Chapter One Summary and Analysis

In Chapter One the readers learn about the Southern culture before the war. The North and South were like two different parts of one country. The North had their manufacturing centers and the South supplied the product. Picking cotton and curing tobacco was killing labor since everything had to be done by hand, a plant at a time. Not only did the Southerner use labor in the fields but the richer the person, the more help they needed. Some plantation owners took better care of the slaves than others but slaves were property and white people saw the black person as less than themselves. The South had codes for how the black person could act and since the blacks were property, the white person could punish them in any way for breaking the code.

The blacks in the South...