry in her essay she brings up the very interesting perspective that slavery, gender, and the political ideology of republicanism drastically influenced southern society in every aspect of life in the early republic. McCurry’s arguments are much more believable in my opinion as she writes, “Not only was the great majority of the population- slaves and women- propertyless and disenfranchised, and the political culture thereby defined principally in terms of whom it excluded; but the concentration of wealth in land and slaves was so advanced that it gave decisive shape to relations between yeoman and planters as well as masters and slaves.” This interaction between yeoman and planter, master and slave dominated the social connections and interactions of early republic south and McCurry points this out throughout her essay.
Slavery in the early republic was by no means completely consistent or the same for every slave or every slave owner. For a slave, depending on where you were and by whom you were own by determined what your experiences would be like. But for the most part, the one consistent fact that transcended all slavery was the fact that the master could do whatever he wanted to you whenever and however he liked. Therefore, the nature of the slaveowner greatly determined the slave’s experience. Slaves had strict schedules. The overseer for the master worked them hard. They had rules to follow. They had to be up at a certain time, had to do a certain amount of work by a certain amount of time, they had to obey the overseer or master totally, had to keep themselves relatively healthy and steer away from danger. If a slave violated any of these rules he or she would most likely face physical punishment. However, an overseer was not to whip or beat too harshly, for it would degrade the value of the owner’s “property.” For some slaves, one he or she got sick he or she was able to take some time off. Pregnant slaves had limited schedules when closer to birth giving. Older slaves were given tasks suited to their physical abilities. Slaves in the upper south mostly worked tobacco and grain farms, in the deep south mostly rice and cotton, and in lousianna also sugar. The slave also had the constant fear of being sold linger over his or her head. Families would be destroyed by such sales, and this was used as a threat to slaves to get their obedience.
ReplyDeleteSlaveowners also had unique experiences. Most slave owners were small time with one or two slaves. These people were small farmers or professionals. However, most slaves were owned by planters (defined by owning 20 or more slaves). Slaveowners who used their slaves for business profit (the planters) had to protect their investment. Without their slaves they did not have the ability to produce as much of whatever crop they sold for profit. This meant a consciousness over the healthy and status of their slaves. They also had to make sure that their slaves were obedient. Some owners professed the nature of “paternalism,” that they were father figures for their slaves, since blacks were of an inferior race. Therefore, masters were protectors and provides for their inferior slaves. Smaller slave owners would use their slaves for subsistence and maybe a little bit of crop for profit. Slave owners used their slaves differently depending on where they lived: upper south vs. lower south, country vs. city, etc.
Johnson and McCurry seem to interpret antebellum slavery in the early republic in different ways. Johnson evaluates slavery purely in the context of the men who bought and sold the slaves. He also evaluates the slaves lives as fearing sale, and the tactics they would use (including running away) to be sold away. He argues that slaves actually had a degree, even though small, of say over the nature of their contracts. McCurry provides a more comprehensive analysis of slavery, and frames the who system within the greater context of southern men’s construction of power. Men maintained power over women, children and slaves. Slavery was consistent with other measures and means for those white men to assert and maintain their power. She says that peoples’ roles determined the amount of freedom that they had, but ultimately it was all a matter of degree of freedom. Slaves were at the bottom of a totem pole, but women and children were on the same totem pole, even if they were higher up. I think I tend to agree with McCurry’s analysis. No doubt slavery was a product of power dynamics and hierarchies. Men in the South asserted their power over slaves, and they asserted their power over any and every other thing they could. Therefore, slavery seems to fall into the same vein of the greater phenomenon of demonstration of white men’s power and authority over everything that was less than them.
This week’s reading completely reinforced the knowledge I have gained from my Antebellum South Class I am taking this semester. The primary sources give a good description of the terror slaves went through daily. James Henry Hammond is one basterd of man, not only was he a pedophile but he, along with most southern planters (owning at least 20 or more slaves) lived in a bubble and had every justification ever thought of for slavery. He is most famous with his “Cotton is King” speech, where he asked America, mainly directed towards abolitionist in the north, “What would England do if we did not tend or export cotton for three days?” He proclaimed that they would falter and the commerce of most of the world would follow. He explained how if the south did not have slaves; there would be no economy for America. Since “Cotton is King” than the justification of slavery in planter’s minds was legitimate. James Henry Hammond instruct his overseer to man the plantation as if was a well made machine and the only way to do that was to have complete control over your slaves and prove superiority. He strategized each scenario for the slaves and established ground rule for the slaves and they were expected to know what to do at all time during each given situation. One scenario I felt totally summed up James Hammond’s compassion for slavery was the sickness rule, where no sick slave could remain at his OWN house because of the fear he or she would infect more slaves. Lizzie Williams gives a great description of what slave life was actually like. There were many attempts to end slavery and Virginia was no different. Virginia becomes a middle state really during the revolutionary war. They were dependent on slavery because of the enormous amounts of tobacco being exported however that faltered and their dependence on slavery grew weaker. Cotton was not a major crop in Virginia and they didn’t need slaves like the south. Of course there is always a counter argument and Thomas Roderick Dew defends slavery in 1832. Their again another southerner brings in Christianity to defend slavery. He knows that slavery is religiously wrong but it is crazy how they alter their beliefs to make it justifiable. Historian Walter Johnson provides a great of how slave owners used the slave’s families as as leverage to make the slaves do work. With the Louisiana Purchase and the spread of cotton, New Orleans established itself as the hub for slave trade, even though the international slave trade was banned in 1808, this did not stop the massive spread and growth of slavery. The female historian, Stephanie McCurry talks about the social implications that followed the southern states and in particular South Carolina. I thought it was interesting how McCurry brings up marriage as a metaphor for slavery, “No other relation was more universally embraced as both natural and divine” (pg.238) I tend to agree with McCurry’s idea of slavery because it was such a natural relationship in the south.
ReplyDeleteSlavery obviously is first and foremost a system for the subjugation of other humans beings. This distasteful reality of the antebellum South was given a unique character by the influence of the domestic market on slaves and slave masters. The purpose of subjugating and purchasing slaves back then was to compel labor from them , so it is hardly surprising that physical violence was an acceptable tactic through which to do this. Slaves apparently labored in fear of whippings and punishment for not meeting work quotas or for being perceived as not laboring their hardest. They were more than forced labor to masters, however, as the domestic slave market brought home the reality that they were commodities that could be assigned a value and traded as such. Accompanying their fear of physical punishment was the more insidious and subtle threat of selling off a slave or their family members, a tactic testified to in several of the readings as the by far the most coercive and effective action available to masters to control their slaves. Clearly the constant threat of being beaten, separated from your family or sold to a harsher life down South made for a life of suffering for slaves.
ReplyDeleteSlaveowners largely were divorced from their slaves in any personal sense it seems, viewing them as profits and investments. They left the more uncomfortable aspects of trading and selling their slaves to slave traders, whom owners summarily blamed for the separations inflicted on slave families, though of greater concern to owners were the supposedly deceptive methods of selling sick and unruly slaves to unsuspecting owners at a higher price than would otherwise be justified. While slaves worried about what their masters would do to them, owners worried about what they could get from their slaves through their forced labor and sale on the open market or as collateral in any number of transactions.
Johnson interprets slavery in the South as being heavily influenced by the market, from the threats issued to slaves to the interests of the master. Interestingly, he also offers an explanation for why masters and slaves couched these transactions in different terms, as slaves supposedly resisted through striking at the precepts of paternalism owners allegedly held dear while owners bemoaned the deceitful slave trader in attempt to paper over their own role in causing such suffering amongst their slaves. For him the market played a dominant role in how slavery proceeded in the South, as decisions made by masters always took into account some influence the market exerted over their slave’s values.
McMurry takes a much more comprehensive view of slavery in the South, couching it in among the overall understanding of power relations in the South that put white men on top and everyone else in their own subordinate roles. No doubt class relations were crucial to how this society functioned, and defining “class” is crucial to understanding how these relations worked. McMurry argues that by espousing that the subordination of women and slaves to white and men helped bridge the gap yawning inequality between the yeoman and planter, uniting them in support of a relational system in which slaves and women were largely disenfranchised. White men’s control was key for her.
As Johnson writes, slaves lived and worked by the “chattel” principle that rooted itself in the intrinsic value of a human being’s potential for work and the manipulation of that potential. While there is really no way to describe the “typical” slave experience, the primary documents provide several different facets of slave life. First, Hammond’s instructions to his overseer illustrate that slaves were often not trusted by their masters; even though Hammond’s slaves were given a weekly allowance, the master’s reason for doing so was to ensure that they did not waste their money, causing them to steal. Hammond warned his overseer to keep an extraordinarily close eye on his slaves, even forbidding them from going outside after dark or socializing with slaves from other plantations. Solomon Northup’s recollection of life as a slave is especially telling, as he says that “the lash is flying from morning until night, the whole day long;” this statement is an interesting contrast to Hammond’s instructions to his overseer that punishment should be “calm” and “deliberate” and never excessive. Northup’s testimony also reaffirms the chattel principle – that a slave’s identity and purpose was rooted in his or her potential to work. Northup writes that on a slave’s first day, he or she is whipped first and then forced to pick cotton as fast as he or she possibly can; at the end of the day, the amount he or she picked is weighed, and if the slave does not meet that threshold in the ensuing days then he or she will be punished accordingly. According to Northup’s experience, slaves were well aware of this concept, contrary to what many slave owners believed. While the primary documents do not detail the everyday lives of slaveholders, once can infer their complacency toward slavery and their separation from reality. Because slaveholders were often far removed from the brutal realities of slavery, they could make statements such as that slaves were “blessed with a measure of happiness” equal to or greater than that of a European free laborer, saying that slaves’ conditions “weren’t so bad.” In the last primary document, Dew even compares slave owners to their biblical and historic counterparts who also possessed slaves, even going so far as to say that slaves were their masters’ “warmest and most devoted friends.” Thus, while slaves were constantly reminded of their value as an agent of work, slave owners were deluded into thinking that their role as master was justified and even natural. Johnson’s article deals almost exclusively with this idea of value in terms of potential labor and the ways in which masters held a slave’s value over his or her head. He writes that slaves were bred for their labor and were constantly reminded of it. However, he also writes that a slave’s life was centered around the possibility of being “sold south,” but his argument essentially stops there. McCurry goes a bit deeper and places slavery in a larger social context. Particularly, many would attempt to justify slavery through religion, citing the fact that the verbiage associated with masters and slaves was often the same as was given to husbands and wives, respectively. Furthermore, many argued that universal equality was a nice idea on paper, but in practice it was not feasible to assume that everyone possesses equal rights but that each individual possesses equal rights of their station. For instance, William Harper argues that women may be just as rational as men are, but because they are of a different societal “order” than men, they are not expected to possess the same rights; thus, using his logic, slaves overall deserved the treatment they received. Because McCurry’s argument is broader and more comprehensive than Johnson’s is, her argument carries more weight and provides a more complex understanding of slavery as a mechanism of southern society.
ReplyDeleteSlaves in the early republic faced a variety of different levels of slavery and oppression. On average, they were treated as subordinate to just about every other group in society. They constantly lived in fear of being sold away from their friends, family, and life. To be a slave in the early republic meant to be the subordinate of every other group in society, and to have no true sense of personal security.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, slave owners were fully supported by many facets of society. The paternalistic culture of the South supported the elevation of the station of the ranking male in a household. This further obscured the idea of slavery as a charity to the slaves. Masked in charity, these same men were fully supported by corrupt theology in multiple southern colleges. Since the Bible outlined acceptance of authority within God's plan, it was widely accepted that the Bible and slavery coincided--in the South, that is. Going even further, the states supported the institution of slavery [even in some state constitutions]. These facets gave incentives to own and keep slaves as laborers in Southern society. With slaves being the equivalent of oil prices today, it was a financially intelligent investment. Essentially, it was economic utopia for slave owners.Johnson's analysis in "The Chattel Principle," largely focuses on how Southern culture hid slavery's brutal effects by alienating it's victims and most prominent maintainers of the institution [slave traders]. He introduces the common greatest fear of slaves: being sold. By explaining how many people would refer to traders as "Southern Yankee" or "Negro Jockey" in order to marginalize them, Johnson sets up the common slave trader as someone falsely set aside from society. Overall, Johnson's analysis is surrounding slavery as an effect of a form of capitalism. Contrasting greatly from this, McCurry maintains the notion that the source is more cultural. By comparing the paternalistic yeoman republican philosophy to the lifestyle of the slave owner, the two are very similar. Personally, I find Johnson's argument much more convincing. It gives much more insight on the slave trade as an effect in a cause-and-effect relationship. The cause being uncontrolled capitalism. Whereas, McCurry suggests the cause is the culture itself that causes slavery, yet her argument is still blurry when brought to a more specific comparison with Southern slave owning individuals.
A slave’s life in the early republic was surrounded by fear and violence. I couldn’t imagine getting married and waking up every day having to remind myself not to mess up or make the master mad because if I did the master might sell me or my wife as punishment. The bond between husband and wife is strong but the bond between mother and child is strongest bond in the world. Mothers that were also slaves during the Early Republic must have been the least free group of people in the history of the world. The fear of being separated from their children by sale directed their actions every second of every day. Mothers would be easily coerced into performing any duty that would keep their children close by. I wonder if some mothers were forced to extinguish the natural bond between mother and child to protect themselves from the pain of separation. If a mother rejected that natural bond mother and child then they would not have to fear their children being sold as punishment. Slaves that were mothers would have probably wished to not be mothers under the rule of a ruthless master because they would only have to worry about physical punishment and not the torment of watching their children being taken away. The pain resulting from a lashing may have lasted a few days but the pain of losing a child would last forever. Through the punishment of sale and breaking the bonds of friendship, family, and marriage I wonder if some slaves were forced into isolating themselves from these bonds by rejecting one of the greatest human compassions know as love.
ReplyDeleteFor slave holders during the Early Republic life was a constant balancing act. Slave holders had to develop a complex system of ruling their slaves so that they could extract the most profit from them property without damaging them. Slave holders had to figure out exactly how much food should be given to slaves to keep them healthy so that too much money would not be spent. Slave holders had to plan out every aspect of their slaves’ lives in such a way that they would maximize profits and keep slaves happy enough to keep them from revolting. I personally do not understand the benefits of slavery and I think that the emergence of capitalism and industry would have ended slavery. From a business standpoint I do not understand why would someone want to have to upkeep their workers, fear being killed in a revolt, or come up with the complex systems of labor division. The daily wages paid in a free labor system could not be as much as providing a slave with food, shelter, medical care, clothes, etc. Especially with the invention of time saving devices like the cotton gin, it would have to be easier to hire daily workers instead of having to spend all the money to keep up slaves. Slavery probably would have ended much sooner in the south if immigrants would have not stayed in the north. If immigrants would have flooded the south, the labor pool would have increased dramatically and it would have been cheaper for a slave holder to pay a starving immigrant that did not care about what job they were performing as long as they were getting the money to sustain themselves and their families. The free labor system would be much more beneficial to a person looking to maximize profits because the employer would not have to worry about the well being of their employees because the employer could just fire a person and replace them.
Slavery in the Early Republic was a life filled with oppression. This oppression came in many different forms, and planters and slaveholders used this mental and physical oppression to try to control their slaves. The daily life of a slave was made up of backbreaking work, and daily threat of punishment if his or her work was not considered fast enough as seen in document 3. Along with backbreaking work slaves also faced the likelihood that their master would use the threat of sale to keep his slaves in line. As William Johnson states, “Master used to say if we didn’t suit him he would put us in his pocket quick – meaning he would sell us.” This is an example of the psychological oppression employed by masters to make sure that their slaves maintained discipline. It is hard to characterize slave life in the Early Republic with just one story because it varied quite distinctly, but it would be safe to assume that slaves were at the whims of their masters.
ReplyDeleteSlavery in the Early Republic was quite different for the slave-owners. Slavery to many planters was about making a lot of money, and they wanted to protect their investment in their slaves. This is evident in document 1 when the writer states, “Never require of your slaves too much—treat them with kindness, chastise them well for disobedience and refractory conduct—keep a clear conscience on these matters.” Slave-owners were also concerned with the number of slaves they owned because it represented a status symbol, and the more slaves you owned the higher you were in society.
Johnson and McCurry seem to interpret slavery in different ways. Johnson seems to analyze slavery through the slave market and the buying and selling of slaves. While McCurry examines slavery through the lens of the slaveholders and his standing within southern society. Her analysis is much more convincing because it outlines the complex relationships involved within slavery. Johnson seems to just focus on the slave markets and his argument is much less convincing because he focuses on one aspect of the complex slave society within the South. Johnson states that, “Nearly all of them (sales) involved the dissolution of previously existing community. And those are only the interstate sales.” Johnson’s argument is not convincing because he just focuses on slave trade, and he refuses to see the bigger picture in his argument. McCurry’ argument is much more convincing because she examines the complex relationships involved within the slave system. She examines how slavery helped the slaveholder describe his manliness. She states, “For southern men like other republicans, established their independence and status as citizens in the public sphere through the command of dependents in their household.” McCurry also addresses the relationship between the planter and the smaller farmer and supports your point from lecture that these middling farmers sought to become planters because owning a lot of slaves provided a southern man with a sense of worth. Slavery in the early republic was a peculiar institution indeed.
Slavery in the early republic was a constant struggle between those in control and those being controlled. This system of labor and social stratification affected everyone involved—slaveholders and, of course, the slaves themselves—differently, and the South’s “peculiar institution” seemed to vary from household to household. Large slaveholders like James Henry Hammond attempted to control nearly every aspect of his slaves’ lives to demonstrate his dominating power on his plantation. Hammond meticulously developed and enforced (with the help of overseers) rules and regulations regarding the work schedule of the old and sickly, standard work hours, marriage, church, visiting, and rewards and punishments. These regulations were meant to isolate Hammond’s slaves from any sense of community outside of the plantation; Hammond, who, like other slaveholders, lived in almost constant fear of slave rebellions and unrest, did not want anything to distract his slaves from their daily work or from his supreme authority. From the slave’s perspective, Hammond’s strict leadership and list of rules forced them to create strong black communities on the plantation which they could depend on for support. Solomon Northup, a former slave, described his life under slavery and attacked Southerners’ argument that slaves were generally content being bound to their master: “Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not […] discourse flippanly from arm chairs of the pleasures of slave life, but let them toil with him in the field—sleep with him in the cabin—feed him on husks; let them behold him scourged, hunted, trampled on, and they will come back with another story in their mouths” (Wilentz 219). Northup’s account discredits the idea that slaves in their downtrodden state of existence were too ignorant or confined to the system of slavery to understand freedom, much less want it.
ReplyDeleteWalter Johnson and Stephanie McCurry have both examined the effects of American slavery from two varying view points. Walter Johnson has looked at the issue of slavery in the early republic and shaped his focus of study around the slave trade and the subsequent effects that separating slave families had on those involved. Slaveholders, he argues, did not see slaves as people with familial relationships, however. Rather, they viewed them as commodities who were incapable of real emotions and opinions: “Everyday all over the antebellum South, slaveholders’ relations to one another—their promises, obligations, and settlements—were backed by the idea of a market in slaves, the idea that people had a value that could be abstracted from their bodies and cashed in when the occasion arose” (Wilentz 234). This perspective allowed slaveholders and traders to distance themselves from the slave trade which continued to flourish in the South as the need for slave labor persisted. Stephanie McCurry takes a different and more convincing approach to slavery than Johnson, and instead of focusing on a single relationship (Johnson’s analysis of the relationship between slaveholder and slave), she looks at the ideology of the Old South as a whole and explains why even non-slaveholders supported the institution of slavery. “They [the aristocracy] repeatedly reminded white southerners of all classes that slavery could not be disentangled from other relations of power and privilege and that it represented simply the most extreme and absolute form of the legal and customary dependencies that characterized the Old South—and their own households” (Wilentz 238). The underlying issue at work here was racism, and slavery was a tool that kept all whites, even the poor, above the status of a slave. It empowered white men, in particular, and became a part of the natural social stratification of the time. As McCurry argues, slavery was embedded in Southern ideology.
The overwhelming discrepancy between the experiences of slaveholders and slaves themselves plays out quite vividly throughout chapter eight. For instance, both selections three and five each give first person accounts of the horrible physical and psychological torments that slaves were forced to endure during plantation life. Solomon Northup’s account stands out for not only its contrast with what Thomas Roderick Dew writes later, but also for the acute sense of hopelessness from degradation that plays out in the slave experience. The first two sources give a great sense of just how fixed slaveholders were to the system. The first source relates the advice and pride that a slaveholding father conveys to his son upon the latter assuming control of the family estate. It would be inconceivable for the father to not imagine the estate not including slaves. Source two is a very well known source, written by a very well known man. John Henry Hammond, former Senator from South Carolina, is famous to this day for the massive estate he controlled and foremost for his “cotton is king” speech. The long list of instructions given here by him to his overseer display to what extent planters sought to control life on the plantation. One wonders what Hammond would have thought had he realized that his slaves had dug a tunnel underneath his house to access his wine seller, what better way to illustrate the hypocrisy of southern planters than to compare the “wine tunnel” against Hammond’s controlling quest?
ReplyDeleteBoth sources four and six further drive home the utter brutality of slavery in the Old South. Overseer George Skipwith considers the slave “Robert” to be a rascal for daring to assert his will for liberty even in the face of the lash. However, as Walter Johnson asserts later in his article at the end of the chapter, it was the slave trade, not the whip that was perhaps the greatest weapon the master/overseer possessed over their slaves as source six illustrates. The trap of southern slavery and racism did not end once a person of color was manumitted. Source seven presents the struggle of freed slaves to procure public education in Virginia, the introduction to the chapter mentions that to no surprise the struggle was unsuccessful. Source eight presents the reader with the rare occasion to feel good about what they are reading in this chapter; the transcript of Nat Turner initiating his “rebellion” by slaughtering the people who were the agents of his oppression. Unfortunately, Turner relied quite heavily on religious “signs” and verbiage. Because of Turner’s assertion that the cause of his rebellion rested on fervent religiosity, it made it all the more easy for proslavery writers to dismiss his rebellion as a result of religious madness as Thomas Roderick Dew does in source ten. Source nine presents a surprising revelation that the abolition of slavery was seriously debated in at least one of the soon-to-be succeeded states. What is clear from the debates in the Virginia legislature, however, is that this debate was overwhelmingly geographically based and did not center on the immorality of slavery as an institution. Beyond any doubt, source ten is the most stunning piece of source material in this collection. Although I have read some of the works of proslavery southern “intellectuals” such as James Henley Thornwell, Thomas Roderick Dew makes some of the most outlandish claims. How anyone could actually believe that most, or even a substantial minority, of slaves had deep affection towards their masters is truly beyond the realm of logic based reality. Dew’s assertions only speak to the obtuseness and desperation of southern thinkers to legitimize slavery and fend off any attacks upon it.
In Walter Johnson’s essay “The Chattel Principle” he makes a convincing argument that a central component of the control/punishment of slaves on behalf of masters was undoubtedly the slave’s fear of being sold and the master’s ability to sell. Johnson’s argument is extremely convincing, after all what deeper connection does one feel in their life than to their family? The fear of being taken away from one’s family explains a great deal about master/slave relations in the antebellum south. Stephanie McCurry argues that the connection between the uses of Scottish natural philosophy on behalf of southern proslavery intellectuals such as Thornwell laid heavily on the sexism inherent in southern culture. Thus the connection between the “natural” relationships of husband/wife and man/woman became mirrored in the defense of slavery as the relationship between master/slave and vice-versa.
ReplyDeleteSlavery was an institution which historically defined the South in Early America. To be a slave meant a fragile existence with a life revolving around labor and being absolutely controlled by their owners.
ReplyDeleteWalter Johnson's argument about slaves being a commodity and able to be controlled by the threat of sale is extremely compelling. While life as a slave was difficult, they had ties to their homes and families just as any other person did. However unlike their white counterparts, they did not control their fate. Frequently owners were able to control their slaves simply by the threat of selling them "down south".
Seperation from their loved ones was not the only thing slaves had to fear when being sold. Working conditions could be very harsh in the deep south. Labor conditions in Louisiana swamps shortened life expectancies by a great deal. Sweltering heat and diseases made the threat of sale a powerful threat against any slave who might show rebelliousness.
Stephanie McCurry frames slavery in gender terms. Inequality was a way of life in the south. Masters ruled over their families and their slaves. Women were expected to be subservient and this paternalism worked its way into political idealogy. Paternalism was further reinforced by southern evangelicals as discussed with our Second Great Awakening readings and it reinforced slavery as an important part of southern culture.
Slaves in the early republic had very few prospects to look forward to in life. As slaves became old enough to work, they were expected to work as hard as possible every minute or they could expect physical and psychological abuse. Slaves were expected to work hard, if they were found to be laggard they would receive the lash and be “whipped up smartly” (p.218). Kidnap victim Solomon Northup recalled his life under slavery in 1853, “In fact, the lash is flying from morning until night, the whole day long”. Fear of being sold down South and being separated from their families was also another punishment slaveholders held over the heads of their property. This threat of sale was used to govern the slaves in the early republic. Such sales routinely and indiscriminately separated parents from children, husbands from wives, and broke families apart. Walter Johnson describes this separation that the domestic slave trade produced was a form of social death (p.232). Slaves being shipped to the Deep South like Louisiana, Alabama, and other places could expect isolation from anyone they used to know, hard labor, and a short life. Many slaves simply ran away. Patrollers, or those who checked slaves for permission to travel between plantations and farms, were ruthless with those they found to be trying to escape. Slaves did not have a desirable position in American society for much of the nineteenth-century, and the slaveholding members in the early republic did many things to defend and perpetuate the cycle of oppression and exploitation.
ReplyDeleteSlaveholders, with the advent of the market revolution and recent improvements in technology, saw slaves as many things. First and foremost, slaves were a source of labor and a commodity which was as good as cash for their owners. The cotton gin, a ready supply of slaves in the Old South and some northern states, and recently de-populated lands to the west, drew many ambitious men and families to carve out a piece of America for themselves. Farmers in the early republic increasingly turned to cultivating cash crops such as cotton and sugar to sell on growing domestic and international markets. High prices of cotton and a ready supply of slaves in other parts of the country helped establish a domestic slave trade which was fueled by cultural, political, and mercantile interests of the South as well as the North.
In his essay Walter Johnson explains how the constant fear of harsh punishment and threat of sale kept the slaveholding society of the South very much entrenched and protected against its critics. Johnson explains the vilification and marginalization of the slave traders as just another mechanism to veil the institution of slavery. “By embodying the economy in people in the stigmatized figure of the trader, slaveholding commonplaces attempted to maintain an artificial and ideological separation of “slavery” from “the market” (p.233). Southern society and the economy present in the South during the nineteenth-century were overwhelmingly reliant on the institution of slavery. Those who bought, sold, and relied on the labor of slaves had a keen interest to see their unique institution survive and thrive.
ReplyDeleteIn her essay, Stephanie McCurry finds that republicanism in the early republic was used by Southern proslavery advocates to perpetuate and defend the institution of slavery. In the South she argues, “Proslavery republicanism had become the state religion” (p.237). Slaveholders here used Biblical, political, and social arguments to defend the institution. The institution of slavery in the South was so engrained in the daily lives of almost every member of Southern society that trying to exterminate it would have been near impossible. Politicians, largely the wealthiest and most prominent planters, had no inclination to see slavery slow down because in doing so their economic and political wellbeing would be severely damaged. McCurry attempts to explain how republicanism and slavery have become central to the understanding of the defense and rhetoric of proslavery advocates. Politicians were “acutely aware” of the social breadth of proslavery arguments. By distancing themselves from theories of egalitarianism and natural rights, proslavery advocates were able to “bind nonslaveholders and small slaveholders of planters within a common system of meanings and values” (p.238)
Whereas McCurry uses republicanism to explain the roots for proslavery advocates and their rhetoric, Johnson uses the Chattel principle to explain the critical role the slave market played in the slave system as a whole. I find Walter Johnson’s view easier to adopt for a variety of reasons. Without an extensive and durable market for slaves, the institution of slavery would have not grown to such a huge economic force and some future problems could have potentially been avoided or reduced. An absence of such a market would have stopped cotton from becoming king in the South potentially and would have eased tensions between the northern and southern states. McCurry also put forward a convincing argument. Ideology, in this case republicanism juxtaposed on top of slavery, allowed slaveholders to justify their actions to themselves and their society. This is compelling because ideology is the root for many of a person’s decisions and the lens through which they view the world. An absence of an ideology would have created a different outcome possibly, but the institution of slavery was already a large part of society and the lives of Americans. The market for slavery, as Johnson explains it, is more convincing to me because it is the practice of slavery within the institution of slavery, rather than just the theory. By studying how this slave trade was plied and how Southern slaveholders defended themselves and their livelihoods, Johnson was able to tell the tragic story of slavery while at the same time explain the necessity of it to the Southern way of life and living.
Slavery in the early republic was dependent on the slaveholder and how they believed in treating their slaves. It ranged from very brutal to somewhat moral treatment. It really varied on whether the holders viewed their slaves as property or human beings with a soul. Slavery was consistent on the fact that the slaveholders had absolute and complete control over their slaves or property. They were worked very hard from the time they woke up from the time they woke up till nighttime depending on the type of work they were placed in. If they were cotton picking slaves they were overseen all the time and if they screwed up were liable to be beaten or whipped back into submission. Slavery in the upper south mostly consisted of working tobacco and grain farms. The Deep South had mostly rice and cotton, and in Louisiana there was sugar. The slave also had the constant fear of being sold linger over his or her head. Families would be destroyed by such sales, and this was used as a threat to slaves to get their obedience. Slave owners however wanted to protect their commodities if they were worth is so if the slaves were to act up they were beaten but not to harshly to the point were they were made unable to work. Johnson and McCurry differ in their annalists in multiple ways. Johnson focused on how slaves were treated and their lives. His main point of focus was a thing called the chattel principle. It was the way the slaves were made into slaves. The way their bodies were sculpted into slavery and how their growth was tracked with their personal value. They had to appear like they were valuable enough to sell in appearance. He talked about how the process by which children were made into slaves was horrible and very scaring. He also talk about the permanent disappearance of people through either trade or running away. Families were spilt up often with no warning and were never heard or seen from again and were virtually dead. Slave holders were apparently “honorable men” and considered to be fairly normal men. He also talked about how very few slaves’ rand a way for fear of what would happen to them if they were caught. But if they were desperate enough to escape brutal masters then they took the chance and left without hesitation. McCurry approached her segment through the description of pro slavery and gender in South Carolina. South Carolina slavery was different in many aspects. There were a vast number of wealthy slave owners due to the rich climate. Many men were established citizens in their towns. Racism in South Carolina was very prominent and socially very seen. There was also a very strong biblical defense of slavery that was the center of society in South Carolina. South Carolina was had very strong Republicanism values and that pro slavery was rooted in republicanism in this part of the south. I found them both convincing because I feel like the both touched on different issues and gave a very good overview of slavery in the south.
ReplyDeleteWhat surprised me most in this week's readings is how slavery was constantly presented not as a paternalism means of keeping slaves in their proper place but as a form of business, pure and simple. The slave narrative of Solomon Northup discusses how beatings were a constant reality, how there were differences between cruel and decent masters, and how "ninety-nine out of every hundred (slaves) are intelligent enough to understand their situation, and to cherish in their bosoms the love of freedom." (219) For slaves, the question of whether slavery was a capitalism system was irrelevant. Lizzie Williams, like Northup, ignores the business aspect of slavery because she knows nothing about it; all she can testify to is the strict control masters exercised over their slaves. The sources from white authors focus almost exclusively on the economic realities of slavery. Slaveowners like the Louisiana planter St. John Richardson Liddell and John Henry Hammond thought of slaves as a commodity that should be managed extremely well; Liddell told his son to "Never require of your Slaves too much" (212) and Hammond let him overseer know that "Much whipping indicates a bad tempered, or inattentive manager." (213) Source 4, a letter sent from an overseer to his absent master, confirms the impression of a system carefully designed to control and manage the daily labor of slaves, and Source 6 offers slaves for auction not as human beings, but as house servants, laborers, and nurses. The advertisement proudly declares "Also for Sale, at Eleven o' Clock, Fine Rice, Gram, Paddy, Books, Muslins, Needles, Pins, Ribbons &c. &c." (222) Slaveowners reduced human labor into another commodity, to be bought and sold in a single auction. The terrifying rebellion of Nat Turner (Source 8) and the quasi-Christian justification for slavery (Source 10) only disguised the daily reality of a cruel system of forced labor.
ReplyDeleteJohnson and McCurry differ in their analysis of slavery in that Johnson condemns the institution of slavery in strong terms through the narrative of William Johnson (could the historian be a descendent?) and by demonstrating how slave-owners attempted to disassociate themselves from the actual business of slave trading, while McCurry attempts to connect the inequality of women with the inequality of slaves. Johnson's argument is much more convincing because he reinforces it with quotes from slaveowners denigrating the slavetraders and quotes from slaves discussing the horror of being sold "down the river." McCurry includes a few quotes to substantiate her argument, but her claim that proslavery ideologues "reminded white southerners of all classes that slavery could not be disentangled from other relations of power and privilege" (238)- namely, the right of a husband over his wife- goes in the face of evidence presented in Source 9 that there were genuine divides in Southern society, and that many white Southerners believed the evils slavery inflicted on poor white men could be separated from the patriarchal system within the household.
There is no one-way to describe how masters treated their slaves because each master treated them differently. Solomon Northup in document three describes this best, describing that some masters are more humane than others. The one thing that slaves did share in common was that they were only objects to the planter class and a means to an end: money. When James Henry Hammond of document two mentions slaves in the beginning of the instructions, he lists them with “land, mules, stock, fences, ditches, farming utensils” as objects that should be taken care of so they do not depreciate in value. Document two probably best describes the routines of a slave and why the slave masters set the system up like that. Almost everything is taken into account for, including an okay to marriage because it will keep the slaves content, when to feed the slaves what to keep them working, ect. Documents two and four show that the slave master did not want the slave to be treated poorly unless absolutely necessary as a punishment, though what can lead a punishment varied. I found it intriguing that the overseer from document four had spelling as bad if not worse than the slaves. This shows that all southerners of the time were not the planter stereotype that Hollywood drives into our skulls. One of the most shocking pieces was Nat Turner’s confession, going so far as to kill in order to achieve his freedom from their domination. Some slave owners wanted to treat the slaves well enough so they could produce to the best of their abilities, not really as a sign of compassion. Document ten gives slave owner’s reasons why slavery is okay, all of which basically can be boiled down to blacks not knowing what is best for themselves so we have to guide them to the light. These seem flimsy, as all the slave owners really cared about was a cheap labor source. Lizzie Wiliams from document five shows a spectrum of white treatment towards blacks. The oddest part about this one is that she claims to be more treated like a white woman than the other slaves, and even looks down on the others by calling them a racial slur.
ReplyDeleteHistorian Walter Johnson describes how slaves were only treated as objects that could be raised to do labor for the master or sold to make a profit. He emphasizes great fear of being sold and separated from those that he knew. Historian Stephanie McCurry, however, describes the alternative reasons for slavery and discusses the fact that slaves were not the only one oppressed at the time. I find Johnson’s argument more convincing, as it gives many examples of slaves’ stories. He’s view makes more sense to me in the beginning, as it was the preconception I had of slavery going into this class. However even with his examples, these are only a few slaves and slave owners during the period. You cannot assume every slave lived like the accounts described. As Solomon Northup stated, every slave owner is different.
Johnson’s The Chattel Principle explores the psychological bondage of slavery: the effect of knowing that one’s entire life could be uprooted at the whim of commerce. Johnson points out the devastating effect that the slave market could have on the individual and he presents the threat of sale as the most coercive mechanism of control that a slave owner possessed. The concept of Chattel examines the commoditization of human beings. These slaves were collateral and wealth no matter how far away from the market they were and slaves were one of the most portable and liquidable assets that Southern land owners possessed.
ReplyDeleteMcCurry’s essay focuses on the Republican idealism, social caste system, and religious rhetoric that were used to justify and reinforce the institution. McCurry’s argument, that social order was the most central defense of slavery, is certainly well supported. And, her argument about Gender roles and the social implications that Slavery and Gender shared and were interconnected (deliberately as a means of indoctrination) is certainly a dynamic approach to the topic. But, her essay does much less to capture the experience, the social ideas, and the real impact of Slavery. Johnson’s article explains the situation from a perspective that satisfies more curiosity and aligns closer to our primary sources.
The primary sources completely express the true commoditization of human beings that occurred (so well that Johnson’s essay is superfluous and redundant to the most part). From the slave owner’s perspective Slaves were thought of as animals: valued highly, taken care of with great attention and careful design, disciplined and conditioned to produce reliable and useful results and generally disregarded as HUMAN BEINGS.
From the slave perspective there seems to have been no safe refuge. Family life was threatened by separation and there was no real society to speak of. Anyone can assume that slavery was stifling and unjust and that individuals suffered immensely most days of their lives, but it is hard to accept or to understand the fact that there was no hope and there was no sense of security.
The Justifications of slavery sound like preaching to the converted, reassuring the already enthusiastic supporters. Who could be convinced that slavery was morally acceptable or justified by any prescident? Who would accept that economy and “tradition” are more important than Human Rights? Enlightened people, who fought against the TYRANY of British Rule and whose economy was meant to free man from feudal limitations, could not possibly believe in the paternalism that people like Thomas Roderick Dew use to justify slavery. But, it is very interesting to see the arguments constructed…often they boil down to a complete lack of logic and evidence.
Slavery in the early republic was an institution of inexcusable and immeasurable pain for those caught in its web. Because the pain was not merely physical, but the mental and emotional effects of being owned, and that one’s children were to be owned and traded as a commodity was terribly cruel, and can not be aptly described by anyone who did not undergo this inhumane treatment. Slavery was an institution and culture largely defined by fear and control from both parties. Slaves feared the whip and control of the whole life of the master while non-slave culture was in constant fear of slave uprisings, causing them to clamp down even harder on their slaves. As Solomon Northup detailed, learning the heart of the enslaved population was the critical aspect of beginning to understand the far reaches of the suffering. Northup described the brutal process of making new slaves pick cotton as fast as possible on the first day of their arrival so that a large quota could be set for them. This quota wasn’t met “it is considered evidence that he has been laggard, and a greater or less number of lashes is the penalty. . .” Strong slaves were able to pick as much as fifty pounds of cotton per day because of the advent of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. It should be noted, however, that slavery was by no means a homogeneous creation across the landscape. As Seth Rockman wrote, slavery was often took urban form in places like early Baltimore. As one travelled further into the belly of the South, slavery took the more brutal and agrarian form that was primarily described in this week’s reading.
ReplyDeleteIt was quite interesting to read the writings of the two historians in succession, because they described different aspects of the institution. In his writing “The Chattel Principle,” Walter Johnson described the potential value of work that was, in his opinion, at the heart of slavery. This economic outlook related how much this principle could be molded and shaped to squeeze maximum value out of each slave. By reminding the slaves of this point, as well as utilizing the aforementioned “fear principle” of sale, Johnson dealt primarily with how each party manipulated situations for their advantage, such as slaves who ran away or slave holders who threatened to separate families. McCurry’s more broad view of slavery in terms of a social institution in the South provided a different perspective on slavery. McCurry detailed the culture battle that kept slavery in place, and the repetitive cycle of fear that ensued. By holding a clamp on slaves in their religious and social lives, masters were able to “conjoin all domestic relations of domination” to their slaves and even made a connection to other “natural” orders, such as the relationship of men and women. I did not necessarily prefer one article over the other, as they both simply examined slavery under different lenses. I thought they were both well articulated, describing not often considered aspects of slavery to their audiences.
The peculiar institution that had existed since the dawn of civilization had one of its last strongholds in a new country that was founded on equality. Slavery’s days were numbered and this was obvious from days of the American Revolution. How could such a practice exist in a country that had just seceded from tyranny? Many two hundred years ago thought the same thing. A delusional protective mentality surrounded prominent Southerners into a “positive good” attitude about the issue. That along with the fact that it was so extremely vital to the Southern way of life and economy forced the abolitionists of the North to pressure Southern society into defending the issue even harder. The documents in the reader provide fascinating firsthand accounts of slavery in the early republic. Documents 1 and 2 typify the way that slaves were viewed. J.H. Hammond’s (the infamous South Carolina planter) instructions to his overseer seem that the sociology behind slavery is not to provide food, shelter, and amenities to the slaves for their own pleasure but to encourage their good work and loyalty to the master, thereby bringing in more capital for Hammond so he can buy more land and more slaves. The system seemed only to be bound by geographical restrictions. The abolition movement in the South is evidenced by document 9 where the end of slavery is debated in the Virginia legislature. The argument here is not that it is demeaning to blacks but because it is “ruinous to the whites—retards improvement—roots out an industrious population---banishes the yeomanry of the country.” Then at the end of that same paragraph the author (Mr. Thomas Marshall I presume) makes a statement that seems very Jeffersonian in nature. “If cultivated by free labor, the soil of Virginia is capable of sustaining a dense population, among whom labour be honorable….” This could be a quote from any loyal Jeffersonian republican. Marshall’s statement coincides well with what McCurry talks about in her essay. As she explains about gender roles and how that paternalistic mindset shaped the proslavery movement it reminds me about what she calls proslavery republicanism. The same idea of republicanism that Jefferson and Thomas Marshall used to explain how the South is a yeoman’s paradise is used by many in the South (as explained by McCurry) is no longer the same republicanism that Jefferson envisioned. The yeoman farmers are obligated to their families the same way that slaveholders are obligated to their families and to the slaves. Everywhere in the South small yeomen made up the majority of the white population. Yet, only a generation removed from the Revolutionary movements of abolition, these yeomen are becoming more and more proslavery. That is because they see the system that they partake in with their families (men being at the head and the wife and children being obedient and sharing mandatory domestic responsibilities) is so similar to the way that the slave system works (masters being the head and the slaves being obedient and fulfilling their mandatory duties) that the white population becomes tied together in ways that are hard to comprehend. To back up my claim I cite McCurry’s last paragraph “proslavery ideologues and politicians attempted to endow slavery with the legitimacy of the family and especially marriage.”
ReplyDeleteSlavery in the early republic was to say the least a grueling enterprise, one that attacked not just the slave himself but the nuclear family unit thereof. The constant threat of rape, beatings, or of being sold in either the international or domestic slave trade would have produced a grating, will braking feeling of hopelessness. Completely dependant on their masters for subsistence, blacks in the Americas faced a life expectancy considerably shorter than their white counterparts. For Slaves, their was relatively little hope of ever bettering themselves or educating their children. Contrasting this, slave owners typically expected a life of relative ease; their ranking in the social hierarchy would be tied even to the number of slaves they held. The cotton boom along with the ever expanding Western frontier would allow white Southerners, not just the planter elite, the opportunity to make their fortune and cement a way of life, one stratified primarily by race- as to be black meant inclusion only into the lowest caste.
ReplyDeleteTurning to the reading, Johnson presents a much more individualized look at slavery, taking more of a sociological approach, and studying the discourse between master and slave/slave familial relationships. McCurry focused on the big picture and Southern justification on a broad scale. I prefer McCurry’s point of view, because it delved into Southern hierarchy not just between black and white, but on how coerced labor effected the relationships between big and small planters, rich and poor populations. The civil war was fought by poor people protecting the rights of the rich, and McCurry’s article helps us to understand a seemingly backwards alliance between yeoman farmers and planter elites.