Name______Per ______Video: North and South Date ______
North and South is a book and a made for TV mini-series that tells the story of two friends and their families before the Civil War. George Hazard (played by James Read, on the left) is the son of the owner of an iron foundry in Pennsylvania. Orry Main (played by Patrick Swayze, on the right) is the son of a plantation owner in South Carolina. They became best friends when they met at West Point, the story of how they remained friends while their nation came closer and closer to a Civil War is a large part of the program.
1. In the first scene, Orry, the Southerner, is going to visit George's family in Lehigh Station, Pennsylvania. What kind of person is George's sister, Virgilia? What does the rest of the family seem to think of her?
She is an abolitionist and is very opinionated and outspoken. She is very rude and to Orry. The rest of the family seems embaressed by her and tries to brush off her ideas. Many Northerners saw abolitionists as trouble-makers, in the period before the Civil War. How do Northerners make Orry feel?
George's family tries to make him feel welcome, but he feels like an outsider. He's very nervous and uncomfortable. Why might the writer have made the abolitionist character a woman? Perhaps because many abolitionists were women (and many of these women worked for women's rights too). Perhaps because she is more easily ignored by the other characters. 2. Orry and George visit the Hazard family's iron foundry. Orry gets many ideas about northern factories from this visit. What are these opinions? Orry likes what he sees of the foundry and is excited to start a factory in South Carolina to mill cotton. (This view is different from his father's view. Orry's father, like most Southerners, doesn't like factories.) Even so, Orry doesn't like to see how the workers are treated. How did Orry and George view the working conditions of the factory workers? How do they differ in their opinions? Orry is apauled by the poor conditions that the factory workers are forced to live in. He says the conditions are worse than the slave quarters at his home. George agrees that the conditions are poor, but says that the workers are free and can leave anytime they want to. Orry points out that they're too poor to go anywhere. ("An empty belly is a good reason to stay.")
3. When the family sits down to dinner, they discuss President Polk and the possibility of a war with Mexico. Who is most for the war? Who is most against it, and why? Orry and George are two young soldiers and they are anxious to see their first battles.
Virgilia is most against the war because she see it as a way to illegally grab Mexican land which could then be used to let slavery expand. She is against anything that helps slavery. Historically, why did the War with Mexico revive the issue of slavery? On a national level, the question of slavery was supposed to have been settled by the Missouri Compromise (1820). This compromise drew a line through the Louisiana Purchase to show where new slave states would be allowed and which territories would not allow slavery. However, the Mexican War brought new land into the country. Would the Missouri Compromise apply to this new land or not? That question would have to be decided in Congress again now. 4. Time passes, and George and Orry graduate from West Point. George visits Orry's family in South Carolina. Why is the slave named Priam punished so harshly (with branding)? (Note: Mr. Jones, the man who brands Priam is the overseer on the Main family’s plantation.) Peer pressure made Priam's punishment so severe. Priam's original punishment was that he was going to be sent to his cabin. When the neighboring plantation owner sneers about how easy Priam was getting off, Orry's father said that Mr. Jones could do whatever he felt was necessary. It's also important to notice that Priam had said, "I'm as good as any man here." The community of white slave owners can't let something like that statement slide by. (It's true that Mr. Jones has set Priam up to get in trouble, but he knew that he would probably get these kinds of reactions.) What do the main characters seem to think of his punishment? How do their opinions differ? Orry and George both think that the slave's punishment was too much. George is so shocked at the cruelty that he is alnost speechless. Orry says that you shouldn't even treat an animal that way. Orry feels like he should be able to talk to his father about it, but he gets angry at George for saying something. Even though he agrees with George, he believes that it is not George's place to say anything.
Orry's father does not want to hear "Yankee sermons" from his son. He seems 5. Later, Orry and George talk about the incident with Priam. What does George think about slavery? Was George an abolitionist before? George was not an abolitionist before. Like the rest of the family, he had always been annoyed by Virgilia's speeches. Now that he has seen slavery for himself, he is waking up to the fact that slaves are real people. He is coming to realize that what Virgilia was saying before is true-- slavery is evil. He always knew it was a bad thing, but now he can feel and care for the slaves because his visit has given them a human face. What is Orry most upset about? Orry is upset that a Northerner is telling him what to do. George is not from his family and is not even from South Carolina. Orry believes that any problems that there may be should be solved by the family (or the people of South Carolina, perhaps), not by Yankee outsiders. Most Southerners felt the same way about Northerners interfering with their way of life. (The last question is closely realted to this one.) Orry says that the slaves are "like children", and George says that they are "not permitted to be anything else." What did each character mean by the words "like children"? (This point was important to both sides.) Southerners like Orry saw slaves as "children" because like children, they believed that the slaves couldn't survive on their own. Like children, they needed to be instructed and cared for and punished on occassion. (This view of Africans is racist, but Southerners believed that they were helping to civilize and Christianize Africans. To them, slavery was actually a "positive good" for both races.)
George correctly points out that the Southerners are not letting the slaves be anything else. For example, it's true that the slaves aren't able to read, but that came about because the slave owners wouldn't teach them to read, not because the slaves were too stupid to learn. George made the statement, “There is something wrong with the whole system!” If Orry agrees that the punishment was wrong, why does he get upset when George says that? Orry is mad because George is not from the South. He's a Yankee, and Orry (like most Southerners) didn't want Northerners telling the South what to do.
** If you understand why Orry is so mad, then you can understand why South Carolina and the other Southern states seceded at the start of the Civil War.
Further Discussion: How "typical" are George and Orry's families to their respective regions? How are they NOT like the "typical" people of their regions?