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 of this is the consolidated association of louisiana, that is a mouthful. This eap l was organized in 1927. It was a bank. It linked cotton planners, english investors and louisiana government. So, what we are seeing here was basically a sketch of how this organization worked. Investors in england bought bonds from the capl. The capl wood loan money to slave owners and louisiana and would put up land and enslaved people as collateral, right . So if they failed it might have to surrender inflate people to the bank. Slave owners would use the cash from the capl to live their daily lives, right . They would use it to buy land, by cotton seed, by a fancy velvet coat if that is what they wanted to do, right . It was a bank, taken whatever they wanted with this money. Repaying these loans, that made dividends for english investors. Basically, you are getting people connected across the Atlantic Ocean and connected in the project of making profit off of enslaved people and the production of cotton. The most Important Development or innovation of the capl is this, right . Louisiana tax revenue would protect investors in case of an 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 capl got the government of louisiana to back them. So if there was a crash, louisiana attacks knowledge would be used to repay english investors. This is like a state guaranteed of the risk of investment in cotton. Governments and investors on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were getting deeply involved in the industry of cotton production. So, it reflects the investment in the production of slavery. Slave owners were using financial power and government power to enhance their wealth. So this is i use the term national. Its also international, but i use the term national. One of the interesting phenomenon phenomena connected to the cotton industry are the way that it brought together the north in the south. So cotton was the fuel for industry in the northern United States. New england factories produced large amounts of cotton clothing for American People, and a number of the American People for whom they produced cotton clothing were enslaved people. So this photo is showing some of the clothing that enslaved people might have been wearing. Likely, these clothes are made out of cotton, right . And there is this interesting phenomenon of what is called the grove cloth. Cotton was grown in the south and then woven into a cheap and rough and ideally durable kind of fabric for clothing that would then be sold back to slave owners in the south, right . So enslaved people were wearing the fruits of their labor, wearing this rough, woven cotton clothing designed to sustain them as they work to cultivate more cotton. So this is part of the story of power in american slaves societies. Slave owners had massive power on their plantations, extensive power beyond their plantations because they controlled so much wealth and because they had Government Support for their efforts to get rich by exploiting enslaved labor. So the institution of slavery is growing at moving and expanding and becoming increasingly embedded in the nations economy. I want to talk through now some of the ways that enslaved people would have experienced this as humans, right . What was it like to live through these changes . 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 that they owned, a number of their enslaved people to alabama. During the trip, one of the women who was named sarah, asked the enslaved people that she owned, she asked him if they want to send messages back to family, messages back to their friends in North Carolina. Spark man wrote to, describe what she was doing. She said, the servants request me to send many messages to all their friends and relations. I will be worried to their friends, thats a very words they want to say to them. So what you are looking at here is a message that a guy name author halle wanted to send. There are a couple of things that you could see here on a basic level, right . He is letting her know that they are doing well. Hes saying have a chance to talk to her, and to hear from her. He misses her and he sends love. We can imagine these are regular things that people would feel and convey to a Family Member from who they were separated. A couple of things that i want to highlight. So when you read this broadly, you can see how important family was to this person. I hope to see you in the spring. There is this desire to believe that in the near future they will be reconnected. They had friends back home, right . And i think this is key, right . I was glad to hear from our home. They had a place to identify as home, and they build communities, they established families. This family is fragile and will be separated from his wife. But these communities were no less valuable, no less significant to the people who made them because they were fragile. We also, author halle writes that he was said that he was sick. He was saying that, it might be saying this because he was reading these, and wants to imagine that arthur haley is concerned about the slaveowners health. Maybe he saying this because he thinks that is what she wants to hear. Another way to read this is that holley was concerned about his owners health. The slave owner who was sick assess label and that might die, he was often sold or inherited or given away and was given away in ways that and slave people had built. So the health of a slave owner could be very important for someone like this writer. The health of a slave owner could be important for the possibility that they might be able to stay in touch. Thousands of people were moved in pursuit of a cotton crop. The fact that people were treated as property had profound effects on their lives, and i will just reiterate this. The fact that people were treated as property had profound effects on their lives. Historians estimate that the domestic slave trade broke up one third of enslaved people marriages in the upper south. So, again, the upper south, North Carolina, maryland, virginia. Its likely that sale and force movement separated half of all enslaved people from at least one of their parents. The economy of slave very had dangerous results for black families and black communities. As all this proceeded, and save people organized and strategized, and they looked for ways that they might claim some power over their lives. Their connections were critical for the kind of power they were trying to use. And one way we can understand this, is to the practice of truancy. 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 thats a way for a week or two. The distinction between trenton truancy and running away is that enslaved people who were described as truant were not necessarily intending to leave the south. So there is a woman name sally smith who describes some of her experiences with this. Smith was interviewed in the late 1800s, after the end of slavery, after having survived emancipation. And smith talked to an interview about her life in louisiana as a slave. Smith said that, at one point, she had a quota. She had to pick 150 pounds of cotton each day, and if she did not meet the quotas she would be whipped. So, one night, sally smith decided that she was going to try to avoid the hassle, right . Avoid the possible punishment. Avoid the hardship of labor of picking cotton. So sally smith went and hid in the woods. She described, basically, this perpetual practice that developed after she went away the first time. Smith said id go so far away from the plantation, i could not hear the cows low or the roosters crow. So sally smith is really getting away. Shes out. She is not and a space where the plantation is really nearby. So she would hide out as long as she could, but she had to come back when she needed food. She talked about this one night, right . She went back to the quarter. She went back to the place where inside people live, she knocked on the latest door and asked for some food. We have so, salads for the starting to heal some things, and the overseer comes in catches her. A couple of things that you can see about truancy. One of them is that truancy was fostered by African American communities. Smith was trying to use her connections to other inflamed people to help her stay away from forced labor, right . She is literally not away from the plantation, but she is avoiding the work of picking cotton. She comes back to get food. Its important that sally smith asked 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 and whatever way she can. We connections between people, connections among inflate people made it possible for individuals like sally smith to escape their night for a few months and a time for. Smith ran away, but she did not really get away. And this case, she got caught. And every time smith right away she was punished, and the punishment was a horrific experience. They catch sally smith and they can tell that shes upset. The overseer had a big barrel, so the overseer has a big barrel, to take a bucket of nails and out. They were all wrapped around inside of this barrel. We so he puts it in and rolls around. Essentially, they were beaten out by a barrel full of nail heads. Another interesting piece of this is that once she was out, she is sore and bruised all over, theres another nice a lady that looks out for her, right . A poor woman greased her all over and helped her get over her bruises so that she be able to go back to work as she was required. So you can see Community Dimensions of what is happening there. But its important to understand that this punishment was a horrific experience, right . So truancy would deliver like a very odd act, why go away if youre not going to get away, right . What is actually matter if sally smith leads the plantation but then gets punished in this horrific way, right . So truancy can feel like a thing that is not all that meaningful if we start thinking about it in those terms. The interviewer is thinking about this as well, right . After sally smith tells the interviewer about this, they ask, i suppose to be the end to your stay in the wood. I tell you i could not stay there. So there were sir Important Reasons why enslaved people went truant. Salah smith dealt with this and decide again and again she would continue to try to leave. One of the reasons people might pursue truancy as a strategy, people might not think they can support system. In someyil one of the reasons tremendously happened, and we will talk more about this in the weeks to come, one of the reason currency happened is because running away from a plantation and escaping slavery was incredibly difficult for. Also, another way to think about how truancy happened is that enslaved people understood that are running away from a plantation often meant leaving behind family and friends. So, as much as enslaved people hated their bondage, they were not always ready to abandon the place that they might have seen at home. Think back to arthur holley, right . He seems to be sad to be leaving the place that he feels it his home in North Carolina. Part of that its because hes leaving his wife. Part of that is that hes leaving his friends, . And even if he has that familiar place where he is held as a slave, it is a place that he knows. So running away from slavery was a decision that would separate enslaved people from a lot of what they understood, a lot of what they knew, and a lot of what they appreciate about their lives, Family Friends and community. I also want to encourage you to think of the truancy as an act, a phenomenon that is meaningful. There are important differences between truancy and escape, truancy and flight. But for enslaved people, currency could feel liberated. Think about the possibilities for freedom. Sally smith is experiencing moments or flashes of freedom. She spent a few days not picking cotton, not having her pickings weighed, not being whipped, and not being whipped over to see whether she was doing the work or being compelled to do, right . Sally smith got a few days off of work on the most basic level. And spent a few days living for herself. She writes about bugs and sneaks, and all kinds of scary outdoor stuff. Shes not sleeping. But even with all that, this is something she came to enjoy. She came to appreciate the time she spent out in the woods on her own. She was living outside. Currency is helping us to see some strategies that inslee people used to claim power over their own lives. Sally smith went to the woods because it may feel good. Truancy also points to how powerful and sleep people actions could be in relation to the larger system of slavery. Is lets think about this. In the eyes of slave owners, we may think about slavery lets make sure this is nice and solid. Win in the eyes of slave owners, it was like a fence. It was a bound space, right . And the idea for slave owners was that they could compel them to do things. Six days a week, add more intensity and particular times of the year, right . Septembers slave owners dictated how to insulate people lived their lives. Every time enslaved person did something that they were not supposed to do, every time and its a person when somewhere they were not supposed to be, they talked a little hole in that fence. So once alex mid runs to the woods, she is poking a hole. When shes punished and then runs again, maybe shes poking and even bigger whole, right . Acts like truancy challenge the idea that slaveowners had absolute control over slaves. Again, its important that this is slaveowners idea of slavery. This is this is how people who owned slaves want to imagine slavery, right . A solid fence. The reality was that it was poked through, shot 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 own and believe that he controlled the people they owned. And there were all sorts of ways that they could seek power in their lives. Sometimes they would break tools. Sometimes they would destroy crops, right . Sometimes they would just lurk a little slower, right . They might take breaks. They might plot, right . Sometimes people like matt turner would rise up. Well talk about him in the weeks to come. Sometimes gabriel would plot a conspiracy. Sometimes a group of enslaved people in a place like South Carolina would come together, share a particular Cultural Practice and try to escape to freedom in florida, right . Every day, insulate people did things that were different from what their owners wanted them to do. One of the most frequent things that they could try to do was, one of those frequent things that they did was try to control the pace of their work. So some of the songs that enslaved people might sing could be used to regulate or influence the pace of labor. I want to play a piece of one of these songs that would allow us to think about this a little bit. Everyone appreciates music, generally, right . You understand that song that might be intended for one place can be enjoyed in other places, right . This is a song that historians understand as he works along. This is how you are hearing at some, and the lyrics suggest that this is the work that we are doing. Were going to sing about it and enjoy that, right . But the song does not have to be confined to the cotton fields. We can imagine that a song like this might be some at home. It might be song at a party. It might be fast, it might be like , it could be totally different. Or we can imagine that its august 28th, its really hot. Its miserable out there and people are out on the field working and trying to make sure that nobody makes anyone else look too bad. So they might sing. We can see with this song, we can think of other ways said another way that we can understand the connections between labor and power and African American communities. So the song is important because its a Cultural Development that was shaped by the work of slavery. It was also a Cultural Development that allowed and slave people to try to shape the work that they were doing. The song was the way they try to shape some of the terms of their labor. Then this is just one example of one of the tools that enslaved people might ease 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 between 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 northrups writing, we can see it play out, right . The lashes flying from mourning tonight, the whole day long. The prevalence of whipping was a response to enslaved people seeking power over their own lives. Slave owners and overseers used the width because they understood that they needed to force enslaved people to do the things that they wanted them to do. So, before we wrap up, i want to talk about one more piece of solomon northrup its narrative. After he described the violence of the plantation and writes about the hardship of being forced to learn how to pick cotton, northrup leaves readers with a stunning observation. These northrup writes, there are few states more pleasant to the eye then a wide cotton field when it is in bloom. It presents an appearance of purity, like an immaculate expansive light. Excuse me, likening inactive expansive light, new fallen snow. So solomon northrup could reflect on the beauty of this landscape at the same time that he is thinking about the horrific circumstances that shaped it, right . The cotton crop that solomon northrup and described as beautiful was violently extracted from enslaved people forced to work. So what northrup suggests is that its critical to think about the conditions that produce cotton and the crop that it became, right . To think about both the harbor and the beauty that are embodied on a plantation, right . The same way i think its important to think in complex terms about the well and the 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 force insulate people to produce cotton. So the labor of producing cotton and the violence that was used to extract that labor never made enslaved people anything less and human, even as people were treated as property, bought and sold and moved as if they had no wills. They were always negotiating, always struggling for control over their lives, even as slave owners try to use them as tools to generate wealth for themselves, right. So i want to wrap up there and turn to our Big Questions and make sure that we are all on the same page. Broadly, a couple of things we want to think through, how did labour shape the lives of insight people in the u. S. South and how can we understand power struggles . What were some of the tools that were used in the struggles. What do we know . Yes. With the growth of cotton in the deep south exactly, we saw a lot of families get broken up, like you said that one third of marriages were broken up. Obviously, that can be pretty traumatizing for a family, especially with the kids that were separated from their families. So a lot of jazzed, tough times for people in the growth of cotton. Yes. The demands of slave owners and the power of slave owners to move people around broke families. It broke communities, right . Among and save people. Other thoughts . What we know . Labor develops communities and culture for them to be able to, like, i guess not only cope with, but create power and how they saw themselves in relation to their environment and each other. I like. This community is really critical for enslaved people, but its not just a way for people to cope, right . Its not just a way for people to deal with slavery, but 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. Punctured by enslaved people, right . And also the tools of wealth. The tools of political power that we Start Talking about fugitive slaves, the way they deployed the state as a way to try to enhance their strength and secure their title to their human property. So, broadly, what you guys have gotten that here is the reality that, again, to reiterate, constant was a struggle between slaveowners and enslaved people. Slaveowners and enslaved people struggled and wrestled every day over control of and its a persons body and control over and enslaved persons time. You will see in the weeks to come some of how that struggle developed in some of the other tools and techniques and some more interesting and vivid stories about how that struggle played out. Cool . All right. Thats what i have today, and ill see you next week. ]3d8q we continue with lectures in history on cspan three with a emory university