IDENTIFICATION
Internal slave trade: the profitability of cotton and sugar increased, so did the value of slaves throughout the entire region. This encouraged the internal slave trade from the upper to the lower south.
Task system vs. gang system: task system is where slaves had a daily or weekly quota of tasks to complete. Gang system is the division of labor within slavery on a plantation.
African Methodist Episcopal Church: predominantly African-American Methodist denomination based in the United States. It was founded by the Rev. Richard Allen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1816 from several black Methodist congregations in the mid-Atlantic area that wanted independence from white Methodists. Allen was consecrated its first bishop in 1816.
Underground Railroad: an organized network of safe housed owned by white abolitionists who spirited blacks to freedom in the North and Canada.
PEOPLE
Nat Turner: leader of eventually 60 followers who lead them against slavery and killed many slaveholders because he believed that God was telling him to do so. He was eventually caught and hanged.
Frederick Douglass: a black abolitionist who was once a slave. He believed that if religion affected him, it made him crueler. In 1838 he borrowed a sailor’s papers to make his escape from Baltimore to New York City.
Denmark Vesey: a slave who won $15,000 in a lottery and bought his freedom. He then bought a carpentry shop and became a preacher at the city’s African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Harriet Tubman: a former slave who made repeated trips back to the South to help other slaves escape using the Underground Railroad.
Mary Edmonia Lewis: named wildfire by her Chippewa mother and black father, then adopted a Christian name when she went to Oberlin College. She later studied sculpture in Boston and Rome.
QUESTIONS
1. How did cotton production shape the economy and society of the Old South?