Answer 1
Answer: Although conditions for slaves varied widely, the daily work schedule for most was long and demanding. House servants generally faced lighter tasks but enjoyed less privacy. Hard work, epidemic diseases, and poor diets contributed to poor health. As both persons and property, slaves suffered from a legal ambiguity with little official protection of rights. Although slaveholders had both moral and economic reasons to maintain slave families, they were often separated.
Answer 2
Answer: Prior to the 1830s, southerners accepted slavery as a necessary evil and even made limited moves to eradicate the problem, primarily through manumission and colonization efforts. After the abolitionists stepped up their attacks, however, southern justification shifted toward defending slavery as a positive good, using biblical, historical, constitutional, scientific, and sociological grounds for argument. Such justifications emphasized racism to avoid potential class antagonisms among whites.
Answer 3
Answer: Slavery as an institution served social as well as economic purposes. Slaveholding represented a path for some and a hope for many of upward economic mobility, social prestige, and political influence. The institution also offered poor whites a sense of superiority over at least one group and a sense of kinship, if not quite equality, with wealthier whites.
Answer 4
Answer: Slaves were used as workers in all types of economic enterprises, but overwhelmingly in cash crop agriculture. A slave generally proved to be a profitable investment for a slaveholder in terms of profit and cost calculations. Most southerners, however, were not slaveholders. The heavy capital investment in land and labor blocked the diversification of agriculture, the development of industry, and improvements in the transportation system, thus limiting overall economic opportunities.
The cypress hills in Alberta and Saskatchewan were the northern-most location that remained south of
A family of African Americans arrive in Chicago, migrants from the American South, in an exodus that
Population Losses in the South, 1920–1930
north of east, east of north, east of south, south of east, etc.
Nutrias native to South America are abundant in freshwater marshes of the Gulf States. Their populat