American slavery may have been the most successful totalitarian system in history, lasting ten generations, far longer than comparable 20th century totalitarian regimes. In some ways, slavery's success as an economic and socio-political system was that it was just brutal enough to generate effective rates of return on investment. But it became even more brutal from the beginning of the 19th century to the Civil War, in part in response to slave rebellions, and to the attacks on the institution made by abolitionists. In part three of our six part episode on Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, we analyze the economic institution of slavery as practiced in the Antebellum South, and its consequences for the black and white people that lived in it. And borrowing from the American writer James Baldwin, we try and understand why this institution led to so many racial attitudes that informed Lincoln's time--and our own.

Part 3: Slavery and Human Rights

Audio Clips:

• James Baldwin, “You’re the Nigger” (1963): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My5FLO50hNM

Music Clips:

• “Long John,” Prisoners of Darrington State Prison Farm, Texas (1933/34?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G5KtQynWvc
• “St. Louis Blues,” Bessie Smith (1929): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bo3f_9hLkQ
• “I Be So Happy When The Sun Goes Down,” Ed Lewis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-zlSq4mWiE
• “CC Rider Blues,” Ma Rainey (1924): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trtxZgF3Dns
• “Early in the Mornin’,” Prisoners of Parchman Farm, Louisiana (1947): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsiYfk5RV_Q
• “Berta, Berta,” Prisoners of Parchman Farm, Louisiana (1947):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWWgN7837Tk
• “Stackolee,” Woody Guthrie (1944): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccgyJQJEMsM

Bibliography:

• Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Vintage, 1976)
• Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Slavery in Black and White: Race and Class in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order (Cambridge, 2008)
• Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations On Cotton And Slavery In The American Slave States, 1853-1861 (1861; Bedford/St. Martin’s 2014)
• Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (Yale, 2015)
• George Fitzhugh, Cannibals all! or, Slaves without masters (1857; Kindle, 2015)
• Mary Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (1981; edited by C. Vann Woodward)
• J.H. Ingraham, The South-West By a Yankee. In Two Volumes. (1835; Kindle, 2017)
• Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Harvard University Press, 2001)
• Richard Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)