Cotton Economy
Invented in 1793, this machine separated cotton fiber from seeds much faster than hand labor.
What is the cotton gin?
This system legally treated enslaved people as property that could be bought or sold.
What is chattel slavery?
This word describes the period before the Civil War.
What is antebellum?
This Republican won the 1860 presidential election without carrying the Deep South.
Who is Abraham Lincoln?
The period before a war, especially the years before the American Civil War.
What is antebellum?
This doctor developed the Mexican-Petit Gulf cotton variety that grew well in Mississippi.
Who is Dr. Rush Nutt?
This hired plantation employee managed labor and enforced discipline.
What is an overseer?
Many white Mississippians associated wealth and prestige with owning this type of large agricultural estate.
What is a plantation?
Mississippi formally left the Union in this month and year.
What is January 1861?
A crop grown mainly for sale and profit rather than for family use.
What is a cash crop?
By the 1850s, cotton had replaced these three crops as Mississippi's chief crop.
What are tobacco, indigo, and hemp?
This enslaved worker was forced to supervise the labor of other enslaved people.
What is a driver?
This worship gathering gave enslaved people space for prayer, music, and independent spiritual expression.
What is a praise meeting?
Southern leaders used this doctrine of state power to defend local control over slavery.
What are states' rights?
A private school offering education beyond the basic level during the antebellum era.
What is an academy?
This person brought Mexican cotton seed to Mississippi before Dr. Rush Nutt improved it.
Who is Walter Burling?
These laws restricted movement, education, assembly, testimony, and other rights of enslaved people.
What are slave codes?
These two institutions opened in 1821 and 1848, respectively.
What are Franklin Academy and the University of Mississippi?
Life and liberty were commonly identified as examples of these rights held from birth.
What are natural rights?
A surveyed block of land divided into thirty-six sections.
What is a township?
This name described the Southern region where cotton dominated the economy, land use, and labor system.
What is the Cotton Kingdom?
Enslaved people often needed this written document to travel away from a plantation.
What is a written pass?
Money from this square-mile part of each township helped support local public schools.
What are sixteenth section funds?
This candidate represented the Southern Democrats in the election of 1860.
Who is John C. Breckinridge?
The legal act of freeing an enslaved person.
What is emancipation?
This skilled enslaved mechanic built a working cotton-gin model in Natchez from a drawing and description.
Who is Barclay?
In order, these were the three changing white Mississippi arguments used to describe slavery.
What are an evil, a necessary evil, and a positive good?
This organization encouraged free Black Americans to migrate to Liberia.
What is the American Colonization Society?
This political party opposed extending slavery into the western territories.
What is the Republican Party?
A square-mile unit of land created by the federal township survey system.
What is a section?
Rather than ending slavery, faster cotton processing produced this major labor effect.
What is increased demand for enslaved field labor?
By this year, enslaved people outnumbered white residents in Mississippi.
What is 1840?
This 1842 Mississippi law restricted new free Black migration and made emancipation more difficult.
What is the 1842 law restricting free Black people and emancipation?
The possible admission of each western state threatened to change this in Congress.
What is the political balance between free and slave states?
Basic rights believed to belong to every person from birth, including life and liberty.
What are natural rights?
These two developments worked together because the new cotton variety processed efficiently with the new machine.
What are Mexican-Petit Gulf seed and the cotton gin?
These three broad labor groups performed agricultural work, household work, and trades or service jobs.
What are field laborers, house laborers, and town laborers?
This free Black Natchez resident became a successful businessman despite increasing legal restrictions.
Who is William Johnson?
These three public forces shaped sectional opinion and made compromise more difficult.
What are churches, newspapers, and politicians?
The official document Mississippi adopted in January 1861 to leave the Union.
What is the Ordinance of Secession?
Cotton profits concentrated these two forms of power among large planters, even though they were a small minority.
What are wealth and political influence?
Despite different work assignments, all enslaved workers faced these three basic threats.
What are ownership and forced labor, punishment, and the threat of sale or family separation?
These cultural practices helped enslaved communities preserve knowledge, faith, identity, and hope.
What are oral traditions, spirituals, praise meetings, family ties, and community support networks?
Complete the cause-and-effect chain: cotton expansion increased dependence on slavery; leaders defended slavery through states' rights; then this election result helped trigger Mississippi's secession.
What is Abraham Lincoln's victory in the election of 1860?
This term means formally withdrawing from a political union, unlike states' rights, which argues that states retain protected powers.
What is secession?