What made cotton so desirable? In the 1790s Americas oldest crops, like tobacco, were depleting farmland and dropping in value. At the same time, the textile industry in Great Britain was exploding, creating enormous international demand for cotton clothing. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which easily separated cotton fiber from its seeds, was merely a motor for a global economic machine. Slavery was its fuel.
Many stakeholders benefited from the cotton economy — plantation owners in the South, banks in the North, shipping merchants, and the textile industry in Great Britain. Cotton transformed the United States, making fertile land in the Deep South, from Georgia to Texas, extraordinarily valuable. Growing more cotton meant an increased demand for slaves. Slaves in the Upper South became incredibly more valuable as commodities because of this demand for them in the Deep South. They were sold off in droves. This created a Second Middle Passage, the second largest forced migration in America’s history.
To feed “King Cotton,” more than a million African Americans were carried off into the Deep South. That’s two and a half times the number that were brought to the United States from Africa.
To learn more about the connection of cotton and slavery, tune in to PBS on October 29, 2013, 8-9 pm ET, for the premiere of episode two of The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Check the local listings on the broadcast schedule.
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The most important export crops of the American colonial period were
A) Cotton, tobacco, and rice.
B) Cotton, sugar, and rice.
C) Sugar, rice, and tobacco.
D) Indigo, sugar, and sorghum.
E) Tobacco, rice, and indigo.
In 30 years before the outbreak of the Civil War, even as northern criticism of the "peculiar institution" began to deepen, pro-slavery thought came to dominate southern public life. Fewer and fewer white southerners shared the view, common among the founding fathers, that slavery was, at best, a "necessary evil." Even those who had no direct stake in slavery shared with planters a deep commitment to white supremacy. Indeed, racism - the belief that blacks were innately inferior to whites and unsuited for life in any condition other than slavery - formed one pillar of the PROSLAVERY IDEOLOGY. Most slaveholders also found legitimation for slavery in biblical passages such as the injunction that servants should obey their masters. Others argued that slavery was essential to human progress. Without slavery, they believed, planters would be unable to cultivate the arts, sciences, and other civilized pursuits. Still other defenders of slavery insisted that the institution guaranteed equality for whites by preventing the growth of a class doomed to a life of unskilled labor. Like northerners, they claimed to be committed to the ideal of freedom. Slavery for blacks, they declared, was the surest guarantee of "perfect equality" among whites, liberating them from the "low, menial" jobs such as factory labor and domestic service performed by wage laborers in the North.
At the center of the slave community stood the FAMILY. On the sugar plantations of the West Indies, the number of males far exceeded that of females, the workers lived in barracks-type buildings, and settled family life was nearly impossible. The US, where the slave population grew from natural increase rather than continued importation from Africa, had an even male-female ratio, making the creation of families far more possible. To be sure, the law did not recognize the legality of slave marriages. The master had to consent before a man and woman could "jump over the broomstick," and families stood in constant danger of being broken up by sale. Nonetheless, most adult slaves married, and their unions, when not disrupted by sale, typically lasted for a lifetime. To solidify a sense of family continuity, slaves frequently named children after cousins, uncles, grandparents, and other relatives. Most slaves lived in 2-parent families. But because of constant sales, the slave community had a significantly higher number of female-headed households than among whites, as well as families in which grandparents, other relatives, or even non-kin assumed responsibility for raising children.
A distinctive version of Christianity also offered solace to slaves in the face of hardship and hope for liberation from bondage. Even though the law prohibited slaves from gathering without a white person present, every plantation, it seemed, had its own black preacher. Usually the preacher was a "self-called" sea e who possessed little or no formal education but whose rhetorical abilities and familiarity with the Bible made him one of the most respected members of the slave community. To masters, Christianity offered another means of social control. Many required slaves to attend services conducted by white ministers, who preached that theft was immoral and that the Bible required servants to obey their masters. In their own religious gatherings, slaves transformed the Christianity they had embraced, turning it to their own purposes. The biblical story of Exodus, for example, in which God chose Moses to lead the enslaved Jews of Egypt into a promised land of freedom, played a central role in black Christianity. Slaves identified themselves as a chosen people whom God in the fullness of time would deliver from bondage. At the same time, the figure of Jesus Christ represented to slaves a personal redeemer, one who truly cared for the oppressed. And in the slaves' eyes, the Christian message of brotherhood and the equality of all souls before the Creator offered an irrefutable indictment of the institution of slavery.
Developments in transportation usually occurred in which order?
- railroads, flatboats, canals, and
turnpikes
- turnpikes, steamboats, canals, and railroads
- turnpikes, canals, flatboats, and steamboats
- canals, turnpikes, railroads, and steamboats
The best known of all slave rebels was NAT TURNER, a slave preacher and religious mystic in Southampton County, Virginia, who came to believe that God had chosen him to lead a black uprising. TURNER traveled widely in the county, conducting religious services. He told of seeing black and white angels fighting in the sky and the heavens running red with blood. Perhaps from a sense of irony, TURNER initially chose July 4, 1831, for his rebellion, only to fall ill on the appointed day. On August 22, he and a handful of followers marched from farm to farm assaulting the white inhabitants. By the time the militia put down the uprising, about 80 slaves had joined TURNER's band, and some 60 whites had been killed. TURNER was subsequently captured and, with 17 other rebels, condemned to die. Asked before his execution whether he regretted what he had done, TURNER responded, "Was not Christ crucified?" In the panic that followed the revolt, hundreds of innocent slaves were whipped, and scores executed. For one last time, Virginia's leaders openly debated whether steps ought to be taken to do away with the "peculiar institution." But a proposal to commit the state to gradual emancipation and the removal of the black population from the state failed to win legislative approval.
Which one of the following lists these events in the correct chronological order?
(1) Nullification Crisis.
(2) Black Baptist Churches founded.
(3) Great Migration to Old Southwest.
(4) Cotton Gin invented.
A) 3, 2, 1, 4
B) 2, 3, 4, 1
C) 2, 4, 3, 1
D) 4, 1, 3, 2
E) 1, 2, 3, 4