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The Reactionary South

Southern politics and slavery

For further details please see Slavery in North America.

Allan Nevins, in his eight volume Ordeal of the Union (1947-1971), argued that the Civil War was an "irrepressible" conflict. Nevins synthesized contending accounts emphasizing moral, cultural, social, ideological, political, and economic issues. In doing so, he brought the historical discussion back to an emphasis on social and cultural factors. Nevins correctly points out that the North and the South were rapidly becoming two different peoples. At the root of these cultural differences was the problem of slavery, but fundamental assumptions, tastes, and cultural aims of the regions were diverging in other ways as well.

At the center of the two diverging societies were differences in labor systems. The plantation system, in effect, determined the structure of Southern society. By 1850 there may have been less than 350,000 slaveholders in a total white population of about six million. Within this group, only a small minority owned the majority of slaves: perhaps seven percent of slaveholders owned roughly three-quarters of the slave population. This small minority, who constituted a class of plantation-owning elite known as "slave magnates," were small enough as to be comparable to the millionaires of the following century. Poor whites or "plain folk" (who resorted at times to eating clay) were outside the market economy. Many of the small farmers with a few slaves and yeomen were on its periphery.

Although those who had a proprietary interest in slavery (i.e. the plantation and slave owners) were a very small minority, slave labor was not on the brink of internal collapse due to moves for democratic change initiated from the region itself. Small farmers in the South generally accepted the political leadership of the slave magnates and embraced hysterical racism; they were thus unlikely agents for internal democratic reforms in the South. Moreover, even poor whites and "plain folk" would often rally to the cause of slavery's most militant defenders. For one, small farmers depended on local planter elites for access to cotton gins, for markets for their feed and livestock, and for loans. In many areas, there were also extensive networks of kinship linking whites of varying social castes. The poorest resident of a county might easily be a cousin of the richest aristocrat, thus explaining why the South would come to defend its "peculiar" institution as the cornerstone of its way of life.

By the 1850s Southern slaveholders felt increasingly encircled psychologically and politically. Increasingly dependent on the North for manufactured goods, for commercial services, and for loans, and increasingly cut off from the flourishing agricultural regions of the Northwest, they now faced the prospects of a growing free labor and abolitionist movement in the North.

Earlier, however, Southern planters had been largely content in the Union, barring occasional grumbles, such as the "South Carolina Exposition and Protest" (1828). The fundamental reason, of course, was the unwillingness of the federal government to take a stand against slavery, given the dominance of the increasingly pro-Southern Democratic party.

The Democrats, meanwhile, were the nation's majority party, usually controlling Congress, the presidency, the courts, and many state offices, and the party fostered alliances between Southern planters and Northern Democrats. As a result, until the watershed election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, slaveholders were able to prevail in more and more of the nation's territories and to garner a great deal of influence over national policy.

The expansion of the nation westward made it seem for the time, under President Jackson in the 1830s, that agrarian principles ("Jeffersonian democracy" and "Jacksonian democracy") - in practice an absolute minimum of central authority and a tendency to favor debtors over creditors - had won a permanent victory over those of Alexander Hamilton.

On economic policy, for example, Southerners hailed Jackson's work to dismantle the Bank of the United States, which had been originally introduced in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton as a way of providing for national debt and increasing the power of the federal government. Another example of strong Southern influence was the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which ended the Nullification crisis. Moreover, the South's sway over the judicial branch was perhaps even greater. In 1835 Roger Taney succeeded John Marshall as the chief justice of the Supreme Court. For roughly three decades, the Taney Court asserted the principle of social responsibility for private property - the basis for upholding fugitive slave laws. Finally, even in the realm of foreign policy, the Wilmot Proviso (1847) and the Ostend Manifesto (1854) were examples of strong Southern influence.

The militant defense of slavery

Slave "patrollers," mostly poor whites, were given the authority to stop, search, whip, maim, and even kill any slave who violated the slave codes. Other penalties included whipping, castration, maiming, and hanging. Abolitionists cited the slave codes as example of the barbarism of Southern society.

With the outcry over developments in Kansas strong in the North, defenders of slavery - increasingly committed to a way of life that much of the rest of the nation considered obsolete - shifted to a militant pro-slavery ideology that would lay the groundwork for secession upon the emergence of Lincoln.

Southerners waged a vitriolic response to political change in the North. Slaveholding interests sought to uphold their constitutional rights in the territories and to maintain sufficient political strength to repulse "hostile" and "ruinous" legislation.

Behind this shift was the growth of the cotton industry, which left slavery more important than ever to the Southern economy. Coloring this and heightening its intensity, it was imbued with a pattern of ideological response and counter-response between the two sections.

Reactions to slave revolts such as the heroic Nat Turner uprising (1831), the popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), and the growth of the abolitionist movement (pronounced after Garrison's establishment of the Liberator in 1831) inspired an elaborate intellectual defense of slavery.

J.D.B De Bow established De Bow's Review, the leading Southern magazine warning the planter class about the dangers of depending on the North economically. De Bow's Review emerged as the leading voice for secession. The magazine emphasizes the South's economic inequality, relating it to the concentration of manufacturing, shipping, banking, and international trade in the North. Franticly searching for Biblical passages somehow endorsing slavery, and conjuring up economic, sociological, historical, and scientific rationales for their case, slavery went from being a "necessary evil" to a "positive good." Foreshadowing modern totalitarian thought, especially Nazism, Dr. J.H. Van Evrie's book Negroes and Negro slavery: The First an Inferior Race: The Latter Its Normal Condition — spewing arguments indicated by what the title would suggest — was an attempt to apply scientific analysis.

Latent sectional divisions suddenly activated derogatory sectional imagery emerge into full-blown sectional ideology that would enter politics. As industrial capitalism gained momentum in the North, Southern writers emphasized whatever aristocratic traits they valued (but often did not practice) in their own society: courtesy, grace, chivalry, the slow pace of life, orderly life, and leisure. This would complement their argument that slavery provided a more humane society than industrial labor. The most influential exponent of this argument was undoubtedly George Fitzhugh. In his Cannibals All!, Fitzhugh argued that the antagonism between labor and capital in a free society would result in "robber barons" and "pauper slavery," while in a slave society such antagonisms were avoided. Disturbingly, he would call for enslaving Northern factory workers - oddly enough - to their own benefit. Lincoln, on the other hand, denounced such Southern insinuations that Northern wage earners were fatally fixed in that condition for life. To free soilers, the stereotype of the South was one of a diametrical opposite - a static society in which the slave system presented an entrenched aristocracy.

This whole section on the Civil War is from the Wikipedia Free Open source encyclopedia.