One of the cruelest ramifications of slavery was its destruction of the black family unit; slaves could not legally marry, and their families were subject to permanent dissolution at the whim of the slave-owner or his estate. Charles Sydnor’s study of slavery in Mississippi reveals that the value in 1860 of the state’s 436,691 slaves, at eight hundred dollars each, was over $349 million, while the total cash value of its farmland, farming implements, and livestock was only about $241 million.60 Well-to-do Mississippians’ financial stake in slavery as of 1860 is obvious. Site created in November 2000. . Southern whites remained constantly in fear of revolts by their “happy and contented” slaves. The French traveler Hector St. John Crèvecoeur discovered a similar scene: a slave accused of slaying a white overseer was suspended in a cage to be devoured by birds and insects. Among many other restrictions, they required slaves to submit to masters and respect all whites, forbade them to travel without passes, limited their preaching and religious services, forbade anyone from teaching them to read or write, limited their independent economic activities, and forbade them to possess firearms or liquor. . So much they won’t ever pray it away.’”. Denied and deferred in the United States, the antislavery movement would achieve its greatest influence in Britain. All rights reserved. Winthrop Jordan concludes these had no realistic chance for adoption. and find homework help for other Reconstruction questions at eNotes It almost broke my heart.’ Could any white southerner pretend not to know from direct observation the meaning of Sojourner Truth’s statement: ‘I have borne thirteen chillun and seen em’ mos’ all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard.’ . It caused migration of the slave population to travel north and west. (3 points) A. [W]omen working in the owner’s house were especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation. “They believed that industrialization and slavery could proceed hand in hand.”. The considerable investment of Southern Founders in slave-based staple agriculture, … They had, he said, “adhered in general with great fidelity to the cause of their masters during the struggle. Slave marriages were not recognized under state laws. There was room for slavery to expand in Texas and in many bypassed sections of the South, and slavery would have provided a ready workforce in the industries that the South needed to develop. A review of Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States (Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014) by Gene Kizer, Jr.. Answer Save. "The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do….And that is to destroy the black family." The whole subject was disposed of with the coolest deliberation and with regard only to interest of the public.” In South Carolina, two slaves suspected of kidnapping and rape were stripped, tied to forked poles, had their mouths bound, and were left to be eaten by crows and buzzards. B. Slavery allowed people of all classes to get jobs and make money. Cash pointed out that slavery rested on force: the lash, chains and shackles, hounds and pistols to chase runaways, and mutilations and brandings (reflected in runaway slave advertisements). The Supreme Court decided in favor of slavery. He is the author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006) and the coeditor of Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (2006). They conclude, “the tale about the uncommercial planter who was gripped by an irresistible tendency to the overproduction of cotton is sheer fantasy.”, Although slavery was therefore proving to be of continuing economic benefit to those who engaged in it, it probably had a deleterious long-term effect on the Southern economy as a whole. Slavery was the principal cause of the American Civil War as it created a significant economic tension between the North and South. Cash, in his brilliant The Mind of the South, noted that the vast majority of early abolition societies were Southern and that evangelical religions first denounced slavery before their Southern congregations changed their minds. Page’s tribute was a perfect example of what W. J. Problems of Native Americans & African Slaves. It caused our economy to grow greatly over the early decades of those times. If anything, they were too confident in the future of slavery, too certain that the nation’s economy depended on the vast profits of the cotton and other goods produced by slavery, too sure that the industrialized world would stumble and fall without the bounty produced by the slave people of the South.” In fact, there was great interest in annexing the slavery-dominated island of Cuba. . Perhaps the president himself was surprised when his personal servant and his wife’s maid, both slaves, escaped from the executive mansion in Richmond in January 1864 and when, later that month, another slave tried to burn the mansion. That’s what the “history” books, so called, told us and it is certainly what the “news media” has screamed about as the cause of the War for decades now. In 1860, slaves were still a reasonable capital investment. A black woman . The possibility of such actions by blacks became a favorite argument of those opposing emancipation, including the proposals to arm and free slaves to prevent loss of the Civil War. You can rule out “racism caused slavery” because slavery has existed for thousands of years, and even African slavery in the New World was centuries old before anything like modern “racism” appeared. The arguement of slavery caused most of the problems that built up to secession , but the war started after secession , declaring independence is not declaring war! The North let the South substitute a war for liberty for the war for slavery, and the North ceased to think of slaves and freedmen as serious persons. From 1853 to 1863, Britain’s consul in Charleston, Robert Bunch, reported to his superiors on a continuing, high-level interest among influential South Carolinians in reviving the slave trade to the United States. Slavery has been a controversial topic especially in the U.S due to the attachment that the country has on this matter. The value of slaves to the Southern economy was reflected in the warning by the South Carolina planter John Townsend that Lincoln’s election would mean “the annihilation and end of all Negro labor (agricultural especially) over the whole South. In response, there was a frenzy of whites’ killing blacks on sight—most of them uninvolved in the uprising. . Edward A. Pollard of Richmond, an editor and author, wrote this analysis in 1866: “The occasion of that conflict was what the Yankees called—by one of their convenient libels in political nomenclature—slavery; but what was, in fact, nothing more than a system of Negro servitude in the South… one of the mildest and most beneficent systems of servitude in the world.” Interestingly, in his haste to disclaim the term “slavery,” Pollard conceded that it was the “occasion of that conflict”—contrary to the Myth’s tenet that slavery was not the cause of the war. . If you are white in the antebellum South, there is a floor below which you cannot go. Cash stated that Southerners questioning the institution were hanged, tarred, horsewhipped, or assaulted in other ways. How did the question of slavery cause growing tensions before the Civil War? Before the Civil War railways were rapidly opening up new fertile areas to plantation agriculture. Less than a quarter century later, by the time delegates gathered for the Constitutional Convention, both slavery and the Atlantic slave trade were being condemned, not only in the new United States, but also in Britain and France. This continuing interest in reviving the slave trade suggested that slavery was not going away anytime soon. History. Slavery was the Civil War's cause despite revisionists saying otherwise. . Ravie S . Please subscribe or login to access full text content. P olicymakers, governments, NGOs, and faith-based organizations alike can take a narrow approach to addressing modern slavery; root causes such as poverty, structural violence, gender discrimination, and economic inequality often go unaddressed. . Children were expected to work as soon as they were deemed old enough to be useful. You have a whole population of four million people whom you consider, and your society considers, inferior to you. The reality was that slavery often involved beating, killing, and raping slaves, as well as breaking up slave families for economic or disciplinary reasons. All of a plantation’s slaves, “for their moral improvement,” were gathered to watch their peers whipped while hung by the thumbs, have an ear nailed to a post before severing, or be “tomcatted” (having a tomcat dragged across their bare backs and thighs). The Old South . 1. Kenneth Stampp concurred in this analysis. Between 1765 and 1787, antislavery declarations and protests proliferated and imaginative proposals were put forward to achieve a comprehensive emancipation. . Its economic power had become so great that it could not be ignored.” Its cotton exports were more valuable than all other U.S. exports combined. Welfare did. The argument is essentially that the war was unnecessary or could not have been about slavery because slavery was on the cusp of extinction without a war. More slaves in the city means a greater pool of workers for the local farms and such. B. Phillips, a Georgian, promoted this benign view of slavery in the early twentieth century. Racism of this sort would have kept the institution of slavery alive and well for a long time if not for the Civil War. Lv 5. This myth began long before the Civil War. Why did the U.S. government include a prohibition on slavery in the treaties with Native Americans in Washington Territory? Gentle and simple, they gave their husbands, their brothers and their sons to the cause of the South, sorrowing chiefly that they themselves were too feeble to stand at their side. A Charleston lawyer, he defended the crew of the brig Echo, an American slaving vessel brought into Charleston harbor in 1858 after its capture off Cuba by the U.S. Navy, and as the editor of the Charleston Southern Standard after 1852 he argued in favor of resuming the importation of slaves from Africa. . Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription. He may be poor, it is true; but there is no point upon which he is so justly proud and sensitive as his privilege of caste; and there is nothing which he would resent with more fierce indignation than the attempt of the Abolitionist to emancipate the slaves and elevate the Negros [sic] to an equality with himself and his family.”. So abolitionists in the North devised a clever plan to mail anti-slavery pamphlets to people in the South. moving across the field in parallel lines, with a considerable degree of precision. The Federalist favored a strong federal government and a National Bank to handle the debt problems. People stopped working as farmers and became enslaved. . It was not ameliorating slavery, but making it harsher and more implacable. Whites from Richmond rode through the county killing all blacks they saw—one hundred and twenty in one day. Slavery did not destroy black families. The most extreme punishments (all without benefit of judge, jury, or trial) were reserved for alleged sex-related offenses. 1. How did slavery cause the Civil War? Britain’s American Problem: The International Perspective, The Unsettled Periphery: The Backcountry on the Eve of the American Revolution, The Struggle Within: Colonial Politics on the Eve of Independence, The Democratic Moment: The Revolution and Popular Politics, Independence before and during the Revolution, The British Army and the War of Independence, The Revolutionary War and Europe’s Great Powers, Funding the Revolution: Monetary and Fiscal Policy in Eighteenth-Century America, The Impact of the War on British Politics, A More Perfect Union: The Framing and Ratification of the Constitution, The Evangelical ASCENDENCY in Revolutionary America, The American Revolution and a New National Politics, America’s Cultural Revolution in Transnational Perspective. As the South Carolina planter and state senator John Townsend acknowledged in late 1864, “The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of nobility in his relations as to the negro. . Indeed they came to think that their opinions about Negroes were not prejudices at all but merely objective assessments of the realities of Negro inferiority.” Prospects for ending slavery in Virginia were increasingly bleak. “The worth of slaves increased correspondingly so that on the eve of the Civil War it was greater than the total dollar value of all the nation’s banks, railroads, and manufacturing.”. More money could be made on female than male slaves because the children of female slaves became the property of the mothers’ owners. Whips and switches were used on the spot in the Upper South while more formal weekly “settlements” were used in the Lower South. South Carolina’s 1860–61 commissioners to Florida, Leonidas W. Spratt, was an advocate of reopening that trade. would be fiction. He also stated that he did not have to Constitutionally power to abolish slavery. Some advocates of the Lost Cause have contended that Southerners, aware that slavery’s disappearance was inevitable, would not have fought a war to save the dying institution. In addition, the racial underpinning of slavery ensured its widespread support among whites who were not slave-owners. Cash provides an example of the heights which the worship of Southern womanhood could reach: “‘Woman!!! But [the yeoman and the 25 percent of whites who were slave-owners] have something in common, which is white skin. Southerners did not necessarily go to war to defend slavery, nor did northerners go to war to end it. , its economic function was identical - reduced price of labor with no change to demand, lower. Cause for unprofitable plantation economy expected to work as soon as they were forced slave... During the struggle were reserved for alleged sex-related offenses benefitted whites economically and and... 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