Though slavery had such a wide variety of faces, the underlying concepts were always the same. Slaves were considered property, and they were property because they were black. Their status as property was enforced by violence -- actual or threatened. People, black and white, lived together within these parameters, and their lives together took many forms. Enslaved African Americans could never forget their status as property, no matter how well their owners treated them.
But it would be too simplistic to say that all masters and slaves hated each other. Human beings who live and work together are bound to form relationships of some kind, and some masters and slaves genuinely cared for each other. But the caring was tempered and limited by the power imbalance under which it grew. Within the narrow confines of slavery, human relationships ran the gamut from compassionate to contemptuous.
But the masters and slaves never approached equality. The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with hundreds of slaves. In fact, such situations were rare. Whites who did not own slaves were primarily yeoman farmers.
Practically speaking, the institution of slavery did not help these people. And yet most non-slaveholding white Southerners identified with and defended the institution of slavery. Though many resented the wealth and power of the large slaveholders, they aspired to own slaves themselves and to join the priviledged ranks. In addition, slavery gave the farmers a group of people to feel superior to.
They may have been poor, but they were not slaves, and they were not black. They gained a sense of power simply by being white. In the lower South the majority of slaves lived and worked on cotton plantations. Most of these plantations had fifty or fewer slaves, although the largest plantations have several hundred. Cotton was by far the leading cash crop, but slaves also raised rice, corn, sugarcane, and tobacco. Many plantations raised several different kinds of crops. Besides planting and harvesting, there were numerous other types of labor required on plantations and farms.
Enslaved people had to clear new land, dig ditches, cut and haul wood, slaughter livestock, and make repairs to buildings and tools. In many instances, they worked as mechanics, blacksmiths, drivers, carpenters, and in other skilled trades.
Black women carried the additional burden of caring for their families by cooking and taking care of the children, as well as spinning, weaving, and sewing. Some slaves worked as domestics, providing services for the master's or overseer's families. These people were designated as "house servants," and though their work appeared to be easier than that of the "field slaves," in some ways it was not.
They were constantly under the scrutiny of their masters and mistresses, and could be called on for service at any time. The colonial system also offered more lenient punishment for disobedient servants than enslaved people, and allowed servants to petition for early release if their masters mistreated them. As James W. At the time, however, Southerners had no problem claiming the protection of slavery as the cause of their break with the Union. The census shows that in the states that would soon secede from the Union, an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned enslaved people.
Some states had far more slave owners 46 percent of families in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi while some had far less 20 percent of families in Arkansas. In addition, the essential ideology of white supremacy that served as a rationale for slavery, made it extremely difficult—and terrifying—for white Southerners to imagine life alongside a Black majority population that was not in bondage.
In this way, many Confederates who did not enslave people went to war to protect not only slavery, but to preserve the foundation of the only way of life they knew. On the Northern side, the rose-colored myth of the Civil War is that the blue-clad Union soldiers and their brave, doomed leader, Abraham Lincoln, were fighting to free enslaved people. The plantation legend was misleading in still other respects. Slavery was neither dying nor unprofitable. In the South was richer than any country in Europe except England, and it had achieved a level of wealth unmatched by Italy or Spain until the eve of World War II.
The southern economy generated enormous wealth and was critical to the economic growth of the entire United States. Well over half of the richest 1 percent of Americans in lived in the South. Even more important, southern agriculture helped finance early 19th century American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in agricultural production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the southern states, including textile and meat processing industries and financial and commercial facilities.
Previous Next. Digital History. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent.
That contrasted starkly with the Thus, volunteers in were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population. The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful. One in every ten volunteers in did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two recruits lived with slaveholders.
Nor did the direct exposure stop there. Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of had a direct connection to slavery. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation. The fact that their paper notes frequently depicted scenes of slaves demonstrated the institution's central role and symbolic value to the Confederacy.
More than half the officers in owned slaves, and none of them lived with family members who were slaveholders. By comparison, only one in twelve enlisted men owned slaves, but when those who lived with family slave owners were included, the ratio exceeded one in three. That was 40 percent above the tally for all households in the Old South.
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