Second Middle Passage Lesson Plan Central Historical Question: Why do historians refer to the slave trade within the United States as the Second Middle Passage? Materials: • Second Middle Passage PowerPoint • Copies of Second Middle Passage Timeline • Copies of Documents A-D • Copies of Guiding Questions Plan of Instruction: Note: Prior to this lesson, students should be familiar with the Middle Passage. A Reading Like a Historian lesson on the Middle Passage is available at https://sheg.stanford.edu/middle-passage. 1. Introduction: Second Middle Passage PowerPoint. Explain to students that they are going to learn about the domestic slave trade that existed in parts of the United States in the decades before the Civil War. We are going to begin with some important background information. Not all of information may be necessary for students who have studied this time period and topic. Students should refer to the Second Middle Passage Timeline during the PowerPoint presentation. Encourage students to add additional information to the timeline. a. Slide 2: Ban on Import of Slaves. The United States Constitution protected the international slave trade for twenty years. In 1807, Congress passed a law that banned the import of slaves beginning the following year. While illegal imports continued, the ban made imports of slaves much less frequent. b. Slide 3: Textile-Based Industrialization. The Industrial Revolution began in textile mills in England in the 1760s and spread to Western Europe and New England in subsequent decades.
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c. Slide 4: New England Textile Mills. The textile mills of Europe and New England radically increased the demand for cotton and boosted the production of textiles. d. Slide 5: Cotton Gin. In 1794, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin. This invention made it easier to separate cotton fiber from cottonseed. Without the gin, a person could clean one pound of cotton in a single day. With the cotton gin, a person could clean fifty pounds in a single day. e. Slide 6: Domestic Slave Trade. Cotton was first cultivated in the American South in the 17th century. The Lower South’s long summers and fertile river valleys provided an ideal climate for cotton. As demand for cotton soared in the early 19th century, so did demand for slave labor on cotton plantations in the Lower South. At the same time, the Upper South experienced an agricultural depression, causing regional demand for slaves to drop. In turn, slaveholders in the Upper South sold their slaves “down river” at tremendous profits, and cotton surpassed tobacco as the South’s largest cash crop. f. Slide 7: King Cotton. From 1790 to 1860, cotton production in the United States skyrocketed by more than 1,500%. After 1820, cotton represented a majority of U.S. exports. Although the cotton gin made cotton cleaning more efficient, no machine was invented during this period to quicken cotton picking. g. Slide 8: Cotton Picking. Despite an absence of new technology, cotton picking per person also increased during this time, at a rate of 2.1% per year, due to what planters called the “pushing system,” or what historian Edward Baptist called “the ‘whippingmachine’ system” (Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, 2014). Baptist used this term to refer to the fact that masters and drivers used violence to force slaves to work harder and faster. h. Slide 9: New Slave States and Territories. As cotton profits grew, planters and others involved in the cotton and slave trades expanded the areas where cotton was grown. Cotton growers pushed south and west into new land seized from Native STANFORD HISTORY EDUCATION GROUP
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Americans and annexed from Mexico. Plantation owners in these areas bought tens of thousands of slaves to harvest the new cotton that was being planted. i. Slide 10: Central Historical Question. Some historians, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Ira Berlin, have referred to the domestic slave trade as the Second Middle Passage. Today, we are going to analyze a series of documents in order to answer this question: Why do historians refer to the slave trade within the United States as the Second Middle Passage? 2. Hand out Document A. Explain to students that they may want to refer back to the Timeline as they are reading the other documents in the lesson. Next, ask students to read Document A and complete the corresponding section of the Guiding Questions. 3. After students have completed the corresponding section of the Guiding Questions, ask them to share their responses. Michael Tadman, a historian at the University of Liverpool, published the research on which Document A is based in 1989. Students should consider the training, knowledge, resources, and freedom of expression available to this historian and how his position could make him a reliable source for learning about this topic. Strong student answers will note that this chart indicates the scale of the domestic slave trade. Although not as large as the Middle Passage between Africa and the Americas, hundreds of thousands of people were trafficked domestically. This is one possible reason why historians refer to the domestic slave trade as the Second Middle Passage. Note: This chart includes only sales across state lines. Owners and merchants also sold slaves within states, both near and far. This chart also doesn’t include sales from the 1790s-1810s. For data on interstate sales from these decades, see the Original Documents file. Make sure students also remember that slave traders captured and sent an estimated twelve and half million Africans to the Americas, about ten and a half million of whom survived the First Middle Passage.
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4. Hand out Documents B and C and have students complete the corresponding sections of the Guiding Questions. Students should note that the gap in time between the events described and the date of the interview may make this account less reliable as evidence. At the same time, they should recognize the value of an account from a person who experienced the domestic slave trade firsthand and notice that information in the PowerPoint lecture corroborates elements of his account. Students will likely draw very clear parallels between the crowded ship scene described in Document C and the Middle Passage. You might also push students to think of the differences between these forced voyages. In using Documents B and C to compare the domestic slave trade to the Middle Passage, students may note similarities between the brutal journeys of slaves by wagon or boat and the transatlantic crossing. They may also point to the devastating human toll of the trade, such as the separation of families. Others may point out that both the transatlantic and domestic slave trades were part of larger, interregional and international trade networks. Note: You may also explain to students that in addition to forcing slaves to move south by ship and wagon, traders forced many slaves to walk hundreds of miles in chains. 4. Hand out Document D and have students complete the corresponding section of the Guiding Questions. 5. After students have completed the corresponding section of the Guiding Questions, ask them to share their responses. Students should understand that McElveen wrote Oakes to advise him on what prices he believed they could get for the slaves they intended to sell. McElveen’s employment as an agent for a slave trader indicates that the slave trade was an industry itself. Students should recognize how this document could be used as evidence of the profitability of the trade for slave owners and merchants. Students may explain that
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McElveen’s descriptions show the dehumanization of slaves as well as the physical violence committed against them. Despite being very different accounts, Document D corroborates some aspects of the trade presented in Document B. For example, both give accounts of interested buyers’ invasive inspections of slaves on the auction block. 8. Discussion: Ask students to consider the following questions: How are these accounts of the Second Middle Passage similar? How are they different? What are possible reasons for the differences among the accounts? 9. Final Argument: Students use evidence from the Guiding Questions to write their argument for why historians refer to the domestic slave trade as the Second Middle Passage. Explain to students that it is likely that different students will have different answers. This is part of history. Different people can arrive at different conclusions as long as they have historical evidence to support their claims. Sources Document A Tadman, Michael, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, 12. Document B "Interview with Mingo White." In A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. Vol. I, Alabama Narratives. Washington, D.C., 1941. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36020/36020-h/36020-h.html#mingo-white Document C “Domestic Slavery,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, October 25, 1828. Document D
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Drago, Edmund, ed. Broke by the War: Letters of a Slave Trader. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, 43-44.
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