1) If slavery didn't happen would there still be a Civil War?
2) Who benefited more from slavery? The slaves or the owners?
3) In what ways do you think that slavery has destroyed black families?
4) Do you think that the Civil War happened only because of slavery or are there other reasons that came up to why this war happened?
Six Excerpts:
1) "They say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken: that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it,-must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself-I have cut capers in chains."
2) "Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, her head injured by an overseer when she was fifteen, made her way to freedom alone as a young woman, then became the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. She made nineteen dangerous trips back and forth, often disguised, escorting more than three hundred slaves to freedom, always carrying a pistol, telling the fugitives, "You'll be free or the." She expressed her philosophy: "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive...." "
3) "some negroes are determined never to let a white man whip them and will resist you, when you attempt it; of course you must kill them in that case."
4) "when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued January 1, 1863, it declared slaves free in those areas still fighting against the Union (which it listed very carefully), and said nothing about slaves behind Union lines."
5) "these slaves had enormous power in their hands. Simply by stopping work, they could threaten the Confederacy with starvation. By walking into the Federal camps, they showed to doubting Northerners the easy possibility of using them thus, but by the same gesture, depriving their enemies of their use in just these fields...."
6) "I saw them kill my husband; it was on Tuesday night, between ten and eleven o'clock; he was shot in the head while he was in bed sick, . .. There were between twenty and thirty men.. . . They came into the room. . . . Then one stepped back and shot him . . . he was not a yard from him; he put the pistol to his head and shot him three times. . .. Then one of them kicked him, and another shot him again when he was down. . .. He never spoke after he fell. They then went running right off and did not come back again. .. ."
Five Difficult Words:
1) Penitentiary- (adj) of, pertaining to, or intended for imprisonment, reformatory discipline, or punishment.
"the penitentiary system of the South, with its infamous chain-gang. . . . "
2) Paternalistic- (n) the system, principle, or practice of managing or governing individuals, businesses, nations, etc.,
"And, interspersed with paternalistic urgings of friendship for the Negro, Joel Chandler Harris, in his Uncle Remus stories,..."
3) Attitudinal- (n) manner, disposition, feeling, position, etc., with regard to a person or thing; tendency or orientation, esp. of the mind.
"Yes, racism was a factor but "accumulations of capital, and the men who controlled them, were as unaffected by attitudinal prejudices as it is possible to be."
4) Pusillanimity- (n) the state or condition of being pusillanimous; timidity; cowardliness.
"I was not aware that there was in the character of that race so much cowardice, or so much pusillanimity"
5) Promulgation- (v) to make known by open declaration; publish; proclaim formally or put into operation (a law, decree of a court, etc.).
He believed "that the institution of slavery is founded on injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends to increase rather than abate its evils."
Labels: Reading, Socratic Seminar