Chapter 11 Objectives

1. The Staple crop of the south was cotton, until it was introduced; the South thought it
would have to find ways other than agriculture to make money. Although short staple
cotton was harder to process and get the seeds out, this was solved by the invention of the
cotton gin. Demand for cotton was growing rapidly because of the textile industry in
Britain.

2. The south did little to change its colonial dependency because of the great profitability
of the region’s agricultural system. In the South the agricultural system was booming and
ambitious people eager to make a profit didn’t look past it. Another reason was that a lot
of wealthy southerners had put a lot of money into the south’s farming system.

3. The power of a southern planter was a lot like an Aristocracy in that, the more land and
slaves that a person owned; the more respected a person was. In fact, many of the planters
in the upper south were people whose families had occupied positions of wealth and
power for generations.

4. The role of a southern woman was to obey her husband. Many women didn’t have the
opportunity to go beyond being a homemaker because they were so isolated from the
outside world. At times, a wife became more of an ornament for the farmer than anything
else.

5. The typical white farmer was not a great planter and slaveholder, but a modest farmer.
“Plain Folk” owned a few slaves who they worked with and became closer with than
most planters. Many planters only planted crops for themselves and lived off their land.
During the 1850’s the number of slaveholding farmers was substantially smaller than the
number of farmers who didn’t have slaves.

6. Slaves in the south basically only got the things that they need in order to work hard
and survive. Many slaves had cultivated their own gardens so they could have fresh
vegetables. They received cheap clothing and shoes and lived in small cabins called
“Slave Quarters”. Female slaves generally worked the hardest because not only did they
work in the fields with the men but they also tended to jobs such as cleaning, cooking and
child rearing.

7. Rarely, slaves held rebellions, for the most part, slaves took less drastic forms of
revolting such as running away. The most common form of resistance was the everyday
behavior of the slaves, most of the times they refused to work hard; they stole from their
masters and neighboring farm owners, they also intentionally broke tools so that they
could get better ones that required less work.

8. The slave culture consisted of their own types of music, language, religion, and family
values. The Slaves created their own language referred to as “pidgin”. It was a mixture of
African words as well as English. It survived in African American culture for many years
after.