What About the Slaves?

1. Introduction —How does slavery fit in the American Republic?
   1. Liberty and self-determination seem to define the American Experience
   2. Slavery is the permanent, hereditary loss of liberty
   3. Frederick Douglass and the Declaration of Independence
   4. But we must always remember that the Black experience in America differed greatly over time and geography
2. Slavery in the 19th Century
   1. The Seaboard South
      1. Long established family, plantation and local connections
      2. Tobacco, Rice and Diversified Farming
      3. Increasing numbers of freed blacks especially in the urban areas
      4. Many different occupations and work environments
      5. The creation of a “middle space” between slavery and freedom (This middle space became problematic: it showed that Blacks could manage on their own despite the innumerable legal, social and political hurdles that they had to face).
   2. The Southern Interior
      1. Clearing the land
      2. Long journey, lonely frontier, overwork, poor nutrition, diseases and bad weather
      3. Cotton as the driving force—short staple cotton and the cotton gin (along with sugar in Louisiana)
      4. Cotton does not require skilled labor—just lots of it—ever increasing need for labor drives up slave prices
         1. long growing season (planted in March or early April and picking ends around Christmas)
         2. many labor intensive tasks
         3. sunrise to sunset gang labor
         4. near universality of white overseers
         5. Relationship with corn
   3. The Second Middle Passage—really gets going in the 1820s
      1. surplus slaves from the Upper South are sold “down the river” to Southern Interior
      2. Some slaves arrive with their masters, many are marched overland or by ship to New Orleans
      3. For the most part young men and women
   4. Re-Forging broken connections and renegotiating the master-slave relationship
      1.  “The Second Middle Passage, like the first, dismantled families, but not the idea of family”
      2. The frontier plantation was extraordinarily  unstable
      3. Sense of locality?
         1. Hierarchies
         2. Religion
         1. Baptist, Methodist, Anglican and Presbyterian
         2. Slaves constructed a unique hermeneutic that conformed to their needs
         3. A sense of kinship—the origins of black nationalism
         4. Exodus narrative
3. Conclusion
   1. Slaves like many Americans are heading West and having to recreate their social patterns from the ground up
   2. The slave experience as an American Experience