Its good to see you all here today. What were 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 and we talked about the ways gabriels story reflects the complexity of slavery. Slavery was a relationship between an individuals, a person owned another person. It was complex. With gabriel, we saw some of the ways an enslaved person could enjoy freedom inside their bondage. Today what were going to do is talk through some of the practices of power and our Big Questions for today are broadly about this, right . Well come back to these questions at the end of class. Questions about the ways that labor influenced the lives of enslaved people in the south and the tools that were available to slave people and slave owners in struggles overpower. Slave owners used their power to move massive numbers of enslaved people into cottonproducing territories. Through physical force, they enslaved people to work and they made massive amounts of money based on the violent extraction of neighborhood. Enslaved people worked and lived together and they cultivated their own kinds of power through their relationships. Slaves did a number of things that enabled them to exercise a degree of control in their own lives. Were going to talk about both of these sides of this story here, the tools, the techniques of slave owner power and well talk about the tools and techniques of power that were practiced by enslaved people. Before we get into the particular questions about power that were 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 teaching tool as well. One of the things i like about it is it that might make it a little better. It makes it possible to really kind of sit down and see the landscape, see the environment of the slaveholding south. How many of you guys have seen it . The story is about the story is a story of this guy who was free in the northern states and was tricked and kidnapped into slavery and spent 12 years in bondage. And the film is based on his narrative. The scene im going to show is about two minutes and its it takes place during a funeral. The scene is just after solomon and other people have watched a fellow enslaved man collapse and die while working in the fields. And so i want to show this and i want to think a little bit together about what we see here. Watch this and think about how we might use it to understand solomon and how we might use it to understand human experiences of slavery and then well build from there. Went down to the river, jordan, where john baptized three. I say roll my soul arrives some say john was a baptist some say john was a jew but i say john was a preacher because my bible says so too i say roll roll my soul arise for the year roll roll my soul arise in heaven lord the year that jordan rolls roll jordan roll my soul arrives in heaven lord the year that jordan roll roll jordan roll my soul arrives in heaven lord for the year when jordan rolls roll jordan roll roll jordan roll my soul arrives in heaven lord for the year when jordan rolls roll jordan roll roll jordan roll my soul arrives in heaven lord for the year when jordan rolls all right. So if we look at this, if we think about what were seeing here, what might this clip suggest to us about the experience of slavey . How might we use this to understand what slavery was like for people who were held in bondage . What do we think . You mentioned earlier about how when someone passes away, like, theyre kind of expected to move on and stuff. So you can see here, you can tell he was obviously really update, but then everyone it was more of a celebration, their funeral. You saw him starting to sing with them at the end, realizing that he has to move on and has to get over what just happened. You can get a sense of maybe a collective Emotional Experience but suggesting theres evidence of an individual Emotional Experience that solomon is feeling particular things. What is happening about what might this clip be saying about solomon . 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 freed man and now hes not anymore. Its showing his transition from you know, maybe this is what my life is going to be going forward. So we can think the reality is, we know solomon was enslaved for 12 years and liberated. In this moment he doesnt know that. Maybe part of what youre seeing is his grappling with that, the feeling of the the possibility that slavery might be a permanent status for him. Other thoughts on how we might think about this transformation . Whats happening with solomon in this moment . Is he resigning himself to the fact he might be a slave for life . How else might we think about it . Would you say he feels sad i feel like hes having a hard time accepting the fact this everyone sees this as being normal. Everyone else doesnt see they have animation in his faces, but he seems like hes going through all of these emotions. It seems like hes trying to not accept it. He doesnt want this to be his life. Theres a change in his face, right, but theres a struggle, i think you can see. That whats happening here, whatever solomon might be feeling at the end of this clip, its a feeling that he comes to gradually and as a part of a difficult process. Its not easy for him to feel what it is that hes feeling in this moment, right . So i think that theres some important things that you guys have pointed to here that i want to build on a little bit, right . On a fundamental level, one of the things we see here is that slavery could be a transformative experience. Enslavement could shape a persons life. Connections with other people, right, with other enslaved people, these things could shape the ways they lived and thought about themselves and thought on a daytoday basis. One of the things i think is interesting about this scene is that he does seem to be thinking of himself gradually as a part of this community of enslaved people. And so one way we can read that is what laura is saying, theres a way that solomon seems to be identifying himself as a slave. In this moment he knows that that is his status, right . There are other ways we can think about what that might mean. Northup is at a funeral. And funerals were celebrations of life, right . Northup is joining in a community that is celebrating this guy, that is singing a song that doesnt sound particularly sad. There are ways to see that solomon is changing how he sees himself both in relationship to the institution of slavery and in relation to other enslaved people. The song theyre singing, it has a hymn that has its origins in communities of enslaved people. And so the jordan river is the last task, crossing the river is the last struggle that people would have to endure before they achieve the kind of spiritual liberation. Thats a way of thinking about what the participation in this singing might mean to solomon. Its not a participation in just an act of grieving, but in a particular act of grieving, an act of grieving that is designed to represent death as a triumph over the bondage of slavery in the south. So solomon northups story, it represents the ways a persons life could be changed by enslavement. The work of cultivating cotton had profound affects on the daily lives of northup and the people who were there and other 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 summers were long and hot, though, also was part of what made slavey so difficult in these places, right . Slaves would plant cotton seeds in the spring and then they would spend summers hoeing and work to keep down the seeds and grasses that popped up between the plants. In late august and into the fall, they would pick the cotton. 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, enslaved people were forced to do this by hand. It 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. Slave owners, because they wanted to maximum their profits, they wanted to force enslaved people to produce more cotton for the market. So after the invention of the cotton gin, more people were forced to produce more cotton to satisfy slave owners demands. And part of what we can see then is that technology is one of the tools that slave owners used to exert power over enslaved people. Picking cotton was a particularly difficult process because cotton is a stubborn crop. Youre looking at a boll. When its ripe, it blooms, it opens up and raw white cotton fibers are exposed. You can kind of see it here, the boll doesnt always open all the way. And the job of a person who is picking this crop is 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 are sharp. This is like a profoundly difficult task and leads to a lot of injuries. So the cotton gin encouraged more slave owners to acquire more slaves and compel them to do this difficult work. Slave owners relied on constant supervision and regular violence to compel enslaved labor. So, were going to look at a couple of pieces of northups narrative and im going to highlight things that he shows us, some things that reveals about the ways the work of the plantation took place. So in his narrative, he described some of the order, some of the structures of power on a cotton plantation. The landscape, one of the things he points out, 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, it made it easy for them to see the progress of enslaved people. If everybody is lined up, you can see how far everyone is moving. So the positioning of the overseer is one of the things that northup highlights here. An overseer is up on horse back. You can imagine somebody standing 10 feet tall and how much they could see as opposed to somebody who is 55, 6 feet tall. Overseers would watch over the work of enslaved people. And overseers would use the whip to continue to compel enslaved people to do this work. He writes that the lashes is constantly moving. All day long, people are being whipped. The sound of the slashes, like a constant background noise for plantation labor. So the labor of cotton shaped enslaved peoples lives and the crop, cotton reshaped the United States. So cotton changed the nations geography and it changed the nations economy. We looked at this slide in other contexts and i pointed out the early state hood of louisiana, 1812, mississippi, and alabama, right . This movement of people into whats now the deep south, what was then called the old southwest. We can see here, the movement of the nation into these spaces. When we look at these maps, we can think about other aspects of whats 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. So you can see two big things here, the top map is 1820, the bottom map is 1840. And each dot represents 22000 bails of cotton. Two basic things, there are a lot more dots than they were in 1820. And the other thing you can see is the shift in where that 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 19th century progressed. The map is representing cotton bails, where these things were being produced. But implicit in this map are the people who are forced to do the labor of producing cotton. Each of these dots represents hundreds or thousands of enslaved people moved into the south and into the west to produce this cotton. 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. 1808 the u. S. Banded the atlantic slave trade. There were not new enslaved people being brought into the country. After that, the population continued 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 in 1840, there were 2. 5 million. So in the early 1800s, massive numbers of these people were moved south and west and what historians have come to describe as the second Middle Passage. This is a reference to the main Middle Passage which weve 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 cottonproducing territory. Between 1800 and 1860, an estimated 1 Million People were moved into these territories. This is a contemporary image that is a representation of what was called a coffle. Its basically the term that was used for a group of enslaved people chained together, forced to walk over long distance. This is a coffle that was being moved from virginia to tennessee. From the old tobaccoproducing regions of the country, into newer spaces that were being intended for cultivating cotton. A an enslaved man dwieescribed wh it was like to be part of a coffle. I think this image is useful, but this image actually i think gives us more texture to see what it would have actually been like, right . Ball wrote this about being in a coffle. The women were tied together with a rope which was tied around the neck of each. For the men, a strong iron color was closely fitted by means of a padlock around our necks. A chain of iron was passed through the hasp of each padlock. You can get a better sense of the forced connection of people in this image. You can see that these two guys are chained together at the wrist and that this guy on the front right is chained by the ankle to people behind him. This is on an obvious level awful, people being bound together and being 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 at night theyre forced to try to sleep. But there wasnt enough slack in the rope or chains to allow them to lie down. People were bound together in pairs. When one person needed to go to the bathroom, they had to stay bound to the person to whom they were chained. And so the concept of privacy is kind of eradicated in some ways by the bonds of ahv8n coffle. So the second Middle Passage moves people in substantial numbers from the states of the upper south and of the east coast, maryland, virginia, North Carolina, delaware, a bit as well, into the deep south. Into the cottonproducing regions, mississippi, louisiana, alabama, increasing texas as well, right . One of the interesting things and really one of the terrifies prospects to think about, a lot of these people were moved over land but a number were transported over sea. You can imagine people being boarded into a ship, people who had heard stories from ancestors about the Middle Passage and then being put into a ship and not knowing what was going to happen to them, not knowing what kind of experience they might have on that ship as it would sail likely into 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 trek or lead them on an ocean voyage with the goal of selling them to cotton planters. So the second Middle Passage i think allows us to see some of the human realities of the growth of the system of slavey. So theres an institution that is growing and an institution that is expanding but we have to think about the marching of the people, right . The forced movement of individuals as slavery moved and expanded. The expansion of slavey was the movement of people. So this was another kind of power that slave owners exercised as well, right . Slave owners had the power to move people, to force them to do work in other places. So as cotton is changing the geography of the United States, it was changing the nations economy. Slave trading was part of this. Slave trading was a big business in the 19th century. There were slavetrading firms in baltimore, richmond and here you see one in alex andrea. Its been photographed by union troops during the civil war. Slavetrading firms had connections with slave traders in places like new orleans and mobile, alabama. And so the south was being linked together by the business of trading slaves, of moving enslaved people. And the business of slavetrading this is an interior shot of this slave market, especially, a jail, where people would be held waiting for sale in alexandria. The business of slave trading was part of a larger set of economic relationships and i just wanted to highlight here on this money from alabama how important slavery and cotton production were to the economy, right . Enslaved people were on the money in some parts of the south. So the business of slavetrading became a set of economic relationships that were connected to cotton production. And so this set of relationships reached far beyond the u. S. South. An example of this is the consolidated association of planners of louisiana. The capl. The capl was organized in 1827 and it was a bank. It linked cotton planters, english investors and louisiana government. So what were seeing here is basically a sketch of how this organization worked. Investors in england bought bonds from the capl. The capl would loan money to slave owners in louisiana and slave owners would put up land and enslaved people as collateral, right . If they failed, they might have to surrender a number of enslaved people to th