Faculty of Humanity and Social Sciences

University of Split

THE OLD SOUTH

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

Professor: Student:
doc.dr.sc. Gordan Matas Ema Čilaš

Split, 2016

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INDEX
1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..…….3

2. The Old South……………………..……………………………………………………….4

2.1. Myths and stereotypes about the Old South……………….…………..………….4

2.2. Distinctive features of the Old South……………………………………..….……4

3. White society of the South……………………………..………………………….……….

4. Black society of the South……………………………………………………………….....8

5. The culture of the southern frontier………………………………….………………….10

5.1. A masculine culture……………………………………………………………...11

6.Antislavery movement……….……………………………………………………………12

7.Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………14

8. References………………...……………………………………………………………….15

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1.Introduction
The Old South is a region of South America where life in 1800s was quite different than in

other regions of America. The scope of this thesis is to explain in detail life in the Old South

in the 1800s, from agriculture and industry to politics movements and women's fight for rights

and equality. The society was divided on blacks and whites, where blacks had some issues

with integration into society and culture, but after some time America became their native

land.

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2. The Old South

2.1. Myths and stereotypes about the Old South

Southeners are often represented as mythological people, full of stereotypes, who still live

in some legendary land. These stereotypes differ and represent Southeners in two ways, first

one comes from novels and classic movies like Gone With the Wind, where white landers and

their families are leading the society. They were kind to their slaves and respected the rural

values of independence. On the other side, there is a myth which represents South completely

different. It comes from the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, where planters are described as

arrogant and evil leaders. Raping women and brutalizing workers was considered to be

normal in that kind of society. These myths died very hard, because they were truly

representing the reality.

Some writers created a stereotype about the South, called the plantation legend which

descrbibed the South as an area of aristocratic planters, faithfull slaves and fieldhands,

although some Northerners believed that the South did not have leisurely pace of life and the

fair social hierarchy. People truly believe in the plantation legend but reality was different.

When Americans talk about the Old South, they think about cotton plantations, although great

part of it was not suitable for planting.

2.2. Features of the Old South

The first feature that separated South from other parts of the country was its high

percentage of native population. The South drew few immigrants from Europe after

Revolution, because of the shipping lines that went to ports on the north. It became the

minority region after the Missouri Controversy of 1819-1821, mainly because of the isolation

of the istitution of slavery.

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 Men of the South were represented as penchants for fighting, guns and military. The South

society fed themselves with food from their own fields. Corn was growing everywhere, it was

used for local consumption more than for the market. In 1860 half of the nation's cattle

belonged to the South. They had over 60 percent of the swine, 45 percent of the horses, 52

percent of the oxen etc. But, their staple crops exhausted the soil very quickly, while open-

row crops left the bare ground which was subject to erosion. Later, eastern Virginia

abbandoned tobacco and began to grow wheat for the market of the North. Old farming lands

had problems with the new soils. All in all, the Southeast and the Old Southwest faced an

economic crisis during the nineteenth century. In the 1800s, many southeners were thinking

how staking everything on agriculture had a bad impact on manufacturing and trade. After the

War in 1812, the South became dependent on northern manufacturing and trade. Southeners

relied on connections in the North for importing of goods. Although the Old South seemed as

prosperous land, it was dependt of North and it became a sort of colonial dependency of the

North.

One of the reasons which put forward at the time for the lag in southern development of

industry was the fact that blacks were presumed to be inapt for the factory work, probably

because they couldn't habituate to the work by the clock. Still, factory owners hired slave

operatives for every kind of manufacture. It was calculated that investent in slaves and cotton

lands was the most profitable investment at that time in the South.

Despite a lot of fights for rights of women and slaves, they were still

ISKORIŠTAVANI, and that fact will be described later in chapters about white and

black society.

Although investment in slaves seemed to be profitable, it had a negative influence on

the economy of the South. It had the negative impact especially on the innovations in

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technology. The cities of the South were small, and they were not engaged in

international trade as much as northern cities. Southern cities served to transport

agricultural crops, and for producing the small number of goods which farmers needed.

The Southerners' way of transport was considered primitive by Northerners.

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3. White society of the South

During the 1850s it seemed like prosperity would last forever. When the nineteenth

century began, the wealth was concentrated in the hands of planters. Although there were few

great planters and plantations, they built foundations of economic and social life of the South.

Use of slaves is what makes difference between plantations and farms. It was also used to

grow staple crops like cotton, rice, tobacco, etc. for profit. The group of planters owned more

than half the slaves, produced most of the tobacco and cotton and all of the rice and sugar.

The total number of slave holders was 383,637. Many small farmers wanted to become

planters themselves and to have their own slaves. In the first half of the 19th century only

one-third of all southern white families owned slaves, but almost all white families either

owned slaves or expected to own them one day.. Some planters were really wealthy and could

enjoy the arts of hospitality, good manners, learning and politics, but more often it was not

like this. Planters did not have leisure like the most legends suggest, they were planters rather

than farmers.

Reading about planters and slaves, some scenes from the movies come to our minds,

for example planters are doing nothing and slaves are exhausted from working all day,

but if we force ourselves to explore more about it, we will find out that it was not always

like that and that not only have slaves worked but also their owners.

Neither mistress of the plantation led a life full of leisure. She was doing housecleaning,

linens, overseeing food, taking care of the sick and everything else that was expected from

her. One thing that was the most frustrating for the plantation mistress was the lack of

freedom, caused by her "separate sphere of genteel domesticity" . White women confronted

double standards. They were expected to be models of discretion and piety, but on the other
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side their husbands used them for sexual satisfaction. They did not consider a rape of a slave

woman a crime, because they had no rights at all. This fact was also to be expected, because

it was the time when women had no rights, they had to do everything men wanted, so it

created a sort of a stereotype which wasn't a myth but a true fact and it will last forever.

Overseers on the most of the plantations came from middle class of farmers. Most of them

wanted to become slaveholders. Some of them succeded, while others were always searching

for better status. The highest position a slave could achieve was a driver or leader, who was in

charge of a small group of slaves.

The yeoman farm families were the most widespread white southeners. The men were

focused on the works outside the house, raising hogs and chicken, growing corn and cotton.

Also, they were trading with their neighbours rather than with local stores. A lot of "middle

class" farmers had a handful of slaves, but most of them owned none.

Southeners were obsessed with a reckless manliness. For them, the duel was representing

an expression of personal honor and courage. They were considered to be kind and polite until

they become angry enough to kill someone.

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4. Black society of the South

The number of slaves in the nineteenth century was growing very fast, which can be seen

from the fact that in 1790 there were less than 700,000 slaves and by 1860 almost 4 million.

In the Old South, black society, or "free persons of color" had an uncertain status which

was something between slavery and freedom. Some of them purchased their freedom, while

some of them got it as a reward for the service in wars. In 1800s there were 319,000 free

blacks in the United States, and 150,000 of them were from the South. In this group of people

were included also mulattoes.

There was a little number of black slaveholders, they were minority. Only 3,775 free

blacks had their own slaves. Some blacks owned slaves even for humanitarian reasons. For

example, one minister bought slaves who were able to purchase their freedom from him.

There were also cases were black slaveholders were buying their own family members in

order to set them free later.

Free blacks were victims of discrimination, they were required to wear passes. They were

not truly free because some of them did not have an official certificate of freedom, which

meant that they could have been enslaved again. So, it can be concluded that black

slaveholders didn't have any more rights than blacks without slaves, the only thing that

was making them different is the possesion of the slaves.

In 1860, a great number of slaves worked on plantations and they were mostly fieldhands.

The jobs they liked the most were those of household servants and skilled workers, for

example carpenters, coopers etc. Fieldhands worked from the dawn to the dusk.

It has been calculated that more than half of all slave babies on plantations died in the first

year of their life. Also, scholars noticed that mortality of blacks was more than twice than of

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white babies. This was probably due to their poverty and the bad nutrition, mothers

were exhausted from work and so did they babies.

The religion was very important for slaves and their culture. Their religion was a mixture of

African and Christian elements. Africans brought with them a term of Supreme God which

could be recognized in Jehovah, and lesser gods which could be identified as Jesus, Holy

Ghost and the saints. Except this, they also believed in magic and spirits. The church was a

place where they could release their souls and emotions.

Slaves had not have rights to get married, so they were accepting marriage as a stabilizing

influence on plantations. They were performing marriages by themselves, without any formal

ceremonies. Their marriages were not legal, but the concept of family had the same meaning

as in white families. The family was considered to be the nuclear unit of parents and children,

where father was the head of a family. Everything mentioned about slaves rings a bell and

sounds very familiar to us, just as we already know it. The reason of that is the existence

of many books and movies that refer to the life of slaves and people in general in that

period. Some of these features remained alive in today's life, for example the stereotype

about the fathers being the head of the family.

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5. The culture of the southern frontier

There was a lot of social and cultural diversity within the South in the period before the

Civil War. The southern frontier was very different from the areas along the seabord of

Atlantic. The Old Southwest is the least known of all the frontiers that have tried to obtain a

distintive culture. It included the states west of the Georgia-Alabama border- Alabama,

Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, and also frontier areas in Tennessee, Kentucky

and Florida. This region was a connection between the South and the West. It was fullfilled

with dangers and opportunities. Behaving like a magnet, it lured thousands of people from

Virginia and Carolinas in the 820s. By the 1830s, the migrating southeners had new lives and

occupations while southern settlers were transplanting institutions and practices from the

coastal states. The differences within various areas were expected, mostly because of the

large area and geographical reasons.

Before the Jacksonian era, the upper South suffered from soil exhaustion. As a result, large

farm families, who had to provide each child a piece of land, decided to migrate to the

Southwest. Young men who wanted to be planters were in search for better life in the

Southwest which could provide them fertile soil. One young pioneer said that he did not want

to live like poor people in North Carolina when he could have everything he wanted in the

Southwest. Every young planter wanted to make something on his own and to be independent,

in order to be freed from his family and its strictures, just like people today think. The new

region was not offering an independence for women, they were a part of a patriarchism in

every area. They appreciated a stable family life more than materiality.

Migrants usually went to the fertile lands of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennesse. Their

path was about 500 miles long, they walked approximately fifteen miles per day. During the

night, they were sraying in taverns, camping in the open amid panthers, bears and wolves.

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Slaves were travelling by foot and they were tied together. When the pioneers arrived in the

Southwest, they bought the land from the Indians. The farms and plantations in the Southwest

were quite larger than these in Carolinas and Virgina, but it was more unhealthy because of

the hot climate and poor sanitation which caused epidemic diseases, especially mallaria.

Many of them decided to go back home or to move again.

5.1. A masculine culture

The new environment provoked a lot of changes, starting with young adult men who started

drinking, gambling and fighting. As a result, they became violent, and were considered as

embarassment to their families back in East. The consumption of alcohol increased and most

plantations manufactured whiskey, causing alcoholism and therefore masculine violence.The

frequency of fights and murders was especially shocking to visitors. White men often took

sexual advantage of slave women. Most of the husbands were beating their wives with whips.

They did not have an opportunity to choose anything because they were completely dependent

on their husbands. This was not the beginning of the violence and bad behavior of men,

but their drinking and gambling became public for the first time. The fact that a woman

was beaten or raped by a man was probably considered to be a shame, so women did not

talk about it a lot.

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6.Antislavery movements

The criticism of slavery was developed in the decades after the Revolution, but the

emancipation movement began in 1817 with the formation of the American Colonization

Society. The society wanted to send freed slaves back in Africa. Supporters of this proposal

were James Madison, James Monroe, Henry Clay, John Marshall and Daniel Webster. They

were considered as an antislavery group, but it was also a way to bolster slavery with getting

rid of free Negroes who were making problems. On the other hand, a group of free blacks did

not want to go back to Africa because America was their native land then. By 1860 only

15,000 blacks had migrated to Africa, and the Colonization Society helped 12,000 of them.

In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison started to publicate a new antislavery newspaper, The

Liberator. He had been apprenticed to a newspaperman and had edited many antislavery

papers, although he was impatient with the moderation. His provocative language caused

replications from slaveholders who advertised his newspaper more than his real supporters

did. Despite his violent language, he was opposed to the use of physical violence. In 1832

Garrison set up the New England Anti-Slavery Society together with his followers. They

wanted to get the publicity gained by the British antislavery movement which had induced to

end slavery in 1833, with some compensation to slaveholders. The Garrisonians felt that the

American society needed universal reform, so Garrison embraced antislavery, temperance,

pacifism, and the women's rights. He was against the colonization of freed slaves and he stood

for equal rights of all people.

Women joined the abolition movement from the start in groups without men. The most known

activists are Grimké sisters who brought the issue of women's rights to the center stage. Sarah

and Angelina Grimké were daughters of slave-owning family in South Carolina. They left

their parents and moved to North to embrace antislavery and feminism, slowly widening their

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audiences to promiscuous assemblies of men and women. This behaviour inspired men

leaders to punish sisters and other women behaving like them because of engaging in

unfeminine activities. The chairman from Anti-Slavery Society of Connecticut said: "No

woman will speak or vote where I am a moderator. It is enough for women to rule at home."

Angelina insisted that women had right to have a voice in all laws and regulations by which

she was to be governed. At the meeting of Anti-Slavery Society, Garrisonians insisted on the

right of women to participate equally in organization . The New Yorkers separated themselves

from the Anti-Slavery Societies.

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7. Conclusion

Although the Old South was considered to be the land of wealthy plantations, big white

houses and happy Negroes living there, in reality it was something totally different. The fact

that people owned slaves and brutalized them shows us what kind of society it was. It was

normal to kill somebody, but when a slave murdered a white, he could be burnt at the stake.

There was too much violence and fights. The society was composed of few rich people at the

top and a lot of slaves at the bottom to serve them, being quite different from the rest of

America.

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8. References
1. Brown Tindall, George & Shi, David Emory, America: A Narrative History. New York

and London: W.W. Norton & Company. 2000

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