The Cotton Economy and Expansion of Slavery
- The invention of the cotton gin (1793) by Eli Whitney revolutionized Southern agriculture, making cotton the most profitable export and dramatically increasing the demand for enslaved labor.
- By the mid-19th century, the “Cotton Kingdom” stretched across the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas), supplying over half of the world’s cotton and linking the U.S. economy to global trade networks.
- The cotton economy entrenched slavery as a social and economic system, creating a wealthy planter elite while keeping millions of enslaved African Americans in forced labor.
Conditions of Enslavement
- Life for enslaved people was marked by harsh discipline, family separation, long working hours, and physical violence. On plantations, they labored from sunrise to sunset under overseers who enforced productivity through punishment.
- Despite brutal conditions, enslaved communities created strong family ties, oral traditions, spirituals, and religious practices that blended African and Christian elements, helping them preserve identity and resilience.
Adaptation and Resistance
- Enslaved people resisted slavery in both subtle and overt ways i.e working slowly, breaking tools, maintaining cultural practices, and in some cases, running away via the Underground Railroad.
- Armed revolts, such as Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) in Virginia, terrified white Southerners and led to harsher slave codes, but they also exposed the moral and political contradictions of slavery in a republic founded on liberty.
Definition
Underground Railroad
A secret network of routes and safe houses used by enslaved African Americans in the nineteenth century to escape from the South to freedom in the North or Canada, aided by abolitionists.
The Abolitionist Debate
- Abolitionists in the North, like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used speeches, newspapers (The Liberator), and novels (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852) to expose the cruelty of slavery and rally public opinion against it.
