Challenging the Peculiar Institution

Johnny R. Phillips                        Chapter 10 Outline

Challenging the “Peculiar Institution: 

Solomon Northup headed to Washington D.C. in 1841 where he was drugged, and kidnapped also robbed of his money and free papers.  Then shipped to New Orleans where he was sold as a slave.  Constantly telling the slave owner and the overseers that he was a free man received constant beatings.  Finely he stopped claiming he was a free man.  With the help from a sympathetic stranger he got a letter to his wife who hired a lawyer that worked with the government officials in New York and Louisiana to track him down.  After a long battle in court,  in 1853 got his freedom. He returned to his family in New York, were newspapers circulated his remarkable story. The attorney helped him publish a book “Twelve years a Slave”.

The Circumstances by which Northup became a slave were extraordinary, but the life he lived as a slave in the American South was typical in many ways. In the 1840, slavery was the bedrock of the South’s economy and social order.

The number of slaves counted 700,000, in the U.S census in 1790 had increased to almost 3,000,000 in the 1840 census.

Several factors accounted for slavery’s rise as the South’s “peculiar institution.” First, unlike most New World slave population, North America slaves achieved a positive rate of natural reproduction by 1750.  Second, the acquisition of new western territories allowed slavery to spread beyond its colonial-era strongholds

Congress ended slavery in 1787 North of the Ohio River, but did not interfere with the expansion of slavery South of the border.

In 1830 an abolitionist movement called for the immediate emancipation of American slaves. Inspired by the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening, abolitionists defined slavery as a sin weighing on the soul of the nation.