A. NAMED B. ENTITLED C. SUBTITLED D. CALLED A. NAMED B....

15. A. named B. entitled C. subtitled D. called II. Read the text and choose A, B, C or D as the correct answer for questions 16-27. (12 points)

Slavery in the American South

The institution of slavery has been a part of human history for thousands of years. That Europeans imported it to the New World in both South and North America is not surprising; that the institution lasted so long in the southern United States is. While governments abolished or abandoned slavery through much of the world, humans, exclusively Africans, were kept in bondage in one of the world's great democracies. This institution was eventually a cause of a great civil war breaking out in 1861. By this point, the system had been in place for more than two hundred years and was the natural state of affairs for Southerners. In the face of increasing criticism from abolitionists. Southerners vehemently provided three main justifications for holding slaves: slavery was necessary to improve the American economy; they were, in fact, protecting Africans from lives of misery; and, finally, slavery was simply natural. The first point only has some basis in fact since the South did provide great financial windfalls with its agricultural produce, the cash crops of cotton, tobacco, and rice, all of which flourished in the hot, muggy climate of the South. Slave owners asserted that these crops were a great benefit to the American economy and the slaves were needed to work the land. Northerners countered that free men working for wages would do just as well. As far as the Southerners were concerned, the so-called free men of the North were also nothing more than slaves, slaves to the necessity of earning a wage or being homeless and starving to death. In fact, the northern industrial centers produced far more income for the country than the mainly agricultural South. The North also had great agricultural lands, which were not worked by slaves, but by free landowners. The second point was one made time and again by Southerners. Slaves were dependent on their masters for food, clothing, and shelter, which the master provided in return for their labor. This reciprocal relationship ensured that all would have a means of survival. If slavery was abandoned, then all the slaves, some four million by the 1860s, would be at the mercy of the cruel fates of life. [A] Slavery was good for the African blacks because the masters cared for them from cradle to grave. [B] In fact, when Northern soldiers invaded the South during the Civil War, they discovered that most Africans were kept in the meanest conditions possible, living in hovels and wearing threadbare clothing. [C] Economically, the slaves were more of a drain than wage earners would have been since the master was obliged to care for the nonproductive Africans, which included the young, aged, and infirm. [D] Finally, the slave owners justified slavery by saying it was the natural order of events and that the Africans’ place in the world was as a slave. For thousands of years, with few exceptions, who was or was not a slave had not depended on race but on the misfortune of the individual. In ancient Greece and Rome, anyone could become a slave in the right circumstances. This bothered philosophers for ages, being unable to explain why one man should be a slave and another a master. In the Africans, Southerners found a reason: race. By nature, according to the pseudoscience of racial classification. Africans were deemed inferior, unintelligent, and unable to care for themselves, and they therefore needed the white race’s help. Of course, all this was nonsense, as proven by the great number of free Africans living in the North, many well-educated and well-off in the hustle and bustle of the world Southerners tried to save them from. Many Southerners knew it was nonsense, but their whole world depended on the institution. It is estimated that fewer than 10,000 Southerners actually owned slaves in the pre-Civil War period. They were the richest and most politically powerful, and, when the time came to defend their rights against the North, they dragged the rest of the South into a war that lasted four long years and killed more Americans than all of its other wars combined. Eventually, the slaves were free, but, for the Africans, it would take another hundred years for them to be the equals of the whites in not only the South but all of America. * Glossary - windfalls : amounts of money that someone receives unexpectedly