1. What factors led to the expansion of slave labor in the Southern Colonies? 2. Describe the backcountry. Then how did the environment of the backcountry affect how people settling there made a living?

3. How did enslaved persons on plantations improve their living conditions and protest their working conditions?

4. Why is studying slavery important to our understanding of our nation’s past AND present? Explain using at least three reasons why. Your reasons should be based on historical fact.

With cash crops of tobacco, cotton and sugar cane, America’s southern states became the economic engine of the burgeoning nation. Their fuel of choice? Human slavery.

If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world at the start of the Civil War. The slave economy had been very good to American prosperity. By the start of the war, the South was producing 75 percent of the world’s cotton and creating more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. Enslaved workers represented Southern planters’ most significant investment—and the bulk of their wealth.

2The backcountry frontier of colonial Virginia reached westward from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the farthest extent of Virginia settlement in the eighteenth century. By royal charter, the extreme western boundaries of Virginia at this time extended to the Pacific Ocean, but the terms "backcountry" or "back settlements" specifically refer to new settlements in the eastern Appalachian Mountains—most notably in the Shenandoah Valley—that began taking shape in the 1720s. This term was commonly used in the colonial era

3Daily life in a slave workplace was marked by countless acts of everyday resistance. Although their freedom was denied by the law, enslaved African Americans used a wide variety of strategies to contest the authority of slaveholders and to assert their right to control their own lives. Slaveholders depended on involuntary labor to keep their businesses solvent, and enslaved workers often used work slowdowns and absenteeism to negotiate some of the terms of their labor.

shang dynasty

western zhou (ca. 1046-771 bce)

eastern zhou (ca. 771-256 bce)

c. the dred scott v. sandford case,