ILRLR 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Wage Slavery, Sharecropping, Deindustrialization
27 Jun 2016
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Economic systems of antebellum north and south: Plantation owners as capitalists who were maximizing profits with low- cost slave labor. Plantation owners as exerting power over labor by denying political and social rights to slaves. Most slaves worked in the plantation fields: Of the 4m enslaved people in the us in 1860: 9/10 lived on farms and plantations (mostly cotton) Asserted agency through individual and collective resistance: Covert resistance (that seemed passive to whites) Historical agency: ability to shape outcomes; having control over one"s destiny. Fully of southern whites did not even own slaves. Of those who did own slaves, 88% owned 20 or fewer. Gives someone a small plot of land to cultivate, they pay rent in the form of crops. Made it difficult for former slaves to get ahead, however plenty of poor white people didn"t own their land either. Rr allowed southerners to ship cotton faster and cheaper than on rivers.
