Essential Questions: What was so radical about abolition? How did Turner�s revolt harden white southern attitudes regarding basic liberties for blacks?
I. Abolitionists Speak Out
A. The beginnings of antislavery
1. Before 1830, only a few whites considered slavery a moral question
2. Organized opposition to slavery before 1830 limited to American
Colonization Society
a. Proposed a voluntary, gradual, and compensated emancipation
of slaves and their repatriation to West Africa
b.Transported a few thousand blacks to Liberia but never posed a
serious threat to slavery
3. Writing on wall for more vocal opposition to slavery
4. Emancipation in North constituted implicit condemnation of slavery in
South
5. Slavery under attack in other parts of the world, where emancipation
became widespread
B. Abolitionists
1. Radical abolitionism began in 1831 with publication of first issue of the
Liberator, written by William Lloyd Garrison
2. Abolitionism strongest in southern New England, western New York,
northern Ohio, and among new middle classes of northeastern cities
3. American Anti-Slavery Society founded in 1833
a. Society demanded immediate emancipation of slaves and full
civil and legal rights for blacks
II. Life Under Slavery
A. The organization of slave labor
1. Plantations of the cotton belt were among the most intensely
commercialized farms in the world
2. Cotton was well suited to slave labor and the climate of the Deep South
3. On large plantations, men, women and children worked from dawn to
dusk in the fields
B. Paternalism
1. Exploitation of slave labor after 1820 became both more systematic and
more humane
a. Prior to 1820, the whip was commonplace
2. Planters paid close attention to slave discipline
a. Attempt to make North American slavery into a system that was
both paternalistic and humane
b. Sprang from both planter self-interest and a genuine attempt to
exert a kindly, paternal control
C. Revolts
1. Nat Turner
a. Turner was Baptist lay preacher who believed he was an
instrument of God
b. Revolt began in Southampton County, Virginia in Feb 1831
c. Bloody and hopeless revolt that ended in mass murder, failure,
and the execution of Turner and his followers
d. Most slave owners began to tighten their controls on blacks
-Slave codes
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