Shaping America
Final Script
TITLE: Lesson 16: The Slave South
PREPARED FOR: Dallas TeleLearning
WRITER: Gretchen Dyer
PRODUCER: Julia Dyer
DRAFT: Final
DATE: November 17, 2000
Lesson 16: The Slave South · 11/17/00 · XXX
Visual Audio
FADE IN:
Introduction / intro music up1. image of cotton gin (need this)
2. images of slaves working in cotton fields / At the end of the 18th century, the increasing use of the cotton “gin” made cotton a more profitable crop. Production increased four hundred percent in five years, and the demand for slaves to work in the cotton fields accelerated accordingly.
3. B-roll: cotton fields
(Roll 6852)
4. Map 16-1c, illustrating cotton production spreading to AL, MS, AR, LA, TX / The profitability of cotton and its adaptability to climate and soil conditions across the South encouraged planters to move westward, spreading cotton and slavery to Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and eventually, the eastern half of Texas.
5. Slide of men on flatboat (14) / As Northerners advanced westward their economy and their society grew more diversified.
6. images of slave coffles on the road west with slave trader
(Slide 16-25) / But in the South, westward expansion had a very different character.
7. images of slaves for sale in Upper South, slave auctions, etc.
(Slide 16-25) / Between 1795 and 1860 more than 800,000 slaves were transported into western cotton states.
8. cartoon, illustration re cotton production overtaking food production / Planters increasingly grew cotton in place of food crops. Industrialization was discouraged.
9. Pix of train loaded with cotton, or docks with bales of cotton
(Slide 16-28)
(Any stock of old railroad?) / Even railroad routes were selected primarily to facilitate the shipment of cotton rather than to promote trade and transportation.
10. Cotton fields, zoom in on cotton ball
(Roll 6852)
11. images of white masters/mistresses/ children with slaves (family photos, portraits with slaves or illustrations of Southern whites and blacks together (Slide 1610) / As the North diversified economically and socially, the South continued to narrow its options, and the “peculiar institution” of slavery came to define the Southern way of life.
Segment One
The South - Shaped by Slavery /
music up
12. VOC Roark(Ext. and Int. Plantations: Middleton Place, Roll 6757-58; Somerset Place, Roll 6775, 76) / JAMES ROARK (Roll 6625, 16:07:10)
Slavery was a very powerful institution in the south. Culturally, socially, intellectually… planters dominated the old south and their power rested on the institution of slavery.
13. VOC Hudson / LARRY HUDSON, JR.: It's in the plantation setting that slavery can be most fully exploited. It's in those areas that we see slavery become much more ingrained as an economic institution and it's with both the economic expansion of slavery and the political and philosophical argument defending that institution that we see the two sections that would become the North and the South moving apart.
14. VOC Roark / JAMES ROARK (16:08:33)
Of course, slavery didn’t affect just southerners. Economically, the nation benefited. Northern merchants, northern insurers, northern shippers profited from the exportation of cotton to New England, and to England and France and Belgium. By 1840, 20 years before the Civil War, 60% of American exports, not southern exports, but American exports, were cotton, produced mainly by slaves.
15. images of wealthy white planters
(need more of these) /
NARRATOR
Slaveholders held sway in Southern politics, but they could maintain control only as long as they convinced non-slaveholding whites of their common cause.16. VOC Larry Hudson; racist cartoons and illustrations
(need these) /
LARRY HUDSON, JR. (Roll 6808, 15:04)
Racism was used aggressively to divide poor white southerners from slaves…(skip up) The relationship between the wealthy and the poor was something that was really aggressively exploited, I think, by slaveholders to ensure that poor white southerners felt that they had a similar cause.17. VOC James Roark /
JAMES ROARK (Roll 6623, 15:26)
Only about 25% of white households owned a slave. So 75% did not.18. Cont’d above; intercut with images of yeomen farmers, poor whites, southern countryside
(need these)
/
(15:27) They didn’t own slaves but they could dream of owning slaves. And if they could dream of owning slaves, they could dream of leaving the fields themselves and allowing slaves to do the farm labor that they and their children did…and withdraw to the verandah, perhaps, and even drink mint juleps along with those rich neighbors down the way.
19. VOC James Roark; images of poor Southern whites /(15:28) But more important, I think, was the psychological satisfaction of being a white person in the South. The fact was that all white men, whether clean and classy or tobacco-stained and ignorant, sat in the social structure at a step or two steps above the most educated, the most refined, the most humane of black people.
20. editorials, book covers re positive effects of slavery(need these) /
NARRATORIn order to quiet the consciences of white Southerners and provide a convincing rationale for the growing system of slavery, slaveholders in the 19th century needed a new definition of slavery. Once considered a “necessary evil,” slavery was now proclaimed a “positive good.”
21. White southerners / ACTOR: GEORGE FITZHUGHThe negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world. Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves.
22. racist images of “barbaric” blacks
(need these) /
Slavery, Southerners insisted, did a great service to blacks, lifting them out of their natural barbaric states and exposing them to the values of Christian civilization.
23. Images of slaves working /ACTOR: WILLIAM S. PETTIGREW“That property is in our hands, I believe, by the will of Providence; and the fact of possessing them is justified by the example and language of Patriarchs, Prophets and Apostles from the day of Abraham to the period of St. John’s Revelation.”
24. newspaper headlines, cartoons(Slides 16-24, 16-13) /
NARRATORAnd as abolitionist attacks in the North grew louder, Southern society closed its ears, outlawing even the publication or discussion of anti-slavery opinions in its midst.
Segment TwoThe Slave World / Song: …..Look down, look down that long, lonesome road….
25. VOC Ira Berlin, University of Maryland / IRA BERLIN (Roll 6621, 13:19)
…Slavery is not one thing but slavery is many things, and when we know somebody is a slave we know something very, very important about that man and woman, but we don’t know everything. Their lives are very, very different depending upon the kind of work they do and the kind of circumstances they live in.
26. images of plantations, slave quarters
(Slide 16-4)
(Cotton fields, Roll 6852)
(Tobacco fields, Roll 6776)
/ NARRATOR
Slaves worked as laborers on small farms, servants in urban households, as factory workers, riverboat men, carpenters, blacksmiths, prostitutes, and at many other occupations.
27. images of urban slaves, slave craftsmen, prostitutes, etc.
(need these) / More than half of all slaves lived on plantations, or agricultural estates with twenty or more slaves on them.
28. VOC Dorothy Redford; Somerset Place
(Slides 16-1, 16-6, 16-7)
(Cotton fields, Roll 6852) / DOROTHY REDFORD (Roll 6774, 4:11)
People who worked in the field were due in the field 30 minutes before sunrise. Women did every job that men did except jobs that required animals. So if a field had to be plowed with an ox, that was a man’s job. If the ditches had to be cleaned, if the canals had to be cleaned, if trees were cut down, if wood was sawn, all of these jobs were also women’s jobs. Children’s jobs on this plantation included going into a 98-acre field and picking the bugs off of all of the crops.
29. VOC Dorothy Redford
(Int. Middleton Place, Roll 6757-58)
30. Images of house slaves
(need these) / DOROTHY REDFORD (Roll 6774, 4:12)
Women and men who worked in the house typically thought of themselves as having a better job, in part because they were associated with the owner’s family…they heard things people who worked in the fields didn’t hear. So their exposure was different, but God knows, their work cycle was not. They worked seven days a week instead of six days a week as field hands did.
31. B-roll of slaveholder bedroom
(Middleton Place—summer bedroom) / ACTOR - MALE SLAVEHOLDER
“Every night the servant comes in and gets my boots and cleans them. Every morning he comes in before I am up, brings me water to wash, brushes my clothes, and builds a fire when one is necessary.
ACTOR - FEMALE SLAVEHOLDER: At night when I am down to prayers the chambermaid comes in and turns down the bedclothes and puts thing in order for me to go to bed. In fine, everything is done for me, I have nothing to do, and I find it really convenient to be waited upon.”
32. images of slaves at work
(Slides 16-1, 16-7) / NARRATOR
Slavery gave whites control over the lives of blacks, control over their physical bodies and to some extent, over their minds. But as in any human relationship, there was always an element of negotiation involved.
33. VOC Larry Hudson, University of Rochester
34. Images of land around slave cabins
(Somerset Place, Roll 6775, 05:12:50) / LARRY HUDSON (Roll 6806, 13:22:56)
I think that the weapon, overt force, is successful only up to a point. Owners are trying to get from the slaves as much work as they can for as long a period as possible; and slaves are trying to get, you know, the human instinct to work as little as possible for as much as they can get in terms of reward. For example, allowing slaves a certain amount of time after they had completed their work to plant a small area of land for themselves, at minimum would be the area around their cottage…
35. Images of slaves relaxing on the land
(Big old tree, Roll 6762, 15:04:20, 15:07:00)
36. VOC Larry Hudson
(Somerset Place, slave cabin, Roll 6775, 05:13) / LARRY HUDSON (Roll 6807, 14:02:55)
The lands were not used only for economic exploitation, but they were also used as special areas of rest and recuperation and may have been used in some areas to bury family members. We get a sense of a relationship between slaves and land which was very similar to the relationship between Africans and land.
37. images of slave preachers, dances, musical instruments, illustrations of folktales, etc.
(Slide 16-1)
(Slave street, Roll 6761, 14:29 & Roll 6762, 15:00) / NARRATOR: Within the confines of slavery, blacks created a world of their own where whites could not enter. Slave culture consisted of religion, folktales, music and dance. It was a shared experience that gave pleasure, hope, and meaning to difficult lives.
And it was a subtle form of defiance.
38. Images of slaves at work
(Slide 16-18) / SINGER(S): slave song
My old missus promise me
Shoo a la a day
When she die she set me free,
Shoo a la a day.
She live so long her head git bald,
Shoo a la a day.
She give up de idea of dyin' a-tall,
Shoo a la a day.
39. VOC Ira Berlin
(Slide 16-12) / IRA BERLIN (Roll 6622, 14:00:50)
Slavery is always two great stories. One of those is the story of imposition and violence, hideous and obscene violence which is rained upon people who are subordinate and don’t have much means to protect themselves. But the other part of slavery’s story is, of course, that slaves themselves refuse to give into the violence, refuse to be dehumanized by dehumanizing treatment, and on very narrow ground, almost from the beginning, begin to create a way of life which sustains them in meaningful ways.
40. VOC James Roark
(Slide 16-17) / JAMES ROARK (Roll 6623, 15:13:00)
They created families. They created community. They created folk culture. They created African-American Christianity in the quarters. They resisted the enslavement that white people thought was natural to them. They knew that slavery was unjust and they fought to keep from internalizing that perspective of themselves.
41. Illustrations from Uncle Remus
(need these) / ACTOR: Uncle Remus (abridged)
“’…You des tuck en jam yo’se’f on dat Tar-Baby widout waitin’ fer enny invite,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee, ‘en dar you is, en dar you’ll stay…kaze I’m gwineter bobby-cue you dis day, sho,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee.”
42. VOC James Roark / JAMES ROARK (Roll 6623, 15:16)
…Slaves’ stories were intended to teach as well as to simply entertain and they taught lessons, particularly to children.
43. illustrations from Uncle Remus / ACTOR: Uncle Remus
‘I don’t keer w’at you do wid me, Brer Fox,’ sez Brer Rabbit sezee, ‘so you don’t fling me in dat dere brier-patch,’ sezee.”
44. VOC Roark / JAMES ROARK
Children had to learn to be slaves and every parent wants to protect children, their children, from the harshness of this world. And slave parents had a particularly difficult task ahead of them. How do you survive the institution of slavery?
45. illustrations from Uncle Remus / ACTOR: Uncle Remus
“Co’se Brer Fox wanter hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch ‘im by de behime legs en slung ‘im right in de middle er de brier-patch.”
46. VOC Roark / JAMES ROARK
…You had to be shrewd. You had to be clever. You had to outthink the master because the master was always stronger.
47. illustrations from Uncle Remus / ACTOR: Uncle Remus
‘Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox,' sez Brer Rabbit sezee. 'Bred and bawn in a brier-patch!’ en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers.”
48. cartoons, illustrations of slave culture / NARRATOR
Slave culture gave slaves a life beyond the drudgery of work…and a means of resisting the dehumanization of slavery.
49. images of slave whippings, photographs of slaves with scars
(Stock) / NARRATOR
Whippings and beatings were common methods of punishing slaves for everything from theft to insolence. The only terror greater than whipping for a slave was to be sold away from his home and loved ones.