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Cultural Source - (Part 1) African American Folktale

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Cultural Source - (Part 1) African American Folktale

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African American folktale, storytelling tradition that evolved among enslaved African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries.

When slaves arrived in the New World from Africa in the 1700s and 1800s, they brought with them a vast oral tradition. The details and characters of the stories evolved over time in the Americas, though many of the motifs endured. The African hare, for example, continued to play the trickster but became Brer Rabbit (or Bruh Rabbit). The African jackal became the American fox. And the African tortoise became a turtle or terrapin. Even with modifications, however, those tales carried from Africa retained a distinctive flavour.

African traditions

Most slaveholders forcibly suppressed the languages, customs, and cultures of the individuals they enslaved. Black slaves often turned to singing and storytelling as a means of expression, as they had traditionally done in Africa. Their nightly entertainment included tales about the world's creation, heroic deeds, and magic. Those stories took the form of parables, which conveyed ideals, morals, and cultural values to the listener.

One type of African American folktale explains why animals look or act the way they do. Common in other cultures as well, those tales-such as "Why the Lizard Often Nods" and "Why the Owl Never Sleeps at Night" are often amusing and attempt to explain common animal behaviour.

Another type, the "how-and-why" story, is filled with hidden messages and offers moral guidance. "Tappin, the Land Turtle," for instance, includes references to the brutality of slavery and explains how hope and humour make the circumstance more bearable. Other how-and-why tales include "Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men" and "Why the Sister in Black Works Hardest."

The purpose of folktales

The oral tradition kept African folktales alive. Storytelling of that type shares several features with oral traditions around the world. It is typically performed in a particular place, at a particular time, and uses a special language; despite those rules, it employs flexible patterns and structures that aid composition, memory, and re-performance. The audience often participates in the performance as well.

For African Americans, the telling of folktales not only enabled the preservation and dissemination of African culture, but it gave some respite from the unbearable hardships of slavery, if only briefly. The storytelling tradition also encouraged a sense of community in being one of few activities that were not controlled by their white owners. Slaves sometimes used folktales to pass coded information about meeting places or escape plans to one another. This theme of outsmarting the slaveholder is reflected in many folktales, such as "The Riddle Tell of Freedom."

Characters and symbolism

Although folktales reflected the uncertainties of life for enslaved African Americans, they also provided a message of stability and assurance. The mother image found in some tales, for example, represents tenderness and goodness, while the child-hero is a symbol of purity and innocence. The smaller, less-powerful creatures, such as Brer Rabbit, always outsmart the larger, stronger characters, such as Brer Fox and Brer Bear. Students of the folktale generally hold that outcome as representative of the slaves' desire to outwit their stronger, more-powerful owners. In the brutal world of the slaves, these images meant a great deal.

After the abolition of slavery in 1865, the Brer Rabbit character became John, a trickster who worked on a Southern plantation and never failed to outwit the "old master." Little evidence exists to prove that the John tales were told during the era of slavery. Students of those stories hold that they are representative of the relationship between the free Black, who is free only in name, and the former slaveholder.

Unlike the John stories, the animal tales do not draw a clear distinction between just and unjust antagonists. They do, however, refute the romantic myth of the plantation that originated in the 1830s and is popularly represented in the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind. On the mythic Southern plantation, virtue, honour, pride, and benevolence determine status. Conversely, in the humanlike society represented in the animal tales, status is based on power, and winning is all that matters.

Folktales in print

Slave folktales continue to be an important part of not only African American literature but also American literature in general. They were first written down in the late 19th century but became widely available only when journalist Joel Chandler Harris published Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-lore of the Old Plantation (1880). Harris's popular book both preserved a significant collection of oral tales-though, like so many narratives of that era, its use of dialect is painful to the modern reader-and introduced many Euro-Americans to the stories of a hitherto unknown culture.

Harris's collection presents a fictional plantation slave, Uncle Remus, as the book's narrator, who recounts to a seven-year-old white boy the meaning behind the various antics of various humanlike animals. In his story "Tar-Baby" (1879), first published in The Atlanta Constitution, Harris launched Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, the first of a larger group of animal characters that were to populate the pages of Uncle Remus and later books. Brer Fox secretly constructs a tar creature in order to catch Brer Rabbit. Then he hides to watch what happens. Tar-Baby, not surprisingly, does not respond to Brer Rabbit's civilities. The story proceeds as follows:

Brer Rabbit keep on axin' 'im, en de Tar-Baby, she keep on sayin' nuthin', twel present'y Brer Rabbit draw back wid his fis', he did, en blip he tuck 'er side er de head. Right dar's whar he broke his merlasses jug. His fis' stuck, en he can't pull loose. De tar hilt 'im. But Tar-Baby, she stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low.

"Ef you don't lemme loose, I'll knock you agin," sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, en wid dat he fotch 'er a wipe wid de udder han', en dat stuck. Tar-Baby, she ain't sayin' nuthin', en Brer Fox, he lay low.

"Tu'n me loose, fo' I kick de natal stuffin' outen you," sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she ain't sayin' nuthin'. She des hilt on, en den Brer Rabbit lose de use er his feet in de same way. Brer Fox, he lay low. Den Brer Rabbit squall out dat ef de Tar-Baby don't tu'n 'im loose he butt 'er cranksided. En den he butted, en his head got stuck. Den Brer Fox, he sa'ntered fort', lookin' des ez innercent ez wunner yo' mammy's mockin'-birds.

"Howdy, Brer Rabbit," sez Brer Fox, sezee. "You look sorter stuck up dis mawnin'," sezee, en den he rolled on de groun', en laft en laft twel he couldn't laff no mo'.

Many story collectors since Harris have published more-readable, often more-authentic, renditions of African American folktales. One notable collector of African American folktales was cultural anthropologist and folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons, who in the 1910s and '20s traveled to the Bahamas, to the Sea Islands, off the coast of the southeastern United States, and elsewhere to collect stories and study their origins. A collection titled Mules and Men (1935) by African American author Zora Neale Hurston may serve as a counterpoint to Harris's Uncle Remus collection in its attempt to share the stories from the perspective of an insider.

Courtesy of James Parsons

David Cunningham

Learn More in these related Britannica articles:

African American folktale

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African American folktale, storytelling tradition that evolved among enslaved African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. When slaves arrived in the New World from Africa in the 1700s and 1800s, they brought with them a vast oral tradition. The details and characters of the stories evolved

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Social source (Part 1) - Antebellum slavery (Conditions)

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Social source (Part 1) - Antebellum slavery (Conditions)

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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…

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At the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, African religious beliefs and practices were numerous and varied. In addition to a wide variety of polytheistic religions, a significant portion of the continent had for centuries fallen under Islamic influence. Despite this diversity, there were some common threads across cultural groups. For instance, West African societies, the largest source for American slaves, shared a belief in a Supreme Creator, a chief deity among lesser gods, to whom they prayed and made sacrifices. Through laws and customs honoring the gods, the ancestors of one's people, and the elderly, West Africans sought a harmonious balance between the natural and spiritual worlds. Further, they made music and dance vital components of their worship practices. Enslaved men and women kept the rites, rituals, and cosmologies of Africa alive in America through stories, healing arts, song, and other forms of cultural expression, creating a spiritual space apart from the white European world.

Africans and African descendents working in the early modern Atlantic commercial system were exposed to the world of European Christianity as early as the fifteenth century, when Portuguese missionaries came to the coasts of Africa. Some slaves, therefore, brought Christian beliefs with them when they were thrust into slavery. Others converted in America. During the seventeenth century blacks in the Dutch New Netherlands and Spanish Florida baptized their children and were married by the church. In part, this participation in the dominant European religion reflected (and helped to bring about) a colonial society in which blacks were more fully integrated and enjoyed greater rights than later generations of slaves would. However, slaves also saw conversion to Christianity as a road to freedom. In the early years of settlement, for instance, fugitive slaves from South Carolina, headed for Florida, where the Spanish Crown promised them freedom as a reward for conversion. Slaveholders in the British North American colonies became increasingly fearful that Christianization of slaves would lead to demands for emancipation. In 1667 Virginia passed a law declaring that conversion did not change the status of a person from slave to free. Other colonies passed similar laws during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

During the early eighteenth century Anglican missionaries attempting to bring Christianity to slaves in the Southern colonies often found themselves butting up against not only uncooperative masters, but also resistant slaves. An unquestionable obstacle to the acceptance of Christianity among slaves was their desire to continue to adhere as much as possible to the religious beliefs and rituals of their African ancestors. Missionaries working in the South were especially displeased with slave retention of African practices such as polygamy and what they called idolatrous dancing. In fact, even blacks who embraced Christianity in America did not completely abandon Old World religion. Instead, they engaged in syncretism, blending Christian influences with traditional African rites and beliefs. Symbols and objects, such as crosses, were conflated with charms carried by Africans to ward off evil spirits. Christ was interpreted as a healer similar to the priests of Africa. In the New World, fusions of African spirituality and Christianity led to distinct new practices among slave populations, including voodoo or vodun in Haiti and Spanish Louisiana. Although African religious influences were also important among Northern blacks, exposure to Old World religions was more intense in the South, where the density of the black population was greater.

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Slavery and the Making of America . The Slave Experience: Religion | PBS

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At the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, African religious beliefs and practices were numerous and varied. In addition to a wide variety of polytheistic religions, a significant portion of the continent had for centuries fallen under Islamic influence. Despite this diversity, there were some common threads across cultural groups.

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The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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Its beautiful bolls,
And bales of rich value, the Master controls.
Of "mud-stills" he prates, and would haughtily bring
The world to acknowledge that "Cotton is King." -The Gospel of Slavery, by "Iron Gray," [Abel C. Thomas] 1864.
The most commonly used phrase describing the growth of the American economy in the 1830s and 1840s was "Cotton Is King." We think of this slogan today as describing the plantation economy of the slavery states in the Deep South, which led to the creation of "the second Middle Passage." But it is important to understand that this was not simply a Southern phenomenon. Cotton was one of the world's first luxury commodities, after sugar and tobacco, and was also the commodity whose production most dramatically turned millions of black human beings in the United States themselves into commodities. Cotton became the first mass consumer commodity.

Understanding both how extraordinarily profitable cotton was and how interconnected and overlapping were the economies of the cotton plantation, the Northern banking industry, New England textile factories and a huge proportion of the economy of Great Britain helps us to understand why it was something of a miracle that slavery was finally abolished in this country at all.

Let me try to break this down quickly, since it is so fascinating:

Let's start with the value of the slave population. Steven Deyle shows that in 1860, the value of the slaves was "roughly three times greater than the total amount invested in banks," and it was "equal to about seven times the total value of all currency in circulation in the country, three times the value of the entire livestock population, twelve times the value of the entire U.S. cotton crop and forty-eight times the total expenditure of the federal government that year." As mentioned here in a previous column, the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased the productivity of cotton harvesting by slaves. This resulted in dramatically higher profits for planters, which in turn led to a seemingly insatiable increase in the demand for more slaves, in a savage, brutal and vicious cycle.

Now, the value of cotton: Slave-produced cotton " brought commercial ascendancy to New York City, was the driving force for territorial expansion in the Old Southwest and fostered trade between Europe and the United States," according to Gene Dattel. In fact, cotton productivity, no doubt due to the sharecropping system that replaced slavery, remained central to the American economy for a very long time: "Cotton was the leading American export from 1803 to 1937."

What did cotton production and slavery have to do with Great Britain? The figures are astonishing. As Dattel explains: "Britain, the most powerful nation in the world, relied on slave-produced American cotton for over 80 per cent of its essential industrial raw material. English textile mills accounted for 40 percent of Britain's exports. One-fifth of Britain's twenty-two million people were directly or indirectly involved with cotton textiles."

And, finally, New England? As Ronald Bailey shows, cotton fed the textile revolution in the United States. "In 1860, for example, New England had 52 percent of the manufacturing establishments and 75 percent of the 5.14 million spindles in operation," he explains. The same goes for looms. In fact, Massachusetts "alone had 30 percent of all spindles, and Rhode Island another 18 percent." Most impressively of all, "New England mills consumed 283.7 million pounds of cotton, or 67 percent of the 422.6 million pounds of cotton used by U.S. mills in 1860." In other words, on the eve of the Civil War, New England's economy, so fundamentally dependent upon the textile industry, was inextricably intertwined, as Bailey puts it, "to the labor of black people working as slaves in the U.S. South."

If there was one ultimate cause of the Civil War, it was King Cotton - black-slave-grown cotton - "the most important determinant of American history in the nineteenth century," Dattel concludes. "Cotton prolonged America's most serious social tragedy, slavery, and slave-produced cotton caused the American Civil War." And that is why it was something of a miracle that even the New England states joined the war to end slavery.

Once we understand the paramount economic importance of cotton to the economies of the United States and Great Britain, we can begin to appreciate the enormity of the achievements of the black and white abolitionists who managed to marshal moral support for the abolition of slavery, as well as those half a million slaves who "marched with their feet" and fled to Union lines as soon as they could following the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.

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The Role Cotton Played in the 1800s Economy | African American History Blog | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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Its beautiful bolls, And bales of rich value, the Master controls. Of "mud-stills" he prates, and would haughtily bring The world to acknowledge that "Cotton is King." -The Gospel of Slavery, by "Iron Gray," [Abel C. Thomas] 1864. The most commonly used phrase describing the growth of the American economy in the 1830s and 1840s was "Cotton Is King."

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John and Priscilla Hemmings were described with fondness in family letters by Jefferson's grandchildren. These letters tell of Hemmings making toys and furniture for Jefferson's family, and complicated terms like "Daddy" and "Mammy" were used by the Jefferson and Randolph families for both Hemmings and his wife.

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Economic source (Part 2) - Modern Voice on Slavery

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Economic source (Part 2) - Modern Voice on Slavery

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Africans in America/Part 4/Eric Foner on slavery

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Just to give you a couple of examples, cotton was by far the major export crop of the United States. It dwarfed anything else produced by the United States and sold abroad. In other words, it was the major earner of foreign exchange, of foreign money for this developing country. And the cotton wa…

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Cultural Source - (Part 2) Music in Slave Life

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Cultural Source - (Part 2) Music in Slave Life

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Slavery and the Making of America . The Slave Experience: Education, Arts, & Culture | PBS

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Today, slave music is usually grouped in three major categories: Religious, Work, and "Recreational" songs. Each type adapted elements of African and European musical traditions and shaped the development of a wide range of music, including gospel, jazz, and blues.

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As late as 1800 most slaves in the U.S. had not been converted to Christianity. In the years that followed, however, widespread Protestant Evangelicalism, emphasizing individual freedom and direct communication with God, brought about the first large-scale conversion of enslaved men and women. At first, itinerant ministers, captivating large audiences at revivals and camp meetings across the North and South during the middle part of the century, reached only a small percentage of the slave population with their calls to Christianity. Larger numbers of black men and women were converted during the resurgence and intensification of revivalism during the Second Great Awakening of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At that time, Baptist and Methodist ministers appealed to the slave and free black populations, preaching a plain-styled message of hope and redemption while also catering to manners of worship that African men and women carried with them to America, including spirit possession, call-and-response singing, shouting, and dancing. Even so, with much of the religious life of the slave community existing as an "invisible institution," beyond the purview of whites or formal churches, white control over African-American religious practices and spiritual beliefs was limited. Slave preachers might emphasize the need for obedience to the master while whites were present, but among other slaves they reformulated their teachings, emphasizing themes of suffering and redemption. Slaves sang spirituals filled with lyrics about salvation and references to biblical figures like Moses, who led his people to freedom. On occasion, these songs functioned even more explicitly as expressions of resistance, encoding messages about secret gatherings or carrying directions for escape.

Whereas an earlier generation of evangelical preachers had opposed slavery in the South during the early nineteenth century, Protestant clergymen began to defend the institution, invoking a Christian hierarchy in which slaves were bound to obey their masters. For many slaveholders, this outlook not only made evangelical Christianity more palatable, but also provided a strong argument for converting slaves and establishing biracial churches.

While some planters became convinced of Christianity as a type of social control, others welcomed ministers to the slave quarters and built plantation chapels out of genuine Christian impulses. Regardless of motives, however, slaveholders remained mindful of the potential subversiveness of religion among slaves. In the 1820s and 1830s, two of the most significant slave rebellions in American history were plotted by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, two men driven by religious fire. In 1829, David Walker's inflammatory text, AN APPEAL TO THE COLOURED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, not only condemned Christians who supported slavery, but also used Christianity as a way to validate slave revolt. In South Carolina, Virginia and throughout the South, these and other events resulted in regulations on black meetings and black preaching without white supervision. Biracial churches also limited the rights of black congregants.

While fear of slave insurrection led to prohibitions on black churches meeting openly in many parts in the South, the black church movement flourished in the North. As members of the Church, blacks were ostensibly the brothers and sisters of whites, equals in the eyes of God. This sentiment was instrumental in helping blacks to gain the right to be ordained as Baptist and Methodist ministers, but it did not prevent discriminatory practice within the church, including segregated seating. In Philadelphia, blacks established St. Thomas Episcopal Church in 1794 as the culminating response to this type of discrimination. Black churches in the North continued to grow into the nineteenth century, providing for much more than the spiritual needs of the black community. They, aided in the adjustment of new black residents, acted as mediators in the personal lives of blacks, and played a vital role in antislavery activities including the protection of fugitive slaves. Black ministers like Philadelphia's Richard Allen and Absalom Jones and Boston's Thomas Paul were among the strongest leaders in black communities.

During the Antebellum period and after the Civil War, black churches, not just in the North, but throughout the nation, offered African Americans refuge from oppression and focused on the spiritual, secular, and political concerns of the black community. Following emancipation, the church continued to exist at the center of black community life. With freedom, African-Americans rejected the second-class status they had been offered by white co-religionists and withdrew in large numbers from biracial congregations. Aided by the Freedmen's Bureau, freedmen and freedwomen pooled their resources to build greater numbers of independent black churches -- symbols of African-American demands for self-determination.

Kimberly Sambol-Tosco is a graduate student in History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation will explore the centrality of gender in African-American political identities in the North during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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Slavery and the Making of America . The Slave Experience: Religion | PBS

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As late as 1800 most slaves in the U.S. had not been converted to Christianity. In the years that followed, however, widespread Protestant Evangelicalism, emphasizing individual freedom and direct communication with God, brought about the first large-scale conversion of enslaved men and women.

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The marriage of ardent abolitionist Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler, heir to one of the largest slaveholding plantations in the nation, mirrored the unhappy union between southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists in the years leading up to the Civil War. The courtship between the spirited and independent Kemble, an acclaimed British actress, and the rich, infatuated Butler turned into an embittered battle of wills over the source of Pierce's wealth: his family plantation where 730 slaves lived on St. Simon's and Butler Islands.

Buried in tattered and filthy blankets ... here, in their hour of sickness, lay those whose health and strength are spent in unrequited labor for us ... to buy for us all the luxuries which health can revel in.

- Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble

When she married, Kemble left the stage, but she continued to write and publish her journals. Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, written during her four-month stay on Butler Island, gives an eyewitness account of the miserable living conditions, infant mortality, and physical and sexual abuse endured by the slaves. She did not publish her journal until May of 1863, long after the couple's scandalous and public divorce in 1849.

* Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler
* Butler Island
* Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation

In The Management of the

Butler Estate, Roswell King Jr., the overseer of Pierce Butler's plantation for many years, gives his own description of plantation life.

Kemble initially thought the slaves were well off, and her early descriptions betray how influenced she was by the racism of the time. But as she came to know the inhabitants of the island, and as the slave women began to confide in her, her views changed drastically.

Kemble's earnest petitions on their account, and her honest efforts to come to an egalitarian understanding, foreshadowed those of the nation, as abolitionist whites struggled to move from a patronizing approach to a more comprehensive understanding of blacks as their equals and a willingness to share power and leadership with them in the abolitionist societies.

Over the years, Pierce Butler squandered his fortune, losing an estimated $700,000 ($24,000 was said to have been lost in one card game; $700,000 in today's dollars would amount to more than $10 million). In 1857, he decided to liquidate his "movable" property in the largest sale of human beings in the history of the United States. The sale was held at a racetrack in Savannah, Georgia and lasted for two days. This event became known as The Weeping Time, as family after family waited to be bid on. Although husbands, wives, and small children were kept together, extended family members of the tiny island community were scattered far and wide. The sale netted $303,850, which went toward Butler paying off his debts and continuing to live in high style.

"Perhaps the greatest horror of slavery was that you were denied your own children. You were denied indeed your own birthright. You were born into the world, but the self that you were, descended from your family, ...was taken away from you. You were suspended in time. You were in limbo. You could not even have your self under slavery. Your selfhood was denied."

- Catherine Clinton, historian

* The Weeping Time
* What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation

The majority of slaves lived on cotton plantations, where they often worked under the supervision of black drivers and white overseers from dawn to dusk, and sometimes longer. Some slaves on rice plantations worked under a task system where if they finished a certain amount of work at the end of the day, they were free to tend their own gardens. Slaves did skilled and unskilled work: the heavy physical labor of clearing the land and tending the crops as well as building houses and ironsmithing. Household slaves cooked, cleaned, and nursed the master's children.

Unsanitary living conditions and inadequate nutrition led to illness, which was compounded by hard labor. In the swampy, coastal rice regions of South Carolina and Georgia, the prevalence of malaria led to high rates of child mortality. Slave women had to endure sexual exploitation, often bearing the children of their masters and overseers. Slaves were disciplined by whipping, imprisonment, torture, and mutilation -- sometimes leading to death -- and being sold off. Under the southern Slave Codes, they were considered property and could not testify against a white person in court. Families could at any time be separated; children could be sold away.

Despite the terrible difficulties of living under slavery, and perhaps because of them, slaves formed strong communities within the plantation's boundaries. Isolated from the larger world, these communities of families supported each other, maintaining many African cultural practices, including music, dance and rituals. Many practiced Christianity with strong African influences. Nonetheless, they knew that at any time their family and community could be disrupted.

* Life Under Slavery

[W]hat the family did for African Americans, was create a world outside of the world of work. It allowed for significant others. It allowed a male slave to be more than just a brute beast. It allowed him to be a father, to be a son. It allowed women to be mothers and to take on roles that [were] outside of that of a slave, of a servant. On the one hand, you see, the slavemaster wanted this family because he wanted the slaves to reproduce and to do it in a rather natural way. But in allowing for that, they allowed for a whole world to develop, because out of families came communities. And with communities came a world that the slavemaster hardly ever knew, didn't know, and didn't venture into.

- Deborah Gray White, historian

* Andrew Jackson's 2nd Annual Message
* Indian Removal

The relationship between masters and slaves was complex. Many slaveowners justified their exploitation of slaves by assuming that they were unintelligent and incapable of deep feeling, or by proclaiming that they were like members of the family, fed, clothed, and sheltered. The institution of slavery had negative effects on slaveowners, as well as on slaves.

In 1830, the total slave population in the U.S. was more than 2 million (U.S. Census), worth over a billion dollars to their owners. The economic importance of slavery increased in the years leading up to the Civil War. Although in the North, a gradual process of emancipation had taken place after the Revolutionary War, in the South, the number and importance of slaves increased with the rise of the cotton industry. President Andrew Jackson removed the Native Americans living in the lower South to less desirable land out west, thus opening roughly 25 million more acres to cotton cultivation.

In Norfolk, Virginia in 1853, Mrs. Margaret Douglas began to teach black children how to read and write in her home. She was subsequently brought to trial and sentenced to a month in prison.

The Case of Mrs. Margaret Douglass

Northern businessmen were involved in shipping the cotton and running the mills that produced cotton fabric, providing wealth for a few and jobs and products for many more. Washington, D.C. became a major center for the domestic slave trade, with a slaveholding president, and with Congress voting in a "gag rule" in the 1830s, which prevented abolitionist petitions from even being read on the floor. Arguments in favor of slavery centered on the economic importance of cotton, the "positive good" theory that slave labor was necessary for the nation's progress, the "scientifically proved" inferiority of the Negro, the belief that the slave class was necessary for the cultural development of the ruling class, and the belief that slaves were better off materially than free blacks or white workers and that the "school of slavery" civilized the "barbarians." Because blackness was associated with inferiority, even whites who did not own slaves benefited from slavery, since it made them feel part of the ruling class.

* George Fitzhugh advocates slavery
* Judge Henry Hammond advocates slavery

Next: Abolitionism

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Africans in America/Part 4/Narrative: Antebellum Slavery

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The marriage of ardent abolitionist Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler, heir to one of the largest slaveholding plantations in the nation, mirrored the unhappy union between southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists in the years leading up to the Civil War.