1. In the decades prior the Civil War, slavery came to be called “the peculiar institution” meaning peculiar to/unique to the South. To what extent do you think it is accurate to analyze slavery in the southern colonies in the colonial and Revolutionary eras as a “peculiar institution”?
2. In what sense was slavery a distinguishing characteristic of the southern colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries?
3. To what extent did the American Revolution change this? Based on your reading of Ira Berlin’s Generations of Captivity, do you think slavery was, in fact, one “institution” in this period of time?
