Gary Gallagher: evaluation

Transcript context

…What was the general view amongst the populace towards slavery? Let’s kind of lay it out. Let’s, you know, for the audience looking back, let’s put ourselves in the mind space of how people saw the world, how people saw slavery, how people saw African Americans. Well, the baseline among the white Americans, there were about 31, shade more than 31 million Americans in 1860 for the census of 1860. About four million of them were African Americans, three and a half million of those enslaved in the South. Anyway, among the white population, the average attitude toward Black people is what we would call profoundly prejudiced. Doesn’t matter whether you… A lot of people think this is a Southern white thing. They’re the only ones who were prejudiced. By our standards, the overwhelming majority of people in the free states were also deeply prejudiced. It’s important to keep in mind that attitudes towards slavery and attitudes toward race are not necessarily the same. I mean, you could be against slavery and still be prejudiced against Black people. By our standards, many abolitionists were prejudiced against Black people. They… But the overwhelming majority of the white North… In the North, often had a hard time getting my students to understand the demographics in 1860. The free states in 1860 were more than 98% white. 98% white. African Americans are a tiny minority in the free states. Black people lived in the 15 slaveholding states in 1860. Most of the white North, by our standards, was very prejudiced. They were against the expansion of slavery into the territories because they thought that would circumscribe white opportunities to make an economic life in these federal territories, and they didn’t want that to happen. About 45% of the people who lived in the free states were Democrats. Most Democrats had no problem with slavery. I mean, absolutely no problem with the institution of slavery. There would be more problems among Republicans, especially with extension of slavery, although many Democrats, white Democrats in the North were against that as well. The white South was overwhelmingly in favor of slavery. You often read the argument, the kind of neo-Confederate argument that they’ll talk about how most Confederate soldiers didn’t own slaves. That’s true. A large majority of families in the South did not own a single slave. But all white Southerners had a stake in slavery. They had a stake in it as a form of labor control, but more important than that, they had a stake in it as a means of social control. They knew, no matter what they said later in the Jim Crow era of how happy Black people were in the institution of slavery, they knew that Black people, of course, did not want to be enslaved, and they were afraid of what would happen if they weren’t enslaved anymore. They had in the backs of their minds Haiti. Is that what’s gonna… If you live in one of the coastal districts of South Carolina where 90% of the residents are enslaved and you’re a white person, you probably don’t sleep all that soundly at night if you think there’s any chance that the Black people are not gonna remain under the control of the white people. enslaved and you’re a white person, you probably don’t sleep all that soundly at night if you think there’s any chance that the Black people are not gonna remain under the control of the white people. So all white people in the South had a stake in slavery, not just some. All of them did, and there were all kinds of ways that it would go back and forth. If you were a modest farmer and grew a little bit of cotton, you didn’t have your own cotton gin, but your more wealthy neighbor had a gin, could gin your cotton there, and then you would take your turn on the slave patrols. So there’s a reciprocity in that regard.…

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