chapter 11 history notes

• King Cotton


  A term for the Lower South used to describe the boom of cotton production and slavery in the Lower South around 1860
• Southern Belle


  A popular portrayal of wealthy southern women who were highly educated beautiful women with little worries. This portrayal was entirely wrong as most women in the South had less access to education as opposed to the North, and most women in the south with a good education were trained to be good wives, and since they lived on farms with little access to the public, they didn't look far beyond their roles as wives, mothers, and farmworkers.
• Nat Turner


  On a summer night in 1831, Nat Turner an enslaved preacher, led a band of enslaved and free black people armed with guns and axes from house to house in Southhampton County, Virginia. They killed sixty white men, women, and children before being overpowered by state and federal troops. More than a hundred blacks were executed in the aftermath.
• Harriet Tubman


  Was born into slavery in Maryland. In 1849 the man who enslaved her died and she escaped to Philadelphia to avoid being sold out of state. Over the next ten years she assisted first members of her own family and then up to 300 other enslaved men and women escape from Maryland to freedom.
• In the South, the agricultural economy was booming, and many entrepreneurs and capitalists didn't need to look elsewhere, It was also clear that wealthy Southerners had so much capital invested in land and enslaved people that they had little money left for other investments
• The South's resistance to transforming its economy was above all tied to a culture that blindly celebrated the wealth and profit wrung from the labor of enslaved people.
• Southern planters and intellectuals fed themselves lies seeing slavery as a kindness in which they were well cared for, and even loved. They and other white Southerners saw black people as too dumb, passionate, and dangerous to live in freedom. They also believed that white liberty and freedom depended on black enslavement.
• We see many supporters of slavery present in Southern politics. Because of this, it made it nearly impossible for anyone who disagreed with them to be elected or have their voices heard in public.
• Slavery shaped the lives of white women in many important ways, the rich were usually gifted slaves at a young age or birth, while those who could not afford enslaved workers still wished to have them and rented them at times. Due to male slaveholders often raping enslaved women, the children that came from this forced white woman to confront the extreme violence and suffering that affected both the enslaved and themselves.
• In the South slavery shaped everyday life, it stuck white and black people together in a violent, and inhumane relationship that only created hatred, distrust, and resentment between the two races.
• Enslaved blacks throughout the South developed their own versions of Christianity, at times incorporating voodoo or other polytheistic (worshiping more than one god) religious traditions of Africa. Much of black American religion reflected influences of African customs and practices, and generally black religion was more joyful and affirming than white denominations. In their religion many black people also emphasized freedom, and gods power to "deliver them home" from slavery; whites took this language as life after death. Black people used Christian salvation as a means to express their own hopes for freedom in the present world.