Chapter 16 Terms and Definitions

"Cotton Is King": The southern belief that the region's cotton exports were so vital to the world (especially British) economy that they guaranteed the South's economic and political power.
Cotton Gin: Eli Whitney's 1793 invention that rapidly separated cotton fiber from its seeds, making short-staple cotton hugely profitable and entrenching slavery across the Deep South.
Planter Elite: The small class of large slaveholders, owning twenty or more enslaved people, who dominated southern politics, wealth, and culture.
Yeoman Farmers: Small, non-slaveholding or modest slaveholding southern farmers who made up the majority of white southern society but held far less wealth and power than the planter elite.
American Colonization Society: An organization founded in 1816 that promoted resettling free Black Americans in Africa, an approach most Black Americans rejected as unjust.
Domestic Slave Trade: The internal buying and selling of enslaved people within the United States, which frequently separated families as the Upper South sold enslaved people to the expanding Cotton Belt.
Denmark Vesey: A free Black man in Charleston accused of plotting a major slave uprising in 1822; he and dozens of alleged conspirators were executed.
Nat Turner's Rebellion: A violent 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia that killed dozens of white residents and led to much harsher slave codes across the South.
"Positive Good" Argument: The proslavery claim, developed in response to abolitionist pressure, that slavery benefited enslaved people rather than merely being a "necessary evil."
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Author of the 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which dramatized slavery's cruelty and hardened northern antislavery sentiment.
Uncle Tom's Cabin: Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling 1852 novel that galvanized northern opposition to slavery and was banned across much of the South.
Underground Railroad: A secret network of routes and safe houses that helped enslaved people escape to freedom in the North and Canada.
Harriet Tubman: An escaped enslaved woman who became the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, making repeated trips into the South to lead others to freedom.
Slave Codes: Laws that strictly regulated the lives of enslaved people, restricting their movement, education, and assembly, and tightened after events like Nat Turner's Rebellion.
Fugitive Slave Act (1850): A law, part of the Compromise of 1850, requiring northerners to assist in capturing and returning escaped enslaved people; it denied accused fugitives a jury trial and radicalized many northerners.
Free Blacks: African Americans, in both the North and South, who were not enslaved but nonetheless faced severe legal restrictions, discrimination, and, in the South, constant suspicion after revolts like Denmark Vesey's.
Sectionalism: Growing loyalty to one's own region's interests — North or South — over the nation as a whole, deepened by the diverging economies and moral debate over slavery.