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El hablante advierte que esta sección tratará aspectos duros de la esclavitud y luego describe la expansión de la población esclavizada en el Sur. También explica diferencias entre esclavitud urbana y rural y usa mapas de Alabama para mostrar cómo la geografía y la historia influyeron en la distribución de la población.
now that we've looked at the big picture top level things right we've looked at the economy and then we looked at the free populations we're now going to get into the heart of this subject which is slaves andslave life and I'll give a bit of a disclaimer this first section is okay but most of the rest of particularly this section of the uh this video we're going to get into some of the more difficult aspectsof slavery the physical social and emotional um ways that slaves were controlled and there's not really going to be jokes there's not going to be levity and I'm not going to be too descriptive with it but there's anda lot of it you already know or understand um but if you need to pause or take time with this part that's that's okay uh it's it's just the nature of the system that needs to be discussed and
understood so just a a bit of a a heads up or or a warning that that once we get into the physical exploitation section and after um it's going to be some some more rougher material than we've coveredbefore but necessary entirely necessary so slaves slaves in the American South uh were accounted for at most fifty percent of the population though typically more between 40 and 45 percent and let's look at the expansion of this howthe the raw numbers of slaves in the south in 1790 that was seven hundred thousand by 1820 that had doubled to 1.5 million by 1860 it had more than doubled to 4 million so this was a exponentially expandingand consistently expanding population 75 percent of slaves at any given time worked on plantations mostly growing and harvesting cash crops like cotton a slave's life ranged based on their owner job location and so on though almost always or
not almost always always with a level of brutality and Trauma and exploitation no matter how quote unquote nice the slave owner was they were still engaging in the brutal practice of slavery Urban slaves were typically Freer quotes aroundFreer while rural slaves were isolated and this is only in the sense of if you were a slave in a city your job probably required you to travel from place to place or within a city or you knowyou may have to leave wherever the home of whoever you owned and and run errands for them that's the only aspect where I uh we mean that they're Freer it's not like they had more rights remember we talkedabout the Black Codes where even the free black populations we're extremely restricted so it's not like they had more of a say or or were even considered citizens or people but they had a little more freedom of movement
whereas if you were a slave on a farm or a plantation that was your entire life was on that farm you never got to leave um and typically conditions were harsher still harsh in the in the in theurban or city settings but uh typically harsher in general out on the agricultural Auto Farms uh before we move on to physical exploitation I want to show you a couple of maps and I mentioned previously that I wasgoing to show you why Alabama has this swath down the middle and this map to start shows the distribution of slaves uh one dot reaching 200 and this does it doesn't correlate with the previous map I showed youwhich was uh the average number of slaves per slave owner so we had that dark green piece here down in Texas where the average slave uh slaveholder had more than 20.
but there's not a high concentration of Dots here which means there's a high number of slaves but few slave owners whereas up here in Virginia and North Carolina this is filled in which means there's a lot of slavesbut it wasn't darker colored on the other map this map because that means there's a high number of slaves but also a higher number of slave owners right lies damn lie statistics so you can see how the numberschange based on the framework but some areas are still um high on both of these right you've got this swath down Alabama up and down the Mississippi River Coastal Carolina those areas same thing Mississippi River Central Alabama CoastalCarolina so maps of Alabama to show you why this swath down here in the middle is the way it is and this to me is super interesting because it shows how history and and all of these things tie
together so top left uh this is it says Cretaceous sediments this is this was the coastline during the Cretaceous Period you know when there were dinosaurs roaming the Earth so all of this down here right here was waterthis is the coastline so a lot of that silt and everything built up there so when you look at it from a geological perspective you have what's called uh fertile black land prairie soil this is the most fertilesoil in Alabama which correlates here then even back in 97 you know zooming closer to the Future the average Farm size still follows that swath of land because that's the most fertile soil here slave population 1860 once againdarker areas higher populations of slaves following the swath down the middle population of African Americans in 2010 once again following this same swath of land and the election results in 2020 the blue went Democrat and this is an
outlier because that's uh I believe it's where Montgomery or Birmingham are I don't remember which city's there but it's a big city well big city for Alabama um these pop this you know the population African-Americans tend to voteDemocrat so the reason you when you look at electoral maps of Alabama and there's always this swath of blue down the middle it's because that's where the coastline was thousands of years ago uh millions of years ago that'swhere the fertile soil is that's where people choose to farm so that's where the slaves were that's where African Americans live and they tend to vote Democrat I just find that incredibly interesting to see where the coastline waswhen dinosaurs roamed the Earth you follow it through history and now it's still affecting the way that our elections go interesting piece here okay
Se analiza cómo el trabajo forzado y el castigo físico eran parte central del sistema esclavista. El hablante describe azotes, collares con púas, cajas de castigo y cómo la violencia se usaba para controlar y humillar a los esclavos.
the physical exploitation of slaves and Punishment we'll start with physical exploitation all slaves shared a universal experience of forced labor and lack of control the treatment of slaves vary depending on their Master but always had a base levelof brutality or harshness let's be clear even the friendliest and nicest slave owner still owned a person they still treated a fellow human being as property as sub-human as a tool for economic production as a commodity to beleveraged and traded the system was about maximizing productivity for the owner to get as much work out of the slaves as possible and almost all slave owners used uh what what we call a carrot and a stick approacha system of of positive and negative reinforcement if the slaves do as you instruct them to do you positively reinforce that if they don't you negatively reinforcement the negative reinforcement side is punishment physical punishment was common in all
areas in all situations the most common forms of punishment were flogging or whipping flogging is similar to whipping but instead of a whip which can cause lacerations and scars it's more of a blunt object like a stick ora bat or something like that less common but well-documented punishments include slave collars with spikes so the wearer could not lay down or lean that's what you see on the right or what were called hot boxes where theslave could be left in with little food or water for days these were sometimes metal or wood boxes that were they could be freestanding like an outhouse but they weren't an actual toilet well not normally um or theycould be buried at ground level and the slave would be placed in there for a day two days a week again with very little food or water and this being through the South imagine how that would be trapped
in a little area with no wind no air no water for days nothing to do barely larger than a coffin
Most states or rather before I move on the first time I gave this lecture it was when I was at UNT and I was in a lecture hall with 125 students the way the classroom was set up wasI was up front and then they were you know the risers going back like you would expect a typical large-scale College classroom to look like right you've got the seats that are like Stadium style seating and I wasdown at the bottom the doors of the classroom were at the top in the back so only I could see the doors and this is when I was a graduate student what was called a teaching fellow so I'mat this point in my lecture and I look up to the left door and I'm the only one that can see it and a couple other grad students not knowing what I was lecturing about were there making faces
doing a few gestures just being General idiots that we were and so I was literally talking about slave collars and hot boxes and I looked up and I went huh because what they were doing was funny I forgotwhat I was doing though because all that my class saw was me talking about these brutal punishments and then I laughed and I very quickly my brain caught up to what had just happened and I was like youknow no no no no my friends were you know they they stick their head in the window in the door and of course the class turned around and they were gone now they believed me or at least ifthey didn't nobody reported it but you know that's this isn't the kind of thing that I would laugh about and I hope by this point in the class you understand that there's a sequel here the first time I
recorded this video several several years ago because I've updated things over time and changed it up I was telling this exact same story and recording at home as I am now and in the middle of telling that storymy cat walked in looked at me and then basically kind of jumped back onto his back legs like full like standing on his back legs made this weird cat noise and then took off running just like now youcan't see me I'm I tell that story my cat comes in does that I go huh I laugh again and so I had to explain a second time I'm not laughing at what I'm lecturing about it this timeit was my cat and I'm very much watching around me to make sure that he doesn't show up again um so I don't know why I've been cursed to have this happen twice here but it has and I
like telling the story because it's a nice little break in what we've been talking about the brutality of slavery um so we have to move forward though just so you're aware the left-hand picture is a photograph of aslave uh and those marks on his back are the scars from being whipped so right back into it um killing and or maiming slaves was not common common because they were expensive assets it did happen though it wasawesome gruesome often gruesome and cruel when it did you know it I hate to use the analogy of a car but I've already used it to explain the the the the value that was placed upon slaves if yourcar doesn't stops working you don't you know just start pummeling it and destroying it you try to you know correct the problem right or or same thing with um um again I hate to compare people to animals but
when when it comes to like training an animal if they're not doing what they're supposed to do it's better to you know you don't just kill them outright same thing here like if you have something that's working foryou you don't break it because you need it to work for you so they killing and maiming uh was was rare but it did happen right um now there were slaves who were who were owned specifically for thepurpose of fighting or other things and you know if your slave was killed because they were a fighting slave that was the nature of that business but and they're obviously very cruel people who would do these things butby and large that was not a common practice because you know if you're wanting to get productivity out of something destroying it or killing it doesn't help that process remember the entire goal was to get maximum productivity out
of the system punishment with both physical and emotional deliberately it was usually conducted where other slaves could see so it could serve as an example of what Disobedience was a resultant also to humiliate the slave regardless of theaudience so it was both to physically punish the slave but also mentally punish the slave and on on that we'll we'll transition a little to the social control this is physical exploitation and Punishment uh punishment is a form
La sección explica cómo los dueños de esclavos usaban la familia, el matrimonio informal y la reproducción como herramientas de control social. También aborda la explotación sexual, la violación, la descendencia esclavizada y el papel limitado de las esposas de los esclavistas.
of physical exploitation just to help with the your notes and organization we'll now look at social control the first way we'll look at social control is through family but in general social control is where slave owners you usedmore than the threat of physical violence to control their slaves one aspect is family they encourage families and having kids both for morale but also to grow their own labor force marriages between slaves were allowed but nothing officialright they were they were legally informal right there was no legal marriage between the slave but you allowed them to to couple and procreate because people are typically happier typically not universally um if they have someone to beclose to and most people um also desire to have children of Their Own and so this allowed them to experience those aspects of of life well not necessarily everything giving any them anything legally
it was mostly a form of control and morale enhancement this quote-unquote institution of marriage did not prevent owners from breaking up slave families particularly amongst the smaller slave owning class who would often sell slaves to pay their debtsremember I said that those small slave owners they're often their only asset was their slaves another form of social control was sexual exploitationthis was common this was a common issue and Universal to the female slave experience yes slaveholders had sex with their slaves correction they raped their slaves slaves were not able to give or deny consent and therefore it wasrape regardless of the gender sadly the rape of a slave was not illegal across the South because you could not rape your own property this is obviously abhorrent and evil but considering the history of the treatment of womenand minorities in this country shouldn't be surprising I mean marital rape was not outlawed nationally in the U.S until 1993.
some slave women were treated as prostitutes but most of them were quote unquote Mistresses but again they couldn't really give consent did they really have the choice to say no of course they didn't another form of social controlrelated to this was offspring naturally these encounters resulted in pregnancy on average African Americans today as of this recording 2022 have on average 25 white ancestry and that comes from this era slave owners wanted as a result ofof this in The Offspring slave owners wanted to avoid any potential inheritance claims or anything like that so across the South they made it so that the legal status of a of The Offspring of a slave was determinedby the mother's status thus The Offspring of a slave woman and a male owner was a slave you would think that this would mean the child of a free white woman and a male slave was free but they
typically just killed the child at Birth in those cases this was to prevent these slaves to prevent black people from taking control of the Family Farms if the slave owner only has one child and it was uh witha slave that he took as a mistress I.E raped then you know they couldn't claim any inheritance they were a Slave most never acknowledge the results of their Affairs you may wonder what about the wives of these slaveowners who are doing these things were they aware 100 percent but the way that Society was at the time and the way that women and married women were were seen is that they were there to support their husbandsand look the other way they knew from what information we know they didn't like it but there was nothing for them to do about it legally right um and I mentioned back when talking about the Edenton tea party
that most women did not have the a right to speak in public and that had not changed so that is the last of the social control where we're going to look at now is to zoom back out a
El hablante cierra esta parte anunciando un cambio hacia las leyes de la esclavitud y los argumentos usados por el Sur para defenderla. Sirve como transición hacia la siguiente sección del video.
little bit and start talking about the laws regarding slavery and the arguments that the South used to defend this horrible horrific and exploitive Institution