Advertisment for slaves, 1860
Credit: Emergence of Advertising On-Line Project
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/

Questions to consider
1. Why did the South come to rely so heavily on slavery?
2. Was slavery expanding and profitable, or declining and loss making?
3. How did slaves create and express a distinctive culture?
4. Why did non-slaveholding whites tend to support slavery?
5. How was slavery justified and why did slaveholders wish to expand it?
6. Is there any merit for the historian in using the term "paternalism" to explain the relationship between masters and slaves?
7. What political strategies did slaveholders use to maintain the security of the slave system?

Primary sources
John C. Calhoun, “Slavery as a Positive Good,” (Speech in the US Senate, 1837)
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave

Introductory reading
Peter Kolchin, "Antebellum Slavery: organization, control, paternalism" in American slavery, 1619-1877 (1993), pp. 93-132
Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War. cc. 1, 4, 5.

Further Reading:
General Overviews:
Peter Parish, Slavery: History and Historians (1992)
Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (1964)
James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (1990)
Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989)
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery (1993)
Mark M. Smith, Debating Slavery (1998)

Slave culture & society:
Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1977)
Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll (1975)
Laurence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American folk thought from slavery to freedom (1978)
James Oakes Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (1990)
Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987)
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 'The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South', American Historical Review 95 (1990)
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South (1988)
Deborah G. White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1999)
Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (1984)
George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (1972)
Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Commnity in the Slave South (1996)
John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972)

Economics and the expansion of slavery:
Gavin Wright The Political Economy of the Cotton South (1978)
John Boles, Black Southerners 1619-1869 (1984), ch. 3, 'The maturation of the plantation system, 1776-1860'
Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross (1974)
Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (1966)

White Society:
Bertram Wyatt Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (1990)
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982)
Robert E. Shalhope, "Race, Class, Slavery and the Antebellum Southern Mind", Journal of Southern History 37 (1971)
Joel Williamson, A Rage For Order (1986)
Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man's Burden (1974)] [an abridgement of White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812--last chapter]
Walter Johnson, "The Slave Trader, the White Slave and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s", Journal of American History 87:1 (2000): 13-38

Websites
Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project --Part of the American memory collection at the Library of Congress
Documenting the American South -- A large site from the University of North Carolina including Francis Butler Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation, Charles Ball, Fifty years in chains, Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, William Brown, Narrative of William Brown, an American Slave
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass