Conspiracy and it was endlessly complex. With gabriel we saw some of the ways that an enslaved person could enjoy some kinds of freedom within their bondage. So different practices of power influenced the ways different people experienced slavery. Today well talk through some of those practices of power. Our Big Questions today are broadly about this. So 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 particular tools to enslaved people and slave owners in struggles over power. In the early 19th century slave owners moved massive numbers of enslaved people into cotton producing territories. Through physical force, slave owners compelled enslaved people to work, and they made massive amounts of money based on the violent extraction of labor. Enslaved people worked and cultivated their own kinds of power through relationships with one another. So slaves did a number of things that enabled them to exercise a degree of control in their own lives. Well talk about both of these sides of the story here, right, the tools, the techniques of slave owner power. 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 slip from the movie 12 years a slave. So i like this film and i like it as a teaching tool as well. One of the things i really like about it is that it 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 have seen the movie or parts of it . The story is of this guy solomon who was free in the northern states and was tricked and kidnapped into slavery and spent 12 years if bondage. And the film is based on northrups narrative. The scene im going to show is about two minutes, and its 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. And so i want to show this, and then 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 where i walked johnny baptized me my soul arise lord well, 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 roll, roll my soul arise hallelujah roll jordan roll my soul arise hallelujah roll, jordan, roll my soul arise in heaven lord for the year jordan rolled everybody say roll jordan roll roll jordan roll my soul arise in heaven, lord, for the year when jordan rolled oh, children roll, jordan, roll my soul arise in heaven lord roll, jordan, roll roll, jordan roll my soul arise in heaven, lord, for the year jordan rolled all right. So if we look at this and we think about what were seeing here, right, what might this clip suggest to us about the experience of slavery . How might we be able to use this 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 theyre kind of expected to move on and stuff, so you could see here you could tell he was obviously really upset. But then Everyone Wants a celebration at their funeral, and you have to move on from it. 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. So you can get a sense of maybe a collective emotional experience, but youre suggesting theres evidence of an individual emotional experience, right that solomon is feeling particularly things. So what is happening about what is happening with solomon northrup . What might this clip be saying about him . John, youre suggesting hes being transformed. Whats happening with him in this clip . Laura . It looks almost like hes starting to accept his fate of the situation because he was obviously a freed man and now hes not anymore. So its showing his transition from maybe this is just what my life is going to be going forward. So we can think about the reality as we know solomon was enslaved for 12 years and liberated. In this moment he doesnt know that, so maybe part of what youre seeing is his grappling with that, the feeling of the possibility slavery might be permanent. Other ways to think about this transformation, right, whats happening with solomon northrup in this moment . Is he just resigning himself to the fact he will be a slave for life . How else might we think about it . Would you say that he feels sad . Mary kate . I feel hes having a hard time accepting the fact everyone sees this as being normal. In the background everyone else doesnt seem like they have animation in their faces, but he seems like hes going through all these emotions, so it seems hes trying to not accept it. I doesnt want this to be his life. Theres a change in his face, right, but theres also a struggle you can see, right . 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. So i think there are some important things you have pointed to here i want to build on a little bit. 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. Forced labor and connections with other people, right, with other enslaved people, these things could shape the ways people like solomon northrup lived, how they thought about themselves, how they felt on a daytoday basis. One of the things i think is interesting about the scene is that he does seem to almost 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. There is a way solomon northrup seems to be identifying himself as a slave. In this moment he knows that is his status. But there are other ways we can think about what that might mean, right . Northrup is at a funeral at, john, you were suggesting funerals were like celebrations of life. Northrup is in this moment joining in a community that is celebrating this guy. Joining in a community that is singing a song that doesnt sound particularly sad, right . So i think there are ways to see that he is changing how he sees himself in relation to the institution of slavery and in relation to other enslaved people. So the song theyre singing roll jordan roll is in enslaved africanamericans and its talking about the river that the israelites crossed just before they entered the promised land. The jordan river is like the last task. Crossing the river is the last struggle that people would have to endure before they achieve the kind of spiritual liberation. So thats kind of a way of thinking about what the participation in the singing might mean to solomon northrup. Its not a participation in just an act of grieving but in a particular act of grieving, an act of grieving designed to represent death as a triumph over the bondage of slavery in the south. So solomon northrups story as its told in his narrative, as told in the film in some important ways, northrups story represents the ways a persons life could be changed by enslavement. The work of cultivating cotton had profound effects on the daily lives of northrup and of the people there at the funeral and other enslaved people forced to cultivate cotton. Cotton grew well in the long and hot summers of the deep south. The fact the summers were long and hot made slave labor so difficult. Slave would planned seeds in the spring and spend summers hoeing and work to keep down the weeds that would pop up. So i want to reemphasize how important the cotton gin was. The gin separated the seeds out of cotton fibers. And before the machine existed enslaved people were forced to do this by hand. So this was a slow process and essentially is described as a bottleneck, it limited the amount of cotton that could be cultivated in any one year. E elis cotton gin allowed more cotton. Slave owners because they wanted to maximize profits wanted to force enslaved to produce more cotton for the market. After the invention more enslaved people had to satisfy slave owners demands. And part of what we can see then is that technology is one of the tools used to exert power over enslaved people. Picking cotton was a particularly difficult process because cotton is a stubborn crop. Youre looking at a cotton bulb. It blooms, opens up and raw white cotton fibers are exposed. But you can kind of see it here, it doesnt always open all the way. And so the job of a person picking this crop is to reach in and 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, and 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 and fingers of people forced to pick cotton. The cotton gin encouraged them to be compelled to do this difficult work. In order for this to happen slave owners relied on constant supervision and regular violence to compel enslaved labor. So were going to look at a couple pieces of northrups narrative as we work through today and im going to highlight some things that he shows us, some things he reveals about the ways the work took place. In his narrative northrup described some of the order, some of the structures of power on a cotton plantation. One of the things he points out the landscape was arranged into rows. So there were need, 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 as they were moving across a field. You can see how far everyone is moving. So the positioning of the overseer is one of the things northrup highlights. The positioning is really important. You can imagine somebody who is standing ten feet tall and how much they could see as opposed to somebody 5 1 2 or 6 feet tall. So overseers on horseback would see over, watch over the work of enslaved people. And overseers would use the whip to continue to compel them to do the work. The lash is constantly moving. All day long people are being whipped, the sound of the lashes is like a constant background noise for plantation labor. It shaped peoples lives and at the same time the crop, cotton reshaped the United States. It changed the nations geography and changed the nations economy. We looked at the slide in other contexts and i pointed out the early statehood of louisiana 1812, mississippi and alabama. This movement of people into whats now the deep south, what was called the old southwest. So we can see here the movement of the nation into these spaces. We can think about other aspects of whats happening when the states are being created. These maps connect the movement of people to the movement or the expansion of cotton production so you can see two big things here. Each of the dots represents i think its 2,000 bales of cotton. So two basic things. One, in 1840 there are a lot more dots than in 1820. Theres a lot more cotton being produced as the 19th century was progressing. The other thing you can see is where the shift of production was happening. It was 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. It represents cotton bales but implicit in the map are the people forced to do the labor of producing cotton, so each of these dots represents dozens of enslaved 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 talking about the late colonial period 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 being imported. In 1808 the u. S. Banned the import of enslaved africans so legally there were not new enslaved people being brought into the country. Even 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 about 2. 5 million. So in the early 1800s massive numbers of these people were moved south and west, and what as historians refer to as the main Middle Passage, the first Middle Passage 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 cotton producing territory. So between 1800 and 1860 an estimated 1 Million People were moved into these territories. And so this is a contemporary representation and this is a critical term for us, a coffle, basically the term used for a group of enslaved people chained together, forced to walk over long distances this is a coffle moved from virginia to tennessee. And so from the old tobacco producing regions, chiefly into newer space that is were being intended for cultivating cotton. An enslaved man described what it was like to be part of a coffle as he was moving from maryland to south carolina. This image is useful as a contemporary representation but this image actually, i think, gives us more texture to see what it actually would have been like, right . Ball wrote this about being in a coffle. The women were tied together with a rope about the size of a bed cord tied like a halter around the neck of each. But for the men a strong iron collar was closely fitted by means of a bpadlock. In addition to this we were handcuffed in pairs. And so you can get a better sense of the forced connection of people in this image. You can see these two guys in the front are chained together at the risk and this guy on the front right is chained by the ankle to the people behind him. And so this is on an obvious level awful, right, people bound together and forced to walk long distances to a new life and a different kind of enslavement. There are Little Things that i think people might not think about when you consider how difficult the situation would be. People forced to walk all day and at night forced to try to sleep but often there wasnt enough slack in the ropes or the chains to actually lie down. People were bound together in pairs. When one person had to go to the bathroom they had to stay bound to the person they were chained. Privacy is eradicated in some ways by the bonds of a coffle. So the second Middle Passage moves people in substantial numbers from the states of the upper south and the east coast, 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 one of the terrifying prospects to think about a lot of these people were moved over land but a number were transported over sea. You can imagine people boarded into a ship in norfolk, had heard stories from and sesers, from older folks about the Middle Passage and being put into a ship not knowing what would 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 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 the human realities of the growth of the system of slavery. Theres an institution thats growing, thats 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 was the movement of people, another kind of power slave owners had. They 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 slave trading firms in baltimore and richmond and here you see one in alexander being sort of inspected and photographed in the civil war. They had connections with slave traders in new orleans and mobile, alabama. The south was being linked together by the business of trading slaves, moving enslaved people. And the business of slave trading so this is an interior shot of this slave market essentially a jail, right, where people would be held waiting for sale in alexandria. The business of slave trading was a part of a larger set of economic relationships and this money from alabama how important slavery and cotton production were to the economy. Enslaved people were literally on the money in some parts of the south. So the business of slave trading became a part of a set of economic relationships that were bound to, that were connected to cotton production. And this set of relationships reached far jond the u. S. South. The s consolidated association of the planters of louisiana, the cpal i will call it. The cpal was organized in 1827. Essentially it was a bank. It linked cotton planters, english investors and the louisiana government. So what were seeing here is basically a sketch of how this organization worked. Investors in england bought bonds from the cpal. The cpal would loan money to slave owners in louisiana, and slave owners would put up land and enslaved people as collateral, right, so if they failed they might have to surrender people to the bank. Slave owners would use the cash that they got from the cpal to live their daily lives. They would use it to buy land, slaves, cotton seed, to buy a fancy velvet coat if thats what they wanted to do. It was a bank. They could do whatever they wanted with this money. Repaying the loans when slave owners repaid their loans, that made dividends for english investors. And so basically youre getting people connected across the Atlantic Ocean and connected in the project of making profit off enslaved people and the production of cotton. The most Important Development or innovation of the cpal, though, is this. Louisiana tax revenue would protect investors in case of emergency. If there was bad weather, if the price of cotton collapsed, if, for some reason a large collection of slave owners were unable to repay their loans, the cpal got the government of louisiana to back them. So if there was a crash louisiana tax dollars would be used to repay english investors. So this is like a state guarantee of the risk of investment in cotton. Governments and investors were getting deemly involved in the industry of cotton production. So the cpal illustrates the extend of national and International Investment in american slavery. Cotton became the most important product in the early 1800s and slave owners were using financial power and they were using government power to enhance their wealth. So this is i use the Term National. Its also international but i use the Term National and one of the interesting phenomena connected to the cotton industry are the ways it brought together the north and the south. So cotton was the fuel for industry in the northern United States. Large amounts of cotton clothing for American People and a number of people for whom they produced were enslaved people. This is showing some of the clothing that enslaved people might have been wearing. Likely made out of cotton, right, and theres this interesting phenomenon of negro cloth. Cotton was grown in the south and woven into a cheap and rough fabric for clothing that would be sold back to slave owners in the south. Enslaved people were wearing the fruits of their labor, wearing this rough, woven cotton clothing to cultivate more cotton. So this is part of the story of power in american slave societies. Slave owners had massive power on their plantations, extensive power beyond because they controlled so much wealth and because they had Government Support for their efforts to get rich. So the institution of slavery is growing and moving and expanding and becoming increasingly embedded in the nations economy. I want to talk through now some of the ways enslaved people would have experienced this as humans. What was it like to live through these changes . So in 1835 there was a family of North Carolina slave owners who decided to pack up and move a number of their Family Members and the people they owned, a number of their enslaved people to alabama. During the trip one of the women named Sarah Sparkman asked the enslaved people that she owned she asked if they wanted to send message back to family, back to their friends in North Carolina. Sparkman wrote to describe what she was doing here, the servants request me to send many messages to their friends and relations. I hope you will read it to their friends. They say it is the very words they want to say to them. What youre looking at is a message a guy named arthur wanted to send to his wife amy. And there are a couple of things that you could see here on a basic level. Hes letting her know theyre doing well. Hes saying hes glad to be able to have the chance to talk to her, to hear from her. He misses her, and he sends his love. We can imagine these are regular things that people would feel and convey to a Family Member from whom they were separated. There were a couple things i want to highlight here as well. So when you read this broadly you can see how important family and friendship were to this one enslaved person. I hope to see you and the children in the spring. Theres a desire, a need to believe that in the near future they will be reconnected. He had a wife, he had children, and he had friends back home. And i think this is key. I was mighty glad to hear from our home. He had a place that he identified as his home. They built communities, they established families. And so one of the obvious things you see here is this family is fragile. Hes separated from his wife. His wife is separated from her children, but these communities, these connections were no less significant to the people who made them because they were fragile. Its two parts of the reality to whats happening in slavery. Also hes sorry to hear his master is sick. Theres a couple ways to interpret this. First he might be saying that he might be saying this because hes reading the messages to Sarah Sparkman and knows the slave owner would want to believe or to imagine that he is actually concerned about the slave owners health. Maybe hes saying this because he thinks thats what she wants to hear. Another way to read this is that he was concerned about his owners health. A slave owner sick might die. And when a slave owner died, they were sold or inherited or given away. And they were begin away in ways that split up communities. The health of a slave owner could be really important for someone like this writer. The health could be important for the possibility that he might be able to stay in touch with his wife and friends in North Carolina. Thousands of people like this man were moved in pursuit after cotton crop. The fact that people were treated as property had profound effects on their lives. This is like the topic of your second essay. Historians estimate the domestic slave broke up about onethird of marriages in the upper south, North Carolina, maryland, virginia. Its likely that sale and forced movement separated about half of all enslaved children from at least one of their parents. It had dangerous results for black families, for black communities. Enslaved people organized, strategized, and looked for ways they might claim some sort of power over their lives. So their connections to one another were critical for the kinds of power they were able to use. And one way we can understand the importance of these kinds of connections is through the practice of truancy. So truancy describes the practice of enslaved people running away from a plantation, running away from a farm, and staying away for a few nights. Maybe they would stay away for a week or two. But the distinction between truancy and just running away i shouldnt say just running away the distinction between truancy and running away is that enslaved people who were described as truant were not necessarily intending to leave the south. Theres a woman named sally smith who describes her experiences with this. Smith was interviewed in the late 1800s after the end of slavery after having survived emancipation and smith talked about her life in louisiana as a slave. Smith said that she had a quota, had to pick 150 pounds of cotton each day and that if she didnt meet the quota she would be whipped. So one night sally smith decided she was going to try to avoid the hassle, avoid the possible punishment, avoid the hardship of the labor of picking cotton and sally smith went and hid in the woods. She described as this perpetual practice that developed after she went away the first time, sometimes i would go so far off from the plantation i could not hear the cows or the roosters crow. Sally smith is really getting away. She is out. She is not in a space where the plantation is really nearby. Smith would hide out for as long as she could but sometimes she had to come back when she needed food and she talked about this one night, right, she went back to the quarter, she went back to the place where enslaved people lived. She knocked on a ladys door and asked for some food. The lady said i dont have a piece of bread but i can bake you a corn cake. Sally smith is starting to feed herself. And just as shes about to make her meal the overseer comes in and catches her. So there are a couple of important things you can see about truancy in this piece of smiths interview. Truancy was fostered by africanamerican communities. Smith was trying to use her connections to other enslaved people to help her stay away from forced labor. She is avoiding the work of picking cotton. She comes back to the plantation to try to get food. I think its important that sally smith asks for help, and this woman says, you know, i dont have exactly what you want, but here is how i can help you. You can bake a corn cake. This woman is trying to offer help in whatever way she can. So truancy was possible because of africanamerican communities. Connections between people. Connections among enslaved people made it possible for individuals like sally smith to escape their owners grasp for a few nights, for a few weeks at a time. So smith ran away but, of course, in this moment she didnt really get away. In this case she got caught. And every time smith ran away, she was punished. And the punishment was a particularly horrific experience. The overseer catches sally smith and then smith sorry, smith can tell that hes upset, right. The overseer had a big barrel. The overseer has a barrel, and what he does, as smith describes it, takes a bucket of nails and hammer those nails in from the sorry, from the inside of the barrel to the out. So the nail heads are all wrapped around inside of this barrel. And then he put sally smith inside the barrel and rolls other aarround. Essentially beaten up by a barrel full of nail heads. Another interesting piece of this, of course, once she is out, she is sore, bruised all over, and theres another nice old lady that looks out for her. A poor old woman greased her all over and hemmed her glped her gr bruises so she could go back to work as required. You can see Community Dimensions of whats happening here. But its important to recognize this punishment was a horrific experience. And so i wanted to talk about this particular punishment because i think truancy can feel like a really odd act. Why go away if youre not going to get away. What does it matter if sally smith leaves the plantation, gets caught and punished in this horrific way, right . Truancy can feel like a thing thats not all that meaningful if we start thinking about it in those terms. So the interviewer is maybe thinking about this as well, right . After sally smith tells the interviewer about this punishment, rogers asks, i suppose that was an end to your stays in the woods. Sally smith says, no, i did not stay more than a month before i ran away again. I could not stay there. So there were some Important Reasons why enslaved people went truant. Sally smith dealt with this brutal punishment and decided that again and again she would continue to try to leave. People like sally smith one of the reasons people might pursue truancy as a strategy, people might not have thought they would be able to run to freedom in some other place so one way to think about this is geography. She is in louisiana, right . If she wants to get to pennsylvania or new york where abolition laws are taking effect, thats a really long way to go. She has to run through a lot of slavery to find a potential life in freedom, right . If sally smith stayed close to the plantation like in this case, she could come back to borrow food, try to get things from neighbors. If she left, if she ran through alabama and mississippi and tried to find her way to the north, she lost that potential support system. So one of the reasons truancy happened, and well talk more about this in the weeks to come, one of the reasons truancy happened is running away from a plantation, escaping slavery, was incredibly difficult. Also, another way to think about how truancy happened is enslaved people understood running away often meant leaving behind family and friends. So as much as enslaved people hated their bondage, they werent always ready to abandon the place they might have seen as home. So think back to arthur haley, right . He is he seems to be sad to be leaving the place he feels is his home in North Carolina and participate of that is hes leaving his wife. Part of that might be hes leaving his friends. Part is he has a familiar place even if that is a planation where hes held as a slave. Its a place that he knows. Running away from slavery was a decision that would separate enslaved people from what they knew and appreciated about their lives, the family, friends, community. But i also want to encourage you to think of truancy as an act, as a phenomenon that was really tremendously meaningful both to enslaved people and slave owners. There are important differences between truancy and escape. Truancy and flight. But for enslaved people truancy could feel liberating. Think about the way that we talked about the possibilities for freedoms in slavery for gabriel. Sally smith is experiencing similar kinds of moments or flashes of freedom. Smith got punished when she got caught but while she was in the woods, she spent a few days not picking cotton. Not having her pickings weighed, not being whipped, not being watched over carefully to make sure she was doing the work she was compelled to do, right . So sally smith got a few days off of work on the most basic level. Sally smith spent a few days living for herself. She talks in this interview about bugs and snakes and all kinds of scary outdoor stuff shes dealing with, sleeping in the woods. Shes not camping. But even with all that shes saying that this is something she came to enjoy. She came to appreciate the time spent out in the woods on her own. She was living outside of the oversight and the violence of her plantation. So truancy on one level is important because it helps us to see some of the strategies enslaved people used to clak power over their own lives. Sally smith went to the woods because it made her feel good. Truancy points to how powerful enslaved peoples actions could be in relation to the larger system of slavery. So think about this. In the eyes of slave owners we might think about slavery as lets make sure this is nice and solid. In the eyes of slave owners slavery was like a fence. It was a bound space and the idea for slave owners was that they could put a person in this space and compel them to do particular things, right . You will go to this place and do this particular work for this long. Six days a week at more intensity of particular times of year. The idea of slave owners slave owners idea of slavery was that it was a fence that dictated where and how enslaved people lived their lives. Every time an enslaved person did something they werent supposed to do, every time an enslaved person went somewhere they werent supposed to be, they poked a little hole in that fence. So when sally smith runs to the woods, shes poking a hole. When shes punished and runs again, maybe shes poking an even bigger hole, right . Acts like truancy challenge the idea that slave owners had absolute control over slaves. Again, whats important here is this is a slave owners idea of slavery. This is how people who own slaves wanted to imagine slavery as an imaginary fence, that it was shot through, poked through with holes that enslaved people used to live lives in the ways that they wanted to. So sally smiths truancy was a threat to her owners belief that he controlled the people he owned. And there are all sorts of ways people could seek power in their lives. Sometimes they would break tools. Sometimes they would destroy crops. Sometimes they would just work a little slower. They might take breaks. They might plot. Sometimes people like nat turner would rise up. Well talk to him in the weeks to come. Sometimes gabriel would plot a conspiracy. Sometimes a group of people would come together, share a particular Cultural Practice and try to escape to freedom in florida. Every day enslaved people did things that were different from what their owners wanted them to do. One of the most frequent things they could try to do one of the most frequent things they did was try to control the pace of their work. Some of the songs they would sing could be used to regulate or influence the pace of labor on a plantation. I want to play a little piece of one of these songs that will allow us to think about this a little bit. To think about this. You turn around dig a hole in the ground hole hole you turn around dig a hole in the ground hole say emma you from the country hole you turn around dig a hole in the ground hole emma help me to pull these weeds hole everyone appreciates music generally, right . Can understand that songs that might be intended for one place can be enjoyed in other places, right . This is a song that historians understand is a work song. Thats how youre hearing it sung there. The lyrics are suggesting this is the work were doing and maybe enjoy that. The song doesnt have to be confined to the cotton fields. It might be sung at a home. It might be sung at a party. I might be sung like that hole it might be august summer in alabama. It its miserable out there. People are out there working and theyre trying to make sure nobody looks bad and theyre singing slowly. Hole dig my hole we can think about other ways we can understand the connection between labor and politics and African American communities. The song is important because its its a Cultural Development shaped by the work of slavery. It was a Cultural Development that allowed enslaved people to shape the work they were doing. So the song was a way they tried to shape some of the terms of their labor. This is just one example of one of the tools that enslaved people might use in pursuit of some control over their lives. So the institution of slavery was a constant struggle between slave owners trying to extract as much labor as possible from enslaved people and enslaved people looking for and finding ways individually and collectively, ways they could control their own lives. So, if we look back at solomon nor northrops writing we can see this. The ashes flying from day tonight, all day long. The prevalence of whipping was a way for slave owners to take control. They used the whip because they understood that they needed to force enslaved people to do the things they wanted them to do. Before we wrap up, i want to talk about one more piece of solomon northrops narrative. After he describes the violence of the plantation and writes about the hardship of being forced to learn how to pick cotton, he leaves readers with a stunning observation. He writes there are few sights more pleasing to the eye than a cotton field when its in bloom. Its like an immaculate spans of light and new fallen snow. Its compelling to me that solomon northrop could reflect on the beauty of this landscape at the same time that hes thinking about the horrific circumstances that shaped it, right . The cotton crop that he describes as beautiful was violently extracted from enslaved people forced to work. What solomon suggests here is its critical to think about the conditions that produced cotton and the crop that it became, right . Think about the horror and the beauty that are embodied on a plantati plantation, right . In same way i think its important to think in complex terms about the wealth and power of the United States in relation to the institution of slavery. The u. S. Became a wealthy nation and a Global Economic power in large part because of brutal violence perpetrated against people like this, used to forced enslaved people to produce cotton. The labor of producing cotton and the violence used to get that labor never made enslaved people feel less than human. They were always negotiating and struggling for control over their lives even as slave owners tried to use them as tools to generate wealth for themselves. So, i want to wrap up there. I want to turn to our Big Questions and make sure that were all on the same page. So broadly a couple things we want to think through here that we thought through today. How did labor shape the lives of enslaved people in the u. S. South . How can we understand the power struggles between enslaved people and slave owners . What were some of the tools used in these struggles . What do we know . Yeah . With the growth of cotton in the deep south especially we saw a lot of families get broken up. You said that one third of marriages were broken up. Obviously that could be pretty traumatizing for a family and especially with the kids that were separated from their families. A lot of just, i guess, tough times for people in the during the growth of cotton. Yeah. The demands of slave owners and the power of slave owners to move people around broke families, broke communities among enslaved people. Other thoughts here . What do we know . Labor in a sense developed communities and culture for them to be able to, like, not only cope with, but like create some power about how they saw themselves in relation to their environment and, like, each other. I like this. Community is really critical for enslaved people. Its not just a way for people to cope, right . Its not just a way for people to deal with slavery, but to strategize, to develop tools and tactics to run away for a little while, right . That would enable them to feel some kind of power over their lives. Other thoughts on power here and its manifestations . What are some of the things that slave owners did that empowered them . What were some of the things that slave owners did that empowered them . John . You mentioned they would carry a whip and punish slaves that would get out of hand or try to run away. Not only to punish them, but to show an example to other slaves so they would be less likely to do what they did. Violence was vcritical here. It was important to enforce this fence. The tools of wealth, the tools of political power, the tools of the law in a way that slave owners tried to bring in the state to ensure their powers. What you guys have got at here is the reality that, again, slavery was a constant struggle between slave owners and enslaved people. They vstruggled, they wrestled every day over control of an enslaved persons body and time. Well see in the weeks to come some of how that struggle developed and some of the other tools and techniques and really some more interesting and vivid stories about how that struggle played out. Cool . All right. Thats what i have for today. Ill see you guys next week. Were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight from our lectures in history series travel virtually to our nations capitol for a night of history classes in the washington, d. C. Region. We begin with white house myths with matthew costello. American history tv tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspan 3. American history tv products are now available at the new cspan online store. Go to cspanstore. Org for more and check out all of the products. Next, from lectures in history Purdue University professor Katherine Brownell teaches about advertising in the 1950s. She compares radio and early con televised ads. Her class is about an hour and ten minute