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Slavery

100

Domestic Slave Trade

The USA ended its participation in the foreign slave trade in 1808

Domestic slave trade = trade in slaves throughout the United States

Two main factors in creating the domestic slave trade:

1) Availability of a ready supply of slaves

2) Insatiable demand for slaves due to expanding plantation regions in the South

US slavery was the only slave population in the New World in which the slave population naturally reproduced itself

Cotton plantations had demand for slaves that was supplied by the domestic Slave Trade

The “Second Middle Passage” fundamentally transformed black life between 1800 and 1860.

More than 2 million slaves were sold in the US between 1820-1860.

The Domestic Slave Trade became a profitable business.

In 1860, the financial investment in slaves in the United States exceeded that of all the nation’s factories, railroads, and banks combined.

200

Gradual Emancipation

Several states in the North sought to gradually emancipate their slaves. It started in 1780

   •   Phase out slavery over time

• Through state constitutions, court cases, legislative laws
• New York as case study

1799 NY law freed all children born to slave women after July 4, 1799 (but not immediately). 

1799 NY law freed all children born to slave women after July 4, 1799 (but not immediately). 

Males freed at 28, females at 25.

Slaves who were born before 1799 remained slaves for all their lives.

• slaves born before 1799 remained slaves for the remainder of their lives
• Many slaveowners feared that if they freed the slaves, they would rebel against the whites.

300

Cotton Revolution

Rise of the Cotton Kingdom created a momentous transformation in the United States. Cotton became the driving force in expanding and transforming the economy not only of the south, but of the US as a whole – and even the world. While growing of cotton came to dominate economic life in the Lower South, the manufacture of cotton textiles was fueling the industrial revolution on both sides of the atlantic. Most of exported American cotton went to Britain’s textile mills. Cotton became America’s leading stale, and the product of the cotton plantations enabled the country to pay interest on its foreign debt and continue to import more capital to invest in transportation and industry.

400

Abolitionism

Abolitionism = a trans-Atlantic movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free.

During the 1830s – 1850s, abolitionism gained a growing audience of sympathetic ears

Some abolitionists became more radical in their demands by the 1830s. (Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips)

Women were active in several reform movements in the nineteenth century, including abolitionism (Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Harriet Tubman)

Abolitionist parties (The American Anti-Slavery Society founded in 1833, Liberty Party)

500

Fugitive Slave Act 

1850

Required federal judicial officials (even in free states) to actively assist with return of escaped slaves

Any federal marshall or other official who didn’t arrest an alleged runaway slave was liable to a fine of $1000

Ordinary citizens of free states could be summoned to join a posse and be required to assist in the capture of an alleged escaped slave.

Fugitive Slave Act sparked a strong reaction in the North

Social "Ills"

100

Seneca Falls

Two-day gathering in 1848 on behalf of women’s rights. 

Raised the issue of woman’s suffrage

300 attendees

Passed a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments

200

Great Second Awakening

Series of popular religious revivals in America that peaked in the 1820s and early 1830s

It reached millions of Americans. Especially African Americans, women, and the poor

Baptist & Methodist churches grew

Mormon church founded

Because the 2GA celebrated self-improvement and self-reliance, many Americans started to believe that insufficient self-control caused the major social problems of the era.

Led to the popularity of various reform movements of the nineteenth century

300

Manifest Density

Manifest Destiny : justification for US westward expansion; the idea that Americans had a divine mission to settle the continent.

Often invoked in the 1840s.

By the 1840s, white Americans controlled almost all the lands east of the Mississippi

Democratic politicians saw westward expansion as a remedy for the nation’s problems

Meanwhile, Whig politicians worried that westward expansion would lead to sectional tensions

Especially with regard to slavery

400

Utopian Communities

~100 communities sprang up between 1800-1865

Wanted to re-organize society

Used small communities as models

~100 communities sprang up between 1800-1865

Wanted to re-organize society

Used small communities as models

500

Popular sovereignty

It means the idea that settlers in territories should decide the slavery issue for themselves.

Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 relied on popular sovereignty

It was a middle ground in the issue of slavery

Change is coming

100

Liberia

• American Colonization Society (1816) helped to found the colony of Liberia in 1821-22 as a place for these freedmen to settle in.
• Between 1821-1860s, thousands of former slaves and free black people moved to Liberia from the US
• Unfortunately, disease was rampant and most of the migrants died quickly
• Liberia declared independence from the US in 1847.

200

Dred Scott

• 1857 Supreme Court case that made sectional differences worse
• Born a slave in Virginia
• Accompanied his owner to free states and territories before going to Missouri
• Sued for his freedom
• Argued that residence in free lands had made him free
• Dred Scott decision further polarized Americans
• Northerners thought it was part of a Slave Power plot
• Southerners supported the Court’s decision

300

Wilmot Proviso

In 1846, Congressman Wilmot proposed a resolution prohibiting slavery from all territories acquired from Mexico

“The Wilmot Proviso”

Northerners supported it, Southerners opposed it.  

1846 newspaper said the Wilmot Proviso “as if by magic, brought to a head the     great question that is about to divide            the American people.”

400

Free Labor Ideology

• Ideology at the heart of the early Republican party
• Concept was based in the idea that free labor was economically and socially superior to slave labor
• The belief that northern economic, political, and social customs and institutions were fundamental to a republic, and that a moral, civilized society could not be based on slavery.
• And that Northern society was superior because it provided wage earners with the possibility of someday owning their own land (independence)

500

The Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. It changed the federal legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the designated areas of the South from slave to free.

Nothing Civil About Civics

100

Compromise of 1850

Designed by Henry Clay

California enters Union as a free state

New strict law allows southern slaveowners to regain their runaway slaves

Issue of slavery left up to individual territories

200

Mexican American War

Polk was planning for war with Mexico by early 1846

In April 1846, US and Mexican soldiers clashed in the disputed borderland between Texas and Mexico

First US war on foreign soil.

1846, American rebels in California declare independence from Mexico

1847 American troops occupy Mexico City, the capital.

300

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Introduced by Stephen Douglass – Democratic Senator for Illinois.

• Proponent of popular sovereignty
• Created the territories of Kansas & Nebraska
• Reopened the question of expanding slavery with his Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854
• Proposed that any state that would emerge from KN&NE territory would use popular sovereignty to determine slavery issue.
• Passed, but shattered both Democratic Party unity and the Whig party

400

Republican party

• Coalition of antislavery Democrats, northern Whigs, Free Soilers, and Know-Nothings who are opposed to the expansion of slavery.
• At first, called the ‘Anti-Kansas party’
• Hundreds of local meetings held in the summer of 1854 to discuss the Kansas-Nebraska Act
• The Republican Party was born in 1854, in Ripon, Wisconsin, when fifty-four citizens founded a party to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threatened to create two new slave states.

500

Election of 1860

Democratic Convention of 1860

Southerners calling for the Democratic candidate to promise to protect slavery in all remaining territories. Front-runner was Senator Stephen Douglas. During 1858 Douglas-Lincoln debates, Douglas had refused to support imposing slavery on all remaining territories. Douglas didn’t get Democratic nomination.

Ended in a schism of the Democratic party. Which also foreshadowed the schism of the Union in the next year. John C. Breckenridge promises to protect slavery in all territories; gets Southern Dem nomination.