US+History+I+29

==USI.29 Describe the rapid growth of slavery in the South after 1800 and analyze slave life and resistance on plantations and farms across the South, as well as the impact of the cotton gin on the economics of slavery and Southern agriculture.==

//**Focus Questions: Why did slavery expand in the South after 1800? What were the features of slave life and slave resistance?**//
=The Growth and Need for Slavery=

The institution of slavery in the United States started in the early 17th century and lasted until 1865. In his 1969 book, __The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census,__ historian Philip D. Curtin estimated that 20 to 30 million Africans were sent to the New World on slave ships, although only 9 to 12 million survived the ocean crossing.

Slavery played a central role in the history of the United States. It existed in all the English mainland colonies and came to dominate agricultural production in the states from Maryland south. In the Americas slavery emerged as a system of forced labor designed for the production of staple crops. Depending on location, these crops included sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton; in the southern United States, by far the most important staples were tobacco and cotton.

A stark racial component distinguished this modern Western slavery from the slavery that existed in many other times and places: the vast majority of slaves were black Africans and their descendants, while the vast majority of masters were white Europeans and their descendants. Debate over slavery increasingly dominated American politics, leading eventually to the American Civil War (1861-1865), which finally brought slavery to an end. After emancipation, overcoming slavery’s legacy remained a crucial issue in American history, from Reconstruction following the war to the civil rights movement a century later.

=Slave Life and Resistance= Slave resistance began in British North America almost as soon as the first slaves arrived in the Chesapeake in the early seventeenth century. As one scholar has put it, “slaves ‘naturally’ resisted their enslavement because slavery was fundamentally // unnatural //.”[|1] Forms varied, but the common denominator in all acts of resistance was an attempt to claim some measure of freedom against an institution that defined people fundamentally as property. Perhaps the most common forms of resistance were those that took place in the work environment. After all, slavery was ultimately about coerced labor, and the enslaved struggled daily to define the terms of their work. Over the years, customary rights emerged in most fields of production. These customs dictated work routines, distribution of rations, general rules of comportment, and so on. If slave masters increased workloads, provided meager rations, or punished too severely, slaves registered their displeasure by slowing work, feigning illness, breaking tools, or sabotaging production. These everyday forms of resistance vexed slave masters, but there was little they could do to stop them without risking more widespread breaks in production. In this way, the enslaved often negotiated the basic terms of their daily routines. Of course, masters also stood to benefit from these negotiations, as contented slaves worked harder, increasing output and efficiency. In addition to everyday forms of resistance, slaves sometimes staked more direct and overt claims to freedom. The most common form of overt resistance was flight. As early as 1640, slaves in Maryland and Virginia absconded from their enslavement, a trend that would grow into the thousands, and, eventually, tens of thousands by the time of the Civil War. During the early years of slavery, runaways tended to consist mostly of African-born males. Since African-born men were in the numerical majority through much of the eighteenth century, this should not surprise us. For the most part, these men did not speak English and were unfamiliar with the geographic terrain of North America. Their attempts to escape slavery, despite these handicaps, are a testament to the rejection of their servile condition. If caught, runaways faced certain punishment—whipping, branding, and even the severing of the Achilles tendon. By the nineteenth century, the North was a particularly attractive destination for acculturated, American-born slaves. Networks of free blacks and sympathetic whites often helped ferry slaves to freedom via the so-called Underground Railroad, a chain of safe houses that stretched from the American South to free states in the North. Men continued to be predominant among runaways, although women, and even entire families were increasingly likely to test their chances in the flight for freedom. As the Civil War unfolded, many slaves abandoned their masters’ plantations, sometimes joining the Union army in what many perceived to be a war to end slavery forever. The most spectacular, and perhaps best-known, forms of resistance were organized, armed rebellions. Between 1691 and 1865, at least nine slave revolts erupted in what would eventually become the United States. The most prominent of these occurred in New York City (1712), Stono, South Carolina (1739), New Orleans (1811), and Southampton, Virginia (Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion).

taken from: []

Frederick Douglass' Speech at Rochester, 1852 "The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.ÑThe rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!" -Frederick Douglass, an excerpt from his speech "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro" full text: []

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Eli Whitney and the Need for an Invention
The entanglement of cotton with slavery in the United States begins in the late 18th century but involves only two of cotton's 43 species: Gossypium barbadense (Sea Island cotton) and Gossypium hirsutum (Upland cotton). Sea Island cotton has black, fuzz-free seeds and superb long staple lint (fibers over two inches in length suitable for spinning) but requires more rainfall and warmer, more consistent temperatures to grow well. Upland cotton, which currently provides 90 percent of the world's cotton crop, has short-staple lint (fibers between 13/16 inches and 1¼ inches) and light, fuzzy green seeds to which the lint is firmly attached, but it may be cultivated in a greater variety of environments.

Planters eager to find something more profitable than tobacco, rice, and indigo began to experiment to fulfill British demand for more cotton. In 1786, Bahamian G. barbadense seed was introduced into the new United States. Experimental plantings produced a crop in 1787 coastal Georgia; in Hilton Head, South Carolina; William Elliott sold his 1790 crop for ten and a half pence per pound. Prices for this desirable long-fiber cotton rose to five shillings (60 pence) per pound at Liverpool auctions by 1800. Since G. barbadense grew best on the islands off Georgia's Atlantic coast (Edisto, James, John, and Wadmalaw), it was nicknamed Sea Island cotton.

Before cotton can be spun into thread, its seeds must be removed. The people of ancient India developed a two-roller device through which they would pull raw cotton to separate the seeds from long-staple cotton fibers. In 1788, Joseph Eve patented a machine that used rollers to clean seeds from Sea Island cotton. One person could clean 24-30 pounds each day. Sea Island cotton is a finicky plant that thrives only in a small strip of land 30-40 miles in coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida (which was Spanish until 1823). It was impossible to grow enough in this confined area to meet world demand.

Short-staple G. hirsutum cotton could be grown in non-coastal upland areas and was nicknamed Upland cotton. The sturdy plant was already growing over a wide geographical range, but it presented a different problem. Upland cotton was so difficult to clean that the roller gin (short for engine) could not be used to clean the cotton. Instead, it took one person an entire day to tear one-two pounds of cotton from the clinging seeds. African slaves developed a type of comb to speed the process, and South Carolina inventor Hodgen Holmes experimented with a sawtooth device to clean the cotton; but there was nothing widely available that eased the bottleneck between field and factory. Unless someone could invent a machine to clean Upland cotton, it would be impossible to clean all the cotton necessary to meet British mills' demands.

Eli Whitney is widely credited with the invention of the machine meeting that demand, the cotton gin. After graduating from Yale University in 1792, Whitney traveled south to accept a teaching job. While staying near Savannah, Georgia, at Mulberry Grove (the plantation of widow Catharine Greene), he heard Phineas Miller (the manager of the estate), Mrs. Greene, and other planters lamenting their inability to exploit Upland cotton. He applied his familiarity with New England textile machinery to the problem and, in roughly ten days during spring of 1793, developed a model. A wooden roller embedded with wire spikes or teeth was fitted into a box (perhaps inspired by a cat swiping at a chicken through slats and only coming up with feathers). A second cylinder fitted with brushes (inspired by Mrs. Greene's use of a small broom to clear the spikes) revolved in the opposite direction. When Whitney fed the Upland cotton into the machine, the wire teeth pulled the cotton fibers through small slats in a grate, separating the seeds from the fiber. The gin tended to damage the fibers by cutting some short, so the cotton was worth only half the price of undamaged Sea Island cotton. However, the cotton gin enabled a single worker to clean 50 pounds of Upland cotton a day.

Whitney left Georgia to patent his invention and build a cotton gin factory in Connecticut, but a group broke into the workshop of Mulberry Hall plantation and began copying the easily reproduced machine. As Phineas Miller wrote in 1794:

The people of the country are running mad for them, and much can be said to justify their importunity. When the present crop is harvested there will be a real property of at least 50 thousand dollars lying useless unless we can enable the holders to bring it to market.

Within four years, Whitney alone had 30 cotton gins operating in Georgia, his competitors had many more, and use of the cotton gin had spread westward to Tennessee. Hand-cranked gins eventually were replaced by gins operated by draught animals or water capable of cleaning 500 pounds of cotton per day. From:[|History Channel] Once the cotton gin came into use slaves were used to pick the cotton more than cleaning it. The need for slaves was less but still a business which work well to the Southern plantation owners. The South would no focus on other cash crops which the slaves could still be used it.

Sample MCAS Question (2007) How did the cotton gin affect the Southern economy from 1800 to 1860? a) It encouraged industrialization in the South. b) It promoted economic equality in the South. c) It strengthened Southerners' reliance on slavery. d) It increased Southerners' use of indentured servants. CORRECT ANSWER: C

Useful Sites : [] [|History Channel] [|Cotton Gin] [|Cotton Gin Patent] Seminal Primary Documents: [|Fredrick Douglas] http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_cotton.htm