This book sheds new light on the role of religion in the nineteenth-century slavery debates. Luke E. Harlow argues that the ongoing conflict over the meaning of Christian 'orthodoxy' constrained the political and cultural horizons available for defenders and opponents of American slavery. The central locus of these debates was Kentucky, a border slave state with a long-standing antislavery presence. Although white Kentuckians famously cast themselves as moderates in the period and remained with the Union during the Civil War, their religious values showed no moderation on the slavery question. When the war ultimately brought emancipation, white Kentuckians found themselves in lockstep with the rest of the Confederate South. Racist religion thus paved the way for the making of Kentucky's Confederate memory of the war, as well as a deeply entrenched white Democratic Party in the state.
Beyond the Rope is an interdisciplinary study that draws on narrative theory and cultural studies methodologies to trace African Americans' changing attitudes and relationships to lynching over the twentieth century. Whereas African Americans are typically framed as victims of white lynch mob violence in both scholarly and public discourses, Karlos K. Hill reveals that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African Americans lynched other African Americans in response to alleged criminality, and that twentieth-century black writers envisaged African American lynch victims as exemplars of heroic manhood. By illuminating the submerged histories of black vigilantism and consolidating narratives of lynching in African American literature that framed black victims of white lynch mob violence as heroic, Hill argues that rather than being static and one dimensional, African American attitudes towards lynching and the lynched black evolved in response to changing social and
On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, an event that soon became a bold statement of presidential power, a dramatic shift in the rationale for fighting the Civil War, and a promise of future freedom for four million enslaved Americans. But the document marked only a beginning; freedom's future was anything but certain. Thereafter, the significance of both the Proclamation and of emancipation assumed new and diverse meanings, as African Americans explored freedom and the nation attempted to rebuild itself. Despite the sweeping power of Lincoln's Proclamation, struggle, rather than freedom, defined emancipation's broader legacy. The nine essays in this volume unpack the long history and varied meanings of the emancipation of American slaves. Together, the contributions argue that 1863 did not mark an end point or a mission accomplished in black freedom; rather, it initiated the beginning of an ongoing, contested process.
Mastering America recounts efforts of 'proslavery nationalists' to navigate the nineteenth-century geopolitics of imperialism, federalism, and nationalism and to articulate themes of American mission in overtly proslavery terms. At the heart of this study are spokesmen of the Southern 'Master Class' who crafted a vision of American destiny that put chattel slavery at its center. Looking beyond previous studies of the links between these 'proslavery nationalists' and secession, the book sheds new light on the relationship between the conservative Unionism of the 1850s and the key formulations of Confederate nationalism that arose during war in the 1860s. Bonner's innovative research charts the crucial role these men and women played in the development of American imperialism, constitutionalism, evangelicalism, and popular patriotism.
On the eve of the Revolution, the Carolina lowcountry was the wealthiest and unhealthiest region in British North America. Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry argues that the two were intimately connected: both resulted largely from the dominance of rice cultivation on plantations using imported African slave labor. This development began in the coastal lands near Charleston, South Carolina, around the end of the seventeenth century. Rice plantations spread north to the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and south to Georgia and northeast Florida in the late colonial period. The book examines perceptions and realities of the lowcountry disease environment; how the lowcountry became notorious for its 'tropical' fevers, notably malaria and yellow fever; how people combated, avoided or perversely denied the suffering they caused; and how diseases and human responses to them influenced not only the lowcountry and the South, but the United States, even helping to
Beyond the Rope is an interdisciplinary study that draws on narrative theory and cultural studies methodologies to trace African Americans' changing attitudes and relationships to lynching over the twentieth century. Whereas African Americans are typically framed as victims of white lynch mob violence in both scholarly and public discourses, Karlos K. Hill reveals that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African Americans lynched other African Americans in response to alleged criminality, and that twentieth-century black writers envisaged African American lynch victims as exemplars of heroic manhood. By illuminating the submerged histories of black vigilantism and consolidating narratives of lynching in African American literature that framed black victims of white lynch mob violence as heroic, Hill argues that rather than being static and one dimensional, African American attitudes towards lynching and the lynched black evolved in response to changing social and
This book examines the home and leisure life of planters in the antebellum American South. Based on a lifetime of research by the late Eugene Genovese (1930–2012), with an introduction and epilogue by Douglas Ambrose, The Sweetness of Life presents a penetrating study of slaveholders and their families in both intimate and domestic settings: at home; attending the theatre; going on vacations to spas and springs; throwing parties; hunting; gambling; drinking and entertaining guests, completing a comprehensive portrait of the slaveholders and the world that they built with slaves. Genovese subtly but powerfully demonstrates how much politics, economics, and religion shaped, informed, and made possible these leisure activities. A fascinating investigation of a little-studied aspect of planter life, The Sweetness of Life broadens our understanding of the world that the slaveholders and their slaves made; a tragic world of both 'sweetness' and slavery.
The story of a black day-laborer called Sam Hose killing his white employer in a workplace dispute ended in a lynching of enormous religious significance. For many deeply-religious communities in the Jim Crow South, killing those like Sam Hose restored balance to a moral cosmos upended by a heinous crime. A religious intensity in the mood and morality of segregation surpassed law, and in times of social crisis could justify illegal white violence - even to the extreme act of lynching. In At the Altar of Lynching, distinguished historian Donald G. Mathews offers a new interpretation of the murder of Sam Hose, which places the religious culture of the evangelical South at its center. He carefully considers how mainline Protestants, including women, not only in many instances came to support or accept lynching, but gave the act religious meaning and justification.
The story of a black day-laborer called Sam Hose killing his white employer in a workplace dispute ended in a lynching of enormous religious significance. For many deeply-religious communities in the Jim Crow South, killing those like Sam Hose restored balance to a moral cosmos upended by a heinous crime. A religious intensity in the mood and morality of segregation surpassed law, and in times of social crisis could justify illegal white violence - even to the extreme act of lynching. In At the Altar of Lynching, distinguished historian Donald G. Mathews offers a new interpretation of the murder of Sam Hose, which places the religious culture of the evangelical South at its center. He carefully considers how mainline Protestants, including women, not only in many instances came to support or accept lynching, but gave the act religious meaning and justification.
This book examines the home and leisure life of planters in the antebellum American South. Based on a lifetime of research by the late Eugene Genovese (1930–2012), with an introduction and epilogue by Douglas Ambrose, The Sweetness of Life presents a penetrating study of slaveholders and their families in both intimate and domestic settings: at home; attending the theatre; going on vacations to spas and springs; throwing parties; hunting; gambling; drinking and entertaining guests, completing a comprehensive portrait of the slaveholders and the world that they built with slaves. Genovese subtly but powerfully demonstrates how much politics, economics, and religion shaped, informed, and made possible these leisure activities. A fascinating investigation of a little-studied aspect of planter life, The Sweetness of Life broadens our understanding of the world that the slaveholders and their slaves made; a tragic world of both 'sweetness' and slavery.
Could Jefferson claim any consistency in his advocacy of democracy and the rights of man while remaining one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia? This extensive study of Jefferson's intellectual outlook suggests that, once we fully acknowledge the premises of his ethical thought and his now outdated scientific views, he could. Jefferson famously thought the human mind to be 'susceptible of much improvement … most of all, in matters of government and religion'. Ari Helo's thorough analysis of Jefferson's understanding of Christian morality, atheism, contemporary theories of moral sentiments, ancient virtue ethics, natural rights, and the principles of justice and benevolence suggests that Jefferson refused to be a philosopher, and did so for moral reasons. This book finds Jefferson profoundly political in his understanding of individual moral responsibility and human progress.
Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.
This book emphasises the centrality of nationhood to Thomas Jefferson's thought and politics, envisioning Jefferson as a cultural nationalist whose political project sought the alignment of the American state system with the will and character of the nation. Jefferson believed that America was the one nation on earth able to realise in practice universal ideals to which other peoples could only aspire. He appears in the book as the essential narrator of what he once called the 'American Story': as the historian, the sociologist and the ethnographer; the political theorist of the nation; the most successful practitioner of its politics; and its most enthusiastic champion. The book argues that reorienting Jefferson around the concept of American nationhood recovers an otherwise easily missed coherence to his political career and helps make sense of a number of conundrums in his thought and practice.
This book traces how and why the secession of the South during the American Civil War was accomplished at ground level through the actions of ordinary men. Adopting a micro-historical approach, Lawrence T. McDonnell works to connect small events in new ways - he places one company of the secessionist Minutemen in historical context, exploring the political and cultural dynamics of their choices. Every chapter presents little-known characters whose lives and decisions were crucial to the history of Southern disunion. McDonnell asks readers to consider the past with fresh eyes, analyzing the structure and dynamics of social networks and social movements. He presents the dissolution of the Union through new events, actors, issues, and ideas, illuminating the social contradictions that cast the South's most conservative city as the radical heart of Dixie.
This book tells the story of Ebenezer, a frontier community in colonial Georgia founded by a mountain community fleeing religious persecution in its native Salzburg. This study traces the lives of the settlers from the alpine world they left behind to their struggle for survival on the southern frontier of British America. Exploring their encounters with African and indigenous peoples with whom they had had no previous contact, this book examines their initial opposition to slavery and why they ultimately embraced it. Transatlantic in scope, this study will interest readers of European and American history alike.
Organized in 1933, the Southern States Industrial Council's (SSIC) adherence to the South as a unique political and economic entity limited its members' ability to forge political coalitions against the New Deal. The SSIC's commitment to regional preferences, however, transformed and incorporated conservative thought in the post-World War II era, ultimately complementing the emerging conservative movement in the 1940s and 1950s. In response to New Dealers' attempts to remake the southern economy, the New South industrialists - heirs of C. Vann Woodward's 'new men' of the New South - effectively fused cultural traditionalism and free market economics into a brand of southern free enterprise that shaped the region's reputation and political culture. Dollars for Dixie demonstrates how the South emerged from this refashioning and became a key player in the modern conservative movement, with new ideas regarding free market capitalism, conservative fiscal policy, and limited bureaucracy.
As cotton production shifted toward the southwestern states during the first half of the nineteenth century, New Orleans became increasingly important to the South's plantation economy. Handling the city's wide-ranging commerce was a globally oriented business community that represented a qualitatively unique form of wealth accumulation - merchant capital - that was based on the extraction of profit from exchange processes. However, like the slave-based mode of production with which they were allied, New Orleans merchants faced growing pressures during the antebellum era. Their complacent failure to improve the port's infrastructure or invest in manufacturing left them vulnerable to competition from the fast-developing industrial economy of the North, weaknesses that were fatally exposed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Changes to regional and national economic structures after the Union victory prevented New Orleans from recovering its commercial dominance, and the former
Before the Civil War, most Southern white people were as strongly committed to freedom for their kind as to slavery for African Americans. This study views that tragic reality through the lens of eight authors - representatives of a South that seemed, to them, destined for greatness but was, we know, on the brink of destruction. Exceptionally able and ambitious, these men and women won repute among the educated middle classes in the Southwest, South and the nation, even amid sectional tensions. Although they sometimes described liberty in the abstract, more often these authors discussed its practical significance: what it meant for people to make life's important choices freely and to be responsible for the results. They publicly insisted that freedom caused progress, but hidden doubts clouded this optimistic vision. Ultimately, their association with the oppression of slavery dimmed their hopes for human improvement, and fear distorted their responses to the sectional crisis.
