Now, on American History tv, university of maryland professor Christopher Bonn or teaches a class about the concept of power and breach civil war slaves societies. He also discusses how the invention of the cotton gin resulted in the expansion of slavery. Okay, i want to get into. Its good morning, welcome back. Great to see you all today. What we are going to do is think through some Big Questions about Power Dynamics in american slave societies today. So, part of this is like a building on what we talked about last thursday. Last thursday we talked about gabriels conspiracy, richmond 1800. We talked in conspicuous about how it reflects the complexity of slavery. Slavery was relationship doing individuals, a person and another person. As an experience, slavery was endlessly complex. With gabriel, we saw some of the ways and enslaved person could enjoy some kinds of freedom within their bondage. So, different practices of power influence the ways different people experienced slavery. So today what we will talk to raise some of those practices of power. Our Big Questions for today are broadly about this, right . We will talk about these questions at the end of glass, questions about the way that labor influenced the lives of people in the south, and the particular tools that are available to both enslaved people and slave owners in the struggles overpower. In the early 19th century, slave owners use their powers to move massive numbers of enslaved people into cotton producing territories. Through physical force, slaveowners compelled enslaved people to work and they made massive amounts of money based on the violin extraction of labor. Enslaved people worked and lived together and cultivated their own kinds of powers through the relationship with one another. So sleeves in a number of things that enable them to exercise a degree of control in their own lives. We will talk about both of these sides of the story, here. The tools, the techniques of slave owner power, and we will also talk about the tools and techniques of power that were practiced by enslaved people. Before we get into the particular questions about power that we are thinking about today, i want to talk about a clip from the movie 12 years a slave. I like this film and i like it as a teaching tool as well. One of the things i like about it is that it yes, that might make it better. It makes it possible to really kind of sit down and see the landscape. See the environment of the slave holding south. So the story how many of you guys have seen 12 years of slave or parts of it . Yes. The story is about the story is the story of this guy, solomon north of, who was free in the northern states and was kidnapped and spent 12 years in bondage. The foments based off of his narrative. The scene i will see is about two minutes and it takes place during a funeral. So the scene is just after solomon and other people have watched a fellow enslaved man collapse and die while working in the fields. So i want to show this and then i want to think a little bit together about what we see here, right . Watch this and think about how we might use it to understand solomon, and having might use it to understand human experiences of slavery. And then lets build from there. All right. If we think about what we are seeing here, what might this clip suggests to us about the experience of slavery . How might we be able to understand what slavery was like for people who were held in bondage . What do we think . John, yes. You mentioned earlier about how when someone passes away, like, they are expected to like move on and stuff, so you can see he was obviously, like, really upset. But everyone is more like a fan of celebration their funeral, so you saw him starting to sing with them at the end, realizing that he has to maybe move on and has to get over what just happened. He can get a sense of a collective emotional experience, but what youre suggesting is evidence of an individual emotional experience, right . That solomon is feeling particular things. So what is happening what is happening with solomon northrup . What might this clip might be saying about him . John, youre suggesting hes being transformed. Whats happening with him in this clip . Laura . It looks like hes starting to accept his fate of the situation because he was obviously a free man and now he is not anymore, so it kind of just its showing his transition from maybe this is what my life is going to be going forward. We can think of this like the reality is, as we know, solomon northrup was enslaved for 12 years and then liberated, right . In this moment, he does not know. That part of what you are seeing is his grappling with that, right . The possibility that slavery might be a permanent status for, him right . Other thoughts of how we might understand this transformation, right . What is happening with solomon northrup in this moment . Is he just resigning himself to the fact that he will be a sleigh for the rest of his life . How else might we think about it . Which you say you feel sad . Yes, merry kate . I think hes having a hard time accepting the fact that this is normal. In the background, everyone doesnt seem to have animation in their faces, but he seems hes going through all these emotions. So hes trying not to accept, it like, he doesnt want this to be his life. There is a change in his face, but also a struggle, i think that you can see, right . Whats happening is there whatever he might be feeling at the end of this clip theres a feeling that he comes to gradually as a part of a difficult process, right . Its not easy for him to feel what he is feeling in this moment. I think there are important things that you have pointed to that i want to build on a little bit, right . On a fundamental level, one thing that we see is that slavery could be a transformative experience. Enslavement could change a persons life. Connections with other people, this could shape the way that they felt on a daytoday basis. One thing that he thinks about himself gradually as a part of this community of enslaved people. So one thing is what laura is saying, right . There is a way that solomon northrup seems to be identifying himself as a slave in this moment. He knows that is his stats, right . There are other ways we can think about that. Solomon northrup is in this moment joining in a community that is celebrating this guy, right . Joining in the sky that is singing a song that is not particularly sad, right . Hes changing how he sees himself, both in the institution of slavery and in relation to other enslaved people. So the song they are singing, roll jordan role, its a him that has its origins in inflate people. Theyre talking about the river that they crossed before they entered into the promised land. Thats the last task. Crossing the river is a lot struggle that people would have to endure before they achieved a kind of spiritual liberation. So that is a way of thinking about what the participation in this singing might mean. Its not a participation in just an act of grieving, but in a particular active grieving, an act that is designed to represent death as a triumph over the bondage of slavery in the south. Solomon northrup story as it is told and his narrative, it represents the ways in which a persons life could be changed by enslavement. The work of cultivating cotton had profound effects on the daily lives of solomon northrup and the people there in the funeral and other enslaved people who were forced to cultivate cotton. Cotton grew really well in the long and hot summers of the deep south. The fact that the summits were long and hot also was part of what made slavery so difficult, slave labor so difficult. Slaves would plant cotton seeds in the spring and then spend summers hauling and work to keep down the weeds and the grasses that popped up between the rules of plants. In late august and into the fall, he would pick the cotton. So i want to reemphasize how important the cotton gin was for transforming the economy of the United States. The gin separated the seeds out of cotton fibers. Before this machine existed, insulate people did this by hand. So this was a slow process and its described as a production bottleneck. It limited the amount of cotton that could be cultivated in any one year. Eli whitneys cotton gin made it possible for enslaved people to clean more cotton. So slaveowners, of course, because they want to maximize their profits, they wanted to force enslaved people to produce more cotton for the market. So after the invention of the cottage, and more and save people were forced to produce more cotton to satisfy slaveowners demands. Part of what we can see is that technology is one of the tools and slave owners use to exert power over enslaved people. Picking cotton was a particular difficult process because cotton is a stubborn crop. So what youre looking at here is a bowl, a cotton bowl. When it rides, it opens up and a raw white cotton fibers are exposed. But the bulls, and you can see it here, the bull doesnt always open all the way. So the job of a person who is picking this crop is to reach in and try to pull out as much of the fiber as they can to avoid pulling out stems and other kinds of pieces of the plant or the leaves, but also to avoid cutting themselves. The leaves of the cotton bowl are sharp. So this is like a profoundly difficult task. It requires a lot of dexterity and really leads to a lot of small injuries on the hands, on the fingers of people who are forced to pick cotton. So the cotton gin encourage more slave owners to acquire more enslaved people and to compel them to do this difficult work. In order for this to happen, slave owners relied on constant supervision, and relied on regular violence to compel in slave labor. So, im going to highlight some things that he shows us and reveals about the ways the work of the plantation took place. In his narrative, they describe some of the orders and structures of power on a cotton plantation. The landscape was arranged into rows. So there were neat orderly ways of laying out a cotton field. That made it easy for overseers or slave drivers or slave owners, it made it easy to see the progress of enslaved people as they moved across a field. Everyone can see how far they are moving. So the positioning of the overseer is one of the things that its up on horseback. You can imagine somebody who is standing ten feet tall and how much they could see as opposed to someone who is five and a half or six feet tall. So overseers on horseback would literally see over, watch over the work of enslaved people. And overseers would use the whip to continue to compel enslaved people to do this work, right . Northrup right that the lashes are constantly moving. All day long, people are being whipped. The sound of the lashes like a constant background noise for plantation labor. So the labor of cotton shaped enslaved peoples lives, and at the same time, the crop, cotton, reshape the United States. So cotton change the nations geography and also changed the nations economy. We looked at the slide in other contexts and i pointed out the early state could of louisiana, 1812, mississippi and alabama. This movement of people into what is now the deep south, right . What was in called the old southwest. We can see the movement of the nation into these spaces. When we look at these maps, we can think about other aspects of what is actually happening when these states are being created. So, these maps connect the movement of people to the movement, or the expansion of cotton production, you can see two big things. The top half is 1820, the bottom 1840. Each represents 2000 bails of cotton. So too basic things, right . In 1840 there are a lot more dots than 1820, a lot more cotton being produced as the 19th century was progressing. Also, you can see the shift in where the production was happening. It was being concentrated around the mississippi river. The production of cotton was moving into new spaces, south and west as the 19th century progressed. So the people and the work of cotton moved south and west as the 19 century progressed. So the map is representing cotton bails, where these things were being produced, right . But implicit in this map, right, are the people who are forced to do labor of producing cotton. So each of these dots represent dozens or hundreds of thousands of and safe people moved into the south and into the west to produce this cotton. So the map is a representation not only of the movement of people across the country, the movement of cotton production, but also the movement of enslavement, right . The transformation of the geography of slavery. I mentioned a few weeks back when we were talking about the late colonial period, i mentioned that the slave population in north america by the late 1700s was experiencing a natural increase. The population was going up even beyond the numbers of enslaved people who were being imported. In 1808, the u. S. Banned the import of enslaved africans through the atlantic slave trade. Legally, there were not new enslaved people being brought into the country. But even after that, the population continue to grow. In 1810, there were about 1. 1 million slaves in the u. S. In 1830, there were about 2 million slaves in the u. S. And an 1840, there were about 2. 5 million. So in the early 1800s, massive f numbers of these people were moved south and west in what historians have described as the second Middle Passage. This is a reference to the main Middle Passage, the first Middle Passage, which we have talked about. The transfer of people across the Atlantic Ocean in the bottoms of slave ships. 12 Million People extracted from africa and transported to the americas. The second Middle Passage describes this Massive Movement of enslaved people into cotton producing territories. Between 1800 and 1860, an estimated 1 Million People were moved into these territories. So this is a contemporary image that is representing, or a representation of what was called a careful. This is a critical term for us. We are no if you can even read that, really. So, coffle was the term use for a group of enslaved people change together and forced to walk over long distances. This was a coffle big move from virginia to tennessee. So from the old tobacco producing regions of the country, chiefly, into newer spaces that were being intended for cultivating cotton. And enslaved man named charles ball describe what it was like to be part of a coffle. As he was moving from maryland to South Carolina. So, i think this image is useful as a contemporary representation, but this image actually, i think, gives us some more texture to see what it was actually like, right . Ball wrote this about being in a coffle. The women were tied together with a rope about the size of a bed court, which was tied like a halt around the neck of each. But for the men, a strong iron caller was closely fitted by means of a padlock around each of our next. A chain of iron around 100 feet long was passed through each padlocked, and in addition to this, we were handcuffed in pairs. So you can get a little bit of a better sense of the forced connection of people in this image. You can see these two guys in the front are trained together at the wrist, and that this guy on the front right its chained by the ankle to people behind him. So this is, on an obvious level, awful, right . People being bound together and forced to walk long distances to a new life and a different kind of enslavement. But there are Little Things that i think people might not think about when you consider how difficult the situation would be. So people are forced to walk all day, and then at night they are forced to try to sleep. But often there wasnt enough slack in the rope or the chain to allow them to actually lie down. People were bound together in pairs, and when one person needed to go to the bathroom, they often had to stay bound to the person to whom they were trained, right . So the concept of privacy is eradicated in some ways by the bonds of a coffle. The second Middle Passage most people in substantial numbers from the states of the upper south end of the east coast, so the upper south, maryland, virginia, North Carolina, delaware, a bit as well. Into the deep south, into the cotton producing regions, mississippi, louisiana, alabama, increasingly texas as well, right . One of the interesting things and the terrifying prospects to think about, a lot of people moved overland but a number were also transported oversee. So you can imagine being boarded into a ship, people that have heard from older folks about the Middle Passage and then being put into a ship, not really knowing what was going to happen to them. Not knowing what kind of experience they might have on that ship is a good sale to a place like new orleans. Slave traders, most of the people who were sold in the second Middle Passage were sold from states like maryland and virginia. Slave traders would buy people and lead them on a track, lead them on an ocean voyage with the goal of selling them to cotton planners. So the second Middle Passage i think allows us to see some of the human realities of the growth system of slavery. Theres an institution that is growing, and an institution thats expanding. We have to think about the marching of the people, right . The force movement of individuals as slavery moves and expands, right . The expansion of slavery was the movement of people. Slave owners had the power to move people and forced him to do work in other places. So ask cotton is changing the geography, its also changing the nations economy. For slave trading was part of. This slave trading was a big business in the 19th century. There were slave trading firms in baltimore and richmond, and here you see one and alexandria that is being inspected and photographed by union troops during the civil war. Say trading firms and baltimore enrichment had connections with slave traders in places like new orleans and mobile, alabama. So the south was being linked together by the business of trading slaves and moving enslaved people. The business of slave trading, this is an interior shot we, on this jail where they would be held in alexandria. The business of slave trading was part of a larger set and how important slavery and cotton production was to the economy. Insulate people were on the money in some parts of the south. The business of slave trading became part of economic relationships that were connected to cotton production. So this set of relationships reached far beyond the u. S. South, and an example