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"Slavery Economic aspects Southern States History 19th century."
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Money over mastery, family over freedom : slavery in the antebellum upper South
Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block. Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American family provided the key to economic growth in the antebellum Chesapeake. To maximize profits in the burgeoning regional industries, slaveholders needed to employ or hire out a healthy supply of strong slaves, which tended to scatter family members. From each generation, they also selected the young, fit, and fertile for sale or removal to the cotton South. Conscious of this pattern, the enslaved were sometimes able to negotiate mutually beneficial labor terms—to save their families despite that new economy. Moving focus away from the traditional master-slave relationship in a staple-crop setting, Schermerhorn demonstrates through extensive primary research that the slaves in the upper South were integral to the development of the region's modern political economy, whose architects embraced invention and ingenuity even while deploying slaves to shoulder the burdens of its construction, production, and maintenance. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom proposes a new way of understanding the role of American slaves in the antebellum marketplace. Rather than work against it, as one might suppose, enslaved people engaged with the market somewhat as did free Americans. Slaves focused their energy and attention, however, not on making money, as slaveholders increasingly did, but on keeping their kin out of the human coffles of the slave trade.
eBook
Masterless men : poor whites and slavery in the antebellum South
\"Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton--and thus, slaves--in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete--for jobs or living wages--with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Raising freedom's child
The end of slavery in the United States inspired conflicting
visions of the future for all Americans in the nineteenth century,
black and white, slave and free. The black child became a figure
upon which people projected their hopes and fears about slavery's
abolition. As a member of the first generation of African Americans
raised in freedom, the black child-freedom's child-offered up the
possibility that blacks might soon enjoy the same privileges as
whites: landownership, equality, autonomy. Yet for most white
southerners, this vision was unwelcome, even frightening. Many
northerners, too, expressed doubts about the consequences of
abolition for the nation and its identity as a white republic. From
the 1850s and the Civil War to emancipation and the official end of
Reconstruction in 1877, Raising Freedom's Child
examines slave emancipation and opposition to it as a far-reaching,
national event with profound social, political, and cultural
consequences. Mary Niall Mitchell analyzes multiple views of the
black child-in letters, photographs, newspapers, novels, and court
cases-to demonstrate how Americans contested and defended slavery
and its abolition. With each chapter, Mitchell narrates an episode
in the lives of freedom's children, from debates over their
education and labor to the future of racial classification and
American citizenship. Raising Freedom's Child
illustrates how intensely the image of the black child captured the
imaginations of many Americans during the upheavals of the Civil
War era. Through public struggles over the black child, Mitchell
argues, Americans by turns challenged and reinforced the racial
inequality fostered under slavery in the United States. Only with
the triumph of segregation in public schools in 1877 did the black
child lose her central role in the national debate over civil
rights, a role she would not play again until the 1950s.
eBook
Society And Culture In The Slave South
Combining established work with that of recent provocative scholarship on the antebellum South, this collection of essays puts students in touch with some of the central debates in this dynamic field. It includes substantial excerpts from the work of Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who lay out the influential interpretation of the South as a `paternalistic' society and culture, and contributions from more recent scholars who provide dissenting or alternative interpretations of the relations between masters and slaves and men and women. The essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including economics, psychology and anthropology to investigate the nature of plantation and family life in the South. Explanatory notes guide the reader through each essay and the Editor's introduction places the work in its historiographical context.
eBook