The South was built politically, culturally, and economically on slavery. In the Antebellum South, the most important factor was not wealth but power. One theme of the Antebellum South was white supremacy and slavery ensured this through the control of labor which also worked as a system of racial adjustment and social order. Slave ownership elevated the status of the wealthy planters and this allowed the institution of slavery to be accepted due to the paternalistic culture of the South. This paternalistic master-slave relationship was important for slaveholders to maintain their power. The wealthy planters set the tone for the Southern society which maintained this idea of white supremacy through the exercising of hegemony. This infatuation …show more content…
“These men rose to power in a region embedded in a capitalist country, and their social system emerged as part of a capitalist world.” However, that does not indicate that the South was capitalist. Genovese argues the opposite that the Antebellum South was rather pre-capitalist. “Their society, in its spirit and fundamental direction, represented the antithesis of capitalism”. Slavery inhibited the economic development of the South and endangered the social stability of the South due to their irrational tendencies. These irrational tendencies allowed them to maintain the master-slave relationship but allowed the South to fall behind the North. Genovese states that “the capital outlay is much greater and riskier for slave labor than for free” and “the sources of cheap labor usually dry up rather quickly, and beyond a certain point costs become excessively burdensome”. Why maintain a labor system that is unstable? With the increase of production and slaves results in a labor system that the South cannot sustain. The slaves’ production was also inefficient. However, Slaves were found to be efficient “in hemp, tobacco, iron, and cotton factories” and “received a wide variety of privileges and approached an elite status.” The South could have industrialized and expanded the economy with these factories but the master-slave relationship if disturbed can lead to a power shift in the South. If the blacks approached …show more content…
This relationship of master-slave was reciprocal. This relationship provided the master with status and power while slaves received autonomy in a sense. On the Silver Bluffs plantation, the slaves negotiated through resistance. The slaves “instead of seeking indirectly to avoid the domination inherent to slavery, these individuals confronted it, turning to arson and escape as overt expressions of their rebelliousness”. The slaves used this to negotiate with Hammond for autonomy and it worked. Hammond viewed himself as a patriarch and needed the slaves for his status and authority. This relationship was beneficial to both parties. Slaves relied on the masters for survival and planters relied on the slaves for sufficiency and status. “The road to power lay through the plantation.” This need for power and status was what separated the South and North. The North had different aspirations than the South which lead to the deterioration of their political and social power within the Union. The South wanted to maintain this master-slave relationship which ultimately required "reopening the slave trade and territorial expansion” to fight the economic deficiencies of slavery which conflicted with the aspirations of the North. Genovese argues that the South would have imploded without the Civil War. The South does not industrialize due to the fear of urbanization, lack of rural market, and diversity of agriculture. Power was more
In “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question” James McPherson argues that the North and the South are two very different parts of the country in which have different ideologies, interests, and values. Mcpherson writes this to show the differences between the north and the south. He gives perspectives from other historians to show how the differently the differences were viewed. These differences included the north being more industrialized while the south was more agricultural. He gives evidence to how the differences between the north and south came together as the south produced tobacoo, rice, sugar and cotton, which was then sent to the north to be made into clothing or other fabrics. Mcpherson analyzes the differences
The United States began to dissatisfy some of its citizens and so the concerns of sectionalism, or the split of the country began to arise. There was a continuous riff between the south and the north over a few issues, a major one being slavery. The south argued that the slaves were necessary to support the southern economy. According to document A, the south were angry that the north was creating taxes that hurt the southern economy, thus increasing the need for slavery since they had to make up for the expense of the taxes. The south felt that the north was able...
In James Oakes, the Ruling Race, the author tackles many of the toughest questions that arose in southern history. In the Ruling Race, Oakes argues against Eugene Genovese ' American slavery 's ideology of paternalism. The author believes that paternalism died by the end of the colonial era and as a result, there came new slaveholders who were diverse, and influenced by the materialistic buildup in the South due to their search for economic opportunity. Oakes views most slave owners as greedy capitalists who embraced the marketplace. When Oakes says “the ideology and culture of slaveholding were not fully developed when Americans declared their independence from Great Britain” (p.34) we see that paternalism is viewed by Oakes as a superior force that was caused due to the American Revolution. The difference between the slaveholding population and the planters is attacked by the author towards Genovese and his ideas of paternalism and anti-capitalistic views. The author states that the desire to expand and prosper was a capitalistic view, which resulted ending the mythology of the paternalistic planter.
At the time, the South depended on slavery to support their way of life. In fact, “to protect slavery the Confederate States of America would challenge the peaceful, lawful, orderly means of changing governments in the United States, even by resorting to war.” (635) Lincoln believed that slavery was morally wrong and realized that slavery was bitterly dividing the country. Not only was slavery dividing the nation, but slavery was also endangering the Union, hurting both black and white people and threatening the processes of government. At first, Lincoln’s goal was to save the Union in which “he would free none, some, or all the slaves to save that Union.” (634) However, Lincoln realized that “freeing the slaves and saving the Union were linked as one goal, not two optional goals.” (634) Therefore, Lincoln’s primary goal was to save the Union and in order to save the Union, Lincoln had to free the slaves. However, Paludan states that, “slave states understood this; that is why the seceded and why the Union needed saving.” (634) Lincoln’s presidential victory was the final sign to many Southerners that their position in the Union was
“The contrast in the relative prominence of slavery between the Upper South and the Lower South reflects the adverse health conditions and arduous labor requirements of lowland rice cultivation, whereas tobacco farming continued to be attractive to free family farmers as well as to slave owners”(Engerman, Sutch, & Wright, 2004). The lower South depended on their slaves more than the Upper because they were in the process of cropping tobacco. The Upper South had to keep up with the lower south, because they had to focus on their slave trade that would build and expand their plantations. During this era, the diverse between these two regions were more concerned with the values of slaves. The values of slave price can increase because of high demands between the upper and the lower South. As the upper South was coming up short, the slave profession took off. The slave profession helped the Upper South, yet there were numerous deformities. The slave percentage was at the end of its usefulness of significance “in the Upper South” significance it had a weaker understanding of community reliability than in the cotton areas. This made the upper south separate on what the future may hold. It was not clear on whether if the future was based on the Deep South’s financial growth between the North and the
Within the economy a great development had been achieved when the upper south handed its power to the lower south all due to the rise of an agricultural production. This expansion was led by the excessive growth of cotton in the southern areas. It spread rapidly throughout America and especially in the South. During these times it gave another reason to keep the slavery at its all time high. Many wealthy planters started a ‘business’ by having their slaves work the cotton plantations, which this was one of a few ways slavery was still in full effect. Not only were there wealthy planters, at this time even if you were a small slave-holder you were still making money. While all of this had been put into the works, Americans had approximately 410,000 slaves move from the upper south to the ‘cotton states’. This in turn created a sale of slaves in the economy to boom throughout the Southwest. If there is a question as to ‘why’, then lets break it d...
The southern economy was largely dependent on slaves, who worked on the numerous plantations of the South. Moreover, the main purpose of slavery in the South was for the cultivation of these cotton plantations. (Doc 4) For this reason, southerners believed
After the Union victory in the Civil War, the South was still bitter and needed vast societal changes that matched those in the North. Reconstruction efforts were made to to make the regions more similar socially, politically, and economically; because despite the fact that they were on nation, the two societies were very different. There were still unresolved issues in regards to the status of former slaves and what system of labor should replace slavery. After the Union’s victory in the Civil War, reform efforts were made during the Reconstruction era to reunite the North and South and make ideas in the South more similar to those in the North; but this failed because of the South’s preconcieved ideas towards race.
the pre-Civil War era, only about 5 percent of white Southern women actually lived on plantations and about half the Southern households owned no slaves at all. Still, slavery defined everything about life in the South, including the status of white women. Southern culture orbited around the strong father figure, simultaneously ruling and caring for his dependents - Mary Hamilton Campbell was struck when her servant Eliza refererred to Campbell's husband as "our master". Black and white women never seemed to develop any sense of common cause, but every Southern female from the plantation wife to the field slave was assinged a role that involved powerlessness and the need of a white man's constant guidance. A Southern slave owner named George Balcombe advised a friend to "Let women and Negroes alone. Leave them in their humility, their grateful affection, ther self-renouncing loyalty, their subordination of the heart, and let it be your study to become worthy to be the object of their sentiments."
Also, in the South, it was hard, rough work in the hot sun and very few whites were willing to do the work, therefore, most plantation owners purchased slaves to work the land. The plantation owner gave the slaves shelter and a small food allowance as a salary. Thereby, the plantation owner "saved" his money to invest in more land, which of course required more slaves to continue to yield a larger profit. An economic cycle was created between plantation owner and slave, one that would take generations to end. Slaves were now a necessity on the larger plantations to work the fields.
The North and South were forming completely different economies, and therefore completely different geographies, from one another during the period of the Industrial Revolution and right before the Civil War. The North’s economy was based mainly upon industrialization from the formation of the American System, which was producing large quantities of goods in factories. The North was becoming much more urbanized due to factories being located in cities, near the major railroad systems for transportation of the goods, along with the movement of large groups of factory workers to the cities to be closer to their jobs. With the North’s increased rate of job opportunities, many different people of different ethnic groups and classes ended up working together. This ignited the demise of the North’s social order. The South was not as rapidly urbanizing as the North, and therefore social order was still in existence; the South’s economy was based upon the production of cotton after Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin. Large cotton plantations’ production made up the bulk of America’s...
...stocracy to indirectly force poor blacks into working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, basically slavery by a different name. As planters needed more land and workers to keep up with the demand for cotton, they looked to the Gulf Coast and Mexico as possible territory for increased cotton cultivation. The postwar exploitation of freedmen and the desire of southern planters to exploit Mexico in order to increase cotton production both demonstrate the materialism and greed of the southern aristocracy.
Between the period of 1820-1861 there was a number of political compromises done in order reduce the sectional tension between the North and the South. While each of the compromises created helped the issue that the country was facing at that time, they did not help overall. The compromises were only a temporary fix to the country’s problem of sectionalism. Therefore, while political compromises were effective in reducing the tension between the North and the South, it did not help in preventing the civil war. The North and the South had a vast amount of political differences, one of the major ones was slavery.
The economies of the North and South were vastly different leading up to the Civil War. Money was equivalent to power in both regions. For the North, the economy was based on industry as they were more modern and self-aware. They realized that industrialization was progress and it could help rid the country of slave labor as it was wrong. The North’s population had a class system but citizens could move within the system, provided they made the money that would allow them to move up in class. The class system was not as rigid as it was in the South. By comparison, the South wanted to hold on to its economic policy. In doing so, the practice of slavery kept the social order firmly in place. The economic factors, social issues and a growing animosity between the two regions helped to induce the Civil War.
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.