8388 AmericanSouth

Topic Subtopic
History Modern History
A New History
of the American South
Course Guidebook
Professor Edward L. Ayers

University of Richmond
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Edward L. Ayers, PhD
Tucker-Boatwright Professor
of the Humanities
University of Richmond
E dward L. Ayers is the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities

at the University of Richmond, where he served as president from
2007 to 2015. From 1980 to 2007, Professor Ayers taught at the University
of Virginia, where he became dean of the College and Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of
Tennessee, Knoxville, summa cum laude, and his PhD in American Studies
from Yale University.
Professor Ayers has written or edited 12 books on the history of 19th-century

America. He is the author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and
Emancipation in the Heart of America. A predecessor to that book, In the
Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859–1864, won
the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history. Professor
Ayers’s book The Promise of the New South was a finalist for both a National
Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He also coedited The Oxford Book of the
American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction.
Since 2008, Professor Ayers has served as one of the cohosts for BackStory, a
podcast that explores a different facet of American history each week. He
is the founder of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond
and coeditor for American Panorama, an interactive digital atlas of American
history. Professor Ayers is also the founder of Bunk (www.bunkhistory.org),
Professor Biography i
a website that weaves together articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, and digital
projects about the American past.
Professor Ayers has won many awards for his teaching and service. Most
prominently, he was named National Professor of the Year by the Carnegie
Institute for the Advancement of Teaching and received the National
Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. «
ii A New History of the American South

Table of Contents
Introduction
Professor Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
Course Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Guides
1 The Geography of the American South . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 The World of Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3 Slavery Becomes American . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4 The Southern Colonies Take Root . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
5 Southern States in the New Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
6 War, Uprising, and Southern Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
7 The Birth of the Cotton South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
8 Evangelical Faith in the South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
9 Rebellion, Renewal: Tightening of Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . 47
10 Arguments for and against Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
11 A Restless South: Expansion and Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . 59
12 Life in the Slave South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
13 Sovereignty and Slavery in the American West . . . . . . . . 71
14 The Complex Road to Secession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
15 Elemental Loyalties and Descent into War . . . . . . . . . . . 84
16 End of War and of Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
17 Reconstruction and the Freedmen’s Bureau . . . . . . . . . . 96
18 The Landscape of the New South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
19 Farmers and the Rise of Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
20 The Invention of Segregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
21 Lynching and Disfranchisement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
22 Religious Faith in the New South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
23 Literature and Music of the New South . . . . . . . . . . . 129
24 The Legacies of the Southern Saga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Table of Contents iii

Supplementary Material
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Image Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
iv A New History of the American South

A New History of the
American South
T he American South constantly appears in films, novels, music, and
television, often in mythical form. The actual history of the South, it
turns out, was more interesting than the mythology.
The course begins with the indigenous people who inhabited the vast
landscape of what would become the South for more than 10,000 years.
The diverse communities who lived along the rivers, coasts, mountains, and
valleys experienced complicated histories long before Hernando de Soto, Sir
Walter Raleigh, and John Smith arrived. Native Americans would struggle,
fight, trade, and intermarry with white and black people for centuries
to follow.
What became known as the South emerged over the 17th and 18th centuries
from a marginal position on the North American coast and in the Atlantic
slave trade. From those uncertain beginnings, it would grow into the largest
and most powerful slave society in the modern world. Black Southerners
created a new culture from their diverse origins in Africa and disruption in
the New World. Evangelical Christianity developed great force among all
kinds of people in the South.
In the American Revolution and the early years of the United States, the
slave societies of Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, and Georgia gradually began
to cohere into a common identity. Soon, too, Kentucky, Tennessee, and
Louisiana came into the South’s orbit. The forced eviction of the Cherokee,
Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians in the 1830s opened enormous
areas of rich land in Alabama and Mississippi to settlers, speculators,
and planters. Slavery spread like a virus into Texas and Arkansas as a
million enslaved people were sold, shipped, and marched from the eastern
South to the new cotton territories in the southwest. In the meantime,
the South boasted the wealthiest white people in the nation and exercised
disproportionate power in the federal government.
The American Civil War grew out of the South’s remarkable growth and
dreams of future expansion. White Southerners gambled that they could
win safety for their slave-based society by seceding from the United States
and creating the Confederate States of America. The white South fought
Course Scope 1
four years for its independence, losing the war despite notable victories along
the way. More Americans died in their Civil War than in all the wars of the
20th century combined. American slavery ended more abruptly, with greater
human and material cost, than anywhere else in a Western hemisphere filled
with slave societies.
Also remarkable and unique was the experiment of Reconstruction. That

effort, using the federal government and army to recast the South after the
defeat of secession and the destruction of slavery, was the most ambitious
of any society that experienced emancipation. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, growing out of the turmoil
of Reconstruction, shaped the United States for the next 150 years and
continue to do so today.
Four million black Southerners, becoming free without property or power,

made new lives for themselves after Reconstruction. White Southerners
who had lost wealth, standing, and political influence at the national level
tried to rebuild their former lives on shifting terrain. Poorer white people
struggled to keep their farms and feed their families even as the price of the
crops they grew steadily declined. Railroads, stores, and cities grew up with
startling speed, leaving the once-dominant countryside behind. Lynching
and other racial violence tore at the South, and legislatures forged the
first statewide laws to separate black people and white people. New rules
excluded black men and many poorer white men from the polls for another
half century.
In this New South, social and cultural change arrived rapidly. Religion
flourished among many groups of people, with evangelists becoming the
most famous people in the South. Pentecostalism was forged in the South
and spread across the country and the world. Southerners created the blues,
jazz, country, and gospel. They wrote best-selling books, popular across the
nation. They invented Coca-Cola and mass-produced cigarettes, popular
around the world.
By the turn of the 20th century, the American South had assumed the shape
it would hold through much of the century. The region and the nation were
forever changed by the events explored in this course. «
2 A New History of the American South

1 The Geography of the
American South
The South has played an unusual and unusually large role

in the history of the United States and the world. This
course’s content will span centuries, from the time before
English settlement until the beginning of the 20th century. As
an introduction, this lecture will give some background on
the South as a geographical region and look at the effects of
European contact on indigenous people in America.
« Geography and Climate of the South «
T he very land beneath

what became the South
began in upheaval. About 475
The South is by no means the most
barren part of North America, but
for agriculture, the South’s soil is
million years ago, continental mediocre and easily eroded. On
masses slammed into one another. the other hand, the South has a
Complex mountains formed, long growing season and a humid
with rock from deep within the atmosphere that is quite beneficial
earth lying on top of sedimentary for agriculture.
material that had once been the
coast of the continent. Large parts of the South, moreover,
do have rich soil, including the
Everything else in eastern North Mississippi Delta, the Shenandoah
America took its definition from Valley, and the Black Belt that
those mountains and the rivers that stretches across Alabama and
flowed from them into the Atlantic Mississippi, which was named both
and the Gulf. The Mississippi River, for the color of that soil and for the
800 miles to the west, gives its shape skin color of the enslaved people
to the western part of the South. who labored on it.
Lecture 1 « The Geography of the American South 3

VIEW OF THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY FROM
STONY MAN MOUNTAIN, SHENANDOAH
« Ancient Chiefdoms «
F rom the viewpoint of

the animals that lived in
North America, humans suddenly
thousand years, the humans had
killed off the largest animals and
turned toward small-game hunting,
arrived as a new force, armed with fishing, and plant collecting.
weapons of stone and fire. Humans,
it seems, migrated into the western By about 1000 BCE, agriculture
hemisphere over a land bridge developed along the Mississippi and
connecting Alaska with Siberia. other southern rivers, including the
They came perhaps 40,000 years first use of corn. People used fire to
ago, settling first in the west and clear land for planting and to drive
slowly making their way to the east. animals during the fall and winter
hunting, transforming the landscape.
South of the glaciers that stretched
down to Ohio and Maine 12,000 The indigenous people of the
years ago, people hunted the southeast spoke languages that
mastodons that fed among the belonged to at least seven different
trees of the South. Within a couple families. The people of the

southeast became what we now call The climate grew colder in what
Mississippian around 1000 AD. is now called the Little Ice Age,
Power became concentrated in the stretching from about 1300 to
hands of chiefs. Military competition 1850 AD. The late 16th and early
grew among the growing chiefdoms. 17th centuries in particular saw
one of the steepest declines in
The largest chiefdoms grew along temperatures in North America in
the richer rivers of the South. thousands of years.
One of the largest chiefdoms was
Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis. Around 1350, chiefdoms across
They also appeared further south the South, including Cahokia, went
on the Mississippi River and along into steep decline and collapsed.
the Arkansas, in the Mississippi Despite this decline, as many as
Delta and in Alabama. They 1.2 million people lived in the
developed in eastern Tennessee and chiefdoms when the first European
northern Georgia. explorers arrived.
« European Contact «
T he first European
contact with what became
the South involved Spanish raiding
and enslaved those who resisted
them, and looked for gold and
silver around every turn in the
parties. The explorer Hernando river. They never found it, and the
de Soto came in 1539, and for the expedition was considered by all
next four years led a small army on a failure. About 300 people with
a desperate journey of almost 4,000 the expedition died, including de
miles through what would become Soto himself.
the South. They were looking for a
rich society like that of the Aztecs For the native chiefdoms of the
or Incas. They wanted wealth, South, the de Soto journey was an
power, and to spread Christianity, unimaginable calamity. They lost
probably in that order. hundreds, sometimes thousands of
warriors—an immense loss from
De Soto and his men confronted which the chiefdoms could not
chiefdoms from northern Florida recover. The Spaniards destabilized
to eastern Texas. Everywhere they relationships among the chiefdoms,
went, the Spaniards took what leading to devastating wars and
they wanted from the storehouses generations of conflict long after
of the peoples they met, killed the Spaniards had left.
Lecture 1 « The Geography of the American South 5

The worst effect was that of The burning of entire villages, the
disease, from being exposed to the enslaving of women and children,
germs and viruses the Europeans and the killing of adult men
unwittingly carried. The worst weakened populations permanently
impact of disease probably and often fatally. As a result of
came in the late 16th and early these combined assaults, over 90
17th centuries. percent of the indigenous people
of North America had died by the
The diseases often arrived before time the English arrived.
the Europeans arrived personally,
carried unknowingly by indigenous For what would become the South,
people who had contact with that means that between 1550
Europeans or with other indigenous and 1650, the populations of all
people who had had contact. the chiefdoms in the Carolinas,
Suddenly, completely mysterious Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi,
illnesses attacked entire villages and Arkansas fell steeply. Elaborate
and chiefdoms. chiefdoms collapsed and people
organized themselves along smaller
and simpler lines.
«
Suggested Reading
Calloway, New Worlds for All.
Cowdrey, This Land, This South.
Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun.
Questions to Consider
1 How might North America have developed as a Spanish colony?
2 How might North America have developed had the Atlantic slave trade
not developed?

2 The World of Slavery
This lecture opens with a look at the African slave trade

before and during European contact. It also gives an overview
of important sites in the Americas as well as Portuguese and
English efforts in the slave trade.
« Background on Africa and Slavery «
S lavery evolved over

centuries and across large
parts of the African continent.
gradually evolved into situations
in which some powerful men
controlled access to many slaves.
There, ambitious men sought to
guarantee control over a group of When European traders first
people. Slaves in this world often arrived in the 15th century, the
originated as outsiders, taken in Africans folded their older
circumstances that saved them practices of the exchange of slaves
from starvation, from harm at into their trade with Europeans.
the hands of pursuers, or from The Europeans did not necessarily
death by judicial condemnation. have better goods, but they had
Additionally, slaves came in different cloth, metal, and jewelry
through war, trade, or accident. than what was available before.
These items could set powerful
Africans engaged in all sorts of men apart and perhaps help them
exchange, of goods and of people, become more powerful yet.
long before Europeans arrived.
Much of that exchange was tribute, Once the cycle began—a cycle
which had a political as well as which benefitted all the powerful
economic meaning. This system men involved in it, Africans
Lecture 2 « The World of Slavery 7

and Europeans alike—it quickly
escalated. Africans who rode their
contacts with the coast to local
power became dependent on the
Atlantic economy to retain the
respect they gained.
The Europeans, often Portuguese

and then Spanish, huddled in their
ships or in the forts of the coast,
waiting for enslaved people to buy.
They won enormous profit if the
enslaved didn’t die.
« The Transatlantic Slave Trade «
T he slave ships of the

Atlantic trade were notorious
for horrific conditions. People
beards, strong smells, alien foods,
incomprehensible language, and
unfamiliar gods.
were packed below decks as tightly
as they could be. The sexes were About a quarter of the passengers
kept separate and naked. They were under 13 years of age. Most
were provided with no means of of the captives were male, partly
sanitation, fed just enough to keep because the African societies
them alive, and dragged overboard tended to retain females and partly
when they died. About 12 percent because those who purchased the
of those crammed on the ships died slaves wanted men.
along the way, and roughly the same
percentage of the crew died as well. Many slave ships saw suicides, as
people threw themselves overboard
The voyage took anywhere from or starved themselves to death. The
three weeks to two months, men who conducted the voyages
depending on the currents and devised harsh regimens to keep
winds. Many of the people on the people from rebellion or death. For
ships, taken from the interior, had example, they forced food into the
never seen the ocean before. Most throats of those who would not eat.
had never seen Europeans, with About 10 percent of slave voyages
their outlandish clothes, strange experienced major rebellions.

« Numbers «
A bout a fourth of the

ships did not reach their
destination because of shipwreck,
the centuries of the Atlantic slave
trade, from about 1526 to 1867,
12.5 million people were taken
rebellion, or capture. Ships that did from Africa and 10.7 million
make it offered great rewards for arrived in the Americas.
the ship owners.
The Portuguese initiated the
The Atlantic slave trade created Atlantic trade in African slavery
vast fortunes for the people in the mid-15th century, and the
and companies that financed numbers soared between 1595 and
the enterprise. 1640. For a century and a half, the
Portuguese virtually monopolized
The trade grew stronger into its the slave trade.
peak in the 18th century. Over
« Portuguese Efforts «
E ven when the Spanish

crown acquired Portugal,
the Spanish were willing to let
into sugar plantations, fueling the
slave trade even more.
Portugal have its own colonies so African slaves became

long as they yielded revenue. The fundamentally important on the
Portuguese focused their efforts on periphery of the action in the
Brazil, a source of valued sugar. The New World. By 1630, African
Portuguese invested their growing slaves comprised about half the
profits in the African slave trade population of Brazil.
« England and America «
T he English, though
badly lagging in colonization,
had an advantage over the other
could get them from their own
plantations, they could undercut
the competition with lower prices.
colonial powers: England was
itself the largest European market For a time, the English did not
for tobacco, sugar, cotton, dyes, throw themselves into the slave-
and spices. If English merchants based plantation model. They

had no compunctions against the area north of Florida and
participating in the slave trade, south of the St. Lawrence River for
but they did not yet see any good England and Protestantism.
reason or good place to establish
slave-based plantations in that If the English established an
New World. outpost in the New World, they
could have a base for their ships
England had been involved that constantly preyed on the hated
with America almost as soon Spanish Catholics. The queen gave
as its existence was known, but Sir Walter Raleigh the exclusive
not in a way that would lead to right to establish a colony in the
colonization. In the 1580s, though, New World just for this purpose.
some English leaders began to argue He looked at the map and saw just
strongly that England would never the right place: the Outer Banks
take its rightful place among the off what is now North Carolina. It
nations of Europe until it had also would be close enough to the West
founded an outpost in America. Indies to use as a base but hard for
They argued that God had reserved the enemy to find.

« The Roanoke Expedition «
F ive major ships left

Plymouth in 1585, sailing
by way of the Canaries to the
prepare for the winter and built a
small fort.
West Indies and then up to the Investors and decision makers had
Outer Banks. The queen wouldn’t great faith in Roanoke, hoping to
risk Raleigh himself on the use it as a place to produce olives,
voyage, but sent trusted advisors wine, and sugar. However, matters
and gentlemen. did not work out in Roanoke. When
the supply ships appeared late, or
They found the place they not at all, people had disappeared.
wanted—Roanoke Island,
protected from both the sea by Roanoke made a profound
other islands and from the natives difference despite its failure. The
on the mainland by water—and English learned that they would
left 100 people there while they have to send over larger companies
sailed back to England for more and that they would have to be
people and supplies. Those who supported for several years before
remained quickly put up houses to they could make it on their own.
« The Chesapeake «
A fter the failure at

Roanoke, the English
targeted the Chesapeake Bay,
gentlemen looking for action, in
command of soldiers who were
veterans of fighting in Ireland and
eventually settling at Jamestown. other brutal campaigns. In all these
They knew they needed to find a ways, the English ignored what they
deep-water port, and they knew had learned at Roanoke.
to build on an island to protect
themselves from the natives, whom It was in December 1606 that the
they expected to be hostile. three ships and 104 people left
London for Virginia. Four months
The Jamestown settlement was on later, they entered the Chesapeake.
a profoundly unhealthy site, with The men went to work building a
water poisoned by salt and sewage. palisade and village. The nearby
The English sent a group of men natives objected when they realized
rather than families—a military this wasn’t one more group of
organization headed by very young Europeans just passing through

but one that was intending to six months later, they found only
stay. Those natives were loosely 38 of the 104 still alive. They
joined together in the Powhatan had died of disease and drought.
Confederacy, led by Chief Nevertheless, Jamestown limped
Powhatan of the Pamunkey. along, gradually growing stronger.
It developed the patterns that
The ships that brought the people would mark the history of Virginia,
left in June. When they returned the South, and America to follow.
«
Suggested Reading
Davis, Inhuman Bondage.
Kupperman, Roanoke.
Miller, Way of Death.
1 How do we best understand African slavery from the point of view
of Africans?
2 Why was the part of North America that became the South late to develop
in comparison to other parts of the New World?

3 Slavery Becomes American
What would become the South began in multiple points that

eventually converged. Virginia played a major role because
Virginia came first. The demand for New World commodities
drove the English to seek out new places to make profit. This
lecture looks at such efforts in Virginia.
« The Arrival of Africans in Virginia «
J ohn Rolfe reported in

August 1619 to the treasurer
few black servants or slaves were
involved. In these decades, there
of the Virginia Company back in were plenty of indentured servants
London that a Dutch man-of-war from England to do the work in the
“brought not any thing but 20, and tobacco fields.
odd Negroes, which the Governer
and Cape Marchant bought for The planters certainly knew of
victualles.” Black people continued African slavery and how to tap
to enter Virginia after 1619, often into it, but Virginia took three
two or three at a time. The census generations to move fully into
even describes several couples the world of slavery. The English
from Africa. aversion to people who looked
or worshipped differently from
Those Africans who arrived in themselves helped resist the turn to
the colony did so not because slavery. Nevertheless, the English
there was regular slave traffic were rapidly building slave societies
to Virginia, but because there in Barbados and Bermuda and had
was continual coming and going shown that they could overcome
between different colonial ports their suspicions when the money
and the metropolis in which a was right.
Lecture 3 « Slavery Becomes American 13

« Tobacco «
A t the same time as

Virginia was seeing a few
Africans arrive, tobacco was
Those servants, after they had
worked off their indentures, would
receive 50 acres of their own. That
catching on in England and the was a strong incentive to take the
Netherlands. By 1650, a quarter risk to come to Virginia and to work
of the English population smoked for the master for the intervening
every day. years instead of running away. This
profit motive made Virginia a more
English merchants looked for a way dynamic place.
to satisfy the tobacco hunger with
an English colony in Virginia. The Virginia’s tobacco production rose
problem was labor. Not only had from 200,000 pounds in 1624 to
most of the original English settlers 3 million pounds in 1638. The
died in Virginia, but most of those crop was remarkably profitable; a
who were brought in afterward farmer in Virginia, working several
were male teenagers, a population indentured servants, could make
notoriously difficult to manage. more in a year than he could in 10
years in England. Virginia needed
The landowners who paid for them ever more laborers, and England
to come over from England were wasn’t sending enough.
slightly older than their servants.
They felt entitled to demand
relentless work, closed mouths, and
quick obedience. Early Virginia
society was filled with violence,
anger, and resentment, with
servants continually running away.
English investors spent enormous

amounts of money trying to
make Virginia profitable, even
as hundreds of settlers died of
disease and hunger. The investors
would allow the settlers to own
and work land of their own and
give additional land to those who
brought servants from England to
work for them for seven years.

« Labor Elsewhere «
T he 50,000 immigrants to
Virginia were not enough
to feed its hunger for labor. Other
Plus, once they learned what they
needed to know, they did not take
that knowledge with them off to
means would have to be found. their own farms, as white servants
English planters in Barbados, eager did. Enslaved people remained
for enslaved labor, invented the laws on the plantation until they died,
of slavery that Virginia would later which was often just a few years
adopt. They combined the law that after they arrived.
covered cattle and other property
with other laws they made up as the A great irony quickly arose. The
occasion demanded. English prided themselves on
being more civilized than the
Barbados and Bermuda shifted over Portuguese and Spanish, but
to African slaves as their primary when it came to slavery, they
labor force as early as the 1640s and were much more rigid. They had
1650s, decades before Virginia did. less trouble than the Portuguese
The English Caribbean sugar boom and Spanish in defining slaves
created such an intense demand as nothing other than property.
for labor that the supply of English However, the death rates among
servants could not satisfy it. the Spanish and Portuguese
colonies, in part because of climate
Africans seemed to live longer than and the labor demanded by the
Englishmen working on the sugar crops they raised, would grow
plantations, and they had more to be much higher than that of
knowledge of tropical agriculture. the English mainland colonies.
« Bacon’s Rebellion «
M eanwhile, in Virginia,
a crucial event occurred:
Bacon’s Rebellion. By 1665, all the
Meanwhile, Governor Berkeley
received a 1,000-pound salary
each year, at a time when most
best tobacco lands were occupied emigrants mortgaged four years of
along eastern Virginia’s navigable their lives to pay the 6-pound cost
waters. White servants who of transatlantic passage.
became free after 1670 had little
prospect of economic success; fewer Rather than pay rent because they
than half became landowners. could not buy land of their own,

many of the recently freed servants created a more democratic kind of
moved to the frontier, where politics; they also determined that
they competed violently with the they would turn against the Native
Native Americans. Berkeley sought Americans more aggressively.
to contain those freed servants,
whose actions he feared, for good They also warmed up to enslaved
reason, would lead to war with the labor. The number of indentured
Native Americans. servants from England was
declining, in any case, in part
In 1676, discontented freedmen because the Great Fire of 1666 in
found a leader in Nathaniel London created thousands of jobs
Bacon. Bacon and his men drove for poorer men who wanted to stay
Berkeley and his supporters in England. The opening of other
over to the Eastern Shore, the colonies in North America, such
end of the peninsula connected as Pennsylvania, attracted many
to Maryland, and burned English immigrants who might
Jamestown. However, Bacon have come to Virginia before.
suddenly died of dysentery, some
ships arrived from England, and In the midst of all this change, the
the rebellion collapsed. The King coming of slavery was gradual. At
removed Berkeley and established first, planters gave white servants
firmer control over Virginia. the more skilled jobs and saved only
the least skilled for the Africans
Bacon’s Rebellion, in itself, newly in their midst. As white
accomplished nothing, but the servants became scarcer over time
reaction to it was meaningful. and enslaved people revealed their
The larger planters in Virginia capacities, planters trained African
immediately reduced taxes and slaves to do more challenging tasks.
« Slavery in Virginia and Maryland «
S lavery itself became

domesticated, routinized,
and defined by law and custom.
population, numbering about
150,000 people.
In 1700, Africans accounted for White Virginians eventually forged

13 percent of the Chesapeake a set of laws, rationalizations,
population; by 1750, Africans myths, practices, and hopes
accounted for 40 percent of that that made African slavery seem

somehow the expected order of
things. The Virginia assembly
forbade marriage between white
people and African people, and
they forbade sexual relations when
the female was white (but not when
the male was). In other words,
raping a slave was not a crime but
marrying her was.
This slave society in Virginia took

almost 100 years to evolve. That
long route, however, was not the
way slavery came to the rest of
the South. Virginia came first and
struggled. Others came later and
followed the Virginia blueprint.
Maryland, adjacent to Virginia,

followed a markedly smoother
path. Lord Baltimore, a Catholic, «
took a royal charter for a million LORD BALTIMORE
acres on the northern side of the
Chesapeake. The young Lord
Baltimore brought over 150
settlers in 1633. However, they confronted different
opportunities and different
The friendly natives swapped constraints. There was no staple
the land the English wanted on in New England that demanded,
St. Mary’s River for bolts of cloth or rewarded, the extensive
and an assortment of metal tools. enslavement of people. As a result,
The colonists immediately planted there was no powerful class of
tobacco and made a profit. slaveholders to push the colony
toward slavery. Had there been,
Englishmen, whether in there is every reason to believe that
Massachusetts, Virginia, or the English of Massachusetts would
Barbados, had the same general have become far more implicated
ideas about Africans and slavery. in slavery.

«
Suggested Reading
Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs.
Horn, A Land As God Made It.
Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom.
1 Why does Jamestown not occupy a more central role in America’s memory
of its origins?
2 What might have happened had tobacco not been adaptable to Virginia?

4 The Southern Colonies
Take Root
This lecture begins with a look at how the slave trade

reached its terrible apogee in the 18th century. It then
moves on to examine how slave societies in Carolina and
Georgia developed.
« The 18th-Century Slave Trade «
N orth America
remained on the periphery
of the unimaginably large Atlantic
Slavers differentiated mainly in
that they exported the men they
captured, and kept the women and
slave trade of the 18th century, children to exploit themselves on
accounting for only about 6 percent agricultural holdings sometimes
of the enslaved people brought from as large as New World plantations.
Africa to the New World before That suited the slave owners of
1820. Although that trade had been the Western Hemisphere, for they
going on since the 15th century, wanted mainly boys and men.
it was in the 18th century that it
reached its horrible peak.
In West Africa, new men rose

to power, creating states like the
Asante, Dahomey, and Oyo, which
gained control of the coast and
then stretched their domination
far into the interior. Special armies
and freelancing gangs kidnapped
millions of men and women and
killed millions of others.
Lecture 4 « The Southern Colonies Take Root 19

A complex web of routes and heterogeneous than any other in
slave traders crossed the Atlantic. the Americas.
Of all of those, the route to
mainland North America proved Enslaved people had to work to find
most indirect, passing through common ground. They experienced
the Caribbean and picking up divisions and struggles among
human cargo along the way. As themselves, compounded by the
a result, the enslaved population injustice and uncertainty they bore
of North America became more every day.
« Carolina «
A n effort to colonize
Carolina came from planters
in Barbados. In 1663, Charles II
labor. They themselves enslaved
Indians from as far away as the
Mississippi River, raiding villages,
gave a vast expanse of land to eight killing the men, and taking the
supporters who, in turn, brought women and children.
in settlers. In 1669, 100 established
Charleston. Most of the proprietors The Indian slave trade might
had a connection to Barbados, have grown even more, but a
the tiny English island that was combination of Indians attacked
producing vast amounts of sugar. the whites in 1715 in what became
known as the Yamassee War.
Some planters from Barbados It almost wiped out the white
came with slaves right off the bat— settlement in Carolina and forced
something neither Virginia nor them to abandon as much as half of
Maryland had experienced. These the area they had cultivated. The
planters knew what slave-based whites gathered themselves and
plantations should look like, and waged war on the Indians, killing
established them immediately along virtually all of them or driving
the rivers of the Carolina coast. At them from the colony.
the same time, the planters enslaved
American Indians or traded them to Unable to enslave, coerce, or
the West Indies and New England in persuade indigenous peoples to
exchange for African slaves. work for them, Carolina imported
slaves of African background from
The same Indians who brought the West Indies. By 1700, Carolina,
deerskins to the English learned of like Virginia and Maryland, had
the insatiable English demand for become a slave society.

Unlike Virginia and Maryland, who were eager to get out from
Carolina still didn’t have a cash underneath the domination and
crop; the enslaved people herded pretension of the elites of Virginia
cattle, cut timber, and harvested and South Carolina. It was known
pitch and tar for ships. The planters mainly for producing naval stores,
kept experimenting, trying to find pitch and tar.
their version of tobacco or sugar.
Enslaved people could do virtually

any work to which they were put,
but slavery really paid off when the
slaves were put to a lucrative, stable,
and replicable staple: rice. The
rice planters became the richest
families in North America. And
the African and African American
population grew to outnumber
whites 8 to 1 in some places.
In 1712, North Carolina became

a colony separate from South
Carolina. North Carolina had
only 800 enslaved people when it
became its own colony. It became
known as a haven for poorer whites
« Georgia «
I n the meantime, the

Spanish continued to establish
missions along the Atlantic coast
Carolina, after the Yamassee War,
was eager to put a buffer between
themselves and the Spanish and
of Florida, all the way up to the Sea their allies. Finally, in 1730, the
Islands of Georgia. They viewed English government began to move.
the spread of English Carolina with They pictured a series of fortified
concern. Settlers and traders crossed townships, with citizen-soldiers
into Spanish land and English to work the fields and defend
pirates raided isolated missions. the settlements.

Those goals fit nicely with those of The trustees of Georgia dreamed
a group of English philanthropists of a society free of every kind of
led by James Oglethorpe. bigotry. They prohibited African
Oglethorpe had been placed in slavery as well as strong drink and
charge of a committee to investigate trade with the Indians. However,
the truly terrible abuses in the farmers hated these laws, especially
English penal system. He and some the one prohibiting slavery. They
allies decided that a charitable worked around the law and then
colony to the south of Carolina flagrantly ignored it. By 1750,
could help create a buffer to Spain, the trustees gave in and Georgia
and at the same time it would became a slave society, its original
create a colony for the deserving mission as a haven for the repressed
poor, named Georgia after King replaced with a different role in
George II. the world.
« Overview of Slave Societies «
B y the time Georgia

became a slave society, slavery
existed in every colony far beyond
Planters looked increasingly to
the legislatures of their localities
rather than to England for the
the South; for example, 14 percent measures they wanted from
of the people in New York City the government—for example,
were enslaved, and Rhode Island the kind of laws they wanted to
played a critical role in Atlantic protect slavery.
slave trade. The New England
colonies built much of their wealth In the year 1750, colonies stretched
on the trade with West Indies and all the way from Maryland to the
were not fastidious about dealing northern border of Florida. Those
with slaveholders and slaves. colonies were distinguished by
several characteristics. They were
Most American slaveholders, the most successful staple-producing
unlike those of the Caribbean, regions of North America—and
lived on their plantations and they were the societies most
among at least some of their slaves. dependent on slave labor.

« Stirrings of Revolution «
I n 1760, George III took the

crown of England when his
father died. The English had
and prosperity. Part of the
expense came because the English
maintained large numbers of troops
defeated one enemy after another in North America, all the way from
around the world, but the victories Canada to Mobile Bay, to make
had put England in great debt, sure the French or Spanish didn’t
and taxes had grown until they threaten the prosperous English
posed a great threat to stability settlements to the east.

These same troops were trying of the government back on the
to prevent conflict between the coast to provide courts, schools,
Indians and the ever-pushing white and adequate representation.
colonists. In 1763, the English drew So-called regulators used violence
an imaginary line down the ridge and intimidation to control their
of the Appalachians and declared neighborhoods, often fighting
everything to the west of that off- against the normal government.
limits to whites from Carolina and
Virginia. The American settlers Some Americans decided to resist.
were furious at this limitation to People who had been used to ruling
their freedom. themselves bitterly resented the
assertion of control from England.
At the same time, the backcountry What such a rebellion might
of the Carolinas fell into chaos look like, no one could imagine at
as settlement outran the ability the time.
«
Suggested Reading
Berlin, Many Thousands Gone.
Jennison, Cultivating Race.
Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves.
1 Did slavery define the South from the beginning, or was there something
else that separated it from the rest of North America?
2 How would being enslaved differ from Virginia to Carolina to Georgia?

Would one place have been any better or worse than the others?

5 Southern States in
the New Nation
The American Revolution was a quite unlikely event. The

American colonists had very little in common, after all. They
dealt far more with, and identified far more with, England
than they did with each other. This lecture looks at the
unlikely revolution through the lens of the Southern colonies.
« Declaration of Independence «
T o white Americans, the

English seemed a corrupt
government demanding taxes from
the colonies. A series of escalations
built on both sides, each thinking
the other would back down. They
did not, and so the American
Revolution began.
A 33-year-old Virginian named

Thomas Jefferson was chosen
to draft a document, which he
wrote overnight in Philadelphia.
The resulting Declaration of
Independence was accepted with
only minor changes on July 4, 1776.
The document proclaimed that all
men are created equal, meaning all
white male citizens in the colonies «
had equal political rights with the THOMAS JEFFERSON
white male citizens of England.
Lecture 5 « Southern States in the New Nation 25

The original draft of Jefferson’s Congress’s committee of revision
declaration blamed the king removed Jefferson’s entire
for both the slave trade and discussion of slavery; this was not
slaveholding in America. the time, they said, to wrestle with
However, the Continental such an issue.
« The Role of the American South «
T he founders took for

granted the congruence of
freedom, citizenship, and skin
aided the patriot cause; instead,
they portrayed all Indians and all
black people as treacherous threats.
color. By the time they had grown Whatever a white American might
up in Virginia, that system had think about British taxation or
become settled into law, custom, representation, he must be opposed
culture, and political ideology. to the enemies in his midst.
They considered their extension
of freedom to themselves and to White Southerners worried from
all white men to be radical within the beginning about what war
those constraints. might do to slavery. In fact, in the
war that followed the Declaration
The colonists repeatedly attacked of Independence, thousands of
the British by focusing on the enslaved people rushed to the
British supposedly instigating British at every opportunity.
slave rebellions or “tampering The British had little or no
with” Indians on the frontier. By commitment to emancipation as a
making an enemy of the British, principle, but they saw liberating
the enslaved, and the indigenous, the slaves of patriots as a useful
white Americans were able to see military strategy.
themselves in a new way. A true
patriot in wartime would not fight The American Indians, especially
merely for independence from the the Cherokee, sided with the
British but would fight to put down English and attacked American
threats on the frontier, and on settlements in eastern Tennessee,
people’s very plantations and towns. western Virginia, and the borders
of both Carolinas and Georgia.
The American press did not The patriots hit back hard and
focus on the American Indians or inflicted enormous damage on
enslaved African Americans who the Cherokee.

« The New Nation «
I n less than a decade, the

scattered Southern colonies were
thrown together into a new nation.
more localist orientation who did
not see the benefits of a strong
government, either in trade or in
The Virginian James Madison politics. The Federalists, by contrast,
drafted much of the Constitution, believed they would benefit most
giving vast new powers to a central from a uniform currency, expanded
government: the right to levy taxes, internal trade, and a stronger
regulate commerce, and enforce presence in the world of nations.
national laws. Lines of debate soon
emerged between smaller states Some of the Antifederalists
and larger states, for many feared were Southern slaveholders, who
that Virginia would dominate the worried about what a strong
government (which, in many ways, federal government might do to
it did). the institution down the line.
However, many of the leading
The Constitution pointed in Federalists were also Southern
different directions on slavery. It slaveholders—and bigger and more
gave slaveholders the three-fifths powerful ones. In Virginia, the
clause and the delay on ending the debate pitched Patrick Henry and
slave trade, but the Constitution George Mason against the new
did not embrace slavery. It was Constitution and James Madison
essentially open ended on slavery. By for it. The key for the Federalists in
increasing the power of the national Virginia was George Washington,
government, the Constitution who held enormous prestige
created greater pro-slavery and anti- because of his leadership of the
slavery potential, putting the power Continental Army.
of the federal government behind
the institution but also creating a The convention ratified the
power that worried the slave states Constitution only by an 89 to 79
from the outset. vote, with a promise for a bill of
rights as a condition. Word raced
The nationwide debate over the to New York, where a convention
new Constitution in 1787 revealed was also in session, and that state,
complex lines in the new country too, narrowly endorsed the new
and within Virginia. The debate constitution. The next decade saw
turned on the issues between the bitter fighting throughout the new
Federalists and the Antifederalists. country over how centralized and
The Antifederalists were men of powerful the new government

would be, with Alexander other hand, the Northern colonies
Hamilton leading one side and did use the opportunity of the new
Jefferson the other. constitutional conventions to begin
the end of slavery in their own
There was no abolitionist states. What had been a national
movement yet calling for the end institution suddenly became a
of slavery across the South. On the Southern one.
« Slavery in the New Nation «
D uring the three

decades following the
outbreak of the Revolutionary
defeated by a single vote. (That
would have meant no slavery
in what became Alabama and
War, every Northern state initiated Mississippi.) Three years later, the
complete slave emancipation. At Northwest Ordinance, also written
the same time, Congress tried to by Jefferson, did abolish slavery in
restrict the geographical scope a vast area north of the Ohio River
of slavery. Because the western known as the Northwest Territory,
territories were largely unsettled including the present states of
by white people, the movement to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan,
prohibit the spread of slavery did and Wisconsin.
not pose the same threat to vested
interests that it did in the existing Jefferson undertook anti-slavery
states. It received considerable efforts at the same time that he
support from those who believed had multiple children with an
slavery could be ended in the South, enslaved woman, Sally Hemings.
including many Southerners. Despite historians’ best efforts,
they have not been able to learn
No one in the South had yet argued how he rationalized this. Jefferson’s
that slavery was a positive good. children were his own slaves.
Everyone seemed to agree that
slavery was an unfortunate legacy All in all, in the first 30 years
from the past (and from England) after the Revolution, ideas about
that would fade away. slavery were in deep flux. The
institution was dying in the north,
In 1784, Thomas Jefferson drafted relatively stagnant in Virginia, and
a bill that would have barred burgeoning in South Carolina and
slavery from all the western Georgia with an active slave trade
territories after 1800, but it was directly from Africa until 1808.

During that time, over 100,000 could see that slavery was wrong,
enslaved Africans were brought inefficient, and hurtful. They
into those new Southern states. wanted to begin to get out from
underneath it while they could.
As yet, there was no such thing
as abolitionism in the sense of In 1782, Virginia legalized private
immediately ending slavery and manumission (an owner freeing a
making the former slaves a part of slave). Many planters in these years
American society. Many people manumitted their slaves, often
talked of colonization of the when they or their spouse died—as
African American population George Washington did. Ten or
in Africa or elsewhere, and some twenty thousand slaves gained their
people spoke of the possibility of freedom in this way in the two
gradual emancipation, but all of decades following the creation of
these solutions were imagined as the United States. However, many
taking place over a very extended other whites felt no guilt, certain
period of time. Many whites, that slavery was part of whatever
Southern as well as Northern, destiny lay before the new nation.
«
Suggested Reading
Parkman, The Common Cause.
Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello.
Taylor, American Revolutions.
1 Should Americans puzzle over the role of slaveholders being the authors of
the founding documents of their nation, or is that an anachronistic reading?
2 Was the American Revolution good or bad for enslaved people?

6 War, Uprising, and
Southern Solidarity
The majority of what came to be known as the South emerged

in a Southern form only in the 40 years between 1810 and
1850. In that time, massive changes took place in the vast
expanse of territory whose future had yet to be decided.
That future depended on a war with a major power, war
among and against various indigenous peoples, and major
concessions from those peoples. Those events are critical parts
of Southern history.
« The War of 1812 «
A t the beginning of the

19th century, the British
were stopping American ships on
the rebellion at the same time they
fought wars in Europe, and so they
simply let the Americans go for the
the high seas to steal sailors from time being.
American ships and force them to
fight against Napoleon. The British Only a great military victory
were also inciting Indians to attack over the English, Americans told
on the frontier. They had refused themselves, could show the world,
to evacuate the forts they’d lost in that the United States was real,
the Revolutionary War, though they permanent, and powerful. They
had agreed to do so in the Treaty of also told themselves that only a
Paris in 1783. victory over the British would get
the Indians under control and
The English insisted that the former open the west.
colonies had never legitimately won
their independence. The English A group of white Southerners,
told themselves that the English the so-called Warhawks, were
had simply grown weary of fighting led by the speaker of the House,

Henry Clay of Kentucky, and The British blockaded the entire
John Calhoun of South Carolina. American coastline with the
They persuaded President James exception of New England, in the
Madison to declare war against hope that that commercial section
Britain, and then persuaded a would secede from the United
small majority of the House and States and return as a British
Senate to go along. Western and colony. Additionally, Napoleon
southwestern states enthusiastically retreated from Moscow and then
favored the war, but the commercial abdicated, leaving Britain free
and maritime east almost solidly to throw its vast military power
opposed it. entirely against the United States.
« The Creeks «
I n the meantime, the

Creeks occupied the area that
is now western Georgia and most
communities tended to be to
the south, in what is now north-
central Florida.
of Alabama, and much of northern
Florida. A few dozen men in a At the same time, relations between
national council had claimed men and women among the Creeks
control over every Creek, executing began to change as well. Planters
those who disobeyed their orders. and merchants wanted the women
to learn a new skill: spinning
Throughout the widely scattered cotton. They were soon shipping
towns of Creek country, the cotton to ports on the Gulf Coast,
status of black Americans varied with 200 spinning wheels in
widely. At one extreme, Creeks their area.
used African Americans as slaves,
particularly where the Coosa Other women made considerable
River and Tallapoosa River met, money by sleeping with white men
and where rich lands permitted for money, clothing, and food.
wealthy Creeks of mixed ancestry Creek men sought to control this
to establish plantations. At the female sexuality just as they tried
other extreme, some Creeks to control relations with African
adopted black people into their Americans, but it was a struggle.
clans and gave them all the rights The number of children of mixed
and obligations of other kin. These race continued to grow.
Lecture 6 « War, Uprising, and Southern Solidarity 31

« The Seminoles «
T he Seminoles were
Creeks who had split apart
from their cousins several decades
told their Seminole allies about a
revolution in Haiti, where the white
men had been driven out. It was a
before. They lived in Florida and dream that many Seminoles still
maintained much more autonomy held, after all these generations of
and older ways than the Creeks white occupation.
farther north. The powerful Creeks
sought to distance themselves On top of this ferment, a severe food
from the Seminoles in every way shortage descended. Some Creeks
they could because the Seminoles starved to death while their richer
continually threatened the racial neighbors ate well. Meanwhile, some
and property order of Georgia and Creek leaders signed away more
South Carolina. and more land to the Americans,
including permission to build a
The Seminole ranks grew from post road across Creek lands to
the arrival of fugitive African Mobile. Outraged Creek dissidents
Americans, who lent their skills removed the men from leadership
and labor, sometimes as warriors. positions, but the bribery and
Some of these African Americans corruption continued.

« Tecumseh «
I n 1811, the Creeks

received a delegation of 16
Shawnees, 19 Choctaws, 46
Though many young warriors were
eager to join, the Creek leadership
said no. However, the Seminoles
Cherokees, and other Indians. decided to join the fight against the
These men were under the Americans and fought a series of
command of the Shawnee warrior conflicts in 1812 and 1814, blacks
Tecumseh, who wanted to form fighting alongside them.
a military alliance between the
Creeks and the Indians of the old In the midst of the war between the
northwest, attacking the whites English and white Americans, the
along the entire border. By this Creeks went to war against each
time, Indians in the northwest had other. The Redsticks (named for
ceded most of Ohio and part of their red clubs) sought to overthrow
Indiana to the United States, and the corrupt men who, they felt, had
were struggling to maintain their sold them out to the Americans
communities in the face of growing and their way of life. They attacked
poverty and alcoholism. all forms of the rich men’s wealth,
especially cattle.
Tecumseh told the Creeks that
they had the support of the British.
« The Rise of Andrew Jackson «
T he governor of
Tennessee responded
immediately. Empowered by the
reached a leading Creek town. They
burned the town to the ground.
The Creeks, once one of the most
legislature to raise 5,000 men for powerful Indian nations, had
a three-month tour of duty, he been shattered.
ordered Major General Andrew
Jackson of the Tennessee militia Jackson imposed a treaty on the
to move. defeated Creek Nation in which
he obtained some 23 million acres
As soon as he got the word to of land for the United States,
attack the Creeks, Jackson drove roughly half of all the land held by
his men south from Nashville at the Creeks. It was approximately
the incredible rate of 36 miles a three-fifths of the present state of
day. By November 1813, they had Alabama and one-fifth of Georgia.

About 2,800 Redsticks, Seminoles, about 250 of the people inside were
and fugitive slaves built a fort in fugitive slaves of African ancestry.
Pensacola. White Americans called The people inside struck an alliance
it the Negro Fort, even though only with the British and the Spanish.
« The British «
M eanwhile, Jackson
and the British warred
with one another along the Gulf.
Americans could have imagined
before Jackson’s victory at
New Orleans.
The British gathered 3,000 Indians
and announced they would free The people in the Negro Fort back
any slaves who joined them. The in Pensacola were starving. The
Spanish gave the British permission Americans, full of confidence
to do whatever they needed to and fury after the events of the
stop the hated Americans. Jackson last few years, moved against the
and his men beat the English at Negro Fort in 1816. They fired a
Mobile. The English then raced to cannonball from a gunboat into
New Orleans. the fort’s powder magazine. It
exploded, destroying the fort. The
A team of peace commissioners people inside who survived fled
had already headed to Ghent, to nearby Redstick and Seminole
Belgium, to negotiate a peace with towns to hide.
the British. The British expected to
win at New Orleans in December After another attack on the
1814. They would not ratify the Seminoles by Andrew Jackson
treaty until they heard what in 1818, Florida came under
happened there. American control in 1819. The
Spanish agreed to fix the western
However, the Americans decimated boundary of the Louisiana
the English at New Orleans. Word Purchase all the way to the Pacific.
made its way back to Ghent, and The Mississippi area was firmly
the war with England came to in American possession, as was
a close on terms better than the New Orleans.

ANDREW JACKSON AT THE
BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS
« Slavery in Virginia after the War of 1812 «
T he War of 1812 brought

massive changes in Virginia.
As part of their plan to defeat
By 1814, the British encouraged
mass escape, including women and
children. They created a battalion
the Americans, the British navy called the Colonial Marines, made
sailed up the Chesapeake Bay as up of 400 escaped enslaved men.
the region of the upstart nation’s The Colonial Marines fought
capital. Virginia had been a major desperately, for they knew they
supporter of the war against Great could neither desert nor surrender
Britain and now it would pay. to white Americans.

The rest of the new United States of states’ rights. The new United
did little to protect Virginia in the States narrowly survived the War
face of the British invasion and of 1812, but white Virginians
the slave insurrection. Virginia, so would also never feel as confident
proudly national in vision and hope about the enslaved people over
only years earlier, began to turn whom they presided.
inward, to argue for the necessity
«
Suggested Reading
Johnson, Soul by Soul.
Saunt, A New Order of Things.
Taylor, Internal Enemy.
1 Would slavery had been different if the British had won the War of 1812?
2 Were the defeat and removal of the American Indians inevitable? Why did
some people feel at the time that it was not?

7 The Birth of the
Cotton South
The Southern states changed a remarkable amount in the

era of the American Revolution. They went from a period of
great prosperity in the embrace of the British to a period of
destruction and drift as producers of tobacco, rice, and indigo
saw markets and relationships destroyed. The Southern states
also saw slavery under enormous strain, as enslaved people
used the dislocations of war to seize any freedom they could.
This lecture looks at how the South responded to such shifts.
« During and After the War «
T ens of thousands of
enslaved people used the
disruption of the fighting in
ringing language about freedom.
Running away increased now that
there were free states to run to.
Virginia, South Carolina, and
Georgia to run away. Of those The event of Gabriel’s Rebellion in
who ran to the British, many died Richmond in 1800 saw hundreds
of disease; the rebels shot others. of enslaved people carefully plan
Sometimes entire plantations’ an uprising. However, the whites
enslaved population managed caught wind of the plan and put
to escape. it down with troops. Seventy men
were prosecuted, with 26 hanged,
Though they emerged from 8 deported, and 1 committing
the Constitutional Convention suicide. Those who revolted spoke
with protections for slavery, the the words of the American, French,
Southerners watched as Northern and Haitian revolutions, declaring
states abolished the institution with their inalienable right to be free.
Lecture 7 « The Birth of the Cotton South 37

Farther south, the Revolutionary from Africa, prompted in part
War increased the tendency by a determination to secure as
toward planter absenteeism, many laborers as possible while the
and further isolated the slave federal government still tolerated
population from the white. The the importation of slaves, reinforced
postwar surge in slave arrivals the black majority.
« The Great Surge «
A t the end of the

American Revolution,
practically all Anglo and African
Kentucky and Tennessee attracted
many settlers and became the first
new trans-Appalachian states in
Southerners still lived within a the entire country in the 1790s.
few hundred miles of the Atlantic This wasn’t so much a westward
Ocean. However, to the west lay movement as it was a movement
an immense territory, bounded by down rivers, which provided
the Ohio River to the north and transportation for property and
the Gulf of Mexico to the south, people. This is why the first
occupied by indigenous peoples settlements in Alabama were not
such as the Creek, Cherokee, along the coast or in the Black
and Choctaw. Within a single Belt, but in the very northern part
generation after the American of the state, where the Tennessee
Revolution, this area would become River dips down into what became
a fundamental part of the South, Huntsville. The same pattern held
settled with incredible speed and in the Gulf South.
effectiveness.
« Cotton and Sugar «
T he Piedmont, all the

way from Virginia through
Georgia, had been filling in steadily
eager to find the most profitable
crops they could, and they
experimented widely, most notably
before the American Revolution with cotton.
but took off afterward. People from
the mid-Atlantic area of Virginia, In the 18th century, English
Maryland, and Pennsylvania entrepreneurs began importing
streamed southward to establish raw cotton and building their own
farms on the rich soil. They were textile industry around it. Soon,

they had developed new kinds of from the seed. Several people
machinery to process the cotton achieved the breakthrough almost
and to weave the cotton. While the simultaneously, a situation that
American Revolution was raging, ultimately prevented the inventor
the cotton textile industry was of record, Eli Whitney, from
consolidating itself in England. capitalizing on his contraption.
Immediately after the fighting His idea was simple: He would

ended, several planters in Georgia refine the old roller gin by adding
acquired some new seeds from wire teeth to one roller and rotate
loyalists who had fled the it to grab and tear the lint from the
American Revolution to the seed of cotton fed into a slatted box.
Bahamas. It was rot resistant and Another roller, with small brushes,
had long, luxurious fibers. This whisked the separated lint from
new cotton flourished along the the teeth of the first roller. Thus,
coast and soon became a huge hit Whitney had made an inexpensive,
in England. Exports doubled and workable, and easily duplicated
doubled again. improvement of the roller gin.
Rapid improvements, especially
Tobacco farmers who were entering circular saws replacing the wire
the Piedmont were eager to move teeth, quickly made it more
into cotton. They just needed efficient. Farmers snapped them up
some way to get the lint separated as soon as they could get them.

Cotton was a perfect crop for By 1801, as many as 75 sugar
rapid expansion. Unlike rice or plantations were producing
indigo, it required no expensive between 4 and 8 million pounds
infrastructure. Once the cotton was of brown sugar annually. Slaves
harvested, it was easy to store and performed this work.
transport. Even small farmers could
grow it, though big farmers with lots Speculators swarmed to the
of slave labor could grow it more rich cotton lands of Alabama
profitably, with economies of scale. and Mississippi. More than
For the rest of the century, both two-thirds of a million new
small farmers and large planters inhabitants entered Alabama and
would grow cotton on every inch of Mississippi between 1820 and
the South that would support it. 1840, quadrupling their population.
Louisiana boomed as well. By
In the 1790s, sugar established a 1850, Louisiana boasted 1,500
strong hold in the South as well. sugar plantations.
« The Domestic Slave Trade «
T he enslaved people that

helped clear Alabama and
Mississippi came from the seaboard
upper and eastern South. The
firms marched them to Richmond
or Alexandria to be made healthy
South—ultimately, a million enough for sale, dressed in clothing
people. In the 1830s, when the made for the sale, insured, and
flow reached its peak, hundreds recorded in sale books by age, gender,
of thousands of people were skill, and capacity for childbirth.
exported from Virginia, Kentucky,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Over time, fewer slaves were
and Maryland. Mississippi alone marched in coffles—people
imported an estimated 100,000 chained together—from Virginia
enslaved people in the 1830s, or the Carolinas. Instead, they
increasing the enslaved population were shipped by boat or railroad.
almost 200 percent in one decade. Advertising at both ends of
the slave trade filled Southern
Large and small firms developed newspapers. The trade was worth
businesses to harvest people from about $20 million a year. Most of
the older plantations, worn-out the people sold were in their late
farms, and small towns of the teens or early 20s.

« Effects on States «
W hile the new states

of the southwest grew
rapidly, the older states of Virginia
by foot, horse, steamboat, and
railroad over an area the size of
continental Europe.
and South Carolina struggled.
Nearly half of all white South People whose ancestors had lived
Carolinians born after 1800 on parts of that landscape for
eventually left the state. By 1850, hundreds or thousands of years
more than 50,000 South Carolina were driven away, surrounded,
natives lived in Georgia, more than or absorbed. Additionally, people
45,000 lived in Alabama, and some whose ancestors had lived in
20,000 lived in Mississippi. slavery for over two centuries in
North America or who had been
Three-fourths of the heads of ripped from Africa just months
households in Mississippi in 1850 before were shipped across that
had not been born in the state. landscape. The places that people
Those that lived there then were left and the places they arrived were
already looking for fresher lands transformed before their eyes.
farther to the west. They moved
«
Suggested Reading
Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told.
Beckert, Empire of Cotton.
Johnson, River of Dark Dreams.
1 The invention of the cotton gin is often seen as an abrupt rupture in the
history of the South and of the nation. Was a gin bound to be developed
with or without Eli Whitney?
2 What would have been the effect of a continued influx of enslaved Africans
after 1808?

8 Evangelical Faith
in the South
Today, the South is known for is being a main part of the Bible
Belt, the portion of the country where the values of evangelical
Protestant Christianity are dominant. However, the South
only slowly became evangelical. This lecture takes a look at
how it came to be so.
« Alternatives to Anglicanism «
T he dominant religion of
the colonial South was
Anglicanism, the English church. It
to spread the “evangel,” the good
news of forgiveness and salvation
available to any person. Jesus Christ
was hierarchical and valued ritual was not distant, as he was made to
and the education of its ministers. appear in the established churches,
The Anglican church was closely but was present in their small
tied to the secular order, with groups. His presence caused an
powerful men in the community outpouring of prayer, devotion, and
being powerful men in the church. mutual affection.
The church emphasized the
authority of men at home as well, A key person in the spread of this
from marriage to servants and slaves. new faith was John Wesley, founder
of Methodism in England. Wesley
Evangelicalism began when a few himself visited Virginia and South
Christians in the 18th century Carolina a number of times in the
began to form small devotional 1740s, leading to great excitement
groups within the churches of and conversions. Methodism spread
Western Europe. They sought as laymen and laywomen founded
to recapture the dynamism and churches and begged Wesley to send
purity of the ancient church and them missionaries, or evangelists.

From the evangelical viewpoint, which only fed the evangelicals’
a person was either saved by a sense of themselves as God’s
conversion experience or not; persecuted messengers.
there could be no middle ground
or lingering devotion to old ways Another group, the Baptists, were
or friends. Conversion began organized by congregation, each
with a moral and mental crisis establishing its own covenants that
in which a person broke down outlined the fundamental doctrines
under the weight of his or own sin, and rules by which their members
accompanied by an awareness of were governed. As a result, the
God’s offer of forgiveness when that Baptists spread even more rapidly,
sin was acknowledged. proliferating and often dividing,
while the Methodists remained
These evangelicals posed a threat more coherent as a denomination.
to the Anglican clergy and laity in
the mid- to late 18th century, for At the other end of the continuum
they declared that they were not of organization were the
authentically Christian unless they Presbyterians, who were more
embraced a conversion experience. centralized than the Methodists.
The established ministers and All three denominations fed off
church members sometimes each other, both competing with
had evangelical preachers jailed, and encouraging one another.
« Evangelicalism and Slavery «
E vangelicalism and anti-

English sentiment grew
together in the South in the
already believed: that they were
equal in the eyes of God, that their
soul could not be enslaved, and
1760s and 1770s. Both were that the power of this world was a
anti-hierarchical and challenged temporary and fleeting thing built
existing authority. The evangelicals on meaningless distinctions. Even
shared with revolutionaries a fear while the American Revolution was
of corruption and a sense that raging, evangelicals were tarred and
extravagance and immorality had feathered, jailed, and beaten.
swamped their society.
Many evangelicals viewed the trials
However, the last thing slave of the revolution as trial by fire,
owners wanted was for evangelicals with the church emerging purified.
to tell black people what they Both slaves and slaveholders flocked
Lecture 8 « Evangelical Faith in the South 43

to the churches. Many of the races. Church clerks wrote to
manumissions that freed enslaved home churches to obtain letters
people in the 1780s came from of dismissal for slaves recently
evangelical masters and mistresses. sold away.
Strong cultural resonances As among white Southerners, it

connected African religion and was mostly black women and older
evangelical Christianity. In Africa, people who tended to be church
religion was an influence on every members. The importance of
occurrence. In African societies, Christianity to black Americans
the gods spoke to persons by can hardly be exaggerated. Often,
sending a spirit, and possession— religious slaves felt themselves
often frenzied—was the human morally superior to their masters.
evidence of communication with The whites’ disproportionate wealth
the supernatural. Although the and power did not undermine such
language, rituals, and paraphernalia spiritual self-confidence but fed it.
of African religions could not be
transported intact to the American Enslaved Africans thought of
South, the philosophical essence of themselves as the children of Israel,
the system was transplanted and held in bondage as a trial toward
slowly transformed. a greater salvation. While most
enslaved people practiced their
In the South, there was more faith with whites in the mainline
nearly a biracial community in Protestant churches, most fair-
the churches than anywhere else. sized Southern towns and cities
Standards for admission to and saw the rise of independent black
dismissal from churches were churches under the control of free
essentially the same for both black leaders.
MEMBERS OF THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH,

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

« Evangelical Women «
A s evangelical religion
spread, the Southern
church itself began to change. The
On the other hand, the domestic
ideal of Southern evangelicalism
also meant that in order to be
father was addressed less often in valued as a contributor to the social
sermons while the mother came good, a woman had to marry, have
to be held responsible for the children, and accept the biblical
moral nurturing of the family. admonition that women should
When Southern churchwomen “submit yourselves to your own
formed their own societies and husbands as to the Lord.” They
organizations, they were able to were often required to assume
participate in civic life in a way a Christ-like role of suffering
possible through no other avenue servant—that is, to serve her
in the South. husband without what she was told
were her own selfish interests.
« The Evangelical South «
W hite evangelicals
struggled with slavery, but
they never identified slaveholding
would begin to shift in the 1830s,
but it took decades for a widespread
Christian abolitionism to take
itself as a sin. Evangelicals were root. In the meantime, only the
already inclined to separate Quakers in England and the new
themselves from worldly concerns. United States denounced slavery.
They became convinced that the They were a marginal people, often
best they could do was to help save by choice.
individual slaves through Christian
concern and fellowship. In one of the key transformations in
the history of the South, slaveholders
Early Northern evangelicals, for came to believe that God must have
their part, took no one position had a purpose in sending Africans
on slavery, either. Some thought to America and that purpose must
slavery a Christianizing force have been for white people to teach
while others argued that slavery them responsible Christianity, in
was wrong because it destroyed which servants obeyed their masters
the element of choice, of moral and masters stewarded their slaves
freedom, central to the faith. This into moral lives.
Lecture 8 « Evangelical Faith in the South 45

As the South grew westward, then, also looked to religious faith as
it grew as an evangelical society. the strongest bonds with the new
The first buildings to go up on enslaved people among whom they
the frontier were often Baptist or found themselves.
Methodist churches. The leading
families of these new communities In the moral chaos of slavery,
were often leaders of the church the Bible and the church offered
as well. In the absence of other the strongest foundations for
markers, people looked to church individuals, families, and new
membership and leadership as communities of black people
evidence of people’s true character. thrown together for the commercial
purposes of their owners.
Communities placed great energies
in starting colleges to train Christian faith became the most
ministers, and in starting schools to widespread rationale to white
bring up children in the spirit of the people for why slavery was not
faith. The American South prided only permissible but even part of
itself on its numbers of churches God’s plan to bring the light of
and members, considerably higher Christianity to people deprived
per capita than that of the North. of it in Africa. It also became the
greatest source of individual and
With the slave trade pulling their communal strength and survival
families apart, enslaved people for African Americans.
«
Suggested Reading
Heyrman, Southern Cross.
Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity.
Mathews, Religion in the Old South.
Raboteau, Slave Religion.
1 Was it good or bad, socially, for enslaved Southerners that they shared
Christianity with their masters?
2 Did the church reinforce or erode the role of men in their households
and society?

9 Rebellion, Renewal:
Tightening of Slavery
In a remarkably brief period, the South raced west, based on

slavery and cotton. Even as the slave South spread so quickly,
however, rebellions broke out in South Carolina and Virginia.
In Georgia, the presence of the Cherokee people agitated white
settlers and leaders, who believed they had a right to the rich
lands the Cherokee had occupied for hundreds of years. The
federal government drove the Cherokee and other groups from
their ancestral homes to land set aside for them in the Indian
territory of Oklahoma. As white Southerners responded to
these crises, they entrenched slavery ever more deeply.
« South Carolina «
I n Charleston, South
Carolina, a free black man
named Denmark Vesey stood as a
man, an Angolan, had arrived
in South Carolina near the turn
of the century, one of the tens of
commanding presence among the thousands of slaves brought into
African American people of the the state right before the end of the
low country. A skilled carpenter legal slave trade in 1807.
and preacher, Vesey traveled up
and down the coast and into the The conspirators hoped to seize the
interior, berating those black people city’s poorly protected guardhouse,
who accepted racial insult. Many stores, and roads before the
African Americans were attracted whites could gather themselves in
to him; most were afraid to oppose opposition. House slaves would
him, regardless. kill their white owners. Once
Charleston was secure, the rebels,
Vesey had a powerful ally, a man Vesey planned, would sail to Haiti,
known as Gullah Jack. This where Toussaint L’Ouverture had
Lecture 9 « Rebellion, Renewal: Tightening of Slavery 47

staged a black rebellion decades companies, and Vesey called off
earlier and where slavery had the attack.
been abolished.
Over the next two months, white
However, a house servant broke authorities hanged 35 alleged
under the pressure and alerted conspirators and banished 37 more
Charleston whites to the danger from the state. Few of the rebels
only two days before the revolt would reveal the names of their
planned for June 16, 1822. The allies, going to their deaths with the
governor ordered out five military secrets of the revolt secure. Vesey
was one of those killed.
« Virginia «
N at Turner was a field

hand, born in 1800, who
felt that God had called him for
not long in coming, as delegates
to the state assembly gathered
in Richmond just a month after
more than the lot of a slave. After Turner’s execution.
slowly gathering followers, Turner
eventually put a slave revolt in In a series of debates, these white
motion on August 13, 1831, in Virginians openly admitted the
Southampton County, Virginia. debilitating effect of slavery on
The revolt and its response from Virginia. They worried about
whites ended with roughly 60 dead slavery’s influence on whites and
white people and many more dead worried that slavery kept the
black people. Turner himself was economy from developing as it did
eventually captured and sentenced in the North.
to hang.
Delegates from western Virginia,
White Southerners saw in Nat where relatively few slaves lived,
Turner their worst nightmares. expressed their misgivings most
He was a literate slave, allowed to freely, but even large slaveholders
travel on his own and to spread from the east admitted slavery’s
his own interpretation of the negative effects. Petitions flowed
Bible to dissatisfied slaves eager into Richmond, urging the
to listen to Turner’s prophecies. legislators to take a decisive step to
The subsequent crackdown was rid Virginia of slavery.

Defenders of slavery warned that the civilizing Africans otherwise lost
debates, published in the newspapers to heathenism and barbarism. The
and discussed on the streets and disparate regions of Virginia found
in the shops and homes across the themselves in deep conflict; some
state, might result in more revolts. discussed separating themselves
Some delegates urged that the state from the rest of the state if one
purchase all slaves born after a policy or another were followed.
certain date—1840 was proposed—
and colonize them in Africa or sell The lawmakers, starkly divided,
them to plantations farther south. ultimately decided that it would
Others argued that the state could be left for subsequent legislatures
not afford such a step. to begin the process that would
free Virginia from slavery. In the
Still others went much further, meantime, they passed harsher
arguing that slavery was not wrong laws to limit the movement and
at all but rather God’s plan for gathering of free blacks and slaves.
NAT TURNER AND HIS CONFEDERATES

« Native Removal «
T he American Indians of
the South found themselves
under pressure as well. White
control, bristled at the continuing
presence of the native inhabitants.
Many white people longed to
people had mixed feelings about banish the American Indians
the Indians. President Andrew to land on the other side of the
Jackson, elected in 1828, told the Mississippi River.
Indians he was their friend, but that
he could do nothing to stop their An already volatile situation
mistreatment except to move them worsened when gold was discovered
beyond the Mississippi River, where, on the Indian lands and white
he promised, they would be safe. prospectors rushed in. White
settlers invaded northern Georgia,
The Indians and their supporters, taking Cherokee property.
mostly religious people in the
North, responded bitterly to Agents, some of mixed blood,
such claims, arguing that the swindled the Indians as they
rights of the Constitution should prepared for the removal. The
certainly extend to people who Choctaws, the first to move, died
had lived in North America since in large numbers as they traveled
time immemorial. However, in the worst winter on record with
the Jacksonians quickly pushed completely inadequate supplies.
through the Indian Removal The Creeks, too, confronted frauds
Act of 1830. and assaults.
The Indians of the southeast The Indians who moved sold

showed no desire to leave the land whatever they could not take
on which they lived in the late with them, usually at a great loss.
1820s. In their view, they had Wagons and carts carried the old
already given up more land than and the sick, while women and
they should have—millions of acres children drove livestock along the
over the preceding 20 years—and trail. Soldiers usually accompanied
were determined to hold on to the Indians, along with an agent
what remained. to hand out whatever support
the government provided. Some
Most whites, especially those who of the migrants used steamboats
lived nearby and coveted the rich to travel by river, while others
cotton lands under the Indians’ proceeded overland.

The Cherokee removal was the deadline. General Winfield
most prolonged. After years of Scott then led 7,000 troops
negotiating, the government against them, driving people
struck a bargain with a small and from their homes empty-handed,
unrepresentative number of the marching them to stockades and
Cherokee in the Treaty of New shipping them out by rail and
Echota in 1836. While groups water. About a quarter of all
of several hundred at a time left, eastern Cherokees died in this
including some of the wealthiest, event, called the Trail of Tears.
17,000 refused to leave by the

The Seminoles fought against swampy landscape to hide, were
removal as long as they could. Led never driven out of Florida.
by Osceola, the son of an English
trader and the husband of an The Creeks of Alabama also
escaped slave, the Seminoles tried underwent a profoundly wrenching
to break the will of the whites forced migration to Oklahoma.
by killing soldiers and civilians About 18 percent of the population
and by burning their crops and died between 1830 and 1833. After
homes. The Second Seminole War another wave of removal in 1836,
launched by the federal government between one-fifth and one-third
to remove the 5,000 Indians began died as well.
in 1836 and dragged on for six
years. The conflict proved both The American Indian peoples,
unpopular and unsuccessful. About despite the death and dislocation,
36,000 US soldiers fought and did everything they could to
1,500 died; many more suffered maintain their religious and
debilitating disease. ceremonial lives along the way
and in Indian territory. However,
The United States captured from Thomas Jefferson through
Osceola only by deception at a Martin Van Burn, every president
supposed peace conference. He died except John Adams oversaw the
in captivity a few months later, loss of Indian land through treaty
after which some Seminoles finally cessions. By 1840, the Indians of
migrated to Oklahoma. Most of the Southeast had been defeated
the Seminole people, able to use the and removed.
«
Suggested Reading
Allmendinger, Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County.
Haveman, River of Sand.
Smithers, Cherokee Diaspora.
1 How did Nat Turner’s rebellion help and hinder enslaved people?
2 Should we, as some do, think of Indian removal as a form of genocide?

10 Arguments for and
against Slavery
In 1819, the United States, growing rapidly to the west, had to

confront a key question: Were there limits on the spread of slavery?
Missouri became the focus because slavery had quickly spread
there when it was a territory, filling the richest land. Missouri
was the same latitude as much of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, and
showed that slavery would expand everywhere it could.
« The Debate «
N ortherners worried
that the South and slavery
would soon overtake the western
prohibited in all the lands acquired
in the Louisiana Purchase north of
the southern border of Missouri.
territories. An amendment was
offered that Missouri would only Many of the Northern men who
be admitted if it admitted no voted for the measure found
more slaves and if those already themselves burned in effigy back
admitted were freed when they home and defeated when it came
reached the age of 25. Most time for reelection. The South
Northern congressmen supported was no more satisfied than the
this amendment and almost all North, furious to hear itself vilified
Southern congressmen opposed it. in the national capital it had
long dominated.
After weeks of debate, a compromise
emerged from the Senate: Missouri, To the North, the South seemed
with no restriction on slavery, greedy and corrupt. To the South,
should be admitted to the Union the North seemed greedy and
at the same time as Maine, thereby hypocritical. The country became
ensuring the balance between slave polarized as never before after the
and free states. Slavery would be Missouri Compromise.
Lecture 10 « Arguments for and against Slavery 53

« Antislavery Publications «
E vangelical religion had

flourished in the North as it
had in the South. Revivals led many
David Walker was a free black
man living in Boston who wrote
a blistering indictment of white
Christians to look into their hearts. Americans’ devotion to slavery.
Some came to feel that society itself His booklet, Walker’s Appeal to
could and should be changed. To the Colored People of the World,
many, slavery was the place to start. appeared in 1829. It portrayed
American slavery as among the
William Lloyd Garrison played a worst the world had ever seen
central role in the emergence of the and critiqued Thomas Jefferson’s
antislavery movement, bringing defense of the institution.
the attention of whites to what had
been largely a crusade by African
Americans. At the age of 22,
Garrison became the editor of the
first newspaper dedicated to the
prohibition of alcohol. Believing in
the necessity of ending slavery as
well as drunkenness, he joined the
colonization movement and soon
became editor of its paper as well.
In the late 1820s, Garrison

attended the anti-colonization
meetings held by African
Americans in eastern cities,
including the group that published
the first antislavery newspaper,
Freedom’s Journal. He experienced
a mounting desire for a more
aggressive antislavery crusade
as he saw the limitations of the
colonization movement and as he
witnessed the passion of people
such as David Walker.

Garrison sought out financial
supporters and a partner to launch
a paper of his own: The Liberator.
It called for the immediate start
toward emancipation, explicitly
rejecting colonization. In 1831, the
paper’s first year, it had only six
subscribers, but it acquired 53 by
the following year, most of them
African American.
«
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
« Antislavery Groups «
T wo hundred antislavery
societies emerged in the
early 1830s. Ground that had been
held out the prospect of a free
South, where 2 million freed slaves
would constitute a marketplace for
prepared by the evangelical crusades the products of manufacturers and
of the preceding few years proved mechanics of the North.
fertile for the antislavery cause.
The antislavery cause brought
The American Anti-Slavery together male and female, black and
Society formed in Philadelphia white, patrician and working class,
in 1833. Looking to the example Quaker and Unitarian, Baptist and
of Great Britain, where the major Methodist, radical and moderate,
denominations supported the and political and anti-political
antislavery movement that was people. Each of these groups had its
at that moment triumphing own vision of how the abolitionists
over slavery in the British West should spend their energies and
Indies, the members of the society influence. Black abolitionists,
expected American church in particular, wanted the
leaders to take the lead against organizations to do more to help
American slavery. black communities in the North.
The North would have to be The antislavery societies used

converted before it could expect pamphlets, leaflets, and other
the South to follow. To convert the literature as their major weapons.
North, antislavery organizations Rapid innovations in printing

lowered the cost of producing such DEPICTION OF
materials, which flooded post ANTISLAVERY
offices and streets. MEETING
The postal campaign reached its

peak in 1834 and 1835, when 1
million pieces went out through the
mail, much of it to the South, where
the abolitionists hoped to appeal
directly to ministers and others
who might be willing to listen to
their pleas. That literature, white
Southerners furiously protested,
virtually invited slaves to follow
Nat Turner’s example.
« An Angry Response «
G eorgia slaveholders
offered a $12,000 reward for
the capture of wealthy merchant
pelted antislavery speakers, and
dragged Garrison himself through
the streets of Boston at the end
Arthur Tappan, who, along with of a rope.
his brother Lewis, funded much
of the postal campaign against The persecution, ironically,
slavery. Arthur received a slave’s strengthened the abolitionist cause.
severed ear in the mail. Mobs in Denunciation and harassment only
Charleston seized sacks of mail made the abolitionists more certain
from Northern cities and burned of the need for their efforts. The
them in the streets. 200 antislavery societies of 1835
grew to over 500 in 1836.
The pamphlets infuriated people
in much of the North as well. The reformers flooded Congress
Mobs, led by some of the wealthiest with petitions calling for the end of
merchants of Northern towns slavery in the District of Columbia,
but constituted in large part by sending over 300 petitions signed
white working people, rose up by 40,000 people. Congress sought
violently against the abolitionists. to avoid conflict by merely tabling
In 1835, mobs destroyed the the petitions, but the compromise
home of African Americans, pleased no one.

« Arguments «
T he white South
mobilized itself to fight
back. Thomas R. Dew, a history
being wrong or even unfortunate,
was in fact the most desirable
form of social organization, for
professor, wrote a pamphlet called white laborers as well as black.
An Essay on Slavery in the wake of Human bondage, he argued, was
the Virginia debates of 1831–1832. an ideal form of social security,
It was the first proslavery argument ensuring subsistence to all and
and would remain a touchstone for eliminating the poverty and
the next 30 years. After providing injustice experienced by the
a history of slavery liberally free laborers of England and the
sprinkled with quotations from the industrialized North.
Bible, Dew argued that, “we have no
hesitation in affirming that slavery Most Southerners never read any
has been perhaps the principal of these theorists. They justified
means for impelling forward the slavery because it existed, and
civilization of mankind.” because, as with all social systems,
the people who lived in them
In the 1850s, George Fitzhugh grew to accept it as the only social
of Virginia, a struggling lawyer, order possible.
argued that slavery, far from
« Educational Institutions «
T he leading intellectuals
of the South were deeply
entrenched in the educational
Increasingly, white Southerners
saw the colleges and universities
of the region as a bulwark against
institutions of the region, which the North. As early as the 1810s,
were rapidly spreading with the Thomas Jefferson promoted his
South’s white population and with University of Virginia as a place
the nearly universal adoption of where the sons of the gentry of
evangelical Christianity. Many the South could safely attend
of the famous universities of the without being inundated with alien
South today have their origins in the ideas about abolitionism or other
evangelical spread. dangerously progressive ideas. This
selling point increased over time.

Slavery supported the colleges Slavery remains the original
and universities of the South in evil of our Republic—an
more concrete ways. Enslaved evil that our university was
people built Jefferson’s University complicit in—a sin that
of Virginia and other schools as tore apart families … that
well. Many colleges hired out through great violence, denied
enslaved people they owned to both and rejected the dignity and
richer and poorer white people in humanity of our fellow sisters
the neighborhood. and brothers. We lay this truth
bare – in sorrowful apology and
The Jesuit leaders of what is now communal reckoning.
Georgetown University sold 272
enslaved people to Louisiana in 1838 Other universities are undergoing
to build its endowment. In 2016, the similar self-examination, apology,
president of Georgetown apologized: and memorialization.
«
Suggested Reading
Fogel, Without Consent or Contract.
O’Brien, Conjectures of Order.
Richards, The Slave Power.
1 Why did abolitionism emerge when it did and not over the
preceding centuries?
2 How would the average white Southerner have defended slavery?

11 A Restless South:
Expansion and Conflict
From its first settlement, the American South was restless. No

sooner had a place been settled than its residents began looking
for the next place of opportunity. Kentucky had been settled as
soon as the United States formed. The Tennessee River valley
followed suit only a few years later, and people in Alabama
settled in and prospered within a remarkably short time. This
lecture looks at expansion that went even father, particularly
into Texas, which was then northern Mexico.
« Movement into Mexico «
S peculators and settlers

from the United States
continually moved into Mexican
While the Mexican laws on slavery
shifted repeatedly, most of the
American settlers—the great
Texas in the 1820s and 1830s. majority of them Southerners—
Sometimes the Mexican officials argued that they had to have slaves
encouraged the newcomers; at if Texas were to develop as they
other times, they sought to slow and as Mexican leaders hoped. The
American settlement. Seeking Americans, with the tacit approval
the end of slavery in Mexico, they of local officials, improvised laws
wanted settlers, but they did not and took advantage of loopholes to
want the slaves white settlers often keep slavery in fact if not in name.
brought with them.
Lecture 11 « A Restless South: Expansion and Conflict 59

The key leader in the American
migration to Mexico was Stephen F.
Austin, a Virginia-born entrepreneur
who first arrived in Mexico in 1821 on
the heels of Mexican independence.
He negotiated with changing Mexican
governments throughout the 1920s,
overseeing the arrival and settlement
of hundreds of Americans.
«
STEPHEN F. AUSTIN
« Santa Anna «
A merican settlers and

the Mexican government
came into increasing conflict, as
In the 1830s, as Santa Anna
consolidated his power in Mexico,
his attempts to centralize control
provincial officials attempted in Mexico City led to revolts. In
to collect tariffs and slow Santa Anna’s eyes, the Texans were
immigration into the district. clearly inviting an expansionist
Some Americans petitioned the United States to take this province
Mexican government to let them away from Mexico; he sent in
become a separate Mexican state troops to meet the threat.
under its own administration,
but they were rebuffed when In 1835, a convention of Texans
Antonio López de Santa Anna voted to fight against Santa
took control of the government. Anna, offering large amounts of

land to all who would come help day later. As a prisoner, he signed
in the struggle. Volunteers and treaties removing Mexican troops
money flowed into Texas from from Texas, granting Texas its
throughout the United States. independence, and recognizing the
Southern states in particular sent Rio Grande as the boundary.
hundreds of men. Nevertheless,
they were greatly outnumbered The Mexican congress, when
by the Mexicans, who decimated they heard of this capitulation,
the Americans at several battles, announced that they would not
including at the Alamo Mission in be bound by its terms. Texans and
San Antonio. many Americans elsewhere urged
the US government to annex the
Santa Anna seemed on the verge new republic before the Mexicans
of victory until Sam Houston, could retake it. That plea unleashed
the general of the American a heated and protracted debate
forces, surprised and defeated between advocates of American
the larger Mexican force at San expansion and those who thought
Jacinto in April of 1836. Santa such a step would be immoral
Anna himself was captured a and impolitic.
« The Republic of Texas «
T he founders of the
Republic of Texas portrayed
their new nation as a refuge for
Indeed, slaveholding turned out
to be a liability as they struggled
to define a place for themselves.
slaveholders against the building A panic in 1837 devastated their
forces of abolitionism that were one-crop economy, and their
peaking in exactly the years Texas government became bankrupt. The
was declaring its independence. value of the rich lands of Texas
To its leaders’ surprise and plummeted in the early 1840s and
frustration, they could not attract settlement slowed abruptly.
the international recognition they
required. They could not obtain the Faced with this desperate situation,
loans they needed or the military Texas leaders called for their
aid. A new nation based on slavery annexation by the United States.
turned out not to be as powerful as The fate of Texas was to be a key
they had hoped. political issue for the next decade.

« The Texas Problem «
T he Mexican government
had never recognized the
independence of Texas, which
the war, made a bold move: When
a bill to appropriate 2 million
dollars to end the war and purchase
Texans claimed as a result of their California and Mexican territory
defeat of Santa Anna in 1836. north of the Rio Grande came
President James K. Polk had his eyes before Congress in 1846, Wilmot
not only on the border with Texas, offered a proviso, or condition,
but also on the sale of California that declared slavery could not be
and New Mexico. The president established in any territory the
prepared for war in Texas, seizing United States might win from
on a skirmish between Mexican and Mexico as a result of the war.
American troops north of the Rio
Grande as a convenient excuse. The proviso eventually went down
in defeat and the war proceeded,
Members of the Whig political but from 1846 on, the opponents
party in the North—including of slavery increasingly distrusted
a young Abraham Lincoln— Polk and southern political leaders.
vehemently opposed the war with The northern Whigs opposed
Mexico, portraying it as a naked to the war found themselves in
land grab and maneuver to expand an awkward position, however,
the empire of slavery. Some argued because they did not want to be
that for the United States to seen as opposing American troops
swallow Texas would be to swallow in war. Regardless, the Americans
the poison of slavery. were effective: The United States
Army, under Zachary Taylor and
David Wilmot, a first-term Winfield Scott, achieved a series of
Pennsylvania Democrat in favor of victories in Mexico.
« More Legislation «
A fabled session of
Congress occurred as a
result of the debate over the issue
John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and
Daniel Webster—assumed leading
roles in the great national drama.
of slavery in Mexican territories
that the United States might win. Clay’s plan addressed, in one
In January 1850, three legislators— inclusive omnibus bill, all the

issues tearing at the United States September, the various components
on the slavery issue. Balance the of the compromise of 1850 had
territory issue, he suggested, with become law.
other concerns that angered people
about slavery. His bill would leave The Fugitive Slave Act directly
slavery in the District of Columbia, implicated white Northerners and
but abolish the slave trade there. insulted them with blatantly unjust
It would provide a stronger law to provisions. Perhaps most horrifying
capture fugitive slaves in the North, of all was this provision: No matter
but announce that Congress had how many years before slaves had
no power to regulate the slave trade escaped, and no matter how settled
among the states. It would also or respectable they had become,
admit California as a free state, but they could be captured and sent
leave undetermined the place of back into bondage.
slavery in the other territories won
from Mexico. Many Northerners were furious.
Armed opposition to the slave
Advocates on both sides hoped the catchers immediately arose in cities
compromise would buy time for across the North; mobs broke into
passions to cool. Each part of the jails to free ex-slaves. One slave
compromise passed because a small owner who came north to claim his
group of conciliatory congressmen property was shot.
from each side worked together. By
« Compromise Attempts «
P arty leaders of both

the Whigs and the
Democrats labored to find ways
called for two kinds of action:
organizing the territories of the
west, especially the Kansas and
to compromise, to hold both their Nebraska area, and building a
parties and the nation together. railroad across the continent to
As it turned out, their efforts only bind together the expanded United
made matters worse. States with the route.
The leader Stephen A. Douglas Douglas wrote a bill invalidating

determined that the best hope the Missouri Compromise line. He
for the Democrats was to deflect proposed that the people of the new
attention to the west. Douglas territories decide for themselves

whether or not their states would Free-Soil Party members,
permit slaves and slaveholders. and abolitionists.
Adopting the phrase “popular
sovereignty,” Douglas put it forward In 1854, a party was founded in
in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Wisconsin to unite disgruntled
voters. The new party appealed to
The Kansas-Nebraska Act sparked former Whigs, Free-Soilers, Know-
a chain reaction. It divided the Nothings, and even Democrats
Democratic Party across the North. fed up with their pro-Southern
It upset the fragile balance of party. This new party called itself
power between North and South the Republican Party. Its platform
in Congress. The act also provided announced that “no man can own
a set of common concerns and another man” and it would not
language to unite disgruntled permit slavery in the territories or
Northern Whigs, Democrats, in new states.
«
Suggested Reading
Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery.
Morrison, Slavery and the American West.
Rothman, Slave Country.
1 Was the slave South inherently expansionist to a greater degree than
the North?
2 How did the arrival of railroads and telegraphs divide as well as unify
the nation?

12 Life in the Slave South
A tour of the South around 1850 would reveal many different

scenarios. This lecture takes a look at some of those scenarios
by focusing on what life was like as slavery spread throughout
the South. Particular areas of focus include the migration
of people, the daily life of enslaved people, and the domestic
slave trade.
« The Spread of People «
M uch of the upper

South (and lower North)
was filled by people from Virginia.
The movement of people to the
southwest occurred because
southern cotton drove national
Nearly 700,000 people emigrated out economic growth. By the time
of Virginia between the American of the Panic of 1837, Alabama,
Revolution and the Civil War. These Mississippi, and Louisiana grew
emigrants went to different places more than half the nation’s cotton.
over time. First, they went mainly
south, to the Carolinas and Georgia. American slavery became ever
Then, in the first six decades of the more diverse as it expanded.
19th century, they went to Ohio, Enslaved people worked in hemp,
Kentucky, and Tennessee. wheat, rice, corn, sugar, and tobacco
fields, as well as cotton fields.
They were just as likely to migrate They worked with livestock and
to the free states of Indiana and racehorses, practiced trades such
Illinois as they were to the slave as carpentry and blacksmithing,
states of Mississippi and Alabama. and labored on the docks of New
South Carolina, too, lost large Orleans, Mobile, and Memphis and
numbers of white inhabitants. in the shipyards of Baltimore.
Lecture 12 « Life in the Slave South 65

« Family Life under Slavery «
A frican American
families tended to rely on a
broader range of kin than did white
Enslaved Americans generally lived
in a relatively small community
of others. About a quarter of all
families. Grandparents, aunts, and held in slavery lived on farms with
uncles often played significant fewer than nine slaves, whereas
roles in child rearing in black another quarter lived on the three
families. When people of actual percent of southern plantations
blood relation were unavailable, that held more than 50 slaves. The
southern slaves created fictive kin. remaining half lived on plantations
Friends and neighbors were given with somewhere between 10 and 49
honorary titles like “brother” or bondspeople. African Americans
“aunt” and treated as such. These often found wives or husbands on
arrangements permitted slave nearby farms, visiting one another
families resiliency and variety. on evenings and weekends.
« The Slave Trade «
T he domestic slave trade

drove on. From the 1820s to
the 1850s, about a million people
life insurance. Their sales had
to be notarized and their sellers
taxed. Tens of millions of dollars
were taken into the southwest. circulated through the southern
Slave traders carried about two- economy as a result of the slave
thirds of these people south. trade within the South.
The slave trade was an immense
business, perhaps as much as 15 Along with the people moved
percent of the entire southern through the interstate trade,
economy. twice as many were sold locally.
Sales from neighbor to neighbor,
The slaves had to be transported, state-supervised debt sales, and
housed, clothed, fed, and treated estate sales dwarfed the number
medically during the one to three of interstate slave sales. Taken
months it generally took to sell together, over 2 million enslaved
them. Some were insured in people were sold in interstate,
transit; others were covered by intrastate, and local sales.

A SLAVE AUCTION IN VIRGINIA
The interstate traders spent the the people they sold or with the
summer buying slaves. They bought people to whom they were selling.
them at courthouse estate sales, Slaveholders knew that almost all
at private sales on plantations and the slaves did not want to be sold,
farms, and from one another. They because it would mean leaving
put the people they purchased into friends and family. However,
slave pens and jails, where they paid slaveholders often surprised slaves
the jailor a fee, and kept them there so they could be sold quickly,
for as long as two months before without a scene.
shipping them south. The slaves
would be sold farther south from An enslaved person had about a
the late fall, through Christmas, 30 percent chance of being sold
into the spring. in his or her lifetime. The chance
of having a loved one sold was
Slaveholders did not like scenes, and virtually a certainty.
they did not want to negotiate with

« Richmond «
B y the 1850s, Richmond,

Virginia, had become the
center of domestic slave sales. Some
The operation stood there for over
30 years, under different owners
but always doing the same work.
slave dealers traveled to Richmond
and conducted business from fine Anthony Burns, a Virginia slave
hotels. Others bought lots of people, who escaped to Boston in 1854,
and then had them shipped by was returned to Richmond and
railroad or steamship to plantations held there for four months. A
in the Deep South. New Orleans biographer wrote that Burns “was
and Texas were also destinations. allowed neither bed nor air; a
rude bench fastened against the
Some white men stole enslaved wall and a single, coarse blanket
people. Others kidnapped free black were the only means of repose.”
people and sold them into slavery. Burns was shackled with tight
Still others used family connections irons, malnourished, and could not
to trade slaves for friends who did properly relieve himself. He was
not want to be seen as participating permanently crippled and fell into
in such a trade. ill health; he died in 1862 at the
age of 28.
Most slave sales began when an
agent, gathering people from farms
and plantations across the Upper
South, came into Richmond with
a group to be sold. The agents had
acquired the enslaved property
from country auctions, approaching
slave owners directly, or buying
free black people who had been
convicted of crimes.
When they gathered enough

enslaved people, the slave traders
would travel to Richmond, where
they would often store the enslaved
people at a so-called jail. One such
notorious place was Lumpkin’s
Jail, in Richmond’s Shockoe
Bottom slave-trading district.
«
68 A New History of the American South ANTHONY BURNS
« Overseers and Drivers «
W hite slave owners

tended to live on the
same plantation as their slaves, but
commanding respect from whites
as well as blacks. Although whites
held the ultimate threat of force,
wealthier whites put day-to-day they much preferred to keep the
control of their plantations in the work moving smoothly, with as
hands of professional overseers. little trouble as possible.
These overseers were often
ambitious young men of middling The driver could help both sides,
background who used the overseer protecting fellow slaves from abuse
position as a stepping stone to their and assuring that the work got
own plantation. done efficiently. Drivers frequently
found themselves caught between
Slaves could and did appeal to the the two competing sets of demands,
owner if they thought the overseer however, and slaves often resented
unfair. Since a master might indeed or even hated drivers.
trust a well-known slave more
than a new overseer, the position About three out of four enslaved
involved tact as well as brute force. people worked mainly in the
fields. Almost all of them went
On larger plantations, where slaves to the fields during the peak
often worked in groups called times. Women, who worked in
gangs, trusted male slaves served the fields alongside men, also
as drivers. Such drivers tended to served in the house as cooks and
be especially strong and skilled, domestic servants.
« Attempts at Justification «
W hites told
themselves that they
provided “their people” a better
Southern slaveholders and
ministers prided themselves on
their Christian mission to the
life than they would have known slaves. Most masters would not
in Africa. Indeed, southern permit their slaves to learn to read,
masters explained the justice of but they did arrange to have Bible
slavery to themselves and to the selections read to their slaves.
North by stressing their Christian
stewardship for the slaves. Although many slaves eagerly
accepted the gospel in the white-

dominated churches, others their deepest religious feelings only
resented the obvious and shallow in their own worship, in the secret
uses the masters made of the meetings in brush arbors and cabins
sermons, telling the slaves to in the slave quarters. There, they
accept their lot and to refrain from prayed to be free and to be united in
stealing food. Such slaves displayed Heaven with those they loved.
« The Life of a Slave «
C ompared with slaves in

other places in the
hemisphere, those of the American
Many slave owners did not refrain
from having their slaves whipped
on small provocation, branded,
South were relatively well fed and shackled, or locked up in sweltering
healthier. They had limited and enclosures. Some slaves suffered
monotonous diets, but generally sexual abuse. Partly because
consumed enough nutrients. expectant mothers were often kept
However, slaves received ineffective in the fields until the last minute,
or dangerous health care, their about a third of all black babies
houses were small and drafty, and died before they reached their
their clothing was limited to a few first birthday.
rough garments per year.
«
Suggested Reading
Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe.”
Camp, Closer to Freedom.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll.
1 How could white people imagine themselves as kind masters when they
could see the damage of slavery all around them?
2 Could slavery have long survived urbanization and industrialization?

13 Sovereignty and Slavery
in the American West
The Whigs, emerging in the 1830s in opposition to Andrew

Jackson, portrayed themselves as the party of progress and
prosperity. Lawyers, editors, and merchants who set up shop
in the hamlets and towns of the South proved receptive to such
views. Large planters and farmers in the mountains of the
Upper South were also receptive. The Democrats, on the other
hand, found their strongest supporters among the middling
farmers and planters of the South.
The Democrats pledged that they would protect slavery by

extending the power of the government as little as possible. The
Whigs, on the other hand, argued that the best way to protect
slavery was for the South to develop its region’s economy and
build strong economic and political bridges to the North. This
lecture looks at how the competing agendas of those groups and
the Republicans played out, with no final resolution.
« The 1850s «
S lavery had never been

stronger in the United States
than it was in the 1850s. The three
gins, riverboats, railroads, and
new kinds of seed to double their
production of cotton.
and a half million slaves of the
South extended over a vast territory The prosperity created by the
stretching from Delaware to Texas. cotton boom resonated throughout
the Southern economy. Southern
Moreover, the slave economy cities grew quickly, attracting
boomed in the late 1850s. Planters immigrants and businesses.
took advantage of improved cotton Although the South could not keep
Lecture 13 « Sovereignty and Slavery in the American West 71

up with the North, it did quite well 1850s, reflected in the escalating
by international standards. value of slaves, dissuaded wealthy
Southerners from investing
On the other hand, the South was in businesses that might have
not urbanizing or industrializing held greater potential for long-
nearly as quickly as the North. term development.
The short-term gains of the
« The Kansas-Nebraska Act «
T he Kansas-Nebraska
Act of 1854 declared that
settlers would decide for themselves,
The proslavery forces triumphed
and took control of the territorial
legislature in Lecompton. There,
by “popular sovereignty,” what they passed a series of aggressive
kind of society they would create. laws against free-soil advocates.
Partisans from both the North and Forbidding antislavery men to
the South determined to fill the serve on juries or hold office, the
territory with settlers of their own legislature also decreed the death
political persuasion. penalty for any person who assisted
a fugitive slave.
The Massachusetts Emigrant Aid
Company announced that it planned Antislavery Kansans decided
to raise $5 million to aid and that their only recourse was to
encourage settlement in Kansas to establish a rival government. They
ensure that the embattled territory worked through the summer and
became a free state. Advocates of fall of 1855 in Topeka to write a
slavery in Kansas believed that the constitution of their own. Over
forces of abolition would overwhelm the winter, the free-soil advocates
the territory before slaveholders ratified the constitution and elected
could move there. their own legislature and governor.
The free-soil delegates felt justified
Proslavery advocates in Missouri by the obvious injustice of their
fought what they saw as Yankee proslavery opponents.
invaders. On election day, they
flooded across the border to vote in Antislavery forces in New England
support of the proslavery candidates and New York sent rifles to Kansas
for the territorial legislature, casting to arm what they saw as the side
roughly 3,400 more ballots than of righteousness. Southerners,
there were eligible voters. in turn, organized an expedition

of 300 young men to reinforce to execute warrants from the
their comrades. proslavery territory court
against free-state leaders and two
This volatile situation soon newspapers. They threw printing
exploded into violence. On May presses into the river, fired at the
21, 1856, a group of slave-state Free State Hotel, and burned the
supporters marched into the hotel to the ground.
free-soil stronghold of Lawrence
« More Violence «
T he next day, in
Washington DC,
Representative Preston Brooks
in 1855. There, he became furious
at the proslavery forces. Brown
accompanied a group of free-staters
of South Carolina searched to defend Lawrence, but they heard
out Senator Charles Sumner of the hotel’s destruction before
of Massachusetts. Sumner they could arrive.
had delivered a series of bitter
speeches against slavery. Brooks
demonstrated his contempt for
Sumner by striking him repeatedly
about the head with a heavy rubber
cane at his Senate desk.
Consequently, Sumner did not

return to his seat for two and a half
years. The empty seat became a
symbol in the North of Southern
brutality; the incident became a
symbol in the South of the only
sort of response the arrogant North
would respect.
An event in Kansas the next day

intensified the conflict. John
Brown had been a supporter
of abolitionism since 1834 and «
followed five of his sons to Kansas CHARLES SUMNER

Brown persuaded four of his sons In the wake of these violent events,
and a son-in-law, along with two the territory became known as
other men, to exact revenge for Bleeding Kansas. A new governor
the defeat. The band set out for finally helped quiet the conflict in
Pottawatomie Creek. There, they September, but the legitimacy of the
took five men from three houses territorial government remained
and split open their skulls. The an issue of heated contention. The
men had been associated in some South won a hollow victory when
way with the territorial district it seized the first election for the
court, but no one was, or is, sure of territorial government in Kansas.
Brown’s precise motives. He was That government would soon pass,
never punished for the killings. but the symbolic value of Bleeding
Kansas would long endure.
« Dred Scott «
I n his inaugural address,

new Democratic president
James Buchanan, a well-known
their freedom, claiming that their
residence in the free territory
entitled them to free status.
sympathizer with the South,
mentioned a slave-related case
pending before the Supreme Court.
The case involved Dred Scott,
born a slave in Virginia around
1800. In the 1830s, Scott had
been taken by his master, John
Emerson, to territories far in the
upper Midwest. Scott had married
Harriet Robinson, the slave of a
federal Indian agent.
Emerson bought Harriet and thus

owned the two daughters she
bore with Scott. When Emerson
died in 1843, Scott and his family
became the property of Emerson’s
widow, who moved to St. Louis.
In 1846, the Scotts petitioned for
«
DRED SCOTT
A long series of postponements
and delays dragged the case on into
the 1850s. Democratic judges and
lawyers worked to deny the Scotts
their freedom on the grounds that
such a precedent would undermine
the right of Southerners to take
slaves into the territories. A
Republican lawyer agreed to carry
the Scotts’ case before the Supreme
Court to counter the Democrats’
aggressive claims.
Unfortunately for the Republicans

and the Scotts, five Southern
Democrats sat on the court, along
with two northern Democrats, one
northern Whig, and one northern
Republican. Presiding was Chief «
ROGER B. TANEY
Justice Roger B. Taney.
The Dred Scott case came before Taney decreed, could not become
the Supreme Court during the citizens of the United States
superheated months of 1856, because “they were not included,
when Kansas, the Brooks/ and were not intended to be
Sumner affair, and the presidential included, under the word ‘citizens’
election commanded the country’s in the Constitution.”
attention. Two days after Buchanan
took office in March of 1857, the Taney also decreed that Congress
Court announced its decision in had never held a constitutional
the Dred Scott case. It took Chief right to restrict slavery in the
Justice Taney two hours to read territories and that therefore the
the opinion. Missouri Compromise of 1820
was invalid. Two justices dissented
Taney spent half his time denying from the majority’s opinion, but
that Scott had the right to bring a the decision stood as the law
case in the first place. Black people, of the land.

« Reactions to the Dred Scott Case «
S outherners and many

northern Democrats exulted
that they had been vindicated
the United States would reopen the
slave trade with Africa and even
extend slavery into northern states
by the Dred Scott decision. The where it had been banned.
Republicans, however, sneered at
the decision. They reprinted the The Republicans thought the
dissenting opinions in the Dred Court’s audacious statement
Scott case and denounced the “the best thing that could have
decision in the state legislatures happened” to the Republican
they controlled throughout Party. As an abolitionist newspaper
the North. put it, the “fiercer the insult, the
bitterer the blow, the better.” The
They argued that the Founding Republicans expected the Dred
Fathers had never intended slavery Scott decision to make their party
to be a permanent part of the stronger. They needed to sweep
United States and merely tolerated the government in 1860, they
bondage because they expected it argued, to clean out corruption
to die of its own weight. If the Dred and conspiracy from the executive,
Scott decision were followed to its Congress, and now the courts.
logical conclusion, they warned,
«
Suggested Reading
Freehling, The Road to Disunion.
Potter, The Impending Crisis.
Varon, Disunion.
1 Was there a turning point in the 1850s toward unavoidable war?
2 Why were the many moderates in both the North and the South unable to
persuade the more agitated and radical?

14 The Complex Road
to Secession
The beginning of the Civil War has fascinated, confused,

and perplexed people since the time it happened. There was
nothing simple or inevitable about anything related to the
American Civil War. This lecture picks up the story of the
road to the Civil War in 1859, after the events of Bleeding
Kansas in 1855.
« Harpers Ferry «
J ohn Brown had become

famous in the years since
surrounded Brown’s men, killing or
capturing eight of them.
he had burst into prominence
in Bleeding Kansas in 1855. He Militia from Virginia and Maryland
toured New England in search of arrived the next day, followed soon
funds to carry on the antislavery after by federal troops. The troops
cause, and he found willing rushed the armory. Ten of the
listeners and open hands. abolitionist forces were killed, five
(including Brown) wounded, and
An assault on the federal armory seven escaped. Brown was tried
at Harpers Ferry began on Sunday, within two weeks and found guilty.
October 16,1859, as Brown’s men He was sentenced to be hanged on
quickly seized the arsenal and a December 2.
rifle-manufacturing plant. Brown
and his men remained in the small The entire episode, from the raid to
armory building, waiting for word Brown’s execution, took only about
to spread among the slaves of six weeks to unfold. However,
Virginia that their day of liberation those six weeks saw opinion in both
had come. The word spread instead the North and the South change
among local whites, who quickly rapidly. The rhetoric surrounding
Lecture 14 « The Complex Road to Secession 77

John Brown seemed almost The many people of moderate
cathartic, as both northerners and sympathies on both sides watched,
Southerners said the worst they dismayed, as common ground
could imagine about the other. eroded beneath their feet.
HARPERS FERRY INSURRECTION
« Political Machinations «
T he Republicans realized
that they would be, and could
succeed as, a purely northern party.
The Democrats also felt the effects
of Brown’s raid. At their party’s
nominating convention for the
Any Southern base of support presidential election, Southern
disappeared, and Harpers Ferry Democrats demanded that the
and the public grief over Brown party explicitly support the rights
had made the Republicans far more of slaveholders to take their slaves
attractive among northern voters into the territories. Northern
than before. Democrats could not afford to

make that concession and still a compromise candidate. Calling
have a chance to win back home. themselves the Constitutional
They nominated Stephen Douglas, Union Party, they settled on John
seen as a moderate. Southerners, Bell of Tennessee.
walking out, nominated John C.
Breckenridge of Kentucky, an The Republicans were much
advocate for the South. stronger than they had been only
four years earlier. They turned to a
Before the Democratic convention moderate who was a favorite son of
met again in June, Unionists in one of the crucial states: Abraham
both the North and the South tried Lincoln of Illinois.
to avert catastrophe by nominating
« The Election of 1860 «
L eading up to the
election of 1860, Lincoln made
no attempt to explain himself
Union candidate, Bell. The election
was not close in the electoral
college, where Lincoln won 180
to the South; Breckinridge made electoral votes to Breckinridge’s 72,
little attempt in the North. They Bell’s 39, and Douglas’s 12.
never met face to face. Bell spoke
mainly to the already converted.
Only Douglas, breaking with
tradition, spoke from New England
to Alabama, trying to warn people
what could happen if they voted
along sectional lines.
On election day, November 6,

Lincoln won in every northern
state except New Jersey, which
was divided between Douglas
and Lincoln. Douglas won
outright only in Missouri. The
Southern Democrat’s candidate,
Breckinridge, won the entire South
except the border states of Virginia,
Tennessee, and Kentucky, which «
went with the Constitutional ABRAHAM LINCOLN
In Southern eyes, the North had In northern eyes, the South was to
arrogantly placed its own interests blame, walking out of nominating
above those of the Union, insisting conventions and talking of disunion.
on electing a man who did not even The election of 1860 completed the
appear on Southern ballots. estrangement of North and South.
« Secession and South Carolina «
E ven though the

Democrats still controlled the
Senate and the Supreme Court,
The state’s leaders, heartened by
the response, seceded earlier than
they had planned, on December
Southerners believed that Lincoln 20. By February 1, Mississippi,
would use the patronage of the Florida, Alabama, Georgia,
federal government to install Louisiana, and Texas had joined the
Republican officials throughout secession movement.
the South and possibly entice non-
slaveholders with their free labor On February 4, delegates from
doctrines. Such officials could these states met in Montgomery,
undermine slavery from within. Alabama, and created a provisional
constitution, similar to that of
The nation’s eyes turned to South the United States except in its
Carolina. Influential men there explicit guarantee of slavery and
believed that the same states that states’ rights. On February 18,
had created the Union could also the convention inaugurated a
dissolve that Union when it no provisional president, Jefferson
longer served their purposes. Davis of Mississippi, and a vice
president, Alexander H. Stephens
The South Carolina legislature met of Georgia. Davis was a strong
on the day after Lincoln’s election, states’ rights advocate but not a
but did not secede immediately. fervent secessionist.
Its members called for an election
two months later to select delegates The advocates of secession wanted
who would then decide the course to strike before Lincoln took office.
the state should follow. In the Two bad events could happen if
meantime, they hoped, support for they waited to see what the new
secession would grow. president did once in office. He
might either attack the South by
States of the Deep South quickly force, or he might prove to be as
lined up behind South Carolina. moderate as he claimed to be. In

the latter case, secessionists feared, throughout the nation watched and
white Southerners would let the waited to see what would happen
moment pass. when the new president officially
assumed office on March 4. In the
Many thousands of white meantime, no one appeared to be
Southerners resisted secession, in charge. James Buchanan, as a
and events did not move quickly lame-duck president, could not do
after Lincoln’s election. After the much, and neither could the lame-
first flush of secessionist victory duck Congress.
at the beginning of 1861, people
« The Conflict Shifts «
I n the winter of 1861, the

center of the conflict between
the North and the South gradually
in Charleston. On December
26, Anderson moved his small
garrison from Fort Moultrie to
shifted to two obscure forts Fort Sumter, a facility occupying a
in the harbor of Charleston, safer position in the center of the
South Carolina. A Kentucky- Charleston harbor.
born US Army officer, Major
Robert Anderson, worried that Meanwhile, South Carolina troops
secessionists would attack his strengthened their position around
small federal force at Fort Moultrie the Charleston harbor. Men from

both the North and the South Lincoln assembled his government
worked frantically, but fruitlessly, under the growing shadow of war.
to find a compromise during He sought to balance his cabinet
these weeks. with men of various backgrounds.
The two most formidable cabinet
On February 11, Abraham Lincoln members were Secretary of State
began a long and circuitous railway William H. Seward, a moderate
trip from Illinois to Washington Republican, and Secretary of the
DC, speaking along the way. At Treasury Salmon P. Chase, a radical
first, he played down the threat Republican inclined to take a
of secession: “Let it alone,” he harder line with the South.
counseled, “and it will go down of
itself.” However, as the train rolled Fort Sumter stood as the most
on and the Confederate convention pressing issue facing the new
in Montgomery completed its administration. Any show of force
provisional government, Lincoln to reclaim the fort from South
became more wary. Warned of Carolina, Southern Unionists
attempts on his life, Lincoln slipped warned, and the secessionists would
into Washington under cover sweep border states such as Virginia
of darkness. into the Confederacy.
« Complicated Problems «
S lavery was a profound

economic, political, religious,
and moral problem, the most
press. Both sides believed the other
was bluffing, both believed that
the other’s internal differences and
profound the nation has ever faced. conflicts would lead it to buckle,
However, that problem did not lead and both believed they had latent
to war in a rational, predictable but powerful allies in the other
way. The war came through region that would prevent war.
misunderstanding, confusion, and
miscalculation. By the time people made up their
minds to fight, slavery itself had
Both sides underestimated the become obscured by political issues
location of fundamental loyalty in and hot tempers. Yet slavery, as
the other. Both received incorrect Abraham Lincoln later put it,
images of the other in the partisan drove everything.

«
Suggested Reading
Crofts, Reluctant Confederates.
Dew, Apostles of Disunion.
1 Why do we keep arguing over the causes of secession? Shouldn’t we have
figured that out by now?
2 Why did the Upper South cast its lot with the Cotton South?

15 Elemental Loyalties and
Descent into War
The fundamental cause of the Civil War—the fight over the

future of slavery in the territories of the west—tore at the
nation for decades. Perhaps because it was such a long-running
conflict, Americans had come to believe that it could somehow
be worked out—that is, Americans would not let themselves
descend into war. That faith proved to be misplaced.
« Lincoln’s Speech «
A t his inaugural speech,

Lincoln told the South that
he had no intention of disturbing
People heard in Lincoln’s inaugural
address what they chose to hear.
Republicans and Unionists in
slavery where it was already the South thought it a potent
established, that he would not mixture of firmness and generosity.
invade the region, and that he Skeptics focused on the threat of
would not attempt to fill offices coercion at Fort Sumter. If Lincoln
with men repugnant to local attempted to use force of any kind,
sensibilities. He also warned that they warned, war would be the
secession was illegal. It was his duty inevitable result.
to maintain the integrity of the
federal government, and to do so he Lincoln did not plan on war; he
had to “hold, occupy, and possess” was trying to buy time, hoping
federal property in the states of that compromisers in Washington
the Confederacy, including Fort would come up with a workable
Sumter. Lincoln pleaded with his strategy. However, there was less
countrymen to move slowly and to time than Lincoln realized.
let passions cool.

« Fort Sumter Escalates «
O n the day after

Lincoln’s speech, Major
Robert Anderson reported to
fire on the Union garrison. The
shelling continued for 33 hours.
Anderson held out for as long as he
Washington that he would be out could, but when fire tore through
of food within four to six weeks. the barracks and his ammunition
Lincoln decided that he would send ran low, he decided the time for
provisions but not military supplies surrender had come.
to Fort Sumter.
Northerners agreed that the events
in South Carolina could not go
unanswered. Lincoln issued a call
for 75,000 volunteers to defend
the Union. Southerners agreed
that they would have no choice but
to come to that state’s aid if the
North raised a hand against their
fellow Southerners.
Virginia, which had voted

repeatedly not to secede, finally
did so when Lincoln called for
« troops. Tennessee and North
ROBERT ANDERSON Carolina followed.
The president recognized that the

Confederacy was determined to act.
Jefferson Davis and his government
had decided a week earlier that any
attempt to provision the fort would
be an act of war.
The Confederate government

decided that its commander in
Charleston, P. G. T. Beauregard,
should attack Fort Sumter before
the relief expedition had a chance
to arrive. On April 12, at 4:30 in «
the morning, Beauregard opened P. G. T. BEAUREGARD
Lecture 15 « Elemental Loyalties and Descent into War 85
« The Combatants «
I n retrospect, the cards

seemed heavily stacked in the
North’s favor. The Union had
plan, named after the snake that
slowly squeezes its prey to death.
That plan depended on sending
vastly greater industrial capacity, an overpowering force down the
railroads, canals, food, draft Mississippi River in the fall, dividing
animals, ships, and entrepreneurial the South in two. At the same time,
talent. The Union could also the Union navy would seal off the
claim four times as many white South from outside supplies. Ground
residents as the South. Although troops and land battles would be
the 3.5 million enslaved people kept to a minimum.
who lived in the Confederacy were
extraordinarily valuable to the The Confederacy possessed
South, everyone recognized that considerable military advantages.
the slaves could become equally It occupied an enormous area,
valuable allies for the North. larger than today’s United
Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain
Neither the Confederates nor the combined. It possessed dozens of
North expected the secession crisis harbors and ports, connected by
to turn into a full-fledged war, an excellent system of rivers and
much less a four-year war. When an adequate network of railroads.
Lincoln called for the 75,000 militia The Confederacy’s long border with
members, he called them for only Mexico made it difficult to seal off
90 days’ service. When Southern outside supplies.
boys and men rushed to enlist for
the Confederacy in the spring of There was also the matter of
1861, they assumed they would be leadership. In 1861, many observers
back home in time to harvest their would have given the advantage
crops in the autumn. to the Confederates in this regard.
Abraham Lincoln had held public
The military strategies of both sides office for only two years before he
sought to minimize actual fighting. assumed the presidency, and his
The South saw itself as purely on only military service had been a
the defensive; it would wait for brief service in the militia. Jefferson
northern armies to invade and then Davis, by contrast, had distinguished
defeat them. himself in the war with Mexico.
He had been secretary of war under
The North, for its part, counted on Franklin Pierce and had served in
General Winfield Scott’s anaconda the United States Senate.

At the beginning of the war, too,
it appeared that the South had
the better generals. The Southern
leaders certainly had more
experience: The average age of
the Union generals in 1861 was
38; of Confederate generals, the
average age was 47. Robert E. Lee of
Virginia had served as an engineer,
an officer in the Mexican War in
the 1840s, and superintendent of
West Point in the late 1850s.
Lee, after agonizing indecision,

resigned his US military
commission and accepted
command of Virginia’s forces. Like
his fellow Virginians, Lee was a «
reluctant Confederate. JEFFERSON DAVIS
« New Armies «
B oth sides took

immediate steps to create
new armies, organized within
even food for the troops from their
localities. Units elected their own
officers. States competed to enlist
local communities and led by local the largest numbers of men.
men. The Confederate Congress
authorized 400,000 volunteers With the first battles, women
in May of 1861. In its special claimed positions as nurses, even
session beginning in July of 1861, though men had served before
the Union Congress authorized as military nurses. Despite some
500,000 troops, each signing on for initial grumbling by men, women
three years. Eventually, 700,000 converted themselves immediately
enlisted under this authorization. into competent and devoted nurses.
Other women stayed closer to
Much mobilization took place on home, working in factories, doing
the local level. Prominent citizens piecework in their households, or
often supplied uniforms, guns, and tilling fields.

« The Spread of War «
T he war spread across

the continent in the fall,
winter, and spring of 1861–1862.
Americans wanted to hunt, fish, or
work for themselves and their own
families rather than labor for the
Southerners watched helplessly as white people.
armies stripped their farms of food
and livestock. They ministered to The Confederate Congress passed
the bleeding young men dragged laws exempting from the draft
into their parlors and bedrooms. white men to supervise slaves on
larger plantations. To many poorer
Confederate leaders worried that Southerners, the law was another
the plantations could not produce in a growing list of grievances.
the food the armies so desperately Resentment against wealthy men
needed if white men did not and women quickly came to the
force the slaves to work. African surface in the context of war.
« April 1862 «
T he end of April 1862

seemed to promise the early
end to the war that people had
choice but to initiate a compulsory
draft. All white men between the
ages of 18 and 35 were required to
expected at its outbreak. Although fight for three years.
many of the battles had been close
that spring, they all seemed to Some exemptions were available.
turn out in favor of the North. The Notably, the Confederacy
first yearlong enlistments in the exempted one white man for every
Confederate army were running 20 slaves he supervised. That law,
out in April; many soldiers left like the draft in general, divided
for home. Southerners more profoundly than
anything else in the Civil War.
The Confederate Congress, fearful A Mississippi private deserted to
that its armies would be short of return home, refusing to “fight for
men as the Union stepped up its the rich men while they were at
attacks, decided that it had no home having a good time.”

«
Suggested Reading
Faust, This Republic of Suffering.
Gallagher, Confederate War.
Rable, Confederate Republic.
1 Does Confederate mobilization for war suggest that it was a more modern
society that we have commonly assumed or reinforce the sense that it was
somehow archaic?
2 Why was the war so much worse than people expected?

16 End of War and of Slavery
The Civil War was enormously complicated—so complicated

that covering its entire scope is nearly impossible. This lecture,
rather than focusing on battle after battle, reflects on what
those battles brought to the larger society.
« A Seeming Stalemate «
B y the summer of 1862,

the war seemed to have
reached a stalemate. Both the
year, however, even Northerners
who did not oppose slavery on
moral grounds could see that
Union and the Confederacy slavery offered the South a major
believed a decisive battle could still advantage: Slaves in the fields
win the war. The North took heart meant more white Southerners on
because Union ships controlled the the battlefields.
coasts and rivers on the perimeter
of the South even as Union troops Wherever Union armies went,
pushed deep into Tennessee and slaves fled to the federals as
Mississippi. The Confederacy took refugees. Although some Union
comfort because vast expanses officers returned the slaves to
of rich Southern farmland and their owners, other officers seized
millions of productive slaves the opportunity to strike against
remained beyond the reach of slavery and use former slaves to
Union control. further their war aims.
President Lincoln, while detesting Lincoln resisted those members

slavery personally, feared that of his party and his cabinet who
a campaign against bondage thought that black men should be
would divide the North. As enlisted into the Union army. Such
the war dragged into its second Republicans, often called radicals

for their support of black rights,
passed laws that forbade Northern
commanders to return refugee
slaves to their former masters.
They ended (albeit gradually and
with compensation) slavery in the
District of Columbia.
Eventually, Lincoln decided that to

win the war he would have to hit
slavery. On July 22, 1862, Lincoln
and his cabinet authorized federal
military leaders to take whatever
secessionist property they needed
and to destroy any property that
aided the Confederacy.
As of January 1, 1863, Lincoln’s

Emancipation Proclamation
declared all slaves in areas
controlled by the Confederates free.
Although this proclamation would
free no slaves under Union control
in the border states, it ruled out
compromise that would end the
war and bring the South back into
the Union with slavery.
« Southern Strife «
C onvinced that greedy

merchants were holding
supplies of flour until prices
ordered a militia unit to prepare to
fire on them. The threat of violence
and of arrest, as well as the promise
rose even higher, poor women in of free supplies, broke up the riot,
Richmond, in the spring of 1863, but similar events occurred in
broke open the stores of merchants, several other Southern cities such as
taking what they needed. After Atlanta, Columbus, and Augusta.
President Davis climbed on a wagon No one could tell when even larger
and threw coins at the crowd, he riots might erupt again.
Lecture 16 « End of War and of Slavery 91

The Southern government could political power closer to localities,
not afford to lose civilian support. protecting slavery in particular and
Although the absence of political self-determination in general. The
parties originally appeared to be a government of the Confederacy,
sign of the South’s consensus, that however, had to centralize power
absence eventually undermined to fight effectively. Jefferson Davis
what original consensus the continually struggled with this
Confederacy had enjoyed. tension. For every Southerner
who considered Davis too weak,
The Confederate government faced another considered the president
a fundamental dilemma. The whole dangerously powerful.
point of secession had been to move
« Effects of Fighting «
A s battles tore at the

country in 1862, 1863, and
1864, a horrifying toll accumulated.
crime, and violence became
widespread problems.
It was, by far, the most costly war The Southern economy fell to its
in which Americans have fought, knees. Major Southern cities had
and the most costly war fought over been reduced to ash. Railroads had
slavery in the Western Hemisphere. been ripped from the ground. Fields
had grown up weeds and brush.
The North lost almost 365,000 Farm values fell by half.
men to death and disease in
the Civil War, and the South The Civil War did not mark a
lost 260,000. Another 277,000 sudden turn in the Northern
Northerners were wounded, along economy, but it did accelerate
with 195,000 Southerners. Black processes already well underway.
Americans lost 37,000 men in the The nationalization of markets, the
Union army and another 10,000 accumulation of wealth, and the
men, women, and children in dominance of larger manufacturing
escapee camps. firms all became more marked after
1865. Despite the prosperity in the
Widows and orphans faced decades North, the hundreds of thousands
of struggling without a male of veterans faced many dislocations
breadwinner. Many people found and readjustments as they returned
their emotional lives shattered to the farms, factories, and shops
by the war. Alcohol, drug abuse, they had left months or years before.

« Former Slaves «
A s the battles ground to

a halt, slaves became former
slaves. Some seized their freedom
crops in the ground. Some former
slaves argued that they should stay
where they were for the time being.
at the first opportunity, taking They had heard rumors that the
their families to Union camps or government would award them land.
joining the army. Others celebrated
when the Yankees came to their Between July and September
plantations, only to find that of 1865, however, those dreams
their owners and white neighbors died. Union officers promised
retaliated when the soldiers left. Still land to former slaves in Virginia,
others bided their time. Louisiana, Mississippi, and South
Carolina, but Washington revoked
Upon hearing the news, the freed the promises. The land would be
people gathered to discuss their returned to its former owners.
options. For many, the highest
priority was to reunite their Former slave owners also responded
families. Such people set off on in many different ways. Some fled
journeys in desperate efforts to find to Latin America. Others tried to
a husband, wife, child, or parent keep as much of slavery as they
sold away in earlier years. could by whipping and chaining
workers to keep them from leaving.
For others, survival was the highest Still others offered to let former
priority. Freedom came in the slaves stay in their cabins and work
late spring, barely in time to get for wages.
« A New World «
T he Bureau of Refugees,
Freedmen, and Abandoned
Lands—the Freedmen’s Bureau—
conflicts and to draw up labor
contracts between landholders
and laborers. It established schools
oversaw the transition from a slave and coordinated female volunteers
economy to a wage economy. Its who came from the North to teach
agents dispensed medicine, food, in them.
and clothing from the vast stores of
the federal government to displaced In the meantime, events in
white and black Southerners. The Washington undermined the
bureau created courts to adjudicate efforts of black Southerners to

build a new world for themselves. Johnson’s plans for political reunion
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated made no provisions at all for black
in 1865. His successor was Andrew voting. Indeed, his plan threatened
Johnson, who was vice president at to return the South to even greater
the time of Lincoln’s death. Johnson national power than it had held
wanted to attract moderates from before, because the entire African
both the North and the South to a American population would now
political party that would change as be considered when the number of
little as possible. representatives was calculated, not
merely as three-fifths of a people as
Johnson held little sympathy for before the war.
black people or for expansion
of the powers of the federal
government. Johnson saw himself
pursuing Lincoln’s highest goal:
reuniting the Union. He believed
that reunification should start
by winning the support of
white Southerners.
In what became known as

Presidential Reconstruction,
Johnson offered amnesty to former
Confederates who would take
an oath of loyalty to the Union,
restoring their political and civil
rights, and immunizing them
against the seizure of their property
or prosecution for treason. By 1866,
Johnson granted over 7,000 pardons
to wealthy Southerners and
Confederate senior officers who
applied individually for amnesty.
«
ANDREW JOHNSON

« New Laws «
T he North erupted
in outrage when the new
state governments enacted the
or rent land, testify in court, and
practice certain occupations.
so-called black codes, laws for When the members of Congress

the control of the former slaves. convened in December of 1865,
The Southern white legislatures they reacted as many of their
granted only the barest minimum constituents did—with fury. To
of rights to black people: the right Northerners, even those inclined
to marry, to hold property, and to to deal leniently with the South,
sue and be sued. the former Confederates seemed
to deny all the war had decided
Most of the laws decreed what with this blatant attempt to
African Americans could not do: retain racially based laws. Many
move from one job to another, own Northerners blamed Johnson.
«
Suggested Reading
Foner, Reconstruction.
Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long.
Rubin, A Shattered Nation.
1 What do we lose when we separate military history from social and
political history?
2 To what extent did enslaved people free themselves?

17 Reconstruction and the
Freedmen’s Bureau
As bloody and extended and momentous as the American

Civil War had been, it barely began to settle fundamental
issues. Secession was dead and slavery was killed, but it was not
clear what would replace either one.
« The Political Landscape in 1865 «
T he Republicans in
Congress in the spring of
1865 occupied an anomalous
The Republicans also needed to
delay formal reunification until
the former Confederate states
position. They had never been acknowledged that they could
more powerful, thanks to the large not simply restore their former
majorities they had won in the leaders to power. The Republicans
election of 1864, but they were not did not have a plan they could
in session while Andrew Johnson agree upon, and they did not have
oversaw the reunification of the a president who accepted their
United States. fundamental premises.
The Republicans struggled to The Democrats had it easier. They

determine what they should do knew exactly what they wanted:
when Congress reconvened in the quickest and least disruptive
December 1865. The party faced reunification of the nation possible,
irreconcilable needs. Though the smallest change in the status
everyone in the North wanted the of black people, and former
federal soldiers to return home, the Democrats back in power.
Republicans needed troops to stay
in the South to protect the freed Across the former Confederacy in
people and to prevent the rise of the the fall of 1865, voters elected men
rebels to local and state power. they knew and trusted to represent

them in their state legislatures unification of the nation possible.
and in the United States Congress He thought that by removing the
that would convene in December. relatively small number of large
Virtually all of those men had aided and domineering slaveholders, the
the Confederacy in some way, often North would free the majority of
as soldiers killing other Americans. Southern white men who had not
owned slaves and who had little
Because of Johnson’s determination prospect of doing so.
to put the nation back together as
quickly as possible, he had granted Instead, the war had welded white
pardons to most of those newly Southerners together in a way they
elected officials. These pardons had never been unified before.
enraged Republicans. White Southerners shared a bond
forged in the sacrifice, suffering,
Abraham Lincoln had thought that and moments of triumph through
killing slavery would make the true four years of all-consuming war.
« Reconstruction «
T he Republicans needed
to win office and legislation
to enact Reconstruction, but in
insisted on the innovation of
formal contracts between laborer
and landlord. Although these
turn, they needed Reconstruction contracts infuriated Southern
to succeed for them to win again. white men, the bureau ended up
The moderates sought to continue supporting landowners as often as
the Freedmen’s Bureau. The black laborers.
bureau was understaffed and
underfunded—only about 900 The moderates also attempted to
agents covered the entire South— institute a civil rights bill to define
but it offered some measure of hope American citizenship for all those
for former slaves. born in the United States, thereby
including blacks. Citizenship would
The Bureau saw itself as a mediator bring with it equal protection under
between blacks and whites. Its the law, though the bill said nothing
commissioner, General Oliver about black voting.
Howard, advocated education
as the foundation for improving Republicans supported the
living conditions and prospects Freedmen’s Bureau and civil
for blacks. The bureau also rights bills as the starting place
Lecture 17 « Reconstruction and the Freedmen’s Bureau 97

for rebuilding the nation. Johnson making. Republicans closed ranks
vetoed both bills, claiming that to override Johnson’s veto, the first
they violated the rights of the states major legislation enacted over a
and of white Southerners who had presidential veto.
been excluded from the decision
« The Fourteenth Amendment «
T o prevent any future

erosion of black rights,
the Republicans proposed the
This clause offered white
Southerners the choice of
acceptance of black suffrage
Fourteenth Amendment, which, or reduced Congressional
as eventually ratified, guaranteed representation. It also was the first
citizenship to all American-born Constitutional amendment to use
people and equal protection under the word “male,” angering feminist
the law for those citizens. The abolitionists who challenged the
amendment decreed that any state Republicans’ denial of suffrage
that abridged the voting rights of based on sex.
any male inhabitants who were
21 and citizens would suffer a Johnson urged the Southern states
proportionate reduction in its to refuse to ratify the amendment,
congressional representation. advice they promptly followed.
« Retaliation «
T he spring of 1866 saw

riots in Memphis and New
Orleans in which policemen and
to overawe the former slaves, hiding
behind their anonymity to avoid
retaliation. The Klan became
other whites brutally assaulted and in effect a military wing of the
killed black people and burned their Democratic Party, devoting much
homes with little or no provocation. of its energy to warning and killing
It was in 1866, too, that the Ku white and black men who dared
Klux Klan appeared. associate with the Republicans.
Founded in Tennessee, the Ku Johnson toured the country in

Klux Klan dedicated itself to the fall of 1866 to denounce the
maintaining white supremacy. The Republicans and their policies.
Klan dressed in costumes designed Even his supporters saw the tour

as a disaster. The voters rejected The Republicans felt they held
both Johnson and the Democrats, a mandate to push harder than
as the governorship and legislature they had before. They had only a
of every Northern state came under few months, however, until their
the control of the Republicans. In term ended in March. However, on
the next Congress, Republicans March 2, 1867, as time was running
would outnumber Democrats out on the session, they passed the
sufficiently to override any Reconstruction Act.
presidential veto.
« The Reconstruction Act «
T he Reconstruction Act
placed the South under
military rule. All the Southern
Black northerners came to the
South, looking for appointive and
elective office.
states except Tennessee, which
had been readmitted to the Union Throughout the South, most
after it ratified the Fourteenth whites watched, livid, as local black
Amendment, were put in five leaders, ministers, and Republicans
military districts. mobilized black voters in enormous
numbers in the fall of 1867. While
Once order had been instituted, many white Democrats boycotted
then the states would proceed to the elections, the Republicans
elect conventions to draw up new swept into the constitutional
constitutions. The constitutions delegate positions.
written by those conventions had to
accept the Fourteenth Amendment Although many black men voted,
and provide for universal manhood African American delegates made
suffrage. Once a majority of the up only a relatively small part of
state’s citizens and both houses of the convention’s delegates. They
the national Congress had approved held the majority in South Carolina
the new constitution, the state and Louisiana, but much smaller
could be readmitted to the Union. proportions elsewhere.
After word of the Reconstruction About half of the 265 African

Act circulated in the spring and Americans elected as delegates
summer, both black and white to the state conventions had been
men claimed leadership roles free before the war, and most were
within the Republican Party. ministers, artisans, farmers, and

teachers. Over the next two years, however, ominous signs came
these delegates would meet to from the North. Republicans were
write new, much more democratic, dismayed at the election returns
constitutions for their states. in the North in 1867, for the
Democrats’ power surged from
At the very moment of the success coast to coast.
of the Southern Republicans,
« Conclusion «
T he Fifteenth
Amendment, ratified in
February 1870, emerged because
states for another seven years,
Congress launched investigations
into the Ku Klux Klan and put
many white northerners did not forward new civil rights acts, and
want to create black suffrage in Republican governments held on
their own states. It protected the in the face of relentless violence
right to vote, blocking its denial and resistance. However, no new
based “race, color, or previous ideas or initiatives came forward.
condition of servitude.” The only Neither Congress nor new president
way to get black suffrage in the Ulysses S. Grant was willing to pay
South was to write an amendment the price to force the white South
that did not have to win voter into line.
approval, merely approval by
Republican-dominated legislatures. However, measured from 1860,
the accomplishments of 1870—the
By 1870, with the passage of the destruction of American slavery
Fifteenth Amendment and the and the creation of universal
readmission of the final four male suffrage in a reunified
Southern states to complete nation—could hardly be believed.
the steps of reunification— Those accomplishments came
Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, because white Southerners and
and Georgia—the fundamental northern Democrats opposed
changes of Reconstruction had them so bitterly, overplaying every
been established. hand, forcing and enabling the
Republicans to take steps they
The struggles continued. Federal could not have taken otherwise.
troops occupied some Confederate

«
Suggested Reading
Downs, After Appomattox.
Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet.
Rable, But There Was No Peace.
1 A frequently asked question in American history is this: What if Lincoln
had lived?
2 Why did Reconstruction go so much further than people expected but less
than the freed people needed?

18 The Landscape of
the New South
In the so-called New South, the daily texture and rhythm of

life changed for millions of people in a relatively few years. The
consequences of those changes would reverberate on throughout
the South. This lecture looks at life in America leading up to
the New South and how life changed during it.
« Politics and Violence «
W hite Southerners
voted again after
1868, and they challenged the
All of this weakened black and
Republican morale because it
became clear that the Republican
Republicans at every level. They governments could do nothing to
often controlled the courts, and protect them. Only Washington
they owned virtually all the land. could help, and Washington
They sought to persuade their was far away.
black neighbors and employees to
vote with the Democrats. When As a result, most states came
they failed, they often intimidated back under the control of white
or threatened them, eventually Southern Democrats in the late
turning to violence in some cases. 1860s and early 1870s. It was only
the states with the largest black
Southern whites attacked black populations that remained under
and white Republicans alone and Reconstruction: Mississippi, South
in groups. There were assaults, Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. By
lynching, massacres, and homicides. the end of President Grant’s second
The Ku Klux Klan became more administration, in 1876, only South
powerful and spread across the Carolina and Louisiana remained
South in different guises. under Republican governments.

The election of 1876 was a black and white Republicans in the
contested election, with plenty South. In the 1870s and 1880s, the
of corruption on both sides. The Supreme Court virtually nullified
Democrat won the popular vote, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
and the Republican won the Amendments as far as black rights
Electoral College vote. South were concerned.
Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida
submitted competing sets of ballots. White Democrats in the South,
including virtually all white men,
Leading men believed they belonged to a somewhat chaotic
needed a compromise to keep the coalition. It did very little except
country from blowing apart again, keep itself intact. It did so by
and so they reached a deal: The keeping taxes low, recalling at every
Republican would be given the election the supposed horrors of
presidency, but he would withdraw Reconstruction, and playing the
the last federal troops from South race card in every way it could
Carolina and Louisiana, putting all conceive. It gave the emerging
Southern states under Democratic railroads and industries of the
control and ending Reconstruction. South what they asked for and
demanded little in return. A new
The Republicans accepted the political order had emerged.
deal and immediately abandoned
« Railroads «
W atched over by
friendly Democratic
regimes, railroad companies worked
Throughout the 1870s and
early 1880s, Southern railroad
companies experimented with
feverishly in the New South. From ways to accommodate themselves
the end of Reconstruction to the to the different widths of track
end of the century, the South built between North and South. Their
railroads faster than the nation methods proved cumbersome and
as a whole. Different lines raced expensive, so in 1885, the major
from one subregion to another, railroads agreed to standardize
competing for key territories; by nearly 13,000 miles of track of
1890, nine of every ten Southerners eccentric gauge, the great bulk of
lived in a railroad county. which lay in the South.
Lecture 18 « The Landscape of the New South 103

The move was all made on one day: The situation changed after
Sunday, May 30, 1886. Frantic work emancipation with the rapid
crews shoved thousands of miles emergence of country stores in
of rail three inches closer together the late 1860s and early 1870s.
on that day. The integration and National laws written during the
improvement never ceased: Steel Civil War put most banks in the
replaced iron, spur lines reached North and left stores to dispense
into ever more remote areas, and the vast majority of credit in the
new companies pushed aside those Southern countryside.
who got in the way of the system.
With cash scarce, Southern
While some general stores had legislators created lien laws that
grown up at junctions on Southern allowed the use of unplanted crops
railroads in the 1850s, the clientele as collateral for loans to get cotton
and impact of those stores had and corn into the ground. Because
remained small. Slaves could the few Southern banks had little
buy nothing, and small farmers, incentive to lend to small farmers
who spent most of their energy or rural stores, stores operated on
producing for their household or credit dispensed by wholesalers,
local market, had little currency who in turn obtained credit from
and little need for credit. manufacturers or town banks.

« Cotton Demand «
I n the first years after

the war, pent-up world demand
raised the price of cotton. Northern
family, nonperishable, in demand,
seemingly profitable, and easy to
get credit for. The fertilizer brought
manufacturers and commission by the railroads extended the
houses sent agents to drum up growing season in the upcountry
business in the South; they met and reduced the risks of growing
eager clients behind the counters. cotton in places beyond the
Hundreds of new upcountry stores plantation areas.
emerged to loan money, market
crops, and make profits from the By the 1880s, cotton production
rapidly spreading cotton economy. had spread to thousands of new
farms, into the upcountry of
In the immediate postwar years, Georgia, Alabama, and South
farmers could count on cotton; Carolina as well as into the Texas
it was easily grown by a farm and Arkansas frontier.
« New Villages and Cities «
N ew villages emerged in
every corner of the South.
These places served as the stages
number of villages in the South
doubled between 1870 and 1880,
then doubled again by 1900, to
where much of the history of the over 2,000 villages containing 1.2
New South was played out. Every million people.
subregion of the South witnessed
the emergence and evolution of The South’s larger towns and cities
villages, which were hamlets of took off in the 1880s, with the rate
fewer than 2,500 people. of urban growth nearly doubling
the national average, and continued
Villages beginning with a single strong for generations. By 1910,
store, church, or school quickly more than 7 million Southerners
grew into larger settlements. The lived in a town or city.
Lecture 18 « The Landscape of the New South 105

« Industries «
I n 1880, a mass of small

workshops employed about
three-quarters of all Southern
southwest Virginia could look
to the expanding coal mines of
the mountains.
manufacturing wage earners.
Beginning in the 1880s, however, Even cotton-producing regions
the key Southern industries began witnessed the development of a
to take shape. Over the next two newly mechanized and more highly
decades, entrepreneurs established capitalized cotton-processing
factories in a broad arc through business, as 17,000 workers
much of the Piedmont. manned the larger cotton gins
and cottonseed-oil installations in
The coastal plains stretching towns throughout the Black Belt
from Virginia into east Texas and the Cotton Uplands. In each
offered work at sawmills. People subregion, cities provided bases for
in northern Alabama, northern foundries, car shops, and regional
Georgia, and eastern Tennessee manufacturing firms. However, the
earned wages in the coal and iron South endured low wages, absentee
fields, while people in eastern ownership, and little control over
Kentucky, West Virginia, and national policy.
«
Suggested Reading
Emberton, Beyond Redemption.
Thomas, The Iron Way.
Woodward, Origins of the New South.
Question to Consider
1 Would the South have developed differently had slavery ended differently?

19 Farmers and the
Rise of Populism
After Reconstruction straggled to an end in the 1870s,

Southerners struggled to define what would come next.
The great majority of people in the South, black and white,
remained farmers, and farming fell into a prolonged crisis.
In one of the many sad ironies of Southern history, formerly

enslaved people became free just in time to confront two
terrible depressions and a steady decline in the price of the
main products they produced, especially cotton. The result
would be a political revolt that threatened to shake the
political and racial order to its foundations.
« Farming: A Hard Life «
T he New South was a

hard place to be a farmer.
Boosterism, advertising, desire,
and food. Yet the prevailing winds
blew in only one direction: toward
ever-greater participation in
liens, mortgages, and stock laws the market.
pushed farmers to concentrate on
producing cash crops. Caution, Ideally, a farmer was able to work
lack of cash, memories of more his way up from landless laborer
self-contained homesteads, and low to sharecropper to renter to
cotton prices pushed them away. landowner. Farm owners tended
to stay on the farms they built up,
Farmers moved between the two but more than half of the region’s
poles, trying varying mixtures of share tenants lived for a year or
crops, foodstuffs, and livestock. less on each farm they worked.
They continually tacked a course Farm laborers moved even more
between market and home, cotton frequently, often seasonally, to
Lecture 19 « Farmers and the Rise of Populism 107

wherever work could be found. share tenants were the most mobile
Race cut across these patterns of of rural Southerners and black
mobility in surprising ways: White landowners the least likely to move.
« Crowding «
D espite all the people

leaving Southern
communities, large parts of the
return precisely because so many
more people were growing it.
rural South rapidly became The average size of Southern

overcrowded. The rural South farms shrank every year as parents
became caught in a demographic divided old farms for their children.
and economic vise. Growing Sons turned to the only alternative
numbers of people tried to make to going to town or moving away:
a living on the land, but the crops starting out as a tenant on someone
they grew paid an ever-declining else’s land.
« The Labor Force «
T he workers in the
Mississippi Delta and the
Louisiana sugar country, the
young men just starting out had
little choice but to work as laborers.
places with the greatest seasonal Planters bewailed the difficulties

demand and the greatest rewards they faced. Every year brought
for workers, tended to fit a common renegotiation with laborers,
pattern. About three-quarters of abandonment by tenants, and
the male laborers in those places competition with other planters for
in 1890 were black, about three- both. Land often brought meager
quarters were single, and about returns to its owners.
three-quarters were under 20
years old. Women, black and white, found
few opportunities to earn money
Most agricultural laborers in the countryside. Even for rural
throughout the South were young black women within male-headed
and single, although in several households, the distinction
states, whites made up over half of between men’s work and women’s
the total of agricultural laborers. work was not as marked as in
Whatever their race, most landless white households.

White landlords, and many black both cropper and landlord figured
husbands, expected black women the labor of the household’s women
to work regularly in the fields into their calculations: The harder
as well as to perform whatever the women worked, the more land
domestic labor they had time left the family could crop.
for. At contract negotiation time,
« Black Landholders «
P erhaps the most

anomalous group in the New
South were black landholders,
of black landowners continued
to mount throughout the first
decade of the 20th century, until it
people whose experience seemed to reached its all-time peak in 1910.
contradict the downward spiral of In that year, 175,000 blacks were
tenantry experienced by so many full owners. Another 43,000 were
whites. Despite the enormous odds partial owners, while 670,000
facing them, a considerable number remained sharecroppers.
of black farmers managed to buy
their own land. The proportions of black farmers
who owned land were greatest in
In 1900, the first year for which the Upper South, along the coastal
region-wide numbers were regions, and in the trans-Mississippi
collected, about a quarter of all states. Very few blacks owned land
Southern black farmers owned the in the Black Belt that cut across
land they worked. The number the region.
« The Mississippi Delta «
T he Mississippi Delta
followed a surprising path
through the New South era. As
made feasible by the levees,
completed in 1886, that reduced the
danger of rampant flooding.
late as the 1880s, black laborers
still worked to clear the Delta of its The business conglomerates and
canebrakes and cypress. Rail lines wealthy individuals who owned
drove deep into rich land that had this newly broken land hired
never been farmed before. Workers resident managers to oversee every
strung miles of barbed wire around detail of the plantations’ business.
the perimeters of new plantations Plantation stores provided the only

access workers had to food and they earned from clearing land and
other commodities, for every acre cutting timber; for a while, more
of land and every tool belonged to blacks than whites owned land there.
the management.
Soon, though, the delta fell under
This work paid well, and black the control of wealthy white
workers rushed to the delta, an area men, who bought up the land
that experienced one of the highest the black workers had cleared
rates of population growth of any and consolidated it into large
part of the South. In the 1880s and plantations. The delta went from
1890s, black farmers were able to being a place of promise to a place
buy land in the delta with money of disappointment and poverty.
« Labor Changes «
E ven though they

produced more goods, paid
more taxes, and cast more votes,
The Knights of Labor grew up
rapidly in the 1880s as well.
They called for opposition to the
farmers’ voices often seemed monopolies that had come to
drowned out. They felt abused dominate large parts of the national
by both of the major parties and economy after Reconstruction.
exploited by every level of business They worked for the eight-hour
from national corporations to local day, the abolition of convict labor,
storekeepers. child labor laws, and equal pay
for women doing the same work
Farmers formed organizations as men. They were open to black
as early as the 1870s to redress as well as white members, and
some of these problems. Early ones immigrants as well as native people.
focused on the currency and called
themselves greenbackers because In the 1880s, the Farmers Alliance
they wanted to use the paper formed in Texas. For a number of
currency introduced in the Civil years, the Farmers Alliance made
War to expand the money supply great progress across the South, but
and raise the prices of the crops the relentless decline in cotton prices
they produced. Their enemies were in the early 1890s put great pressure
the bondholders, who insisted on on them. Men and women, unable to
returning to a gold standard that afford the dues, began withdrawing.
would repay their investments at a Their cooperatives collapsed under
higher and more certain rate. debts they could not repay.

« The Populist Party «
S ome political leaders

came in to harvest the
discontent. A third party was
especially in North Carolina.
Leaders decided to merge with
the Democrats in 1896 in search
the answer, they said, for white of free silver, a halfway point
Southerners detested Republicans between the gold standard and
and the Democrats had proven greenbacks. Their candidate,
themselves greedy and neglectful of William Jennings Bryan, lost and
Southern farmers. In 1892, many the Populists dissolved. When they
farmers joined the Populist Party. did, farmers in the South found
themselves without a voice. They
The Populists won important would be Democrats or they would
elections at the state levels in 1894, be nothing.
«
Suggested Reading
Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth.
Goodwyn, Democratic Promise.
Postel, The Populist Vision.
1 How did farming in the South differ from farming elsewhere in the nation?
2 How could the large political revolt of populism take place in such a
conservative place as the New South?

20 The Invention of Segregation
Black Southerners faced opposition, resistance, and obstacles

in every facet of their lives, whether in slavery, wartime, or
Reconstruction. However, segregation, as it came to be known
in the 20th century, did not exist. This lecture looks at how
formal laws that separated people by race came to be created,
rationalized, and enforced.
« Background «
I nitially, few laws

circumscribed day-to-day rural
race relations. Rural roads, country
of the relations between the races
had been established quickly after
emancipation. Schools, poor houses,
stores, and cotton gins were not orphanages, and hospitals, founded
segregated; hunters and fishermen to help people who had once been
respected rules of fair play, slaves, were usually separated by
regardless of race. Corn shuckings race at their inception.
saw black and white men working
around the same fire and black Cities segregated cemeteries
and white women cooking over the and parks; counties segregated
same food, though members of the courthouses. Churches quickly
two races went to separate tables broke into different congregations
when it came time to eat. for blacks and whites. Hotels served
one race only; blacks could see plays
However, in a quest to control the only from the balcony or separate
relations between the races, white seats; restaurants served one race
Southerners enacted one law after or served whites and blacks in
another to proscribe contact among different rooms.
blacks and whites. Some aspects

Even if the general boundaries by the 1880s. The notion of a
of race relations had been completely circumscribed world
drawn early on, though, many of white and black had not yet
decisions had yet to be made become entrenched.
« Railroad Segregation «
I n the New South, most of

the debates about race relations
focused on the railroads. While some
no choice but to use the same
railroads. As the number of
railroads proliferated in the 1880s,
blacks resisted their exclusion from segregation became a matter of
white-owned hotels and restaurants, statewide attention. The result
they could usually find, and often was the first wave of segregation
preferred, accommodations in black- laws that affected virtually the
run businesses. entire South, as nine Southern
states enacted railroad segregation
Travel was a different story, laws in the years between
for members of both races had 1887 and 1891.
« Sexuality and Segregation «
T he history of
segregation shows that the
more closely linked to sexuality,
Places where people of only one
gender associated with one another,
though, tended to have relaxed
the more likely was a place to be racial barriers. Part of the lowered
segregated. At one extreme was the boundary grew out of the necessity
private home, where the intimacies whites perceived in the use of black
of the parlor, the dining table, labor, but blacks were permitted in
and bedroom were never shared kitchens and nurseries because those
with blacks as equals. Exclusive rooms saw the interaction only of
hotels, restaurants, and darkened white women and black women.
theaters, which mimicked the quiet
and privacy of the home, also saw Male preserves, for their part,
virtually no racial mixing. Schools, were often barely segregated at all:
where children of both genders Bars, racetracks, and boxing rings
associated in terms of intimacy and featured the presence of blacks
equality, saw early and consistent among whites. Some houses of
segregation. prostitution profited directly from
Lecture 20 « The Invention of Segregation 113

the sexual attraction black women to the callous abuse of black women
held for some white men. by white men as soon as slavery
ended. By moving into their own
In general, interracial sex and homes and out of the quarters,
marriage came to be far more black families reduced the access
opposed by both blacks and whites white men had to black women.
as the decades passed. Whites
thought black people were widely Interracial sex by no means ended,
infected with venereal disease; though the sexual contact between
that fear discouraged white men the races seems to have shifted from
who might otherwise have pursued plantations to the well-defined
black women. terrain of stores and towns, where
white men felt freer to proposition
For their part, black women and black women. In such places, white
men strengthened their resistance men harassed black women.

« Railroad Segregation, Part 2 «
T he railroad became
a point of focus because
blacks were seeking first-class
“separate but equal,” the foundation
of Southern segregation for
generations to follow.
accommodations where women
as well as men traveled. In this With every year in the 1880s,
space, blacks appeared not as dirty black literacy, black wealth, black
workers but as well-dressed and businesses, black higher education,
attractive ladies and gentlemen. and black landowning all increased
Second-class cars were different, substantially. When they traveled,
filled with drinking, swearing, these self-consciously respectable
and spitting—and predominately people wanted to be with other
male passengers. respectable people, black and white.
However, white people found this
When black families bought tickets to be too assertive and threatening.
for the first-class car, they could
be accosted, assaulted, expelled at In the 1880s, then, blacks
any point along the journey. When confronted a dangerous and
they were, they often sued the uncertain situation every time
railroads and won. they bought a first-class ticket to
ride on a Southern railroad. Each
The railroads did not want to police road had its own customs and
Southern race relations. They policy, and the events on the train
also did not want the expense of might depend on the proclivity
running separate cars for black of the conductor or, worse, the
people and white people. The mood and make-up of the white
Southern legislatures decided passengers who happened to be on
that the railroads could divide the board. Although the courts upheld
second-class cars with a partition the rights of several blacks who
and declare half of that car as had the means to take their cases
first-class for black people only, so to court, many blacks suffered
long as the accommodations were discrimination, intimidation, and
supposedly equal. Thus was born violence in the meantime.

« Segregation Spreads «
S egregation quickly
spread in Southern cities,
and the newer the city, the more
while keeping the races separate.
They found their answer, and their
model, in the American South.
thoroughly it was segregated. The
new streetcars were first, followed From the immediate postwar years
by swimming pools and other on, in growing numbers as the years
forms of recreation. passed, restless blacks moved to
the North as well as to other places
By 1910, segregation had become in the South. As a result, in the
the new legal norm. Visitors from 1890s and 1900s, every Southern
South Africa came to see how a state except Mississippi, Alabama,
modern, mobile, and dynamic and Florida registered high rates of
biracial society could operate black outmigration.

Black mobility came at a cost to were often pulled in strongly
black families. For young black divergent directions by the hope of
men, the best chances to make a decent living.
a decent living appeared where
lumber camps, sawmill towns, Partly in response to the powerful
large delta plantations, and steel centrifugal forces pulling against
mills used large numbers of wage the family, blacks adopted flexible
laborers. Black women found the domestic arrangements. As young
best jobs in the domestic work adults left the household, family
available in the small towns of the heads invited in other people to
South, where most white families take their place. Almost a quarter
employed a cook or washerwoman. of the black households in one
study included blood relations
As a result, the heavily black parts other than children, and about
of the South from Virginia to a third of all families lived near
Mississippi contained the largest other relatives. Black families also
proportion of women relative to relied heavily on remarriage to
men in the entire country. The keep households complete, as a
gender imbalance among blacks life expectancy of only 33 years
throughout the South, furthermore, repeatedly undermined the deepest
was far greater than among of commitments.
whites; black men and women
«
Suggested Reading
Welke, Recasting American Liberty.
Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
1 Are you struck more by the continuity or discontinuity in relations
between black Southerners and white Southerners in the New South?
2 How did white Southerners who considered themselves of good will toward
black Southerners justify segregation?

21 Lynching and
Disfranchisement
Segregation would endure as the most visible manifestation of

the conflict between white Southerners and black Southerners
in the New South, but two other manifestations of that
conflict were profoundly important. One manifestation
was lynching, the illegal execution of alleged criminals by
self-proclaimed vigilantes. The other manifestation was
disfranchisement, the systematic denial of the vote by legal
and even constitutional means. Lynching was lawlessness;
disfranchisement was the misuse of law.
« Background «
I n the time period

discussed in this lecture,
Southern whites were convinced
weapons seemed everywhere. Guns,
as well as life, were cheap.
that it was black people who In the turbulent South of the 1880s
bred the violence that hung over and early 1890s, when politics and
the South. Virtually every issue economic turmoil constantly threw
of every Southern newspaper people into conflict, such weaponry
contained an account of black and violence could easily spark
wrongdoing; if no episode from interracial bloodshed. Most of that
nearby could be found, episodes violence was directed by whites
were imported from as far away against blacks, whether in barroom
as necessary. shootings, political assassinations,
labor disputes, or because of some
The New South was a notoriously real or imaginary breach of the
violent place. Homicide rates racial code. When blacks did turn
among both blacks and whites were against whites, they risked terrible
the highest in the country. Lethal retribution from other whites.

« Lynching «
T he visibility and
ferocity of lynching assumed
new proportions in the 1880s
than in others. Two areas witnessed
especially high rates of lynchings:
the Gulf plain stretching from
and 1890s. One peak of lynching Florida to Texas, and the cotton
appears to have occurred in the uplands of Mississippi, Louisiana,
early 1880s and another in the years Arkansas, and Texas.
around 1890.
These subregions had an extremely
Lynchings were far more likely to low rural population density,
occur in some regions of the South often only half that of states in
Lecture 21 « Lynching and Disfranchisement 119

the east. In the last two decades of Lynching served as a method of law
the 19th century, they experienced enforcement in sparsely populated
tremendous rates of black places where white people felt
population increase. especially insecure.
The counties most likely to witness Whites dreaded the idea that black
lynchings had scattered farms where criminals could get away with
many black newcomers lived and harming a white person without
worked. Those counties were also being punished. The sporadic
likely to have few towns, weak law violence of lynching was a way for
enforcement, poor communication white people to reconcile weak
with the outside, and high levels of governments with a demand for
transiency among both races. an impossibly high level of racial
mastery. It was a way to terrorize
Such a setting fostered the fear blacks into acquiescence by brutally
and insecurity that fed lynching killing those who intentionally
at the same time it removed the or accidentally stepped over
few checks that helped dissuade some invisible and shifting line of
would-be lynchers elsewhere. permissible behavior.
Jesse Washington
was lynched in Waco,
Texas, on May 15, 1916.
He was 18 years old.

Although most lynchings were learned early in their lives that they
inflicted in response to alleged could at any time be grabbed by a
murder, most of the rhetoric and white mob.
justification focused on the sexual
assault of white women by blacks. That atmosphere, and that threat,
That assault sometimes involved would endure for decades into
rape, while at other times a mere the 20th century. The lynching of
look or word was enough to Emmett Till in the 1950s helped
justify death. trigger the modern civil rights
movement. The display of his body
Just as white girls and women in an open casket in Chicago, with
were raised to fear strange black the picture of his disfigured face
men, so were black boys and men published in African American
taught to avoid any situation where magazine, shamed the nation and
they might be falsely accused. electrified protest.
For generations, young black men
« Disfranchisement «
I n the same years that

statewide railroad segregation
and lynching peaked, the South
aspiration. A constitutional
convention could break this cycle
by doing away with the need for
embarked on the constitutional force altogether.
disfranchisement of black voters.
The prospect facing the Democrats Mississippi held the first
was one of perpetual turmoil, disfranchising convention in 1890.
violence, dispute, factionalism, After a great deal of conflict and
and growing opposition. They criticism, the Mississippi legislators
wanted to find some way to cobbled together a combination of
purge the black vote without poll taxes, residential requirements,
bringing down on themselves local registration to bypass federal
the Republican-controlled power officials, and a selective use of
of the federal government. criminal records.
Mississippi took the first steps The convention was not satisfied,
toward disfranchisement. Many though, until it had tacked on
white Mississippians had grown one final and novel provision: the
weary of the constant fraud and so-called understanding clause.
violence they used to check black An aspiring voter had either to

be able to read any section of the instead merely proclaiming it the
state constitution or to understand law of the state.
that section when it was read to
him. The idea was that illiterate After Virginia’s convention, the
whites could understand the Southern mania for constitutional
constitution to the satisfaction of revision cooled, in large part
the white registrar, while even a because every Southern state
literate black man would find it managed to limit the suffrage
difficult to persuade the official of in one way or another by 1908.
his understanding. Texas instituted a poll tax and
secret ballot law that seriously
To their credit, many white cut into the electorate. In 1908,
Mississippians rejected such ideas. Georgia added a literacy test and
However, it was too late to turn a property qualification to its
back. The new convention did longstanding poll tax.
everything the Democrats hoped it
would do and met little resistance By the time Georgia acted, every
from the courts. As a result, other state of the former Confederacy
Southern states followed over the had instituted a poll tax. That tax,
next decade, starting with South the oldest tool of the disfranchisers,
Carolina and then Louisiana. Each also proved to be the most effective
piled on a new kind of corruption. of all the laws enacted in the heated
legislatures and conventions of the
Alabama joined the process in New South. Each kind of law did its
1900, and Virginia followed share of defeating or discouraging
in 1901. The convention in one more kind of voter; by and
Virginia eventually agreed on large, the more restrictions a state
a long residency requirement, piled up, the lower the proportion
a cumulative poll tax paid of eligible men who voted.
six months in advance, and a
grandfather clause. By the first decade of the 20th
century, the Southern electorate
As Virginia’s constitutional had been transformed from what
convention wound down, it met it had been 20 years earlier. More
much of the same derision and than two-thirds of adult Southern
disappointment that confronted males had voted in the 1880s, and
its counterparts across the South. that proportion had risen to nearly
Critics lambasted the delegates for three-quarters of the electorate in
not having the nerve to submit the the 1890s in states that had not yet
document to the people of Virginia, restricted the franchise.

In the early years of the 20th near invisibility in many states. In
century, by contrast, fewer than one all the states that instituted these
man in three voted in the South. laws, turnout hovered between
The percentage of voters who cast 15 and 34 percent. That situation
a ballot for someone other than a was not to change significantly
Democrat declined to the point of for generations.
«
Suggested Reading
Feimster, Southern Horrors.
Perman, Struggle for Mastery.
Wood, Lynching and Spectacle.
Question to Consider
1 Why did white Americans not criticize disfranchisement
more strenuously?

22 Religious Faith in
the New South
In the midst of all the turmoil in the New South, religious

faith remained the touchstone for many people, black and
white. This lecture looks at how religious faith and language
permeated the lives of the people of the New South.
« Overview «
P eople in the New South

worshipped in a wide variety
of ways. Some counties, especially
Great variability in church
membership marked the South.
In some rural communities, only
those on the western edge of the about 10 percent of the residents
South, held only a few Southern belonged to a church, while in
Baptist and Southern Methodist others, nearly 60 percent claimed
congregations. Counties in the membership. A higher percentage
Piedmont, on the other hand, of city dwellers belonged to
often contained a wide diversity of churches than did people in
older denominations, ranging from the countryside.
Lutherans to Quakers to Jews.
The churches did not enjoy an
In Louisiana, Catholics easy dominion over the South.
predominated over large areas. Membership was difficult to
In the mountains, where maintain, and ministers often
Catholics and Jews were rare, stayed at a church only a year
a constantly changing array of or two before moving on to
Baptist congregations flourished greener pastures. About half
and differed heatedly over issues were forced to work other jobs to
outsiders could barely understand. support themselves.

Black churches confronted all the demands of young assertive
the problems white churches blacks and the caution of more
confronted, plus more. Black conservative older leaders. Black
church leaders constantly ministers were central figures in
negotiated between the desire of their communities, with a relative
their congregations for autonomy importance far greater than that of
and the need of their churches their white counterparts.
for money. They also balanced
« Multiplying Congregations «
O ver time, the number

of congregations multiplied
in response to competing loyalties.
three or four different churches a
month, going to wherever a sermon
could be heard. Each church
Members of some Protestant preached the same morality, and
denominations viewed others people could take satisfaction
with mild disdain. The Baptists in feeling part of a larger
reciprocated. Protestant Christianity.
Members of other Protestant On the other hand, many people

denominations were less suspicious took the theological distinctions
of one another. It was not among the Baptists, Methodists,
uncommon for people to attend and Presbyterians quite seriously.
Lecture 22 « Religious Faith in the New South 125

Differences over whether the Bible should be a matter of reflection,
demanded complete immersion reason, quiet joy, and peace.
during baptism, or whether or not Beautiful singing, stained-glass
infants should be baptized, could windows, an educated minister,
pit neighbor against neighbor and and organizations to aid the
church against church. unfortunate could only help
Christ’s cause. Many other people,
The rapidly proliferating though, became increasingly
churches of the South’s major suspicious of these innovations, or
denominations stressed that faith what they saw as ostentation.
« The Holiness Movement «
T he most volatile
conflict came in the holiness
movement within the Methodist
scholarship, fine buildings, and
social pretension.
church. Holiness doctrines held In 1894, the leaders of the

that a Christian would be uneasy Methodist church forced its bishops
until he or she had received a to choose between holiness and the
second blessing—that is, a sign that church hierarchy. The Methodist
a person had achieved holiness leadership decreed that no preacher
through speaking in tongues could enter another’s territory
or otherwise achieved direct without the invitation of the
connection with God. A sanctified regular pastor, thus undercutting
person would not be sinless, but the influence of itinerant
would enjoy love from Jesus in a holiness evangelists.
new state of grace and in a more
ascetic and disciplined life. While the Methodists reclaimed
official leadership of churches and
Southern holiness began among districts, devout holiness people
relatively educated people within quickly established their own
the Methodist churches. They churches and named their own
feared that the boundary between pastors. Some managed to establish
the church and the world was dominion over their communities
growing too indistinct. They and even expand, while others
feared that the churches were too were persecuted and crushed by
susceptible to the new biblical their opponents.

The holiness churches challenged While the doctrine of holiness
dominant gender relationships, began in the Methodist church,
valuing faith over domestic a broader quest for a more vital
loyalty and giving women a more religion began in sects and
prominent place. A number of denominations that had nothing
women seized the opportunity and to do with Methodism. One of
embarked upon bold ministries. the first and most powerful began
Roughly one-third of the holiness in 1886, and eventually became
preachers were women. known as the Church of God.
Lecture 22 « Religious Faith in the New South 127

« Black Southerners «
B lack Southerners
rushed to embrace the
holiness movement on their own
This was the first holiness
church, black or white, to become
legally chartered.
terms. Several black congregations
appeared in the South after 1890. Armed with this advantage, the
The most prominent of these new Church of God in Christ was able
black churches became the Church to win clergy rates on railroads
of God in Christ. Created in the and perform legal marriages.
mid-1890s, it accepted the practice White ministers from independent
of foot washing and speaking holiness congregations sought
in tongues. and received ordination from
the black church. The Church of
The two black leaders of the God in Christ was the holiness
church soon led a holiness revival church most receptive to musical
of their own in a Mississippi gin experimentation, encouraging
house. They then incorporated the instruments and music related to
new denomination in Memphis. ragtime, blues, and jazz.
«
Suggested Reading
Anderson, Visions of the Disinherited.
Ownby, Subduing Satan.
Wilson, Baptized in Blood.
1 When did the South become the Bible Belt? What made it different from
other parts of the country?
2 Was Christianity a helpful bridge between black and white Southerners?

23 Literature and Music
of the New South
The Gilded Age in the United States saw the emergence of

several new kinds of popular culture. Much of it was mass-
produced for a new commercial market, spreading sheet music,
short stories, dime novels, and traveling shows across the vast
new nation. The American South became an eager participant
in that new mass culture, and this lecture looks at some
notable examples.
« Fiction «
T homas Nelson Page was

one of the most popular
authors in America in the late 19th
century. A young lawyer, he broke
into prominence with a poem,
written in black dialect, which
celebrated the glorious life of the
antebellum era. Page followed with
enormously successful stories that
fantasized about the Old South,
indulging in unbridled glorifications
of a lost childhood, lost innocence,
and a lost civilization.
Page was just what editors and readers

had in mind. Soon, magazines were
filled with fiction that celebrated
the old order with the formulaic and
«
uncritical voice of Page. THOMAS NELSON PAGE
Lecture 23 « Literature and Music of the New South 129
Fiction became one of the first Southern women, discovered them.
Southern products that could Charles W. Chesnutt, an African
hold its own in the national American writer, is also admired
marketplace. So-called local color now for his subtle explorations of
literature dominated the national race in the New South in books
literary scene in these decades. By such as The House Behind the Cedars.
putting words into the mouths of
ex-slaves, former secessionists, and
mountaineers, authors could tame
these outcasts. The caricatures
made these people less threatening.
The most prominent of the new

Southern authors who used local
color to connect with a national
audience was Joel Chandler Harris,
a young white editor in Atlanta.
Harris created the character of
Uncle Remus, a fictional elderly
black man who told stories.
Harris’s work was a huge hit, in

part because it avoided some of
the sentimentality of Thomas «
Nelson Page. Harris himself CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
said that he merely conveyed
stories he had heard from black Unfortunately, the book that had
Southerners he had known. He the largest impact at the time
was not unsympathetic to those turned out to be The Leopard’s
black people, clearly believing Spots, published by Thomas Dixon
them wise in ways white people in 1901, after he walked out in
seldom acknowledged. protest of a theatrical production
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.* Dixon
Other popular writers emerged determined that he would write
from the South, though their a rebuttal, showing slavery, war,
reputations have not endured. Ellen and Reconstruction from the
Glasgow and Kate Chopin fell into white Southern point of view.
neglect until later feminist writers, The Leopard’s Spots sold nearly a
impressed with their bold stories of million copies.

Dixon followed with The Clansman It was in this world of the 1890s
in 1906.* That book would provide that William Faulkner came of
the foundation for D. W. Griffith’s age in Oxford, Mississippi. After
Birth of a Nation, which came out in an aborted career as a pilot in
1915 and became a sensation as the World War I, Faulkner returned
first great American film. It also home and wrote some of the
sparked a rebirth of the Ku Klux greatest novels in the English
Klan and would be seen for the next language in the 1920s and 1930s.
century as a remarkably racist film His work converted the outsized
that poisoned American culture dramas of the South in the 19th
with the belief that Reconstruction century into pieces that spoke of
had been a gross violation of the power of the past far after that
virtuous white Southerners. past had supposedly died.
* The video erroneously attributes the authorship of The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman to
Thomas Nelson Page.

« Music in General «
M usic offered some

otherwise marginal
people of the New South their
Musical instruments were
among the first mass-produced
commodities Southerners bought.
best opportunity to be heard. The ledger books of Southern
Young black men of the cities and stores were filled with entries
plantation districts seized on music marking the sale of fiddle, guitar,
as their chance for freedom and and banjo strings, or the sale of the
respect. Discontented people of instruments themselves, many for
both races and genders made new less than a dollar.
churches their own and created new
forms of music there. The South Bouncy popular music filled
became the crucible for the blues, parlors, stages, tents, and streets
jazz, and country music that were to in the New South. Every town
spread throughout the world. Those of any size had an opera house,
who played such music incorporated and traveling performers
new ideas and styles from outside brought shows of variable talent
the South into their own distinctly to their stages. Sentimental
Southern vocabularies. songs proliferated.

« Jazz «
B lack music in New

Orleans in the 1890s and early
1900s had begun to sound like what
an occasional piano accompanied
the hymns.
became known as jazz. However, it Bolden put together his own band
was not yet a coherent style. A key early on, combining a bass, guitar,
figure in the crystallization of the clarinet, cornet, and sometimes a
music later to be known as jazz was violin. This band played at dances
Charles Bolden. and parties. While earlier dance
bands had featured the fiddle,
Born in New Orleans in 1877, close guitar, and banjo, Bolden relegated
to the railroad depot, Bolden was of those string instruments to the
the postwar generation, attending rhythm section and featured the
school and taking formal lessons brass instruments instead.
on the cornet. Yet Bolden was old
enough to have heard the black At first, some listeners who were
musicians who played African steeped in the European styles
drums and other instruments found Bolden’s experiments
in the city up through the early distasteful, but younger blacks
1880s, directly conveying African responded with enthusiasm.
styles. Bolden picked up further Bolden, working as a plasterer in his
influences at the barbershops of his day job, began to build a following.
neighborhood, where men played Bolden’s band is considered to be
guitars and fiddles while waiting the earliest jazz band because it
for work, and at the Baptist church contained the largest stretches
he attended, where clapping and of improvisation.
« White Southern Music «
J ust as Southern black

musicians constantly remade
The older ballads brought to the
South by British settlers recounted
the music they heard, so did tragic events in a relatively
Southern white musicians. detached voice, telling of distant
Sentimental parlor songs had an happenings in the third person.
immediate appeal in the South, The sentimental parlor songs of
where the sad lyrics and music the Gilded Age, on the other hand,
resonated with evangelical religion. spoke of the loss of children and

mothers in an intimate language simplifying the music, changing
and music that proved comforting the key, and altering names
to the people of the time. to fit a more familiar context.
Songs that came to be known as
Although these parlor songs were mainstays of country music—such
written by and for Northern as “Wildwood Flower” and “Little
middleclass audiences, Southerners Rosewood Casket”—began as
quickly made them their own by parlor songs.
« Religious Music «
D espite the well-known

ferment in jazz, blues, and
country styles, religious music
defeat and the loss of so many
loved ones made the shape-note
hymns even more powerful. New
was the most widespread form of gospel music was soon adopted by
popular music in the South at the dissident religious groups in the
turn of the century. Many of the South, who seized on the music as
lyrics reflected their origins in their own and experimented with
18th-century English hymns, with its possibilities.
a strong emphasis on the depravity
of man and the overwhelming In congregations scattered across
strength of God. the region, people were eager for a
more vital religion and for music
Southerners were drawn to such suitable to its stirring message.
a view of the world and made A. J. Showalter’s “Leaning on the
the hymns their own, compiling Everlasting Arms” became one
books as early as the 1840s for of the most popular songs of new
Southern audiences, and selecting congregations, with its catchy
those hymns with proven appeal in chorus and driving rhythm. This
the region. religious music, in turn, influenced
and mixed with secular music. Any
The post–Civil War years found popular performer could play and
no diminution of the tradition. sing gospel music alongside all the
If anything, the experience of other forms.

«
Suggested Reading
Gioia, The History of Jazz
Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A.
Palmer, Deep Blues
1 How could the South be creative culturally when it was relatively backward?
2 How much did white Southerners and black Southerners share culturally?

24 The Legacies of the
Southern Saga
Because the South has been the place where the greatest
American problems have lived—slavery, secession, and
segregation—the South has been a place many Americans
have not wanted to see too clearly. However, as this lecture
shows, the South is a fundamental part of the nation’s DNA.
This lecture focuses on the South at the end of the 1800s and
beginning of the 1900s.
« Sports «
T he integration of the
South into the economy
and mass culture of the nation
The South eagerly embraced each
of these sports, finding that they fit
well with a longstanding Southern
accelerated in the late 1890s and fascination with physical display
early 1900s. Sports serve as an and competition. Southerners,
example. recognizing that they had begun
a bit late, tried to make up for lost
Sports became established in time. By 1900, sports had assumed
the 1890s as the embodiment of an important place in the public
everything new, youthful, and culture of the region.
wholesome in the United States.
Men turned to baseball, boxing, A fascination with baseball came
and football as arenas to prove first, then boxing, and then
their masculinity; women turned football. Unlike baseball, football
to bicycles, calisthenics, and entered at the top of the Southern
swimming as evidence of their social order and trickled down. The
fashionable healthfulness. game began at Northern colleges,
migrated to Southern colleges,
then slowly worked its way into

the region’s high schools, where spectacle in the South, generating
interest built quickly and never interest far beyond the scattered
flagged. By the turn of the century, campuses of the region.
college football had become a major
« Education «
E ducation and towns

had offered opportunities
for a postwar generation of black
Washington’s philosophy rested
on a faith in the training of young
black people in practical skills. For
Southerners to develop a stronger the great majority, Washington
sense of their own abilities and argued, it was far better to learn
the injustices they faced, yet black how to make bricks or how to cook
Southerners confronted mounting than it was to learn literature,
legal and illegal restrictions in every foreign languages, or philosophy. He
facet of their lives. They struggled did not oppose all higher education
to find a way to persuade whites for black youths, but he did believe
that such restrictions hurt the that scarce resources should be
entire society. concentrated on industrial training.
The most prominent voice belonged

to Booker T. Washington, who
leaped to national fame in 1895.
That year, he spoke from an
impressive platform: Atlanta’s
Cotton States and International
Exposition, a fair staged in the
newest city of the New South.
Washington worked closely with

local whites and blacks to build the
Tuskegee Institute into a successful
school. He won support from
Alabama’s legislature and treaded
a crooked and narrow line between
assertion and accommodation.
«
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Lecture 24 « The Legacies of the Southern Saga 137

In the 1880s, he had publicly Washington encouraged boycotts
attacked the segregation of railroad because such resistance fell in
cars. In the year before his trip to the economic rather than the
Atlanta, he had encouraged blacks political realm. It sought to use
to boycott streetcar companies that the leverage of blacks as paying
would separate the races. customers to win their fair rights in
the marketplace.
« Plessy v. Ferguson «
M ost of the country

paid little attention when
the Supreme Court announced
Segregation would have proceeded
without Plessy v. Ferguson, without
outright endorsement, but Plessy
the Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but- v. Ferguson was welcome to those
equal decision in 1896. The law white Southerners who still cared
seemed merely to ratify the course for what the rest of the nation
of race relations in the years since thought, and for the validation
Reconstruction. The separate-but- of federal law. The decision
equal doctrine encouraged every encouraged white progressives
level of government in the white as well as white reactionaries to
South to turn to segregation as a continue the relentless division
matter of first resort. between the races, just as the
Supreme Court tolerated poll taxes
and literacy tests.
« The Spanish-American War «
W hite Southerners
joined with other
white Americans in the Spanish-
from Spain, a conflict waged during
the South’s Reconstruction years,
broke out anew in the mid-1890s.
American War.
The sinking of the Maine at the
News of the escalation of tensions beginning of 1898 forced President
with Spain quickly took over the William McKinley and the nation
front page in the 1890s. A conflict into action. Across the country,
that had been growing ever since black people saw in the war a
the end of an unsuccessful attempt chance to claim their rightful
by Cuba to gain its independence place in America and display their

patriotism. Other black spokesmen with one another. However, they
denigrated such notions as discovered that they had grown
wishful thinking. When President more alike than they had expected.
McKinley, a Union veteran, toured The war also brought blacks and
the South in search of support for whites of all regions into contact.
the treaty with Spain, he played up They discovered, much to the
reconciliation for all it was worth dismay of blacks, that they were
even farther apart than they
The war brought Southern and had imagined.
Northern whites into contact
« Monuments «
T he turn of the
century saw the peak of
the cult of the Confederacy. The
The celebration of Confederate
veterans deemphasized the fight
to end slavery and replacing it
United Confederate Veterans with an emphasis on the shared
(UCV) organized in 1889, experience of battle. The Civil
and by 1896, three-quarters War came to seem not unlike a
of the counties in the former ball game, its importance based on
Confederate states could claim the sportsmanship and effort its
camps of the UCV. Somewhere participants displayed rather than
between a fourth and a third of all on the questions of fundamental
living veterans joined. human importance for which
they fought.
By 1895, the United Daughters
of the Confederacy (UDC) had
organized. Towns across the South,
often following the lead of the UCV
or the UDC, raised funds for the
erection of Civil War monuments.
While early postwar monuments
were located in cemeteries, the new
monuments went up in the center
of town. In 1890, a thousand whites
dragged, by rope and hand, a new
statue of Robert E. Lee to its site
in Richmond.
Lecture 24 « The Legacies of the Southern Saga 139

« The 20th Century «
A s the 20th century

began, the nation had come to
a set of bargains that would endure
is continually being recreated and
reinforced. Americans, black and
white, somehow need to know that
for the next half century. In the the South is different and so tend
decades since, the South has become to look for differences to confirm
ever more important in the economy, that belief.
demography, culture, and politics of
the nation. Today, four of every ten Southern history bespeaks a place
Americans live in that South, the that is more complicated than the
fastest growing part of the nation. stories many people tell about it.
Black Americans have begun to Throughout its history, the South
return to and reclaim it as their own. has been a place where poverty and
plenty have been thrown together
The South plays a key role in the in jarring ways. It has been a place
nation’s self-image: the role of evil where democracy and oppression,
tendencies overcome, of mistakes white and black, and slavery and
atoned for, and of progress yet to be freedom have warred. The very story
made. Before it can play that role of the South is a story of unresolved
effectively, the South has to be set identity. The South was not a fixed,
apart as a distinct place that carries known, and unified place, but rather
certain fundamental characteristics. a place of constant movement,
As a result, Southern difference struggle, and negotiation.
«
Suggested Reading
Blight, Race and Reunion.
Gallagher, Causes Won and Lost.
Janney, Remembering the Civil War.
1 Why has the Southern past weighed on its people so heavily? Will
that dissipate?
2 The South is now changing with remarkable speed. Do you imagine that it
will disappear?

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Horn, James. A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America.
New York: Basic Books, 2005. An engaging telling of this important and
often misunderstood story.
Hudson Charles. Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and
the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. A
remarkable story told with care.
Irons, Charles F. The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black

Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2008. A subtle and empathetic exploration of what
slavery meant for Southern Christianity.
Janney, Caroline. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of
Reconciliation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. A
nation-wide account that puts Southern remembrance of the Civil War in a
broader context.
Jennison, Watson. Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia,

1750–1860. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2012. An
original study of the meaning of slavery’s expansion for white as well as
black Georgians.
Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton
Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. A strong account of
the centrality of slavery in American capitalism.
——— . Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999. A sensitive portrait of the meaning of the
slave trade for enslaved people themselves.

Kupperman, Karen. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman
and Allanheld, 1984. A rigorous study of a mysterious subject.
Litwack, Leon. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. A sweeping and richly detailed history of the
end of slavery.
MacKeithan, Lucinda H. The Dream of Arcady: Time and Place in Southern

Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. A
stimulating overview of leading Southern authors in the New South era,
including Page and Harris.
Malone, Bill C. Country Music, U.S.A. Austin: University of Texas Press,

2010. The best account by the best historian of country music.
Mathews, Donald G. Religion in the Old South. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1977. A pioneering study that shaped the way we understand
the evolution of Southern religion.
Miller, Joseph. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave
Trade, 1730–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. A
powerful explanation of what slavery meant in Africa and in the slave trade
that preyed on Africa.
Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of

Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975. The classic study of
colonial Virginia, finding slavery at the heart of our founding documents.
Morrison, Michael A. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest
Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1997. A comprehensive account of the meaning of slavery for
the West and for the nation.
O’Brien, Michael. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American

South, 1810–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. A
work of remarkable ambition and erudition, recasting our understanding of
the antebellum South.
Ownby, Ted. Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural
South, 1865–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. A
Bibliography 145
colorful and sometimes funny account of the what it meant to be a man in
the evangelical South.
Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking Press, 1981. A pioneering
book that conveys the spirit of the early blues with great power.
Parkinson, Robert. The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the
American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2016. A deeply researched and original book that finds white solidarity
against Indians and enslaved people at the heart of the identity of the new
United States.
Perman, Michael. Reunion Without Compromise: The South and

Reconstruction, 1865–1868. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
The title conveys the story: The former Confederates would not retreat in
their claims of power after Appomattox.
——— . Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. An exhaustive
overview of complicated maneuvering in each Southern state.
Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. New York: Oxford University Press,
2007. A synthesis of the populist movement across the country.
Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper and
Row, 1976. A classic account.
Rable, George C. But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics
of Reconstruction. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1984. Documents
the centrality of violence in the fights over the future of the South after the
Civil War.
——— . The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics. Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. A useful overview of the
Confederacy, emphasizing its demand for non-partisanship.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum

South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. A subtle account of the
Christianity that the enslaved people made.

Reed, Annette Gordon. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. An award-winning and empathetic story of
the enslaved members of Thomas Jefferson’s family.
Richards, Leonard D. The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern
Domination, 1780–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2000. A rich account of the way many white Northerners saw the
antebellum South.
Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the
Deep South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. A helpful portrayal
that puts the spread of slavery at the heart of American history.
Rubin, Anne Sarah. A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy,
1861–1868. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. A fresh
account that spans the Civil War and its aftermath.
Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the

Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999. An exciting portrayal of the Creeks, their wars, and
their struggles.
Smithers, Gregory D. Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration,

Resettlement, and Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. A fresh
take on a much-studied subject.
Taylor, Alan. American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804. New

York: W. W. Norton, 2016. An ambitious and sweeping account of the
American Revolution, placing the South in a larger context.
——— . The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. New
York: W. W. Norton, 2013. A rich and original exploration of the place of
slavery in the years surrounding the War of 1812.
Thomas, William G. The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making
of Modern America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Offers a
new way to see the place of railroads in the history of the South and of the
United States.
Bibliography 147
Usner, Jr., Daniel J. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange
Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1996. Chronicles the complicated connections within
what would become a major part of the South.
Varon, Elizabeth. Disunion: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. A long-term view
of secession, finding that many Americans considered the possibility from
many angles before 1860.
Welke, Barbara. Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and

the Railroad Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001. Emphasizes the centrality of women’s roles in the development
of segregation.
Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause,
1865–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Reveals the powerful
interaction between faith and memory in the post–Civil War South.
Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in

America, 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2011. A study of the disturbing popularity of photographs and gatherings
surrounding lynching.
Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 1951. The classic account of the era,
defining many of the issues historians still discuss.
——— . The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1955. One of the most important books ever published in Southern
history, playing an important role in the civil rights movement by showing
that segregation had been created not long before and could therefore
be dismantled.

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History Modern History

Professor Edward L. Ayers

4840 Westfields Boulevard | Suite 500 | Chantilly, Virginia | 20151‑2299

Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2018

Printed in the United States of America

E dward L. Ayers is the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities

Professor Ayers has written or edited 12 books on the history of 19th-century

ii A New History of the American South

Table of Contents iii

iv A New History of the American South

Also remarkable and unique was the experiment of Reconstruction. That

Four million black Southerners, becoming free without property or power,

2 A New History of the American South

The South has played an unusual and unusually large role

« Geography and Climate of the South «

T he very land beneath

Lecture 1 « The Geography of the American South 3

F rom the viewpoint of

4 A New History of the American South

Lecture 1 « The Geography of the American South 5

6 A New History of the American South

This lecture opens with a look at the African slave trade

« Background on Africa and Slavery «

S lavery evolved over

Lecture 2 « The World of Slavery 7

The Europeans, often Portuguese

« The Transatlantic Slave Trade «

T he slave ships of the

8 A New History of the American South

A bout a fourth of the

E ven when the Spanish

Portugal have its own colonies so African slaves became

« England and America «

Lecture 2 « The World of Slavery 9

10 A New History of the American South

F ive major ships left

A fter the failure at

Lecture 2 « The World of Slavery 11

12 A New History of the American South

What would become the South began in multiple points that

« The Arrival of Africans in Virginia «

J ohn Rolfe reported in

Lecture 3 « Slavery Becomes American 13

A t the same time as

English investors spent enormous

14 A New History of the American South

Lecture 3 « Slavery Becomes American 15

« Slavery in Virginia and Maryland «

S lavery itself became

In 1700, Africans accounted for White Virginians eventually forged

16 A New History of the American South

This slave society in Virginia took

Maryland, adjacent to Virginia,

Lecture 3 « Slavery Becomes American 17

18 A New History of the American South

This lecture begins with a look at how the slave trade

« The 18th-Century Slave Trade «

In West Africa, new men rose