lecture 1, "southern society: slavery, king cotton, and antebellum america's 'peculiar' region"
david blight

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question of how peculiar/distinctive/different is the American South? "the dixie difference"

the "South" of course, is many many things, many many people--this question, in some ways, is irrelevant, though of course, not. Presidential elections are won/lost in the South (name me a president who won without some success in the states of the Old Confederacy).

the question, of course, is fraught with stereotypes. and the idea of Southern stereotypes--the "South" as an idea--is a very old concept, definitely precedes the civil war, very salient through the colonial period.

Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s: Northerners "cool", "sober", "persevering", "independent", "superstitious", "jealous of their own liberties", etc.; Southerners "fiery", "voluptuous", "indolent", "zealous of their own liberties", "generous", "candid", "without pretentions"

Note the refrain on "liberties" -- everyone in the civil war will say that they're fighting for liberty.

Wilburt Cash, 1940, "The Mind of the South" -- he did something similar to Jefferson, though he focuses only on Southerners; deeply critical of his beloved South. Argues in this book that the South has "no mind", in a sense. Chock-a-block of stereotypes, his characterizations--prof is reading them out.

Shelby Foot, on white Southerners and the South: unable to express themselves in Art.

Why does the South have such a long memory? "Because we lost the war." (Toni Morrison, though, in "Beloved"--"me and you Sethie, we got too much yesterday, we need more tomorrow")

David Girganus: "attempting the impossible at great cost, proudly celebrating the failure, and then getting admiration for the performance."

One could go on and on... Every major African-American poet and writer of the 20th Century was from the South--and has certainly always been reflecting on the South, in one way or another.

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Back to the Old South, though.

First of all, it's worth remembering, there are a lot of clear, undeniable similarities between South and North in the 40 years before the war.

(a) Roughly the same geographic size.

(b) Spoke the same language, though in different dialectics.

(c) a certain common heritage, of the American Revolution (John C. Calhoun, a key intellectual architect of the "South", was very much an American nationalist). And you can find a deep American nationalism in many of the young leaders of the Southern secessionists.

(d) shared the same Protestant Christianity.

(e) similar political ideologies, born of the American Revolution (when you hear about a slaveholder preach about political liberty, and individual liberties, you think "Come On"--but this was a history informed by the American Revolution, can't forget.)

(f) a strong localism. State's rights was not unique to the South--some of the most open demonstrations of State rights were in the North (Wisconsin refused, for example, to enforce the Fugitive Slaves' Act).

(g) Shared a belief in progress -- lingered in America's air of the 1840s and 1850s

(h) Both the South and the North shared the reality and spirit of the Western expansion.

(i) Both North and South and their political-economic leadership were comprised of hard-boiled, believing, practising capitalists (Southern slaveholders were not pre-capitalists). Both sides, in a sense, had the same kind of oligarchies, it could be argued: less than 1% of the real and personal property was held by 50% of free adult males. The richest 1% held 27% of the wealth (the North had budding oligarchies, even if they were based on different things--which is where the rub comes in, of course).

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Nevertheless, back to the notion of the distinctiveness of the South.

Travelers from Europe came to the South and remarked on the "indolence" and "drinking" of Southerners--the idea of the South as "exotic", "different", and "dangerous". The North as independent and free republicans, in contrast to what these travelers saw in the South.

Trying to understand how "difference" boils into "disunion" -- this does have some roots in these distinct caricatures. But, prof is saying, as one of my friends warned me, "don't leave out the politics."

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One kind of Southern distinctiveness, above all: if there were one distinct feature that eventually evolved in the South, in prof's opinion, it was what we might call its anti-modernism. A disdain for what was determined to be the corruption of modern commercialism--Southern slaveholders were skeptical of the democratization slowly beginning in the North (spreading literacy, etc.). Democracy was a threat to hierarchy, and the South became, quite distinctively, a very hierarchical society. Rooted very deeply in open conceptions of class and race; some were born to rule, in the opinions of the planter class of the 1840s and 1850s ("deal with it", was their attitude).

They became inflamed with their own peculiar sense of "honor." A set of values, or form of behavior--signed a particular kind of gentleman's behavior (property, class, rank, status that must be recognized). Reputation and recognition were critical. There must, indeed, be a ritual of that recognition. (James Henry Hammond, of SC: "Reputation is everything. Everything depends upon the estimation in which I'm held")

When they started encountering these Northerners, who spoke of a "politics of law", or "conscience", they're not always on the same page.

Then there's this issue of Conservatism--why is the US South a seat of modern American conservatism? There is this overall claim, of course, of anti-reform, anti-intellectual defense of a hierarchical civilization in white supremacy--and, indeed, in one of the biggest slave systems that had ever been created (there's the corollary issue of violence--why is cock-fighting more popular, etc.?)

South, though, eventually "liberated" from this burden of being the site of all of America's sins, by:

(1) the Civil Rights' Revolution

(2) the discovery of Northern racism

(3) the loss of the Vietnam War, in the sense that the Southerners were now not the only Americans who had ever "lost" a war.

(4) the last 20-25 years of political-economic history; the Sun-belt migration, massive immigration to the South (Vietnamese in Louisiana, Hispanics in N. Carolina/Texas), and the political culture will have to respond to that.

Yet America seems unable to forget the Confederate flag...

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There's another kind of burden, though, which is more directly historical (rather than "cultural")

Let's remember, the South had a distinctive history.

The antebellum Southern economy became, by the 1820s, a slave economy--it became the fifth/sixth slave society in human history. For a long time, in American scholarship, one of the deep mythologies about the Old South was that the plantation economy in the run-up to the Civil War was dying out (lots have argued it). But a generation of scholars have looked at the Southern economy and have discovered that the Southern economy was booming (greatest cotton crop in 1860). Slavery was extraordinarily profitable.

And, lo and behold, the idea of the Southern planter as a "backward-looking" "inward-looking" oligarch--completely false. The average American planter was a raging capitalist--they understood profits and markets (they were men of rational choice--and the way to wealth, even before the cotton gin but especially after Eli Whitney's cotton gin, was "slavery"). In Faulkner's words, "a house, land, and some niggers."

How powerful was the cotton boom once it took hold? By the 1820s, within a decade of the War of 1812, cotton's future seemed limitless--one of the best analogies is to the oil-rich regions of the world in the post-WWII era. If you're an oil rich country today, you have the world at your knees, in a sense. And that is how the Southern leadership began to see itself, as early as the 1820s and 1830s. For four decades in a row, the production of American cotton doubled every decade. Became, without question, the country's largest export. Already, by 1825, the South was the world's largest supplier of cotton--fueling the industrial revolution in textile production in Britain and elsewhere.

Southern political power by the 1850s and 1860s was no longer based in Virginia or even South Carolina, it's out in the Mississippi valley--this is the region Jefferson Davis, from Mississippi, becomes the President of the Confederacy.

Fortunes were made in an instant.

The slave-holding population was fluid, though, prof is arguing. There were about 400,000 slave-holders in the South in the 1860s. About 1/3 of white families, at one time or another, had at least a toe-hold in slave ownership. 2/3 remained yeoman farmers, poor whites, etc. (in many regions, these were 40-50% of the population). Jefferson Davis is an excellent example of the cotton boom planter; though born in humble circumstances, he made millions in cotton.

What is the relationship between the spread of cotton and the spread of power?

By 1860, there were roughly 4 million slaves in the US South (the second largest slave society in the world, only larger one was Russian serfdom, Brazil was close)--American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately 3.5 billion dollars, just as property (in today's dolllars, that is roughly 75 billion dollars). In 1860, slaves, as an asset, worth more than all of the manufacturing, than all of the railroads--than all of the productive capacity of the US put together. The single largest financial asset in the American economy. The only thing more valuable than the slaves was the land itself.

If you're looking to understand why the South will look to defend this system, this social structure--look no further. What would you compare that to today?