Whitney's cotton gin > King Cotton! > Planter aristocracy.
* By 1840 the south produced more than half of the entire world's supply of cotton.
* In 1850 only 1,733 families owned more than 100 slaves and the economic structure of the south became increasingly monopolistic.
Southern Society: The White majority
A. Only 25% owned any slaves and 2/3 of them owned fewer than 10 slaves.
B. 75% of southern Whites were non slave-owning subsistence farmers.
C. Marooned in the valley's of the Appalachian range were the mountain Whites who were the most pro-union of the White southerners.
Southern Society: The Black Minority
A. Southern free Blacks numbered about 250,000 by 1860.
B. Most (4 million) Blacks were slaves - increase came from natural reproduction (breeding)
Life Under Bondage:
- Slave auctions at which families were often separated was the theme of Harriet Beecher Stowe's: Uncle Tom's Cabin.
-By 1860 most blacks were concentrated in the "Black Belt" of the deep south.
-An African-American culture developed on the larger plantations.
-Slaves were denied an education > 90% illiteracy rate
-The slaves did resist including armed insurrection which was never successful: Gabriel (1800), Denmark Vessey (1822), and Nat Turner (1831)
Abolitionism:
1817- The American Colonization Society
1830's- Theodore Dwight Weld: American Slavery As It Is.
1833 - American Anti-Slavery Society was founded by:
William Lloyd Garrison who published a militant anti-slavery newspaper - The Liberator.
Wendell Phillips who was a renowned orator
Black abolitionists included David Walker, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass (1845 : Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)
Most abolitionists backed the Liberty party in the 1840 election
The voice of White southern abolitionism was silenced in the 1830's > Massive defense of slavery, the "Gag Resolution", and the censuring of abolitionist mail to the south.
Even the north resisted radical abolitionism > Death of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy (The Martyr Abolitionist ) by a mob.