Define the changing relationship between masters and slaves in the antebellum South

into the community. Forced into an alien land, worlds apart from white settlers in miles, culture and language, they were easily-exploited and could be forced into life servitude. Blacks were additionally denied legal and political rights, permanently barred from the company of white landowners, unable to organise themselves into political groups, bound as much by their own diverse cultures as their white masters' suppressive and often brutal treatment. This dehumanisation of slaves was institutionalised in law in 1705 in Virginia; although various seventeenth century statutes had limited the rights of blacks and defined their rôles as slaves, it was not until this date that the first extensive legal code explicitly defined slaves as property: "All Negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves within this dominion shall be held to be real estate and shall descend unto heirs and widows according to the custom of land inheritance." White has traditionally been associated with purity and goodness, while the colour black has been used to symbolise evil, witchcraft and sin. These historical stereotypes further reinforced southern prejudices, convincing white settlers in colonnial America that they were on a moral crusade. The white oppressors used theories of black inferiority in order to justify this radically inegalitarian system, arguing that Africans were a primitive, heathen, barbaric people, and that the white settlers were fulfilling a moral obligation in "civilising" them with white culture and Christian values. Part of this "civilising" rôle that the master was expected to fulfill in exchange for hard, loyal labour was outlined in a 1742 sermon, delivered in the Espicopal parish of the Reverend Thomas Bacon in Maryland; Bacon asserted that God had "laid the foundation of justice and equity between man and man, by making each in his several station, " and that it was the obligation of masters to feed, clothe, and shelter their bondsmen, and to educate them in Christianity, in return for "care, fidelity, and honest labour" from their slaves. The obvious difficulty of investigating relationships between slaves and their masters is that there are few written accounts and artifacts dating back to ante-bellum America, which were written by blacks. Many states prohibited any form of basic education or reading and writing skills to blacks, fearing the threat of rebellion once their slaves gained information and intelligence. This paranoia towards educated slaves is demonstrated in Alex Haley's Roots, an account of black slavery in the South, based on historical documents. In this book, plantation owner Massa Waller, finding that one of the slaves, Kizzy, has been taught to write, decides to sell her, despite beseeching pleads from her family for forgiveness, saying, "The law is the law. She's broken my rules. She's committed a felony." Although this book is a twentieth century insight into slavery and is only loosely based on facts, it demonstrates the way in which the early treatment of slaves was harsh and often uncompromising. Slaves who attempted to rebel against their cruel masters faced severe retribution. One example of this was the 1739 Stono uprising in South Carolina, when planters who caught slaves who had taken up in this rebellion "cutt off their heads and set them at every Mile Post." Masters were therefore suspicious of slaves revolting during this early period of American slavery, and felt obliged to use harsh disciplinary methods and extreme retribution as a deterrent. The American Revolution, fought between 1775 and 1783 had a significant impact on the institution of slavery in America. The abolition of slavery in the North following the War of Independence made slavery a uniquely Southern insitution. In Maryland and Virginia the most important accomplishment of the Revolutionary period was the formation of a significant free black population amid widespread slavery. Prior to the Revolution, the number of free blacks in these states was marginal, the majority being the offspring of inter-racial unions; in cases where these children had white mothers and black fathers, they were legally born free. Before the Revolution, white fathers who wished to liberate their mulatto children were restricted by a Virginian law, implimented in 1723 and overruled in 1782, which made manumission by will or deed illegal. Additionally, many slaves had fought during the war, and received their freedom and in some cases, land bounties, as a reward for their service. A small number of masters freed their slaves out of conscience, resulting in the conflicting interests of democracy and slavery. Richard Randolph emancipated his slaves by will at the start of the Revolution in order "to make retribution, as far as I am able, to an unfortun ate race of bond-men, over whom my ancestors have usurped and exercised the most lawless and monstrous tyranny, and in whom countrymen (by their iniquitous laws, in contradiction of their own declaration of rights, and in violation of every sacred law of nature, of the inherent, inalienable and imprescriptable rights of man, and of every principle of moral and political honesty) have vested me with absolute property." In the Upper South, the Revolution had some impact on localised emancipation; masters such as George Washington were increasingly freeing their slaves in their wills. Despite these philanthropic acts, it is important to note the irony that Randolph, Washington and other masters only freed their slaves upon their death. Although the Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, declares that "All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness...", it is evident that these stipulations did not extend to those who were not born white. Slaveholders attempted to justify this obvious breach of justice by claiming that those of African descent were primitive savages, whose heathen culture was a danger to themselves; by "civilising" blacks, and forcing them to labour, they were saving their corrupt souls. As George Alsop reasoned, "There is no truer Emblem of Confusion [than an attempt by subject or servant] to be equal with him, from whom he receives his present subsistence." Despite this continuous support for the racial oppression and domination of blacks in the post-revolutionary South, there is also evidence to suggest that relationships between masters and slaves were improving. Although many "liberal", influential Southerners such as Thomas Jefferson campaigned for greater liberty democracy, and republicanism, they owned large plantations, laboured by a considerable number of black slaves. Jefferson recognised the paradox of slavery in a democratic society; in his Notes on Virginia (1785), he wrote:"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever." Many masters therefore believed that their livlihoods would not survive without the institution of slavery, and allowed their personal prosperity to come before their conscience in perpetuating this unequal and unconstitutional system. "The white man will never raise - can never raise a cotton or a sugar crop in the United States. In our swamps and under our suns the negro thrives, but the white man dies." Many masters saw abolition as a threat to liberty and prosperity, rather than as a means of ensuring that "all men are created equal", as emancipation limited their resources for expansion in achieving the American Dream. Perhaps the most important consequence of the post-revolutionary era was the signing of an article in the Philadelphia Convention which stipulated that the legal importation of black slaves into the United States of America would be banned after 1 January 1808. This radical measure taken by the founding fathers infuriated many Southerners, who saw their liberty threatened by a restricted slave trade; the twenty years leading up to the ban saw a mass importation of African slaves, throughout the South. The 1808 restriction encouraged inter-state trading, and in spite of the heavy penalties given to those who engaged in the illegal trafficking of African slaves after this date, it is estimated that as many as 300,000 slaves were smuggled into southern states between 1808 and 1861. However, the vast majority of slaves in the south were the product of several generations of black bondage in America; the United States became the only slave society in the Western hemisphere that was naturally sustaining and reproducing itself. The inter-state slave trade played an important rôle in the westward movement of the slave population. This had important consequences on the relationship between masters and slaves in the South: because slaves became harder to replace, masters realised that they would have to improve their conditions, in order to ensure that they lived longer and led healthier lifestyles. As the demand for slaves increased, but the means of acquiring them became more arduous, their market value increased dramatically. Prior to the ban, the vast majority of imported Africans were male; female slaves now became more valuable than ever before, seen as an essential breeding machine to perpetuate slavery. As the value of slaves increased, masters became aware that they would have to ameliorate their standards of living, and there is evidence to suggest that there was less use of brutality during this period. As a freed slave recalled, "Massa was purty good...He treated us jus' 'bout like you would a good mule." One of the great ironies concerning improved conditions for slaves during the 1800-1840 period is that as slave treatment became better, emancipation became more difficult. As psychological domination was replacing physical punishment, servile dependancy increased. Prior to the Revolution, masters demonstrated little interest in intruding into their subjects' religious life; this altered due to the massive expansion of the evangelical movement in the nineteenth century, and Christianity started to play an important part in the daily lives of slaves. At the same time, family life became instrumental in the slave community, to the point where whites often considered slaves to be an extension of their own families. African slavery was therefore becoming domesticated; masters sought to provide stability for their slave communities, so that they would become more obedient and dutiful, and would not consider rebellion. However, slaves often saw religion as being a useful means of gaining knowledge about everyday lives from the slave congregation, and their spiritual hymns often carried messages of liberation rather than obedience; religion was therefore manipulated as a convenient tool for sharing collective values of freedom amongst the slave population. Black slaves in the antebellum South developed an anti-language, a form of linguistic subversion, in which new words constantly replaced old ones in order to confuse the establishment and as a means of clandestine communication. For example, the derogatory term "nigger" was used even by the black slaves themselves as a means of communicating indirectly to each other without the white master noticing subversive undertones. Words and phrases acquired double entendres, so that the term "bad nigger" used in front of the master to another black would have sounded like condemnation to the slave-owner but would in fact have served as a means of praise to the other black. While becoming psychologically dependent on the masters during this period, blacks were simultaneously becoming more harmonious in their secret fight for emancipation. The Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century had an enormous impact on the relationship between masters and their slaves. As crops such as tobacco, rice, sugar cane, and most importantly, cotton became mass produced, more and more slaves were required to provide efficient labour. As Southern society became more urbanised, more and more black slaves were forced to toil in shops and factories, building bridges, streets, railroads and municipal installations. In 1820, slavery was as much a part of life in the city as on the farms and plantations of the South; however, as the cities expanded, they produced conditions which first strained, then undermined, the regime of bondage in the cities. As escaped slave Frederick Douglass stated, "Slavery dislikes a dense population." By 1860 the institution of slavery was in disorder, as the number of blacks in the cities had declined, and discipline over those remaining proved to be difficult to maintain. The nineteenth century saw the collapse of slavery as an institution, following strong abolitionist movements emerging in the North, heightened by Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election victory, Southern secession in 1860-1861, the outbreak of Civil War in 1861, and President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, signed on 1 January, 1863. While conditions for the majority of blacks had notably improved throughout the nineteenth century, masters still perceived slave ownership as a fundamental part of their liberty; the 1857 Dred Scott decision clearly demonstrates the manner in which blacks in the United States still h ad no civil rights, and the law was subject to corruption by white slave-owners. There was enormous support for the Civil War from the South in its early stages. The relationship between slaves and masters in the antebellum South was therefore dynamic, becoming more humane, Christian-based, and family-oriented, as events such as the American Revolution, the 1808 ban on importation of slaves, and the Industrial Revolution changed the philosophy and structure of slavery in the South. It is difficult to assess the extent of black sentiment towards their owners, as the vast majority of slaves were illiterate, and therefore unable to produce diaries, letters, books, and other historical documents. From the rare accounts of escaped slaves such as Frederick Douglass, and archive-based biographies such as Alex Haleys Roots, it is possible to assess that during the antebellum era, psychological domination was replacing physical punishment, increasing servile dependancy; however, there is evidence to suggest that slaves were communicating in language codes, and to some extent engaging in rebellions, and were therefore not as subserviant as their white masters would have liked to imagine. Bibliography William J. Cooper, Jr. & Thomas E. Terrill, The American South, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1991 Harry P. Owens, Perspectives and Irony in American Slavery, University Press of Mississippi, 1976 Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1982 Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820-1860, Oxford University Press, 1964 Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery, The University of Chicago Press, 1976 George B. Tindall & David E. Shi, America, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989 Alex Haley, Roots, Pan Books Ltd., 1977 James Oakes, The Ruling Race, a history of American Slaveholders, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982 Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1956