Free or Not to Be Free?

• Freedom was actually the aberration rather than the norm in the 1600s. In what ways would people be not be free? Yet England prided itself on being a ‘free’ country without slavery. So how do the English colonies become slaveholding ones?

Slavery is not Static or Monolithic

• Why did so many students and historians tend to view all slavery as antebellum slavery. What are some of the ways that you would expect slavery to change over time and place?

Look At The Numbers

• 75% of Southerners did not own slaves. Yet they generally viewed slavery as an institution worth preserving. What factors would explain this? What sources do we need to consult?

Nobody’s Average

• The ‘average’ slave did not belong to the ‘average’ owner. How do we explain this? How might a slave’s life change if he went from being owned by a planter with over 100 slaves to being owned by a man with only 2 or 3 slaves? What changes would he experience?

Slave-owning Presidents

Nine of our first 12 presidents owned slaves. What does that say about the institution and the United States’ early history?

Extremes

Slavery is easy to take to extremes. Should historians avoid them?

Part of the ‘Big Picture’

• What are the dangers of studying slavery in a vacuum? How can we better integrate it into the overall story of American history?

Orlando Patterson and Eugene Genovese