HIST 309 Slavery in the Antebellum South
This course examines the southern region of the United States as a “slave society,” that is, a society in which: 1) a system of enslaved labor and human commodification drove the region’s economy and 2) a powerful slaveholding minority held the reigns of political power. How did this minority white ruling class maintain their power over a large enslaved population (1 in 3 southerners by 1860) and a majority of non-slaveholding whites (3 out of 4 white southerners by 1860)? How did enslaved women and men create community, build solidarity, chart insurgent geographies, and establish a political tradition of resistance in the face of arbitrary and institutionalized violence? We will examine the rise of chattel slavery, its importance in American capitalism, and its impact on southern households, political institutions, religion, and cultural practices. Our readings will explore how a white supremacist system of transgenerational human property shaped the social relations and lived experiences of enslaved African Americans, common whites, slaveholding planters, and Indigenous nations of the South. How did these groups of southerners use religion, violence, and ideologies of sex, gender, race, and class either to challenge or reinforce existing power relations? How was the US nation as a whole complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery? Finally, how does the US as a nation continue to reckon with the legacies of chattel slavery in contemporary social movements, law, and culture? Course materials include primary documents, first-person narratives, film, music, and groundbreaking historical scholarship.