19th Century Slavery Essay

1. Why did the nineteenth-century southern economy remain primarily agricultural? (pp. 330-36) Slaves made it possible for the people in the southern warm climate areas to make a profitable living off the land. Plantation owners were able to maintain the slave labor, which kept their costs down. Planters kept investing in cotton and slaves. The cotton grown by the planters in the south was the largest exporting crop at the time. The planters were getting rich off of their cotton crops. Having slave labor in the south kept immigrants from coming there because there was no money in labor.
2. Why did the ideology of paternalism gain currency among planters in the nineteenth century? (pp. 336-39) For the slave owner it made what they did, own and mistreat slaves, seem as though they were doing the slaves a courtesy. All it really
What types of resistance did slaves participate in, and why did slave resistance rarely take the form of rebellion? (pp. 339-44) Slaves showed resistance in different ways. Telling stories among themselves of victory against slave owners, breaking tools, adding stones for weight to their bags of cotton, pretending to be sick, and running away were all forms of resistance. A rebellion was rare because of whites out numbered the slaves and little protection from the land for the slave to hide.
4. Why did the lives of plantation-belt yeomen and upcountry yeomen diverge? (pp. 344-47) The upcountry yeomen resisted slavery and plantation. The plantation-belt yeoman were tied to the planters because they could not afford cotton gins or bailing presses and had no link to merchants.
5. Why did many state legislatures pass laws restricting free blacks’ rights in the 1820’s and 1830’s? (pp. 347-49) The southern people were afraid of the number of free blacks already in the south. Laws were made to make sure the number of free laves didn’t increase cause a rebellion. They wanted slaves to work the cotton fields, not more free blacks in the