HIST 120 Diablo Valley College Slavery and Reform America Race Questions

For this discussion, address one of the following in your first post. For your follow-up posts, you may respond to a post that addresses any of the questions.

Your posts should:

1) make direct reference to Give Me Liberty!, most likely to help provide context

2) quote as evidence the primary sources in Chapters 11 and 12 in Voices of Freedom.

–What made ideas about race so powerful that poor whites in the Old South seemingly ignored their own economic interests to support slavery and the disproportionate benefits it provided the relatively small number of planter elite?

–Given that most northern states had abolished slavery by the 1830s, how is it useful to think of slavery as a national—rather than regional—economic and political system?

–How did the planters’ paternalism serve to justify the system of slavery? How did it hide the reality of slavery?

–Identify the basic elements of the proslavery defense and those points aimed especially at non-southern states.

–How did enslaved people create community and a culture that enabled them to survive in an oppressive society?