Southerners provided slaves with care from birth to death, he asserted; this offered a stark contrast to the wage slavery of the North, where workers were at the mercy of economic forces beyond their control. Beg your pardon, our dear Sir, but we have—hosts of them. This period in the South's history was marked by the economic growth of the region, largely due to its heavy reliance on slave labor, and of its political influence on the U.S. federal government. Call Number: F347 W29 M67 1995. Defenders of slavery, such as George Fitzhugh, argued that only the clever and the bright could truly benefit within a laissez-faire economy. Southern planters exerted a powerful influence on the federal government. . At the top of southern white society stood the planter elite, which comprised two groups. Our negroes are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better. How did defenders of slavery use the concept of paternalism to structure their ideas? Several defenses of slavery were prevalent in the antebellum era, including Calhoun’s argument that the South’s “concurrent majority” could overrule federal legislation deemed hostile to southern interests; the notion that slaveholders’ care of their chattel made slaves better off than wage workers in the North; and the profoundly racist ideas underlying polygenism. The Virginian George Fitzhugh contributed to the defense of slavery with his book Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854). Autobiography. Among the white members of the household, labor and daily ritual conformed to rigid gender delineations. Black Literature. However, Hampton instead tried to use the liaisons to destroy his former friend politically. During the antebellum era, white women may have occupied the domestic sphere but white men controlled it. Phillips also contended that masters treated slaves relatively well; his views on that issue were later sharply rejected by Kenneth M. Stampp. “[A]ll of them rushing on every occasion into my arms,” Hammond confided in his private diary, “covering me with kisses, lolling on my lap, pressing their bodies almost into mine . Articles from Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. This 1857 illustration by an advocate of polygenism indicates that the “Negro” occupies a place between the Greeks and chimpanzees. Writers in the antebellum period were fond of celebrating the image of the ideal southern woman. To question another man’s assertions was to call his honor and reputation into question. Because of this perceived threat to southern society, Calhoun argued that states could nullify federal laws. Of the people who did own slaves, more than half held five or fewer, and 88 percent owned twenty or fewer. . He published Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society in 1854, in which he laid out what he believed to be the benefits of slavery to both the slaves and society as a whole. Retired professor, author, historian and lecturer Mahmoud El-Kati shares his views on the impact of slavery in America, The Yellow Rose Of Texas by Unknown Author, Street Team INNW, St. Paul, Australian Aboriginal Affairs Conference Held, Professional Athlete honored by Amnesty International, University of Alabama apologizes for supporting Slavery. The Deep South culture shares with its Tidewater cultural companion the essential features we commonly identify with the antebellum South: slavery, plantations, agriculture, and plantation owners. He is but a grown up child and must be governed as a child . One historian of this era was Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who studied slavery as a social and economic system focusing on the large plantations that dominated the South. The plantation technique was a factory system applied to agriculture, with a concentration of slave labor under skilled management. Nor did the slave woman’s role as daughter, wife, or mother garner any patriarchal protection. It was also characterized by the rise of abolition and the gradual polarization of the country between abolitionists and supporters of slavery. What does this image reveal about the methods of those who advocated polygenism? Antebellum America: Literature, Art In the first half of the nineteenth century, an American national literature was born. *On this date 1776, the Antebellum South is briefly described. In its heyday, the Lloyd family’s plantation boasted holdings of forty-two thousand acres and one thousand slaves. At the top of southern white society stood the planter elite, which comprised two groups. One member of the planter elite was Edward Lloyd V, who came from an established and wealthy family of Talbot County, Maryland. . Calhoun’s idea of the concurrent majority found full expression in his 1850 essay “Disquisition on Government.” In this treatise, he wrote about government as a necessary means to ensure the preservation of society, since society existed to “preserve and protect our race.” If government grew hostile to society, then a concurrent majority had to take action, including forming a new government. The Antebellum period is typically understood as the time before the Civil War when slavery was extremely popular in the south as a means for furthering crop yields and commerce. —D. Both the American North and the South were characterized by a high degree of inequality during the plantation era. "Town and Country in the Old South: Vicksburg and Warren County, Mississippi, 1770-1860." . Their arguments were further developed by Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, who argued in their 1974 book, Time on the Cross, that slavery was both efficient and profitable, as long as the price of cotton was high enough. He debated that large-scale plantation slavery was efficient and progressive. Identify the main proslavery arguments in the years prior to the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. They also engaged in the daily rounds of maintaining slavery by serving on neighborhood patrols to ensure that slaves did not escape and that rebellions did not occur. In fact, owning land and slaves provided one of the only opportunities for upward social and economic mobility. https://www.openassessments.org/assessments/984, concurrent majority a majority of a separate region (that would otherwise be in the minority of the nation) with the power to veto or disallow legislation put forward by a hostile majority, polygenism the idea that blacks and whites come from different origins. The antebellum South was an especially male-dominated society. "Most farmers in the South had small to medium-sized farms with few slaves, but the large plantation owner’s wealth, often reflected in the number of slaves they owned, afforded them considerable prestige and political power.". Though few in number, the large pl… But while the industrial manufacturing-based labor economy of the North was driven by growing demand, maintenance of the plantation economic system depended upon usage of slave labor that was both abundant and cheap. As a general thing they own no slaves; and even in case they do, the wealthiest of them rarely possess more than from ten to fifteen. Slave masters epitomized the paternalistic duties of wealthy white men in the South. and permitting my hands to stray unchecked.” Hampton found out about these dalliances, and in keeping with the code of honor, could have demanded a duel with Hammond. As a representative and a senator, Lloyd defended slavery as the foundation of the American economy. Other allegations were also made against Kirkconnell on a Reddit thread. Folklore. Get our quarterly newsletter to stay up-to-date, plus all speech or video narrative bookings near you as they happen. R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 1860. What is an Antebellum plantation themed party? Antebellum Era. The actuarial risk, or the potential loss in investment of owning slaves from death, disability, etc. This was the period before the Civil War and after the War of 1812. This effort proved disastrous for Hampton, because it represented a violation of the southern code of honor. Whites, whether rich or poor, were bound together by racism. . Like other members of the planter elite, Lloyd himself served in a variety of local and national political offices. [A]lthough not as a class pecuniarily interested in slave property, the Southern Yeomanry are almost unanimously pro-slavery in sentiment. Both stood at the top of South Carolina’s society as successful, married plantation owners involved in state politics. Significantly, all whites were also bound together by the constant, prevailing fear of slave uprisings. Describe the southern culture of honor. D. R. Hundley was a well-educated planter, lawyer, and banker from Alabama. Throughout each of Michigan’s regions, opportunities abound for outdoor adventure, good eats and drinks, shopping, family fun, arts, culture, history and more. As the wealth of the antebellum South increased, it also became more unequally distributed, and an ever-smaller percentage of slaveholders held a substantial number of slaves. The culture had an emphasis on chivalry, gentility, and hospitality, the last becoming a marked trait of modern Southern society. Distribution of wealth in the South became less democratic over time; fewer whites owned slaves in 1860 than in 1840. Beyond the hoop skirts and endless pastures, there was grim side to the antebellum South. What womanly virtues does Louisa Cheves McCord emphasize? The development of separate northern and southern economies, westward expansion … During the roughly 100-year Antebellum era the demand for slave labor and the U.S. ban on importing more slaves from Africa drove up prices for slaves. Hammond’s reputation, though tarnished, remained high in the esteem of South Carolinians, and the governor went on to serve as a U.S. senator from 1857 to 1860. These landless white men dreamed of owning land and slaves and served as slave overseers, drivers, and traders in the southern economy. Sweet Sister! Defenders of the institution also lashed out directly at abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison for daring to call into question their way of life. The nostalgic view of the South emphasized the elite planter class of wealth and refinement who controlled large plantations and numerous slaves. The culture of the Southern United States , with its landed gentry, was distinctly different from areas north of the Mason–Dixon line and west of the Appalachians . . The grand house of Edward Lloyd V advertised the status and wealth of its owner. Fitzhugh’s ideas exemplified southern notions of paternalism. The demands on the labor of slave women made it impossible for them to perform the role of domestic caretaker that was so idealized by southern men. What elements of social relations in the South is Hundley attempting to emphasize for his readers? By the end of this section, you will be able to: During the antebellum years, wealthy southern planters formed an elite master class that wielded most of the economic and political power of the region. Seven of the first eleven presidents owned slaves, and more than half of the Supreme Court justices who served on the court from its inception to the Civil War came from slaveholding states. . Although a small white elite owned the vast majority of slaves in the South, and most other whites could only aspire to slaveholders’ wealth and status, slavery shaped the social life of all white southerners in profound ways. Southern culture valued a behavioral code in which men’s honor, based on the domination of others and the protection of southern white womanhood, stood as the highest good. Men represented their household in the larger world of politics, business, and war. They were suspicious of the state bank and supported President Jackson’s dismantling of the Second Bank of the United States. Something of an amateur sociologist, he argued against the common northern assumption that the South was made up exclusively of two tiers of white residents: the very wealthy planter class and the very poor landless whites. Far more than in the North, southern men, particularly wealthy planters, were patriarchs and sovereigns of their own household. Among antebellum diaries, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (edited by C. Vann Woodward, 1982) most elaborately details antebellum southern cultural life, landscape, social events, political controversy, and domestic relations. . The profit distribution was much more unequal in the South than in the North shown primarily through land, slave labor and wealth distribution. Prior to his election as governor of the state in 1842, Hammond became sexually involved with each of Hampton’s four teenage daughters, who were his nieces by marriage. While the two largest classes in the South included land and slave owners and slaves, various layers of social classes existed within and between the two. Know, then, that the Poor Whites of the South constitute a separate class to themselves; the Southern Yeomen are as distinct from them as the Southern Gentleman is from the Cotton Snob. As slavery began to displace indentured servitude as the principal supply of labor in the plantation systems of the South, the economic nature of the institution of slavery aided in the increased inequality of wealth seen in the Antebellum South. It is but the better to perfect all those feminine graces, all those fascinating attributes, which render her the center of attraction, and which delight and charm all those who breathe the atmosphere in which she moves; and, in the language of Mr. Burke, would make ten thousand swords leap from their scabbards to avenge the insult that might be offered to her. It also showed slaveholders’ willingness to unite against the federal government when they believed it acted unjustly against their interests. He would become an insufferable burden to society. “Disquisition on Government” advanced a profoundly anti-democratic argument. The Antebellum South (also known as the antebellum era or plantation era) was a period in the history of the Southern United States of America from the late 18th century until the start of the American Civil War in 1861. They also did not support taxes to create internal improvements such as canals and railroads; to them, government involvement in the economic life of the nation disrupted what they perceived as the natural workings of the economy. One such writer, Thomas Roderick Dew, president of Virginia’s College of William and Mary in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote approvingly of the virtue of southern women, a virtue he concluded derived from their natural weakness, piety, grace, and modesty. Over the course of this lesson students will be immersed in the culture of the time period, they will learn about the major crops of the various Southern regions, the function and structure of large slave plantations, the … Naturally accompanying it was the first American reference work, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language , published in 1828. The Antebellum South was a period in the history of the southern United States, from the late 18th century until the start of … The antebellum South was an especially male-dominated society. Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860. Upward social mobility did not exist for the millions of slaves who produced a good portion of the nation’s wealth, while poor southern whites envisioned a day when they might rise enough in the world to own slaves of their own. In 1910, he argued in "The Decadence of the Plantation System" that slavery was an unprofitable relic that persisted because it produced social status, honor, and political power. In much the same way they viewed slave marriage, planters also saw religion as a means of controlling their slaves, and they encouraged it. He advanced the idea of a concurrent majority, a majority of a separate region (that would otherwise be in the minority of the nation) with the power to veto or disallow legislation put forward by a hostile majority. The antebellum South was an especially male-dominated society. Twentieth-century romantic portrayals of the antebellum South, especially Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1937) and the 1939 film adaptation, mostly ignored the role yeomen played. When he died in 1851, he left an estate worth more than $2 million (approximately $63 million in 2014 dollars). This made it profitable for smaller farmers in older settled areas such as Virginia to sell their slaves further south and west. In order for slavery to continue, white, landowning, slave-owners had to compete with other members of the master class. While responsibilities and experiences varied across different social tiers, women’s subordinate state in relation to the male patriarch remained the same. This agrarian era saw large expansions in farming while manufacturing growth remained relatively slow. This cover illustration from Harper’s Weekly in 1861 shows the ideal of southern womanhood. If the challenger was not satisfied by the exchange, a duel would often result. The theory of polygenism codified racism, giving the notion of black inferiority the lofty mantle of science. Defending their honor and ensuring that they received proper respect became preoccupations of whites in the slaveholding South. Another image of the antebellum South … In fact the vast majority of southerners at the time were struggling farmers who did not own any slaves. The five major commodities of the southern agricultural economy were cotton, grain, tobacco, sugar, and rice, with the production of the leading cash crop, cotton, concentrated in the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana). During the antebellum years, wealthy southern planters formed an elite master class that wielded most of the economic and political power of the region. Planters operated within a larger capitalist society, but the labor system they used to produce goods—that is, slavery—was similar to systems that existed before capitalism, such as feudalism and serfdom. Phillips addressed the unprofitability of slave labor and slavery's ill effects on the southern economy. What basic premise underlies his ideas? The ideal southern lady conformed to her prescribed gender role, a role that was largely domestic and subservient. . 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