Antebellum South

President Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States was one of the most consequential political struggles in the early 19th century. A fight over the Bank's reauthorization, the “Bank War,” provoked fundamental disagreements over the role of money in politics, competing constitutional interpretations, equal opportunity in the face of a state-sanctioned monopoly, and the importance of financial regulation—all of which cemented emerging differences between Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs. As Stephen W. Campbell argues here, both sides in the Bank War engaged interregional communications networks funded by public and private money. The first reappraisal of this political turning point in American history in almost 50 years, The Bank War and the Partisan Press advances a new interpretation by focusing on the funding and dissemination of the party press.
Drawing on insights from the fields of political history, the history of journalism, and financial history, The Bank War and the Partisan Press brings to light a revolving cast of newspaper editors, financiers, and postal workers who appropriated the financial resources of pre-existing political institutions, and even created new ones, to enrich themselves and further their careers. The Bank propagated favorable media and tracked public opinion through its system of branch offices, while the Jacksonians did the same by harnessing the patronage networks of the Post Office.
Campbell’s work contextualizes the Bank War within larger political and economic developments at the national and international levels. Its focus on the newspaper business documents the transition from a seemingly simple question of renewing the Bank’s charter to a multi-sided, nationwide sensation that sorted the American public into ideologically polarized political parties. In doing so, The Bank War and the Partisan Press shows how the conflict played out on the ground level in various states--in riots, duels, raucous public meetings, politically orchestrated bank runs, arson, and assassination attempts. The resulting narrative moves beyond the traditional boxing match between Jackson and Bank president Nicholas Biddle, balancing political institutions with individual actors, and business practices with party attitudes.

A timely analysis of the power and limits of political parties—and the lessons of the Civil War and the New Deal in the Age of Trump.

American voters have long been familiar with the phenomenon of the presidential frontrunner. In 2008, it was Hillary Clinton. In 1844, it was Martin Van Buren. And in neither election did the prominent Democrat win the party's nomination. Insurgent candidates went on to win the nomination and the presidency, plunging the two-party system into disarray over the years that followed.

In this book, Cedric de Leon analyzes two pivotal crises in the American two-party system: the first resulting in the demise of the Whig party and secession of eleven southern states in 1861, and the present crisis splintering the Democratic and Republican parties and leading to the election of Donald Trump. Recasting these stories through the actions of political parties, de Leon draws unsettling parallels in the political maneuvering that ultimately causes once-dominant political parties to lose the people's consent to rule.

Crisis! takes us beyond the common explanations of social determinants to illuminate how political parties actively shape national stability and breakdown. The secession crisis and the election of Donald Trump suggest that politicians and voters abandon the political establishment not only because people are suffering, but also because the party system itself is unable to absorb an existential challenge to its power. Just as the U.S. Civil War meant the difference between the survival of a slaveholding republic and the birth of liberal democracy, what political elites and civil society organizations do today can mean the difference between fascism and democracy.

Now a major motion picture, Solomon Northup’s autobiographical Twelve Years a Slave tells how he, a free man of color, was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. and transported to New Orleans. There he was sold as a slave to a Baptist minister and plantation owner named William Prince Ford. Influenced by Alexander Campbell and other Reforming Baptists, Ford and others separated from Beulah Baptist Church in Cheneyville, Louisiana, to form a Campbellite church in 1843. This paper utilizes Northup’s narrative to illuminate Baptist-Campbellite relations while also documenting an extensive network of Campbellite sympathizers among the Baptists in antebellum Louisiana.

In much of the South in the decades before the Civil War, the social culture of plantation slavery produced a cultural ideal that relegated poor landless whites to the margins. This was partly due to the economic condition of poor whites, and their lack of property, but more importantly, it resulted from their inability to live up to cultural ideals of whiteness. An ideal that was wrapped up in a southern honor culture coached in the social culture of plantation slavery.

Paper was written for class during academic studies.

Abstract:

By briefly examining the underlying reasons, background history, and individuals related to the attitudes, advances, movements, and policies regarding health in Antebellum America; this research paper endeavors to properly provide an introductory closer examination of emerging concepts, public/private responses to various health concerns/issues, and advancements in technologies/techniques by various individuals and organizations within the American private/public health communities. The impact on current medical infrastructure and policy will also be briefly reviewed. For best results, the search for evidence regarding this agenda will include the review of pertinent literature and archeological records catalogued in the university research center, to the best extent access allows. Additionally, outside academic literature and research available on the internet may also be consulted.

Historian Jacob Rader Marcus observed that a full and accurate telling of American Jewish history can be accomplished only by looking at “the horizontal spread of the many” as opposed to “the eminence of the few.”  It was my intention to explore the “spread of the many” when I discovered the plantation records of Marx E. Cohen in the Manuscripts Division of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina.  Born and raised in Charleston, Cohen was one of only a few Jewish plantation owners in the antebellum South. I had hoped to use these records to create a microhistory of Clear Springs, his rice plantation on the Ashley River roughly fifteen miles outside Charleston, and to explicate Cohen’s life and times in order to add his life story to an already large corpus of literature on Lowcountry rice planters. To have done so would have resulted in a historiographical milestone, as it would have been the first full-scale biography of a Jewish rice planter.

Octavia Butler's Kindred is a novel in which contemporary subjects access the past through a supernatural medium–time travel–and recall these encounters using memory, as opposed to writing. A genre that is difficult to define, Kindred offers a combination of slave narrative realism and science fiction as an alternative to the master narrative of American history. In this way, the novel challenges the normative means of recounting history, offering a new way of perceiving the antebellum moment that is paralleled within the text itself. As the main character Dana, a writer, is compelled to use mediums other than what has traditionally been available to her to both access and recall the past, readers of Kindred are compelled to recount the past through forms of writing other than the master narrative. This symbolic parallel suggests the tendency of traditional historical texts to distance contemporary subjects from the past, watering down violent realities and leaving the unspoken unacknowledged. Butler offers that alternative mediums may be a way to compensate for this "distancing," forming a more holistic, reliable view of history.

This essay examines the evolution of American antislavery literature. It shows that arguments against slavery had been circulating in the colonies since the end of the 17th century. Between 1688 and 1865, there were thousands of separately published titles, including works in every genre, from poems and novels, to slave narratives and children's books. The essay argues as well that for all their historical importance, many antislavery writings also have interest in their own as works of literature. Looking at the history and the evolution of these writings the essay shows how a first, primarily religious type of writing was replaced, after 1775, by a more secular, more literary and more nationalistic mode of writing, followed by a great surge in antislavery writing after 1820, with poetry or slave narratives assuming increasing importance during the years 1820 to 1850. And it is antislavery writing in all its forms and media which conditioned many Americans to view slavery as the essential issue at stake in the war that ensued. The essay concludes on the fact that the continued need for antislavery writing speaks to a painful truth: it was not slavery that was extraordinary, but rather the idea of freedom as the natural condition and universal right of mankind that marked a revolutionary turn.

Lydia Maria Child establishes a telling dynamic in her short story "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" between Rosa, a mulatto slave, and Marion, the white woman she serves. Child uses descriptions of the physical characteristics, interactions and experiences of both characters to establish an anti-slavery discourse that also serves to promote a white feminist agenda, particularly with regard to the plight of white womanhood in the antebellum South. The language Child employs to accomplish this task draws parallels between the two women, connecting the cause of the black female slave to that of her white female counterpart. She endears a predominantly white readership to the black figure by endowing Rosa with "white" characteristics, while also uniting the characters in experiences of female powerlessness. This serves to generate a dialogue that fuses the abolitionist and feminist agendas. While her work predominantly serves to promote this duality, there are key places in which she departs from this parallelism to make statements that favor the anti-slavery sentiment over the plight of white womanhood. This serves to occasionally delude the broader cause of her writing. In addition to these minor departures, there is the problematic nature of basing the appeal of her work on the whiteness embodied in the black characters, suggesting a subtle undertone of black inferiority, which Child may have considered a necessary sacrifice on the path of reaching a broader readership.

The Nat Turner Slave Revolt in 1831 was a pivotal event on the path towards disunion and Civil War.  It created enough of a shock that in the immediate wake of this event, Virginians considered emancipation as a viable option.  The Virginia Slavery debates held in the Virginia Legislature in 1832 presented the last great opportunity for the South to resolve the issue of slavery from within by offering many viable plans for the abolition of slavery.  However, rather than forging a consensus, the debates led to hardening of opinions on both sides of the slavery question.  This hardening of positions on slavery made compromise on the issue virtually impossible, and would be a major contributor towards the division of Virginia along sectional lines of East versus West, the dissolution of the Union, and the inexorable path to Civil War between the States.

This study may emphasize Southern Jewish women and the Civil War but the span of this book ranges over 100 years, and at the heart examines the Jewish-Christian relationship and definitions of race that have made the South unique in American history. Southern Jews’ position and status in the Southern white world were forever linked to the position of blacks in Southern society, and assimilation with the customs of Southern Christian society the key to acceptance. The best preventative measure against the Jewish age, old fight with anti-Semitism was acceptance. As Karen Brodkin explains in How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America, "With slavery, blackness became stigmatized as servile and worse, and whiteness became a privileged condition made visible by its never-ending efforts to distinguish itself from blackness."  For Southern Jewry and most particularly upper class South Jewish women’s goal in the Antebellum and Civil War South was being considered white.

"The War of Northern Aggression" is a popular term for the American Civil War in certain circles, taking it as a given that the Civil War was of Northern construction. This paper seeks to examine the patterns of aggression between the slaveholding and non-slaveholding states in the antebellum period from the 1830s to 1861 to determine the truth of the statement.

This article explores the ways in which Philadelphia banker Nicholas Biddle financed the political economy of cotton and slavery. Most historians have focused on Biddle's political interactions with President Andrew Jackson during the Bank War, either ignoring or minimizing the banker's southern investments in the late 1830s. By examining the complexities of the antebellum era credit system, we can see how Biddle and his business partners provided financing for, functioned within, and extracted profits from a region that depended to a significant extent on the commodification of land, cotton, and slaves. Biddle invested in the South because he saw the expansion of the Cotton Kingdom in lands once occupied by Native Americans and that would soon be worked by enslaved African Americans as consistent with his own nationalistic assumptions and as crucial to the recovery from the Panic of 1837, the bank's profits, and the restoration of American credit abroad.

Elias Miller was born in Georgia in 1834 before the Cherokee Indian Removal, a mulatto who married a white woman in 1850 before the Civil War.  He moved to Ohio during the war and went back to Georgia when it was over because "it was too cold up there."  He owned farms in Campbell and Haralson County, GA as well as Marshall County, AL.  He and Elizabeth raised ten children.  He died alone in the state psychiatric hospital yet he is the ancestor of over 1,000 descendants living nationwide.  The identity of his parents are still unknown.  Who was this man and where did he come from?  How did a mulatto in Reconstruction Georgia own so much property and move around so freely?

The Nat Turner Slave Revolt of 1831 is perhaps the most significant milestone on the path to Civil War due to the fact that it prompted serious debate on the abolition of slavery in the Virginia legislature in 1831-32.  Arguments for and against the peculiar institution were articulated and solidified for the first time in an official public forum.  This debate caused a hardening of attitudes on both sides of the argument, which caused an intractable rift in the sectional differences over slavery both within Virginia, and the Union writ large.  A rift that became an insurmountable obstacle towards reconciliation, and ultimately made the outbreak of violence over the issue of slavery all but inevitable.

This article explores the origins of the matrimonial rite "jumping the broom", and the reasons for its significant popularity among various free and enslaved communities connected by the Atlantic world. Examining the marital traditions of British Gypsies, Celts, common Anglo-Saxons, American slaves, and poor white southerners, I reveal how the folk customs of these subaltern groups illustrate the intercultural, multiracial, and transatlantic foundations of southern culture.

Antislavery activists in the 19th century United States faced a set of formidable obstacles in moving the needle of northern popular opinion from apathy (at best) to engagement. This essay explores the hostile landscape of American social, political, and cultural life within which antislavery writers operated. They could not ignore these conditions if they were going to appeal to their largely northern, middle class audience: they had to assuage their concerns, prompt them to question assumptions, and force them to question conventional wisdom. But northern middle-class culture also provided antislavery activists with opportunities. Pushing the right buttons had the potential to transform hostility and apathy into interest and, maybe, enthusiasm in the fight against slavery. This essay does not show how antislavery women and wen pushed those buttons, but it does identify them and explores their potential to turn a culture of indifference into a culture of antislavery.

George Tucker (1775–1861) is one of the more unique nineteenth-century American philosophers. This is a newly-edited version of his autobiography and several of his philosophical essays that appeared in pamphlets or periodicals.  A practicing attorney and Congressman from the state of Virginia, Tucker was an original thinker who expressed his views in a range of literary genres. Many of these were among the first of their kind: a biography of Thomas Jefferson, a major history of the United States, a science fiction novel about the moon, and a southern U.S. novel. He also composed several influential books in economic thought and frequently wrote on the subject of slavery. While in Congress, he published a collection of essays on philosophical and political subjects, which attracted the attention of Jefferson who subsequently appointed him as the first professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia. Near the end of his life he published a second collection of philosophical essays. Tucker believed that the state of philosophy in the United States was largely undeveloped and, in his various writings, he attempted to address this deficiency.

This historical and archaeological research assesses the construction methods and geographical placement of the Hammock Landing Battery (8LI334) in Liberty County, Florida. Landscape data and terrain analysis demonstrates the location of the battery conferred a tactical advantage to the Confederate military. Constructed during the summer of 1863, the Hammock Landing Battery mounted six heavy guns served by three powder magazines and was one component in the line of defense to prevent Federal blockading vessels from reaching the important industrial complex of Columbus, Georgia. Archaeological investigations allowed a comparison of its construction techniques with period engineering manuals. Although many of the dimensions of the excavated structural features differ from the archetype presented in contemporaneous manuals, they exhibit similar characteristics. Artifacts recovered from the site also shed light on the labor exerted during construction of the earthworks, as well as the types of ordnance stores available to Confederate troops in northern Florida.

The Simpson Lot of Arcadia Mill is an antebellum industrial site in Northwest Florida that was inhabited by five population groups—none of whom left a particularly discernible material trace. In this study, game theory, the study of strategic and dynamic interactions, is tested as means to interpret a site where historic and material evidence is lacking. Game theory methods can help to enhance our understanding of ephemeral sites like the Simpson Lot by deconstructing and reorganizing data to incorporate broader, and perhaps better understood, historical or contextual patterns, and then predict possible site-specific activities that produced the material outcome recovered through excavations. A series of State Against Nature (SONAT) vector diagrams use regional and local patterns to augment archaeological, geophysical, and Geographic Information System (GIS) evidence. Results facilitate the creation of a multi-scalar data network and the subsequent identification of the living quarters of two female overseers at an antebellum textile mill. Although specific information about their lifestyle remains unseen, this previously untested approach successfully analyzes enigmatic and faint patterns in the material record.

On this day in history October 19, 1796, Former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton wrote an essay in the Gazette of the United States under the pseudonym “Phocion” accusing presidential nominee Thomas Jefferson of having an affair with one of his slaves. During the contentious campaign between anti-Federalist Jefferson and Federalist Vice President John Adams, Hamilton wrote 25 essays attacking Jefferson. None of the attacks would plague Jefferson beyond the 1796 campaign as the accusation he was involved with his slave later revealed to be Sally Hemings. For 200 years, it would haunt Jefferson’s legacy, which historian Joseph J. Ellis called, “The alleged liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings may be described as the longest-running miniseries in American history.”

The focal point of the present essay is examining the representations of the Old South in Southern American literature. The South as a region (and the prewar epoch) occupied the American imagination for so long, and still does. Not only it gave birth to some of the greatest writers worldwide, but it produced songs, movies, much cotton and also myths. Thus, it is important to investigate the portrayal of the Antebellum South in southern literary works. William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind are one of the novels that marked the southern renaissance (1930s) like no other two did. However, their representations of the Civil War and the southern way of life cannot be more dissimilar. In what way(s) are these narratives different? And what is the impact, if any, of such difference on their reception? These are the main questions that the present research aims to answer.

Though they had been vital agents in the backwoods diplomacy of the eighteenth century, through colonial warfare and treaties, Virginia politically and militarily subjugated the Iroquoian- speaking Nottoway as “tributaries” of the English Crown. Two Nottoway “Indian Towns” were surveyed and the surrounding lands held “in trust.” Eventually, the House of Burgesses appointed “Trustees” to assist with select tribal land sales and the management of monetary distributions. Situated in Southampton County, Virginia, the antebellum Nottoway community was politically active: they petitioned the legislature, governors, and county courts to intercede on matters related to the mismanagement of their funds, distribution of property, illegal seizure, and treaty obligations. In contrast, by the end of the century, the Nottoway were described by contemporaries as “very few left in the county,” all reservation lands had been allotted, and their trustees dismissed. This paper explores Indian–white interactions within Southampton’s antebellum political economy. The financial relationship between the tribe and their trustees is analyzed, as are the catalysts for Nottoway land sales and reservation allotment. The role of matrilineal leadership figures in Nottoway Trustee discourse and a series of asymmetries that emerged as the result of the tribe’s engagement with the capitalist system are considered. This essay also examines Southampton’s competition for control of Indian land and monetary capital in order to explicate the underlying causes of socio-cultural transformation. The prime mover of this change was economic, as community members struggled with their trustees for control of Indian resources and became more fully engaged in the cash-crop economy of the region.

This project aims to help answer the question of "How did Christians in the Antebellum South support such an institution as chattel slavery?" To do so it offers a survey of the scriptural, moral, economical, and theological defenses of the system used by Christians in the Antebellum South. It also gives attention to the role clergy played in promoting slavery. It relies heavily on secondary sources, but also incorporates significant primary sources from the time period. This project hopes to provide in one place a concise survey of the defenses for slavery used by Southern Antebellum Christians. This research reveals not only "how" Christians defended the institution of slavery, but also that they believed by doing so they were being obedient to God.

There were two dichotomous views on the Constitution advanced during this age that attempted to answer one of the questions of contention between the rival factions competing for political dominance: Was the Union created by the people of the several states in their highest sovereign capacity, with the federal government being their agent of limited, enumerated powers, as the compact theory asserted? Individuals such as Thomas Jefferson, St. George Tucker, Abel Upshur, James Madison, and John Calhoun supported this view.  Or was the Union a creation of the American people in the aggregate, establishing a consolidated national government, as it was espoused by nationalists such as Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, John Jay, Daniel Webster, and Justice Joseph Story? This question was one of fundamental importance to the American polity, because a verdict on this subject determines whether the states are (a) legal fictions; administrative units akin to provinces or counties who had surrendered their sovereignty, or (b) through the consent of its peoples, were parties to the Constitutional compact who retained all aspects of their sovereignty not expressly delegated to the federal entity they created in signing the Constitution. Or, potentially, neither is true. This essay will examine two works by eminent Constitutional theoreticians whose writings on this subject deserve serious scrutiny, namely Justice Joseph Story and Abel P. Upshur.

In the decades before the American Civil War, as sectional tensions and debates brought slave society to the forefront of intellectual culture, rising economic inequality brought the potential for class resistance and biracial solidarity to the forefront of elite concerns about the southern social order. Poor landless whites were a large segment of southern society, and the group with the most tenuous ties to the slave labor system. They were marginalized not only economically, but also socially and culturally from southern society, and were portrayed by southern authors and leaders in ways that made them seem both un-southern and not quite white.

From the days of the country’s beginnings where resistance to England brought together the founding fathers, to the present day two-party system of Republican versus Democrats, the United States of America was a country founded on political opposition.  Politics have always been a passionate endeavor of the American culture. Propaganda of political views has been able to seep into the American psyche since the creation of the penny press. The penny press newspapers that were invented during the antebellum years, made news and information readily available to people of all classes. They created new ploys to appeal to the masses and engage their desire to be political involved in the Republic. The newspapers became politically affiliated and soon their information began to disclose party’s political views as well as attacking opposing parties’ beliefs. During the antebellum years, a regional location could determine the views of its papers due to a political parties pro- or anti- slavery beliefs. Democrats were typically associated with the South and were pro-slavery, while Republicans were found in the North and were anti-slavery. Although these parties were not completely regionalized, this was a common trend that could be seen in many cases throughout the later stages of the antebellum period. By examining two different newspapers, one from the North and one from the South, the contrasting views of political parties based on region can be observed as well as the typical day-to-day use of newspapers during the antebellum period regardless of location.

This volume reprints some fifteen anti-slavery texts that, with  one or two exceptions, have been out of print for almost two centuries. They have been edited by an unusual editorial team, con sisting of scholars at every rank from undergraduate to full professor. Our overarching purpose has been to restore to view some of the extensive anti-slavery literature—pamphlets, poems, sermons, printed speeches, and more—that flourished in early America. As the twenty-first century begins, it is easy to forget that slavery was not universally accepted during the Founding Era. Despite the failure of the founders to eradicate slavery at the national level, there were—as this literature attests—energetic and articulate opponents of slavery who attacked it relentlessly and achieved significant gains in many parts of the country over the period 1760 to I820.

In this article I examine the portraits of Martha Washington that circulated during the antebellum period. Her image became associated with a form of political womanhood that prized indirect participation in politics instead of the direct political participation that women's rights activists advocated. Washington's portrait and the type of political womanhood it represented dominated American culture during this time period. Martha Washington became the first woman whose portrait appeared on American currency.

White-pillared mansions, courtly cavaliers, charming belles and happy slaves – these are some of the best known images associated with the antebellum South. These images were created by the authors of plantation romances, the first literary genre to originate in the South, and they are in sharp contrast to the images presented by slave narratives and abolitionist novels. This paper focuses on John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) and Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) and their contribution to the creation of the Myth of the Old South.