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    • More than twenty slaves

      • Of the people who did own slaves, more than half held five or fewer, and 88 percent owned twenty or fewer. Though few in number, the large plantations and their farming operations worked more than twenty slaves—and often many more—and were a major fact of life in the antebellum South.
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  2. The plantation system created an environment for the South to experience an economic boom in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. However, reliance on both the plantation system and more widespread slave labor, left the South in a precarious economic situation.

  3. Sep 19, 2024 · A planter aristocracy controlled politics and society. In 1850, only 1,733 families owned more than 100 slaves each. This elite group formed the political and social leadership of the South. The “cottonocracy” lived in large, white-painted plantation mansions — symbols of wealth and power.

  4. Although most slaves lived on small farms with fewer than 10 slaves, the large plantation with hundreds of slaves has come to define our image of the antebellum South.

    • The Cotton Gin
    • The Value of A Slave
    • Plantations of The “Old South”
    • Regulating Slavery
    • Expanding Southwest
    • The Internal Slave Trade
    • Slave Life on Plantations
    • Resistance and Escape

    At the end of the eighteenth century the farming economy of the South was in trouble. Many wished to convert their farms to grow cotton because England, having recently developed new machines to process cotton into cloth, would buy as much cotton as southerners could grow. But separating the fragile cotton fibers from the seed—a process known as gi...

    The rise in need for slaves came exactly at the time that Congress banned the Atlantic slave trade, which forbade the importation of slaves from foreign lands. Slaves suddenly became much more costly. In 1810 the price of a “prime field hand” was nine hundred dollars; by 1860 that price had doubled to eighteen hundred dollars. Despite the ban on fo...

    The years from 1831 to 1861, the high point of cotton plantation culture, came to be known as the classic era of the “Old South,” often depicted in popular literature with images of large plantations with pillared mansions run by aristocratic gentlemen with hundreds of slaves. In fact the vast majority of southerners at the time were struggling far...

    Southerners lived in great fear of slave uprisings and did everything in their power to prevent their slaves from finding opportunity to discuss plans for escape or revolt. The southern states passed “slave codes,” which made it illegal for slaves to read and write, to attend church services without the presence of a white person, or to testify in ...

    As depleted soil lowered farm productivity in states such as Virginia and South Carolina, cotton planters moved into Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee , Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida , Missouri , Texas , and Arkansasbetween 1790 and 1860, bringing their slaves with them. From the 1830s through the 1850s the steady shuffle of slave coffles (groups of sl...

    Because it was illegal to import slaves from other countries, an internal slave trade developed among the slave states of the South. It was an ugly business and slave traders were considered the least reputable of white men. Nevertheless the southern plantation economy could prosper only because of the transfer of surplus slaves from the upper Sout...

    Life for slaves on plantations was, at best, very difficult. While many plantations were run by impersonal overseers who did not hesitate to apply the lash, some wealthy southern plantation owners viewed themselves as father figures for their slaves and took pride in treating them with kindness. People who owned smaller farms and worked alongside t...

    In most southern states, whites outnumbered slaves. The strict slave codes and slave patrols made it difficult to escape, and the lack of mountains and forests made it difficult to hide. Nonetheless up until the time of emancipation (freeing of the slaves) in 1863, about fifty thousand slaves a year ran away for varying lengths of time. Most of the...

  5. In the lower South the majority of slaves lived and worked on cotton plantations. Most of these plantations had fifty or fewer slaves, although the largest plantations have several hundred.

  6. slaves. The average number of slaves per plantation was about ten, but that number must be reckoned against a substantial number of plantations on which a hundred or more slave laborers existed. On smaller plantations there was a high likelihood that the plantation owner might been less than fully literate or too busy to keep detailed records.

  7. Jun 11, 2023 · The largest rebellion in US history occurred in Louisiana in 1811, when some two to five hundred enslaved plantation workers marched on New Orleans, burning sugar plantations en route, in a failed attempt to overthrow the plantation system.