Chapter Overview

As the southern region of the United States expanded westward across the Mississippi River, slavery was compelled to follow. The northern states had virtually eliminated slavery by 1820, and the nation was becoming polarized by the necessity of slavery to drive an agrarian Southern economy versus a larger, critical world in which slavery was seen as immoral and primitive. In this South of the early nineteenth century, slaves worked at brutal labors, producing a host of cash crops of which cotton was king. Slavery grew to its most oppressive heights as more and more land was given over to cotton production during westward expansion. But these enslaved African Americans were always more than mere chattel property and expressed their individuality in thousands of ways through societal organization, resistance, inward culturalism, and attempts at escape.

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter you should understand the following:

• The idea of an American domestic slave trade after the international slave trade ground to a halt
• That the African slave trade was not entirely halted by national legislation; an underground market for fresh slaves was always present
• The gradual restriction of human rights applied to African Americans through state and local legislations called "slave codes"
• The antebellum reality of the southern agrarian plantation and how it functioned almost entirely on the backs of slave labor
• The plight of slaves in urban areas or of those with non-agricultural "occupations"
• The social and cultural context of life as a slave in the antebellum South
• Examples of slave resistance and their outcomes