4.13

Initially the English colonies had developed as parts of distinct regions: New England, Middle, and Southern. A combination of geography and cultural differences among immigrants, compounded by limited contact because of poor transportation, shaped the differences among the regions. As the colonies became states and as transportation improved in the 19th century, the regional distinctions remained, based on a combination of geography and economics. The states where slavery was widely practiced formed a distinctive region, the South. By 1861, the region included 15 states, all but four of which (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) seceded and joined the Confederacy.

Agriculture and King Cotton

Agriculture was the foundation of the South’s economy, even though by the 1850s, small factories in the region were producing approximately 15 percent of the nation’s manufactured goods. Tobacco, rice, and sugarcane were important cash crops, but these were far exceeded by the South’s chief economic activity: the production and sale of cotton. The development of mechanized textile mills in England, coupled with Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, made cotton cloth affordable, not just in Europe and the United States, but throughout the world. Before 1860, the world depended chiefly on Britain’s mills for its supply of cloth, and Britain, in turn, depended chiefly on the American South for its supply of cotton fiber. Originally, the cotton was grown almost entirely in two states, South Carolina and Georgia, but as demand and profits increased, planters moved westward into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. New land was constantly in demand because the high cotton yields desired for profits quickly depleted the soil. By the 1850s, cotton provided two-thirds of all U.S. exports and linked the South and Great Britain. “Cotton is king,” said one southerner of his region’s greatest asset.

Slavery, the “Peculiar Institution”

Wealth in the South was measured in terms of land and enslaved people. The latter were treated as a form of property, subject to being bought and sold. However, some Whites were sensitive about how they treated the other humans, so they referred to slavery as “that peculiar institution.” In colonial times, people justified slavery as an economic necessity, but in the 19th century, apologists for slavery mustered historical and religious arguments to support their claim that it was good for both the enslaved and the master.

Population

The cotton boom was largely responsible for a fourfold increase in the number of people held in slavery, from 1 million in 1800 to nearly 4 million in 1860. Most of the increase came from natural growth, although thousands of Africans were also smuggled into the South in violation of the 1808 law against importing enslaved people. In parts of the Deep South, enslaved African Americans made up as much as 75 percent of the total population. Fearing slave revolts, southern legislatures added increased restrictions on movement and education to their slave codes.

Economics

Enslaved workers were employed doing whatever their owners demanded of them. Most labored in the fields, but many learned skilled crafts or worked as house servants, in factories, or on construction gangs. Because of the greater profits to be made on the new cotton plantations in the West, many owners in the Upper South sold their enslaved workers to owners in the cotton-rich Deep South of the lower Mississippi Valley. By 1860, the value of an enslaved field hand had risen to almost 2,000 at a time when a typical wage for a laborer was 1 a day. One result of the heavy capital investment in slavery was that the South had much less capital than the North to undertake industrialization.

White Society

Southern Whites observed a rigid hierarchy among themselves. Aristocratic planters lived comfortably at the top of society, while poor farmers and mountain people struggled at the bottom.

Aristocracy

Members of the South’s small elite of wealthy planters owned at least 100 enslaved people and at least 1,000 acres. The planter aristocracy maintained its power by dominating the state legislatures of the South and enacting laws that favored the large landholders’ economic interests.

Farmers

The vast majority of slaveholders held fewer than 20 people in bondage and worked only several hundred acres. Southern White farmers produced the bulk of the cotton crop, worked in the fields alongside enslaved African Americans, and lived as modestly as farmers of the North.

Poor Whites

Three-fourths of the White households in the South owned no enslaved people. They could not afford the rich river-bottom farmland controlled by the planters, and many lived in the hills as subsistence farmers. These “hillbillies” or “poor White trash,” as planters derisively called them, defended the system, hoping that some day they, too, could own enslaved people. Further, the slave system meant that White farmers, no matter how poor, still felt superior on the social scale to Black people.

Mountain People

A number of small farmers lived in frontier conditions along the slopes and valleys of the Appalachian and Ozark mountains. They were somewhat isolated from the rest of the South. The mountain people disliked the planters and slavery. During the Civil War, many (including a future president, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee) remained loyal to the Union.

Cities

The South was an agricultural region with few large commercial cities. The largest city in the region was New Orleans, with a population of about 170,000. It was the fifth-largest city in the country, after New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston. Only three other southern cities—St. Louis, Louisville, and Charleston—had populations greater than 40,000 people.

Culture and Outlook on Life

The South developed a unique culture and outlook on life. As cotton became the basis of its economy, slavery became the focus of its political thought. White southerners felt increasingly isolated and defensive about slavery as northerners grew hostile toward it, and as Great Britain, France, Mexico, and other European and Latin American states outlawed it altogether.

Code of Chivalry

Dominated by the aristocratic planter class, the agricultural South was in some ways a feudal society. Southern gentlemen ascribed to a code of chivalrous conduct, which included a strong sense of personal honor, the defense of womanhood, and paternalistic attitudes toward all who were deemed inferior, especially slaves.

Education

The upper class valued a college education for their children. Acceptable professions for gentlemen were limited to farming, law, the ministry, and the military. For the lower classes, schooling beyond the early elementary grades was generally not available. To reduce the risk of slave revolts, the law strictly prohibited teaching enslaved people to read or write.

Religion

The slavery question affected churches. Partly because they preached biblical support for slavery, both Methodist and Baptist denominations gained members in the South. However, both groups split into northern and southern branches in the 1840s. The Unitarians, who challenged slavery, faced declining membership and hostility. Even Catholics and Episcopalians, who took a neutral stand on slavery, saw their numbers decline in the South.

Social Reform

The antebellum reform movement of the first half of the 19th century was largely found in the northern and western states, with little impact in the South. While “modernizers” worked to perfect society in the North, southerners were more committed to tradition and slower to support public education and humanitarian reforms. They were alarmed to see northern reformers join forces to support the antislavery movement. Increasingly, they viewed social reform as a northern threat against the southern way of life.

Historical Perspectives: What Was The Nature Of Slavery?

During the two decades following the end of World War II, Black Americans led a vigorous fight against racial discrimination. In the context of this civil rights movement, historians began to revaluate slavery.

Features of Slavery

Before 1945, scholarship on slavery followed Ulrich B. Phillips’s American Negro Slavery (1918). He portrayed slavery as failing economically but maintained by paternalistic White owners who gave civilization to enslaved but contented Black Americans. Most of his views have been entirely discredited. For example, historians demonstrated that owners and enslaved people were in continual conflict. Kenneth Stampp summarized this view in The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956). Two years later, Alfred Conrad and John Meyers published an influential article that provided evidence that slavery was profitable, adding to the argument that the institution would not fade away as it had in most of Latin America.

Slavery's Impact on Black Culture

Historians have bitterly disagreed over the legacy of slavery on the culture of African Americans. Stanley Elkins, in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional Life (1959), argued that slavery was so oppressive that no distinctive Black culture could develop. In contrast, Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) argued that enslaved African Americans did develop and maintain a culture based on family life, tradition, and religion. Recent scholars have expanded on how enslaved people not only created their own culture but found creative ways to resist their condition. Tera W. Hunter’s Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (2017) highlighted how enslaved people developed long-term relationships, despite obstacles to traditional marriage created by their owners.