Antebellum Slavery

In this unit, we learned a lot about slavery in America in the 19th century.  We learned how America's economy became dependent on slavery and how slaves were treated.  There are three essential question about this unit: How did Slavery become economically entrenched in American society by the early 19th century?, How does a system of slavery based on race affect human dignity?, and finally What human characteristics does such a system choose to ignore?

For the first essential question, we answered it by doing an interactive map activity.  We used the following activity, http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/US/US18-00.html. Here we saw how the discovery of the cotton gin jump started slavery. With this new invention it was now easier and faster to separate the cotton from the seeds. This caused a big increase in slave trade in the south because plantation owners wanted a lot of slaves to produce a lot of cotton. Now that cotton was being grown and manufactured in huge amounts, it became the south's main economy. The south became dependent on cotton for money and to keep the economy running. Even though the north didn't allow slaves, they still were indirectly funding slavery by buying cotton from slave plantations.

Map in interactive activity:

In class we were put into groups and assigned one of three slavery activists to research and read about. They were Frederick Douglass, George Fitzhugh and John Brown. George Fitzhugh had this idea about the free laborers being more enslaved than the negro slaves. He said that slaves had it better off because they had less responsibilities than free laborers. He goes on to explain his ideas in his book, Cannibals All! When free laborers see this, they lose their dignity because Fitzhugh is basically calling them all worse off than slaves. For most of their lives free whites have been told that they're better than slaves, but now Fitzhugh is saying the opposite almost. This leads on to the next point of the human characteristics that are ignored. For one, intelligence is ignored a lot if you're a slave. People think you are dumb and can't think and everyone thinks that they're better than you. Love is also another big characteristic that gets ignored a lot for slaves. For example, in the movie we watched, Prince Among Slaves, Prince has to free his wife and kids himself. He is set free by his owner, but his wife and kids are not. People not only deny people love, but they deny family too. Many slaves' families have been split up again and again, and no one cares about it. Overall, slavery as a whole in 19th century America was morally wrong, even if it was part of the economy, they could have at least treated the slaves better.

Women's Equality

This past unit, we learned about a lot of social reforms in the mid 19th century.  A really big reform movement was the Women's Rights movement.  The essential question of this unit was "How did the mid-19th century American society react to women's demands for equality? Does 21st century society still react differently to men and women?"

In the 19th century men were viewed as better than women, and women were only supposed to have certain duties in the house.  As this picture shows,  the women was supposed to be in charge of watching over the children, keeping them entertained, their education, and to keep them fancy and give them nice clothes.

These weren't all of their chores however, they had to cook and clean, and wash clothes.

Not only did women have these duties, but they also had to live life without ever sinning or doing any bad deed.  People in the mid-19th century didn't blame men for crimes because it was normal for men to sin and they were supposed to, but a women is supposed to be pure and never sin.  

Women started to realize how unfair this was and they started to demand rights for themselves.  There was a big convention held in Seneca Falls in 1848 and discussed everything they wanted to change about how women were treated.  The came up with a document called The Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions.  In this document they tried to fix all of the laws and social norms where women weren't treated as equal.  An example of one of the laws comes from the Laws and Practices document when it says "In most states, it is legal for a man to beat his wife." The Sentiments and Resolutions resolves most of the issues however it takes about 72 years before anything changed in the U.S.


Today, in the 21st century, people still see and treat women differently than they do men.  For example we watched this video:

This video shows a really accurate way how society labels men and women differently.  Even if they are doing the same thing, people label them differently.  I believe that the society today has still come a long way from back in the mid-19th century on how we view women, however I believe that we still have a long ways to go before we treat everyone equally.  I don't think we fully understand the Declaration of Independence when it says "All men are created equally..." A lot of people still see it as men and not (wo)men.