THE SOUTH AND SLAVE CULTURE,,,

Donald L. Miller with Pauline Maier and Louis P. Masur

Introduction
Maier: You know, we for so long thought of slavery as a kind
of monolithic institution. And we've really broken out of that.
And we have to we have somehow in this program to get
through the complexity of the institution.
Miller: An insidious institution becomes the foundation of a
culture.
Miller: What makes the South is it land?
Maier: Well, they have a staple product. It's a plantation
economy. It's a very different form of social organization.
Masur: Part of what we've learned about slavery is the
notion of the slave family, the notion of a slave culture, and
then a wave of studies that have demonstrated beyond any
doubt the power of even within slavery for AfricanAmericans to create a religion and a culture and a family. But
then, did we go too far? I mean, have we forgotten that this
is an institution of slavery? An institution of slave labor.
Miller: Today, on A Biography of America, "Slavery".
Slavery Divides the North and South

Masur: In the 1850s, Frederic Law Olmsted, a

28-year-old farmer and landscaper, journeyed
from New York through the South. He would
become best known for his work at Central
Park, but at the time, his reputation rested on
his writings. In a series of letters to The New York Times, he
described the differences between the two regions. Southern
society, he thought, was agricultural, hierarchical, and mainly
static. Northern society, by comparison, was industrial,
meritocratic, and dynamic. The glaring difference, of course,
was free labor vs. slave labor.
Olmsted could not comprehend slavery. In Louisiana he
interviewed a slave, and he asked him what would he do if
he were free. And the slave responded that he would work,
save money, buy a house and land, and he would visit his
mother back in Virginia. Slaves, too, had dreams, and in
Olmsted's telling, this particular slave's dream fit with those
of most Americans. Olmsted asked how was it possible that
slaveholders could handle simply as property a creature
possessing human passions and feelings.
Well, if Northerners critiqued Southern society, Southerners
also had plenty to say about Northern society. George
Fitzhugh, a self-taught Virginian, published several books
during the 1850s. Northern society, he said, was a failure.
Wage labor was far more exploitative than slave labor. Free
laborers, he claimed, have not a thousandth part of the rights
and liberties of Negro slaves. Northern workers, he thought,
were slaves without masters, subject to the moral
cannibalism of capitalists.
Well these tensions between North and South percolated
through the years and they reached one climax as early as
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1819 when, Missouri petitioned to enter the Union. If that

occurred, the slave states would outnumber the free states
12 to 11. Slavery would inch northward into a region
occupied by the free states of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
A volatile argument over the admission of Missouri as a
slave state ensued. A New York legislator proposed an
amendment that would ban slavery altogether, and
Southerners in response threatened to dissolve the Union.
A compromise was finally reached when Missouri joined the
union as a slave state, Maine entered as a free state, and a
line along Missouri's southern border, the 36 30" line,
forbade slavery north of the area. Jefferson, in retirement,
watched the proceedings, and he commented on this
geographic line. He said that "such a line coinciding with a
marked principle moral and political, once conceived and
held up to the angry passions of men, will never be
abolished. And every new irritation," he predicted, "will mark
it deeper and deeper."
Two Economies
Northerners and Southerners saw themselves as rival,
antagonistic, incompatible sections. But in fact, culturally and
commercially they shared a great deal. Southerners enjoyed
great upward mobility, struggling to get ahead just as
Northerners did. They were a migratory people, just as
Northerners were, moving west in search of land and
opportunity. And the South also engaged in commercial
development, committing themselves early on to railroads,
turnpikes, even state banks to promote the development of
the region.

There were many, many links between North and South,

particularly economic ones. Northern merchants were the
ones who extended credit to Southern planters. It was
Northern ships that got crops to market. And the
Southerners, relying on an export economy, basically bought
Northern goods and supplied themselves with their needs.
For all the talk of Southern backwardness, if we were to
consider the South apart from the United States, it would
have ranked 4th in the world economy at the time,
behind only the Northeast, Great Britain, and Australia.
But the differences, real or perceived,
overwhelmed the affinities. The Southern
economy lagged behind that of the North. The
production of manufactured goods was largely
centered in the Northern region. The percentage of the labor
force in agriculture was increasing in the South, whereas it
was decreasing in the North. And the free states were
urbanizing and modernizing far more rapidly than the slave
states. The Southern economy may have been growing, but
it wasn't developing.
The Slave South
The greatest difference between the regions, of course, was
slavery. But we must take care not to characterize the North
as progressive on the issue of race. Even as slavery was
coming under attack, some 200,000 free blacks were losing
their rights. Tocqueville, always the acute commentator,
observed that "the prejudice of race appears to be stronger
in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where
it still exists. And nowhere is it so intolerant as in those
states where servitude has never been known."

The slave South consisted of 15 states. Of the 11 million

inhabitants in the South, 7 million were free, 4 million were
enslaved. One third of all Southern whites owned slaves,
most of them four to five bondsmen. Less than 1 percent of
the white population owned more than 50 slaves. But this
number accounted for one fourth of the nation's slaves.
These planters, while a minority in terms of population,
exercised considerable political power and control in society.
Over the course of the early nineteenth century, slavery
expanded into Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
Migration was as much a Southern obsession as Northern
moving on to fertile land, reaching out for new territories.
Cotton, in particular, becomes the obsession of
the South. It accounted for half of all American
exports, and production of cotton accelerated
from 700,000 bales in 1830 to over 5 million in
1860. Southerners exported their cotton to
England, where the factories would turn it into woven goods
and send it out into the world. Southerners truly believed that
cotton exercised power in the transatlantic economy. James
Henry Hammond of South Carolina declared, "You dare not
make war on cotton; no power on earth dares to make war
upon it. Cotton is king."
The monarchical language was suggestive of another aspect
of Southern society. The plantation South was a bastion of
patriarchal authority and power. It meant that the lives of
women were often particularly difficult and challenging,
especially in the slave-holding household. One woman
proclaimed, "It is the slaves who own me." Women were
expected to be chaste and pure, but men often took liberties
with the enslaved.
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Mary Chestnut, who kept a diary, wrote, "Ours is a

monstrous system. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the
father of all the mulatto children in every household but her
own. Those, she seems to think, dropped from the clouds."
The reputation of families mattered deeply to Southern men,
and honor was a key to Southern identity. Status in the
South was public and relational, not private and solitary.
We could talk about the difference between the South as a
culture of shame, whereas Northern evangelical culture was
increasingly driven by internalized notions of guilt. The
defense of honor meant vindication through bloodshed.
Andrew Jackson carried a bullet from a duel he had had
early in life. And a friend once told Henry Clay that he would
have rather have heard of his death than that he'd backed
down in a duel.
The myth of the plantation slave-holding South is a
persistent one, but non-slaveholders accounted for threefourths of the population. These were yeomen farmers.
Some, especially those in the western parts of the Southern
states, opposed the policies of the plantation elite.
But despite their differences, they came to the defense of the
social structure. John C. Calhoun offered an explanation as
to why. "With us," he said, "the two great divisions of society
are not rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former,
the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper
class and are respected and treated as equals."
The enslaved numbered 4 million souls. More
than 75 percent of them worked the land
cultivating cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice. About 15 percent
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served as domestic servants in households, and 10 percent

or so worked in factories and industry. The typical Southern
slaveholder may have owned several slaves, but most of the
enslaved lived on plantations with twenty or more
bondsmen.
Slave Life and Culture
Slaveholders repeatedly praised the institution
as paternalistic and proclaimed that the
enslaved were contented. But one Southern
jurist made clear the rule of law that undergirded the system. "The power of the master,"
he said, "must be absolute to render the submission of the
slave perfect."
A photograph taken during the Civil War captures the
absolute power of the master, but it also conveys the
humanity and agency of the enslaved. The man's posture
suggests pride, defiance, survival. His name was Gordon,
and he took advantage of the dislocations of war to run away
from a Mississippi plantation into Union lines. An assistant
Surgeon General took his photograph and circulated it as
evidence of the barbarity and cruelty of the slaveholding
class. The image appeared as well in Harper's Weekly
magazine, where it was used as a recruitment poster to
enlist black soldiers. In exposing himself, in allowing his
picture to be taken, Gordon pushed the cause of
emancipation.
In the campaign against slavery, words could be every bit as
potent as images. Prior to the Civil War, another runaway
slave published a book that introduced readers to the horrors
of slavery and explained the nature of slave culture. In his
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narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American

slave, the runaway recounted his journey from enslavement
in Maryland to freedom in New England. Douglass exploded
the myth of the happy, docile, deferential slave, a stereotype
that slaveholders used repeatedly to defend the institution.
He examined, for example, the meaning of slave songs. The
singing of the enslaved marked the persistence of oral West
African traditions that offered spiritual hope for salvation, not
only in the eternal life but in the temporal one as well. Some
of the songs contained coded messages. In the lyrics, "O
Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,"
singers were not just bound for heaven but for the North.
Douglass claimed to be utterly astonished to find people in
the North speak of the singing among slaves as evidence of
their contentment and their happiness. "It is impossible," he
screamed, "to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing
most when they are most unhappy." The songs of the slave,
he thought, represent the sorrows of his heart, and he is
relieved by them only as an aching heart is relieved by its
tears.
Consider another story Douglass told. Colonel Lloyd, a
wealthy slave owner, is out riding one day and comes upon a
group of slaves working. He asked one of them to whom did
he belong? "Colonel Lloyd," the slave answered. "Does the
Colonel treat you well?" "No, Sir," was the reply. A few weeks
later that slave was sold to a Georgia slave trader for having
found fault with his master. And to be sold into the Deep
South was to be sold to an area where the institution of
slavery was in its most violent and least paternalistic form.
The story helped explain to a Northern audience why it was
that slaves might act as if they were happy and contented.
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Douglass's narrative was eye opening. It revealed to an

unknowing public the nature of slavery. It explained that no
matter how docile slaves appeared, no matter how brutal
and repressive the institution, the slaves also found ways to
resist their enslavement.
Methods of Rebellion
One of the ways in which they resisted was through religion.
Slaves held their own prayer meetings and they transformed
a slaveholding religion, a religion designed to justify and
defend the institution, into one that emphasized deliverance
and redemption. Rather than scriptural texts such as, "slaves
obey thy masters," slaves embraced the story of Exodus
which told the story of the deliverance of a people from
slavery to freedom.
Slaves also resisted by maintaining family, by
struggling to preserve marriages and blood
relations in the face of terrible uncertainty. The
slaves maintained extended kin networks. They
preserved taboos against first cousin marriage,
and they stayed connected across different plantations.
Douglass recalled that his mother would travel twelve miles
at night after a long day in the fields to lie down beside her
son.
But in slavery, any family was vulnerable. Husbands and
brothers stood by helplessly as wives and sisters were
sexually assaulted. Slave owners separated loved ones from
one another and sold them to other parts of the South. The
internal slave trade relocated hundreds of thousands from
slavery in the Upper South to slavery in the Deep South.
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The strength of these family ties is indicated by the number

of slaves who after the Civil War sought out one another.
One freedman who had watched as his wife and children
were sold away remarried someone after the Civil War, but
then happened to relocate his first wife. He wrote her the
following letter. I would come and see you but I know you
could not bear it. I want to see and I don't want to see you. I
love you just as well as I did the last day I saw you, and it will
not do for you and I to meet. I am married, and if you and I
meets it would make a very dissatisfied family. Send me
some of the children's hair in a separate paper with their
names on the paper. My dear, you know the Lord knows
both of our hearts. You know it never was our wishes to be
separated from each other, and it never was our fault. I think
of you and my children every day of my life."
The letter writer's literacy was in itself a form of resistance to
the institution. Slaveholders tried to keep slaves from
learning to read and write. Douglass's master chastised his
wife for teaching the slaves the alphabet, saying it would
forever unfit him to be a slave. To be a slave was to be kept
ignorant. To be free was to be enlightened. And at night in
the slave quarters, some bondsmen struggled to read
knowing that where literacy went, freedom followed.
Oral traditions also posed a challenge to the omnipotence of
slaveholders. Slaves loved to tell stories, and in those stories
they inverted the social order. In animal trickster
tales, for example, the world is reversed. The
weak outsmart the strong. The powerless
become empowered. For example, Brer Rabbit
is trapped by a fox and he tells the fox that of all
the ways to die, he is most afraid of being thrown into the
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briar patch. The fox, unable to control its sadistic nature, of

course complies, and the rabbit cunningly escapes.
Slaves also resisted by everyday acts, such as stealing food,
breaking tools, and feigning illness. As Douglass pointed out,
these measures contributed to the racial stereotype of the
enslaved as lazy and indolent, but they served as
indispensable strategies of everyday survival.
Sometimes, slaves ran away. They took advantage of their
knowledge of the land to disappear into the swamps and
forests for days, even for weeks. Full communities known as
maroons survived for years in isolation. Running away was
usually temporary, and runaways paid for their brief escapes
with the lash. But the time outside the shadow of the
planter's house provided needed relief from the day-to-day
brutalities of the institution.
The enslaved also rebelled both individually and collectively.
It was an act of personal rebellion and violence that
Douglass placed at the heart of his narrative. He battled his
overseer one day, Mr. Covey, and he told his audience that
"you have seen how a man was made a slave, now you shall
see how a slave was made a man. The bloody fight," he
said, "was the turning point in my career as a slave. It was a
glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery to the heaven
of freedom."
Turner's Insurrection
Rebellion punctured the myth of the docile, contented slave.
In August of 1831 a Virginia slave and self-anointed Baptist
preacher named Nat Turner, who had been separated from
his wife and had religious visions of bloodshed, rose up in
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armed rebellion in Southampton County. He was yet another

manifestation of the religious impulses of the second Great
Awakening. Turner and his followers murdered some sixty
slave owners and their families. The state eventually
captured and executed the rebels, and folk legend had it that
Turner's body was skinned, his flesh fried into grease, his
bones ground into dust.
Following Turner's insurrection, slave owners became
nervous. They imagined widespread conspiracies and they
blamed Northern abolitionists for fomenting rebellion in the
South. Indeed, both regions imagined dueling conspiracies
against one another. Southerners envisioned an abolitionists'
conspiracy to end slavery, whereas Northerners were
convinced that a unified slave power was conspiring to
spread the institution throughout the land.
But Turner didn't rebel because of Northern encouragement,
and the widespread circulation of his confessions, in which
he expressed no remorse whatsoever, did little to ease
Southern anxieties. Following the rebellion, "Virginians," one
paper suggested, "could never again feel safe, never again
be happy."
Turner's insurrection led the Virginia legislature to an
unprecedented act. They debated what to do about slavery.
"There is a dark and growing evil at our doors. What is to be
done?" asked the Richmond Inquirer. Representatives,
largely from the western, non-slaveholding part of the state,
called for some form of gradual, compensated emancipation
that would remove the black presence from the land.
Slavery is Upheld

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It was Thomas Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson

Randolph, who proposed a plan that would have freed
slaves born after a certain date and provided for the removal
of all blacks from the state. The plan to abolish slavery in
Virginia was defeated. In the face of the abolitionists'
critiques from the North and slave rebellion in the South,
slaveholders rallied around the renewed defense of their way
of life. Dismissing Turner's rebellion as an aberration, "The
slaves," proclaimed one planter, "are as happy a laboring
class as exists on the habitable globe."
The south unified around slavery. Prior to the 1830s, many
Southerners depicted slavery as a necessary evil that would
die out on its own accord. But the cotton gin had rejuvenated
the institution economically, and attacks on the institution
from outside united the region. Fearful of interference on the
part of the national government, Southerners urged that
liberty, in this case the freedom to own slaves, came before
any commitment to Union.
Southern state legislators began to pass laws
that forbade the teaching of slaves how to read,
limited their movements off of the plantation,
and made manumission more difficult. John C.
Calhoun described this shift in attitudes. "Many in the South
once believed that slavery was a moral and political evil.
That folly and delusion are gone," he proclaimed. "We see it
now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable
basis for free institutions in the world."
The Charleston Mercury summarized the lesson learned
from decades of conflict: "On the subject of slavery, the
North and South are not only two peoples, they are rival,
hostile peoples." Those peoples first met in battle on the
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frontier in the 1850s. In Kansas, a territory north of the line

created by the Missouri Compromise, blood was shed, and
warfare over the status of the nation's soil, slave or free, had
begun.
Slavery and Art
The images of the era capture the complexities of slave life.
Cartoons that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic
illustrated the arguments made by pro-slavery advocates.
Slaves are depicted as happy and contented, while free
wage earners are portrayed as miserable and impoverished.
"What wretched slaves this factory life makes me and my
children," laments one sickly worker.
But daguerreotypes of actual slaves gave lie to the myth of
robust, joyful bondsmen. These images, taken in 1850, were
meant to support racial theories of a separate creation. And
while the fact of their existence demonstrates the power of
the master over the bodies of the enslaved, the gaze and
posture of these men and women suggests endurance and
shared humanity.
Some artists recorded the absolute authority possessed by
the master. "An American Slave Market" shows the sale of a
runaway slave named George. He's surrounded by loved
ones, but the well-dressed buyers tower over the slaves.
Another painting depicts women and children being
inspected and auctioned off as families are broken apart.
Those slaves sold at market were often swept South. Lewis
Miller, a Pennsylvania craftsman, happened upon a trader
marching a group of slaves from Virginia to Tennessee. He
wrote down the words of the song that they sang. "Arise,
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arise and weep no more. Dry up your tears. We shall part no

more."
But part they did, sometimes by running away, sometimes by
being sold away, and eventually by dying. John Antrobus, a
Southerner who supported the Confederacy, painted this
scene of a plantation burial: "In the woods, the slaves could
come together and worship in their own way, could share in
their travails as a community." Here the enslaved are at the
visual center of the painting, while a white couple, the
owners perhaps, stand in the shadows on the periphery, and
observe this heartfelt, human scene.
In the end, those who could rode to liberty as a
family. Eastman Johnson, a well-known portrait
painter, captured such a moment during the
Civil War, when a father, mother, child, and baby took
advantage of the chaos of battle the glint of bayonets shine
in the distance and delivered themselves to a new life.

Key Events
1819 1820

Missouri Compromise

1822

Denmark Vesey' s plot in

South Carolina discovered

1831

Nat Turner's Rebellion

Frederick Douglass'
Narrative published

1845

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1857

Fitzhugh publishes
Cannibals All!

Maps
Free States and Slave States, before the Mexican War

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