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As slavery began to displace indentured servitude as the principal supply of labor in the plantation systems of the South, the economic nature of the institution of slavery aided in the increased inequality of wealth seen in the antebellum South. The demand for slave labor and the U.S. ban on importing more slaves from Africa drove up prices ...
Even more perhaps than Uncle Tom's Cabin, it fed the fires of sectional controversy leading up to the Civil War; for it had the distinction of being the only book in American history to become the center of bitter and prolonged Congressional debate". [2]: 542 [note 1] In the Northern United States, it became "the book against slavery."
In American Slavery, the historian Peter Kolchin suggests that the economists did not fully consider the costs of the forced migration of more than one million slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South, where they were sold to cotton plantations. [6]: 97 He wrote that the book was a "flash in the pan, a bold but now discredited work."
Not that slavery was a good thing, mind you—but still, it probably hurt the Negroes less than it did the whites. Indeed, the whites were really more enslaved than were the Negro slaves" (429). Stampp likens this claim to pro-slavery arguments before the Civil War, which were "based on some obscure and baffling logic" (429).
The North and the South was one of several examples of the pro-slavery plantation literature genre that emerged from the Southern United States in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which was criticised in the South as inaccurately depicting the workings of slavery and the attitudes of plantation owners towards their slaves.
The number and proportion of freed slaves in these states rose dramatically until 1810. More than half of the number of free blacks in the United States were concentrated in the Upper South. The proportion of free blacks among the black population in the Upper South rose from less than 1 percent in 1792 to more than 10 percent by 1810. [101]
African slaves were sent to the South during the slave trade. Slavery in the United States was primarily located in the American South. By 1850, about 3.2 million African slaves labored in the United States, 1.8 million of whom worked in the cotton fields. Black slaves in the South faced arbitrary power abuses from white people.
The politics and economy of the South were historically dominated by a small rural elite. [10] When looked at broadly, studies have shown that Southerners tend to be more conservative than most non-Southerners, with liberalism being mostly predominant in places with a Black majority or urban areas in the South.