Southern Slave Owners example essay topic

Analyze the philosophical and economic reasons for the growth of slavery in the United States. Slavery has been of signal importance in American history. During the Antebellum Period, it undergirded the nation's economy, increasingly dominated its politics, and finally led to the Civil War between the north and south. After war, the legacy of slavery continued to shape much of American history, from the struggle over Reconstruction in the 1860's and 1870's to the struggle over civil rights a century later.

From the middle of the seventeenth century to the start of the Civil War, slavery and commercial agriculture were intimately associated. During the colonial period, slaves grew much of the tobacco in Virginia and the Carolinas, rice in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. Neighther southerners, who used slaves as field laborers and servants, nor northerners, who supplied plantations and consumed the products of slave labor, questioned the economic value of slavery. By the late eighteenth century, however, some southern slaveholders began to have doughts. Deteriorating tobacco lands and a declining process for southern crops seemed to be transforming valuable slaves into what George Washington in 1794 called "a very troublesome species of property". Ironically, Washington wrote just as Eli Whitney began production of his cotton gin, an innovation that would begin the expansion of cotton production and end any slaveholder's doughts about the economic value of slavery.

The growing demand for cotton from European and northern mills drove prices up and drew settlers west seeking new lands on which to grow the staple. Cotton rapidly became far and away the nations most valuable commercial crop during the Antebellum years. Although cotton was grown on family farms, the amount was small, limited by the labor force of family members and their need to produce food also. Those using slaves could increase output and their income, which allowed them to buy more and better land and more slaves to increase production even further. As a result, slaves grew most of the cotton (as well as the other southern staple crops- tobacco, rice, and sugar), the largest proportion on plantations with the slave labor force that numbered in the tens or hundreds. Slavery seemed enormously profitable.

Cotton exports alone constituted 50-60 percent of the value of the nation's total exports, helping pay for imports from abroad. Slave labor provided the raw material for New England's textile mille, helping stimulate the nation's early industrialization. Slave labor produced commercial crops which required a host of middlemen to sell and transport them to markets and to finance and supply the slave owning planters. Southern cities such as New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah, Charleston, and Memphis and nothern parts such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia depended heavily on the southern trade. Northern farmers and manufactures found ready markets for their products in southern towns and cities, but especially on the southern plantations.

The products of slave labor stimulated the nations economic development, the slave south itself remained primarily agricultural and did not experience the urban and industrial growth that took place in the North. Some blamed slavery for fastening a backward, inefficient agrarian economy on the south. Theorists could find support for their views in the works of Adam Smith and other classical economists who argued that slave labor, and more practical minded charged that slavery absorbed the south's resources, allowing northern and foreign bankers, merchants, and manufacturers to reap the benefits from the South's production. Others, however, argued that the South lagged behind the North only because southerners failed to take advantage of available opportunities.

They called for economic diversification, saying that slaves could be profitably employed in industry and other urban jobs, as indeed they sometimes were. But the planters ignored such advice and continued to invest their profits in more minds and more slaves to grow more of the staple crops. Although many southerners got rich by using slave labor to produce agricultural staples, northerners were clearly demonstrating that trade, commerce, banking, shipping, and manufacturing could be equally or even more rewarding. Southern slave owners largely ignored these investment opportunities in the south and continued to invest in slaves because earning maximum profits was not their primary motivation. The most passionate proslavery advocates admitted that slave labor was not as efficient as free labor but then insisted that the slave system had advantages that outweighed this deficiency. It united all whites on the basis of race, thereby avoiding class antagonisms and labor unrest that characterized northern society.

Unlike northern employers who discharged workers when they were old, sick, or no longer needed, slaveholders protected their slave workers throughout their entire life, not merely because they were valuable property but also because the were part of what the planters called their "families", and deserved and needed the protection. Such reasoning provided pro-slavery advocates with a response to those who condemned slavery on economic and moral grounds. Planters who dominated southern society recognized that to adopt to northern economic practices would be to destroy the slave system. Even the limited use of slaves in manufacturing posed a danger; Some urban slaves escaped close supervision and control and were, as some put it, "half-free". Large scale of commercial and industrial development would bring to the South masses of free workers, who would object to competing with slaves, and would create rich and powerful industrialists, bankers, and others, who would have little reason to protect these interests clashed with their own. As a result, planters paid little heed to calls for economic diversification and maintained their control over a slave society that lagged being the growing North.

Some grew rich, the three-quarters of the white population that did not own slaves and, of course, the slaves themselves did not share in the wealth. Northerners who depended upon cotton and other staples and who served the southern market strenuously opposed those who would destroy the system that undergirded their livelihood. But when southerners threatened to expand their system at the expense of free labor and when the very economic development that had depended so heavily on slave produced staples and on the southern trade produced new and increasingly more important markets in the North and abroad, opposition to slavery grew stronger. Southerners, convinced that cotton was king and could command the world, found when they attempted to secede that other, more powerful forces had usurped the power of their monarch. "Slavery, on the other hand, was a form of persecution which, in the eyes of colonial America, had to be justified.

Therefore, the black slave became an easily identifiable group targeted as being inferior, subhuman, and destined for servitude. The early members of the "lower orders"; Christian churches did not take up the cause of eliminating slavery until much later in the century". (web) Opposition to slavery among white Americans was virtually nonexistent. Settlers in the 17th and early 18th centuries considerd slavery to be a sin when the upper classes savagely exploited lacking a later generation's belief in natural human equality, they saw little reason to question the enslavement of Africans. Throughout the New World was the racial basis of enslavement. Slavery forced Americans to confront their true selves. In a republic born of liberty but prospering from bondage, the expansive energy of freedom collided with that of slavery.

Such tensions led to the civil war and, finally, to emancipation. The cultural worlds of blacks and whites endured, and the economic and political legacies of slavery and the war that came from it burned deep into the American psyche. Slavery based on color, stressed differences, but natural rights stressed sameness, the inalienable rights of "all men". Even though most people in the United States considered slavery to be right, there were some oppositions. A group who marched through Charleston in 1760 chanted down the streets "Liberty, liberty", at the same time, the evangelical thrust challenged the political and social assumptions, which brought the authority into question. Some white religious groups worried that slavery was corroding their own piety, Quakers sought to cleanse themselves of the sin of slaveholding, which they equated with kidnapping and avalice.

As time went on, many anti-slavery movements were formed and slavery soon became an ideological and moral defense. As American planters sought to mold a docile labor force, they resorted to harshly repressive measures that included liberal use of whippings and brandings. Sentiment opposing slavery on humanitarian grounds was expressed as early as 1688, but slaves and indentured servants for another century formed the nucleus of labor in all the colonies throughout the colonial period. From the first colonial plantings to the Civil War, southerners and to a lesser degree northerners, feared and mistrusted the black race.

The African American was perceived as alien and inferior not only in color but also by common prejudice: In habits of speech, manners, and even ethical and intellectual capacity. In the South, controlling both slave and the free black population affected the social structure and moral and political ideals in ways unfamiliar to northern whites. Set apart, as they were, white southerners grew increasingly self-conscious and defensive as criticism of their distinctiveness mounted. The nineteenth century attempt by northerners to reach a national uniformity of social, moral, economic, and political behavior struck southerners as the course of the age. The south hobbled with slavery and retained an older code of behavior, a concept of race and class hierarchy and a sense of communal society and solidarity. Gradually, as slavery became more entrenched, changes occurred in the way masters looked on their slaves (and themselves).

Many second-generation masters, who unlike their parents had grown up with slaves, came to regard them as inferior members of their extended families, and to look upon themselves as kind patriarchs who, like benevolent despots, ruled their "people" firmly but fairly and looked after their needs. Such slave owners continued to rely heavily on the lash (and other forms of punishment) for discipline, and few slaves saw their owners as the kindly guardians that they proclaimed themselves to be. Still, the most extreme forms of physical abuse became less common over the course the 18th century, at the same time, many slave owners accepted the idea that they should treat their slaves humanly. Slavery has definitely played a central role in the history of the United States. As millions of slaves throughout the United States performed numerous tasks, little did they notice the significance that they inputted into America's economy. Slavery was the main industry that made the new nation emerge and multiply.

Morally and ethically, slaves were treated like savages in the early era of the United States, but many of their masters soon realized what an impact they had served throughout the years. Although slavery brought forth a lot of negativity, a positive vibrant African American culture emerged. I am thankful to live in this society today, where everyone is "treated equal" and different races can come together and share their own special uniqueness. The early members of the "lower orders"; did not take up the cause of eliminating slavery until much later in the century". Christian churches.