What to make of the Old South in light of the current generation of scholarship? This question haunts the essays in this volume and the larger field of Southern history. Characterizations of the antebellum South as tradition-bound and provincial seem more open to question than in the past, whereas comparisons of the Old South to places beyond the North and considerations of its history in global dimensions fit more comfortably with the historical consciousness of today. In our time, the global interconnections of American life figure prominently as does the recognition that countries once viewed as “developing” or “third world” now claim markers of modernity that had formerly been reserved for the “developed” nations of the “first world.” Further removed from the horrors of two massive world wars and freed from the reductionist tendencies prevalent during the Cold War, twenty-first-century historians are also less likely to embrace the stark dichotomies—liberalism vs. fascism, capitalism vs. communism, progressivism vs. traditionalism—that defined twentieth-century scholarship. At the same time, multiculturalism and revolutions in gender identity and family organization in the last decades of the twentieth century have, along with important historiographic developments, raised the possibility that the heterogeneity of the way we live now has resulted from a diversity of ways of living in the past.
Our polyglot understanding of a pluralistic past is reshaping the questions that define new Southern scholarship. In place of studies that asked if the Old South was an advancing society or in retreat, similar to the North or different, engaged with the world or closed off from it, historians now tend to ask how Southerners engaged modernity, what sectionalism meant to Americans, and in what ways did transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas cross into a South with less clearly defined boundaries than we previously thought. The essays in this volume allow the region to stand as a constituent element in America’s future that sits alongside and interlinked with the North, the West, and the world. The people of the Old South voluntarily entangled themselves in the expansion of the market and the culture of capitalism; slavery was a flexible system of labor control adaptable to industrial settings; Southerners paid close attention to international events and many of them came from or traveled to the world outside slavery’s borders.
Rather than the great exception to modern progress, the Old South might now be understood as one of several building blocks of American modernity. As the essays herein suggest, the Old South, considered as the sum of its diverse parts, modernized—albeit on terms unlike those of the North. Those terms made for critical differences between the sections, but they did not place the North necessarily ahead of the South on the road to the future. Going forward, perhaps, it is the trace of some, but by no means all, of America’s future in the Old South rather than the region’s embodiment of a doomed-to-die past that will be more intriguing to the historical imagination.1
Of course, searching for a definitive answer to broad historical questions is itself illusory, given the nature of the sources, which are neither transparent nor self-evident, and the diversity of opinion that is inherent to scholarly inquiry. Looking through wider and less monochromatic lenses, recent scholarship on Southern history expands the ground for historical inquiry and debate rather than fielding a rival argument designed to run over the same pathways covered by its predecessors. Remapping the antebellum South in this way enables us to see under-explored pathways and discover new topographic features previously difficult or impossible to detect because of the narrower questions asked. Immigrant manufacturers like William Tappey and free-black reformers like Maria Moore emerge as individuals worthy of study rather than remain ignored as exceptions to an unspoken rule. Conceiving of the Old South as a nonperipheral part of nineteenth-century modernity also allows us to understand well-known features of the region (cities, plantations, and Native Americans) in fresh ways and as shaped by, rather than set apart from, the complicated and increasingly global processes of the day. By reframing questions and using different historical tools, the slave states, as depicted in this volume, remain a distinct region, but not one that was exceptional to the main currents of American or world history.
To understand more about what this altered interpretive terrain says about the Old South, scholars might pursue several avenues of further research that draw on the global and the local and reconsider the South’s influence on the nineteenth-century world. In light of the enhanced appreciation for the Old South’s participation in global processes, historians will continue to benefit from comparative analysis, a method for studying Southern history that has done much to sharpen our understanding by drawing out similarities and differences between places.2 Southerners—regardless of their race, gender, creed, or class—did precisely that; however, as Peter Kolchin reminds us, they had multiple points of reference, and to “generalize about the southerness of these southerners is indeed a Herculean task.”3 For example, examinations of Indian-white interaction might usefully be compared and contrasted with similar developments within Latin American nations and ever-expanding interracial European empires. In addition to continued comparisons within the Atlantic world, a heightened awareness of the significance of Asia—both in today’s world and in nineteenth-century globalization—suggest great promise lies in broadening our comparative reference points to include the diverse societies of the Pacific rim.4
A related way of looking at the Old South is to place its history into what David Brion Davis calls the “broader view.” Treating the conflicts of the slave South within global battles over slavery and freedom helps to lift the struggles fought on Old South plantations beyond the marginal subfield of southern history.5 This perspective is expressed in new scholarship that sees slavery as a national problem, emancipation as a hemispheric struggle, and the Southern planters as “a part of the master class of the Americas.”6 Considering material modernity, the broader view makes us aware of how international developments, and Southerners’ cognizance of them, shaped regional political economy, industrial slavery, and geopolitical calculations.7 In addition, knowing that Southerners participated in intellectual, cultural, and religious trends that were transnational in nature permits us the opportunity to reintegrate regional history into a larger world history in a way that will help enlighten both.8
Another approach explores the changes of the nineteenth century through the lens of their interplay within the Old South. How did Southerners adapt to aspects of industrialism and accelerated international trade? What reception did Victorian culture find in the slave states? How did the rising tide of nationalism shape Southern politics—black, white, and Native American? Historians who have begun to ask these questions have found a diversity of industrial practices,9 a thriving railroad network,10 a vibrant middle class,11 slaves in contact with resistance movements in Africa and elsewhere in the Americas,12 and slaveholding politicians absorbed in Europe’s revolutions.13 There remains much work to do, however. For example, despite Harold Woodman’s, Peter Coclanis’s, and David L. Carleton’s models and appeals for more scholarship, we know comparatively little about how planters, factors, merchants, and farmers created and financed local, national, and international trade.14 Answers to broader sets of questions like these will likely reconfigure how we understand the interrelationships formed within the South.
In this sense, an increased emphasis on the “big picture” should not displace the local studies, which have, quite often, offered the most interesting windows into Southern history. Instead, more consciously situating Southern farms, cities, and plantations within broader worlds (rather than defining them as outside of them) allows us to better explain the interconnectedness between town and country and between those localities and the world economy upon which their residence often depended. Advances in computer technology and digital history allow for precisely this type of approach, enabling us to better assemble and interpret information about specific localities—like the Valley of the Shadow Project has done for Augusta County, Virginia—but also, as David Eltis’s slave database indicates, to track relationships and patterns across space and time.15
The recent historiographic emphasis on the Old South as modern and interconnected also begs a rethinking of other critical issues in U.S. history. In making the Old South one of several of modernity’s nineteenth-century midwives, scholars necessarily destabilize the North and western Europe’s familiar position as the forebearers of everything from middle-class families to big business. Such a perspective also recasts some well-known differences between the sections that factored into the Civil War’s causes and outcome. How should historians who conceive of the Old South as sharing many of the same modernizing trends that swept the North explain the Civil War? Nothing in this volume disputes the fact that in 1861, the free states had more of many modern things that nations need to win wars. The North had more people who filled out a bigger wartime army; more factories that supplied that army with more and deadlier weapons; more trains, ships, and draft animals to transport all those troops and supplies to the front; more cities to house the people and the factories and to coordinate the traffic. All that “more” contributed to Union victory in the Civil War, and it is tempting to interpret that balance of resources as the product of a southern mindset opposed to the modern things that helped the North win. Without gainsaying these differences, other measures of modernity counterbalanced these aspects of Northern superiority. In short, as Edward Ayers has suggested elsewhere, “modernity was a shared catalyst between North and South, a shared medium, a necessary precondition for anything like the war that began in 1861.”16 As this volume indicates, by some important measures of antebellum political economy, Southerners counted themselves ahead of their sectional rivals rather than behind. Up to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, American presidents had supported slavery’s steady expansion westward, and Southern slaveholders had exercised much more power in the federal government than was proportional to their tiny share of the U.S. electorate. Southern slaveholders also made more money than most other Americans and used that superiority to create dependent relationships with their less-wealthy countrymen. An improved understanding of slavery’s reach into the political economy of both sections—of the ways that Northern free-labor capitalism and Southern slave-labor capitalism were comingled—might better illuminate the revolutionary aspects of Northerners’ decision to elect a Republican who vowed to put slavery on the road to extinction.17 The tenacity with which white Southerners fought and died for the Confederacy strongly suggests that a modern nationalist sensibility had taken root in the South. Similarly, the modernizing impulses of the Old South help explain the centralizing policies of the Confederacy as more continuous with the prewar era and less a product of wartime emergency.18 If the Southerners who helped start the Civil
War and determine its outcome were as deeply enmeshed in modernity as their opponents, we must reassess a prevailing narrative that minimizes agency and views the crisis as the inevitable result of two diverging societies: a North that portended the future and a South clinging to the past.
Beyond the Civil War, the revised picture of the Old South suggests continuities stretching into the late nineteenth century that are harder to see if the Civil War is regarded as a fundamental break. Antebellum Southerners provided blueprints for the New South’s railroads, towns, and mills as well as its “cosmopolitan-minded” racism and its mix of free and forced labor. And, as Steve Hahn has argued, black Southerners’ efforts to carve out a separate space from whites can be understood as a thread of African-American politics stretching back to slavery rather than as a new agenda devised after the defeat of liberal, integrationist ideals in Reconstruction.19
In this vein, the future that had some, but not all, of its roots in the Old South reached beyond 1900. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries commentators consistently juxtaposed the apparent end of Southern distinctiveness against the backdrop of the tradition-bound, parochial Old South. Removing that prop promotes a reevaluation of what accounts for the unique dynamics of Southern politics, culture, and racial conflicts. That reevaluation may provide a better appreciation for the national and global dimensions of what too often has been written off as a Southern problem from which the rest of the country, and the world, are exempt.
Perhaps the most discomforting perspective gained by looking at the Old South as a contributor to the present and future is the context it provides for twentieth- and twenty-first-century systems of human coercion that if not called slavery nonetheless approximate it. Slavery’s legal abolition stands as perhaps the greatest human rights achievement in world history, but as Seymour Drescher notes in reference to Soviet gulag and Nazi slave labor, “the second quarter of the twentieth century. . . offered traumatic reminders that devastating forms of mass coerced labor could still reemerge anywhere.” Recent estimates put the number of people “entrapped in servile conditions for part or all of their lives” at between ten and thirty million people worldwide. Fortunately, heads of state and their publics now oppose rather than sanction slavery and, unlike the world in 1800, those living free of slavery far outnumber those in bondage. Still, slavery, the most troubling aspect of the Old South, cannot easily be consigned to the forever-gone past. Because slavery was part of the future that the Old South’s leaders sought to create, understanding its entanglement in making our modern present is vital to explaining abolition’s victories won and battles ongoing.20
This brief foray into ways of thinking about the future of the Old South encourages a critique and reevaluation of what the antebellum slave states were and what they left in their wake. Yet whatever future the Old South has in academic writing, the idea of it as the exception to American modernity will likely endure in popular culture because the themes of Southern traditionalism and provincialism play an enduring, vital role in the ways Americans understand themselves a nation. Nonetheless, historians have a role to play in offering alternatives to received wisdom; and if this volume can help to refine collective understanding of the South’s place in making the modern world, then it will have succeeded in its goal.
NOTES
1. Laura F. Edwards, “Southern History as U.S. History,” History 75 (August 2009): 563–564.
2. Recent examples of comparative historians’ sophisticated approach to the Old South include Stanley L. Engerman, Slavery, Emancipation and Freedom: Comparative Perspectives (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landlords, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Peter Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Don H. Doyle, Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).
3. Kolchin, Sphinx on the American Land, 49.
4. Peter A. Coclanis, “Lee’s Lieutenants: The American South in Global Context,” paper delivered at The Historical Society, 2010 Conference, June 3, 2010, Washington, D.C.: and “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (October 2006): 725–742.
5. David Brion Davis, “Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives,” American Historical Review 105 (April 2000): 455.
6. Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in an Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 6 (quotation); Laura Jarnagin, A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008); Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
7. Peter A. Coclanis, “Globalization before Globalization: The South and the World to 1950,” in Globalization and the American South, ed. James C. Cobb and William Stueck (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 25; Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (December 2004): 1405–1438; Daniel Rood, “Industrial Epistemologies: A Social History of Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2010).
8. For example, see Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); and O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life in the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
9. Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Barbara Hahn, “Making Tobacco Bright: Institutions, Information, and Industrialization in the Creation of an Agricultural Commodity, 1617–1937” (Ph.D diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2006); L. Diane Barnes, Artisan Workers in the Upper South: Petersburg, Virginia, 1820–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
10. Aaron W. Marrs, Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); William G. Thomas, Railroads and the Making of America: A Digital History Project, online at http://railroads.unl.edu/ (accessed October 2010); Kenneth W. Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
11. Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1860–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 8, 10; Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006).
12. Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in America: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
13. Timothy Mason Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Paul D. H Quigley, “Patchwork Nation: Sources of Confederate Nationalism, 1848–1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2006).
14. Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and Its Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (1960; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1990), xv; David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).
15. See the websites by Edward L. Ayers, The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/ (accessed October 2010); and David Eltis, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces (accessed October 2010).
16. Edward Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 142.
17. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
18. Robert E. Bonner, “Proslavery Extremism Goes to War: The Counterrevolutionary Confederacy and Reactionary Militarism,” Modern Intellectual History 6:2 (2009): 261–285; John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Harold S. Wilson, Confederate Industry: Manufacturers and Quartermasters in the Civil War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002); Mark E. Neely, Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999).
19. Michael W. Fitzgerald, Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South form Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
20. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 455, 460 (quotation).