The term “Old South” describes a time and a place: the fifteen states that maintained slavery from the ratification of the Constitution in 1787 to the start of the Civil War in 1861. It has also served as interpretive shorthand for seeing antebellum America as a nation torn between a backward-looking past, embodied by a static, essentialized Old South, and a forward-looking present, represented by the dynamic and diverse North. This collection of essays reconsiders that second interpretive meaning. The Old South as a place that defied the march of progress has deep roots in popular culture but also resonates through professional scholarship that measured it according to a standard of modernity defined by the North, its sectional rival, and Britain, the global superpower of its day. That comparison still has value to be sure, but it now competes with other interpretations of the Old South that avoid such sharp juxtapositions and their underlying assumptions by focusing on the region’s diversity, modernity, and global interconnections.1
Expanding on this effort, this volume recasts the Old South not as the anti-North or as a region stuck in time, but on its own terms and as an active participant in, and even promoter of, change and progress. The essays that follow consider some of Southern history’s mainstay topics, such as cotton and slavery, from fresh perspectives and explore lesser known aspects of the Southern past, such as the history of planter sexuality and the Native American encounter with modernizing trends. Taken as a whole, they reiterate the often-made point that the South contained great diversity, but contend that each of the “many Souths” was inextricably shaped by modern experience. Discussing historical actors and events in light of relevant secondary literature, they seek to give student and professional readers examples of the changing interpretation of the Old South.
An understanding of the Old South as modern-minded and globally interconnected has emerged from studying the slave states in contexts that previously drew little scholarly attention. These new contexts can be divided into two broad, interrelated areas. The first situates the national history of the United States at the center of Southern history and, in turn, considers how the Old South contributed to processes that defined the nation. Where one dominant scholarly tradition has sought to explain what made the Old South distinct from the rest of the United States, another one contemplates how Southerners contributed to national narratives and were influenced in turn by these narratives. To ask how antebellum Southerners influenced the main currents of U.S. history opens new understandings of what it meant for all Americans to celebrate the Fourth of July, seek profit, move west, join a church, and draw lines between white and black, men and women, and rich and poor. Applied within the South, those questions suggest answers that replace a regional identity often presented as dichotomous with an American one that more comfortably overlaps with it and is central to it. Putting the Old South squarely in the middle of U.S. history calls into question not only its status as an exceptional region but also as one that stood outside the currents of modern social change. As a constituent element of a modernizing nation, the Old South can more easily be comprehended as oriented toward the future rather than as stuck in the past.
The second context for reimagining the Old South is global rather than national, and it joins efforts by historians of other regions to move the United States out of an exceptionalist analytical framework and into one that integrates the nation and its regions into larger narratives of the nineteenth-century world. In the exceptionalist account of U.S. history, the Old South operated as the catch basin for those elements that did not fit easily into an understanding of America as uniquely free of the hierarchies and traditions of a premodern Old World. International and comparative studies of the nineteenth-century United States have effectively demolished the myth of American exceptionalism. In turn, that reorientation of national history has cast doubt on the Old South’s standing as distinctively parochial and isolated. One way to study the South’s part in global trends is to investigate the transnational flows of commodities, ideas, and people between the South and the world. Such globally informed histories also demonstrate the relevance for understanding Southern history of international events such as the end of slavery in the British Empire or Asian and European competition in staple crop production. Another method, longer in use but being transformed by global history, looks beyond national borders to compare the Old South to a wider variety of places, ranging from southern and eastern Europe to Latin America. These comparisons remind historians that coerced labor, racism, and sectional identities were not exceptional to the South. Nor were Southern reading habits, consumption patterns, and immigrant flows significantly different from other contemporary cultures. As with integrating the South into the nation, placing the South in a global context casts doubt on impressions that it resisted or lagged behind in adapting to modernity.
These approaches to the South’s place in nineteenth-century national and world history depart from popular narratives of the Old South and of the region’s portrayal in a vast body of professional scholarship. Often associated with a traditional society at odds with the modernizing trends of its era, the term “Old South” has a history all its own. While its associations echoed the plantation myth concocted during the antebellum era, the phrase “Old South” first came into popular usage during the late 1870s as Southerners, many of whom hailed their time as a “New South,” charted a variety of paths forward in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction.2 The call for a New South referenced the immense postwar challenges to find prosperity amidst the destruction of the war and falling staple crop prices, to negotiate the meaning of race and gender after emancipation, and to redefine regional identity in the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat. Diverse groups disagreed on how best to address these challenges. Despite their differences, however, late nineteenth-century observers agreed on three key points: The Old South had been defined by slavery, the Confederacy’s defeat marked a fundamental break between past and present and the region was outside or at the minimum behind the modernizing trends of its times.
The boosters of a New South who promoted this last assumption about the Old South drew selectively from a variety of pre–Civil War descriptions of the region. Black and white abolitionists—though frustrated with the slave South’s continued power—rightly cast the region as retrograde opponents of expanded liberty, their definition of modern progress. Economic reformers—some inside the South, others outside—alleged that Southerners’ loyalty to traditional methods led them to reject new technologies and increased manufacturing. Many stressed the undeniable fact that the South had fewer markers of economic progress such as factories, railroads, and banks, than did the North and Britain. Politicians—appealing to the electorate and arming for battle against real and presumed foes—occasionally trumpeted themselves as honor-bound purists fighting external enemies and newfangled policies. Southern journalists and romantic novelists promoted regional pride by highlighting what they thought made their localities different: pastoral life and a unique appreciation for the past. Crafted for precise, often strategic, purposes in the antebellum era, narratives of a pre–Civil War Old South were treated by later writers as confirmed evidence of an exceptional society deeply committed to preserving the old rather than embracing the new.3
This image of the Old South as the embodiment of traditions that defy modern times has endured to the present day, with Southerners and non-Southerners alike remaining susceptible to or strategically deploying a largely fictionalized “Southern culture.” Commerce offers plenty of examples. The idea helps Walt Disney World, the South’s biggest tourist attraction, promote its central Florida Port Orleans Resort. “Welcome back to a time and place,” their advertisement reads, “where everything seems to move a little slower and simple pleasures flourish like magnolia blossoms in the springtime.”4 Similarly, the makers of Old South pickled green beans promise “a revival of historic taste from a simpler time.”5 Popularized in novels and movies, the “Old South” conjures up a place where life was slower, community and evangelical religion mattered, and there were only two kinds of people, free Anglo-Saxon whites and enslaved African Americans.6
In thinking about why this image persists, literary critic Scott Romine argues that “the South still operates as a battle slogan, often in projects decompressing space and time against modernity’s late encroachments.”7 Today, much as it did in the late 1800s, the conception of a premodern Old South both highlights the promise of the future by suggesting how the nation has overcome past evils and allays modern fears that fast-paced social and technological change is destroying a sense of community. Ills of today’s America such as racism, violence, and persistent poverty can be isolated as either a Southern problem or explained away as unfortunate legacies of the Old South and its antimodern ways. Conversely, Americans can take “Southern comfort,” not just from the whiskey that traces its origins to the mid-nineteenth-century splendor of Mississippi River towns but also from an idealized Old South where human connectedness and enduring tradition were not erased by the latest fad or disastrous downturn in the business cycle.
While rarely as one-dimensional as an advertisement, the image of the Old South as a holdout from the trends of its times has been a dominant theme in historical writing. In the early 1900s, interpretations of the Old South as a place of tradition resonated among historians who were critical of Northern industrial capitalism. For example, Ulrich B. Phillips, a prominent scholar of this era, waxed poetic about the Old South’s freedom from industrial timekeepers, contending that “the strokes of a tall clock in the hall were of little more concern than the silent shadow on the sundial outdoors.”8 From the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, historians influenced by victory in World War II and the Cold War treated slavery as a historical outlier from mainstream support for natural rights and free-market economics. This idea complemented an interpretation of U.S. history as an exception to the devastating wars and ideological extremes of fascism and communism that beset Europe. Just as it did in popular culture, the Old South—“an alien child in a liberal family,” in the words of one historian—soaked up those elements of U.S. history that defied a narrative of steady progress.9
The Vietnam War and social criticism of the 1960s leveled some weighty intellectual challenges to Americans’ self-understanding, and the civil rights movement brought renewed focus to the study of the South and slavery. Ironically, the effort to rebut an interpretation of American history as dominated by liberal, middle-class values drew “new” social historians to ask the same basic questions about why the United States had diverged from European patterns.10 For a burgeoning number of Southern historians writing within this framework, slavery and its legacy of racism provided part of the answer. Inspired by Marxist structuralism, historians—most famously and influentially Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese—concluded that the South had been born as the “bastard-child of merchant capitalism and developed as a non-capitalist society.”11 In arguably the most detailed and sophisticated set of plantation studies ever written, they suggested that U.S. slavery and the South were best seen and studied through the lens of a negotiated master-slave relationship that, though cruel and fraught with tension, could be labeled “paternalist.” While sometimes qualified, subsequent work has fleshed out this argument further suggesting that the “historically unique kind of paternalist society” that blacks and whites created and contested in the Old South led Southern whites towards an exceptional, tradition-driven, and evangelical-inspired understanding of the past and present.12
The persistence of an analytical framework that asks how the U.S. South differed from Europe and the North has come at a price. This focus on “the exceptional South,” as historian Laura Edwards has recently observed, “still traps historians,” providing “an easy way out of difficult problems” and leaving “comfortable historical assumptions in place. Segregating the South obviates the need to confront the most difficult truths and contradictions in the nation’s past.”13 It has also tended towards an approach that defines the region for what it was not, rather than for what it was.
Naturally, this interpretation has not gone unopposed. As in earlier eras, the 1970s’ and 1980s’ variants on the Old South as an exception to American progress came in for criticism. Self-described cliometricians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman developed a statistically driven economic argument for the productivity of slave-based agriculture as an essentially capitalist activity that generated bourgeois values and living standards at par or above those of the Northern states. Adding to the debate, Edward Pessen and Carl Degler argued that shared language, religion, politics, and history as well as innumerable economic ties made the sections more similar than different.14 Meanwhile, social and political histories of nonelite planters, farmers, and middling Southerners emphasized the dramatic effect that commercial expansion and a liberal-capitalist mindset had in reshaping the antebellum South. Although the South was slower to modernize than the North, these historians argued, it was modernizing nonetheless. Being drawn into the market revolution brought anxiety about market downturns and soil exhaustion, but white Southerners’ response—to push for slavery’s expansion westward and some economic development—were meant to advance economic progress, not simply preserve noncapitalist aspects of the slave economy.15
The debates over slavery and capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s foreshad-owed transnational and comparative themes in today’s scholarship. For example, Genovese and Fox-Genovese insisted that Southern slaveholders be understood in the context of transatlantic merchant capitalism. Similarly, the first chapter of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross considered slavery’s international context. Degler’s study of race and slavery in Brazil and the United States showed the possible richness of comparative histories. Moreover, present-day studies of the Old South share the earlier concern for how slavery fared in relation to the general patterns of change worldwide.16
Yet there are important differences between these understandings of nineteenth-century change—often summarized as modernization—and current usage. In debating the South’s difference from the North, scholarship published in the 1970s and 1980s agreed on what modernization looked like, whereas more recent studies cast doubt on earlier assumptions about modernity that were built into comparisons of North and South. Previous studies saw the North as more advanced, but that judgment begs the question of what constituted “more advanced.” Seeking a standard for measuring the United States, historians have (often implicitly) looked to Britain, the nineteenth-century’s dominant global power, for “grand narratives of improvement and capitalist expansion.”17 In the early 1800s Britain strengthened its already powerful role in world affairs by de-emphasizing the territorial conquests and mercantilist economics that defined its eighteenth-century expansion in favor of a policy of industrial development and free trade enforced by its supremacy on the high seas. These developments were accompanied by a wave of self-proclaimed benevolent reforms that included the abolition of slavery throughout the empire in 1834. By treating Britain as the exemplar, historians have made the most visible trends in its society—empire, industrial cities, railroads and telegraphs, bourgeois gender relations and moral reform, and ultimately slavery’s extinction—the standard measurements of nineteenth-century modernization for other countries. These British-cut paths through the nineteenth century are compelling comparisons both because Britain’s enormous impact on the America South ensured it weighed heavily on contemporaneous minds and because enduring theories of modernization were crafted by thinkers who either lived in Britain or who took its examples as the most advanced versions of changes that were sweeping the globe.18
Among the theorists most often looked to were Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Despite disagreeing over capitalism’s virtues, they nonetheless agreed that the system’s march was inevitable and that elements not fitting the more advanced forms present in Britain were traces from earlier stages of economic development. For Smith, slave labor limited productivity, harmed capital accumulation, and made whites “unfit to get a Living by Industry.”19 Marx argued that slavery belonged to an earlier stage of “primitive accumulation” that preceded the commodification of labor through wage contracts and made the American Civil War inevitable.20 Although his own work avoided human history, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution provided social scientists with a powerful biological metaphor for the birth, maturation, and decline of human communities.21 Smith, Marx, Darwin, and European thinkers such as Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Alexis de Tocqueville disagreed sharply on what mattered most about the changes of the nineteenth century and why they had come to pass, but they shared in common developmental theories of change that used a British or near-British standard against which all other societies could be judged.
Applied to U.S. history, the North, which more closely resembled England, inevitably appeared to be the more developed section. Exemplifying this approach, prominent Civil War historian James McPherson writes: “Until 1861 . . . it was the North that was out of the mainstream, not the South. Of course the Northern states, along with Britain and a few countries in northwestern Europe, were cutting a new channel in world history that would doubtless have become the mainstream even if the American Civil War had not happened.” In a world history that treats Britain and the societies most like it as the carriers of the future, the South, which fought against one of England’s look-alikes, quite logically appears as a remnant of a past historical epoch.22
The intellectual climate of recent decades, however, has fostered doubts about the limits of any all-encompassing definition of modern social change. In the 1970s and 1980s theorists in the humanities drew attention to the ways that language mediates, or constructs, perception of social reality and from this insight deconstructed the inherent contradictions, or disruptions, within a variety of overarching “master” narratives of human progress.23 This new skeptical tone coincided with political and economic changes that caused historians to rethink the primacy of industrial capitalism as the leading edge of modernization. In the 1970s deindustrialization began transforming the factory districts of the northeastern United States and the British Midlands into “rust belts,” casting doubt on their centrality to economic innovation.24 The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the era of globalization that followed reinforced skepticism about a unified modernization theory. In a post–Cold War world less concerned with the struggle between capitalism and communism, the flow of goods, people, and ideas between nations seems more significant for understanding current affairs than any breaks between the traditional past and the modern present.25
Drawing on these influences, historians have been increasingly critical of teleological narratives because, as William Sewell argues, they attribute cause and effect not to human agency set within specific conditions, “but rather to abstract transhistorical processes leading to some future historical state.”26 This conception of a uniform chronological process encompassing all human history forces its adherents to characterize the things that do not fit a particular period—such as slavery in an age of wage labor—as anachronisms. In its place are alternative definitions of modernity that open the concept up to more general categories of experience going beyond the most visible features of change in western Europe and the northeastern U.S. and appreciating how local circumstances and transnational forces created variants of the general features of modernity.27
Modernity can be understood as both a matter of cultural outlook and material achievement. Modern culture gives priority to the present over the past and regards the present as elevated above and advancing beyond previous human epochs. This distinguishing feature of modernity, which historian C. A. Bayly calls “an aspiration to be ‘up with the times,’” can generate an anxious pursuit of the latest fashions, most advanced technologies, and newest ideas, not merely for their own sake but also as proof of being up to date.28 In reference to collective relationships, modernity simultaneously promotes equality and exclusivity, often expressed as racism, by treating as insiders those identified with a particular vision of human progress and shunning people perceived to stand in its way.29 According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, “an era that declared achievement to be the only measure of human worth needed a theory of ascription to redeem boundary-drawing and boundary-guarding concerns under new conditions.” In this way “modernity made racism possible” and elevated demand for rational, uniform systems that “[cut] out elements of the present reality that neither fit the visualized perfect reality, nor can be changed so that they do.”30
Materialist definitions of modernity identify social organizations that rationalize human activity in order to maximize its productive capacity. Examples include open markets for land, labor, capital, and the commodities they generate; cities linked by rapid transportation and communication; sufficient levels of productivity and consumption, usually starting in agriculture, to support further improvements in production, such as manufacturing; government organized under a rational bureaucracy that protects contracts and property; a division of labor that maximizes efficiencies; and widespread literacy coupled with mass media.31 It is tempting to boil these abstractions down to their celebrated nineteenth-century manifestations: the department store, industrial metropolis, railroad, factory, wage earner, government ministry, and penny press. Resisting that temptation allows historians to consider different, and sometimes less flattering, expressions of these modern processes and to appreciate that even conventional markers resulted from more complicated dynamics. More than simply bringing additional historical experience under the umbrella of modernity, the inclusion of unlikely players—such as the slaves and slaveholders of the Old South—in the history of modernity also reconfigures its meaning over time as something other than the inevitable unfolding of human liberty.
Two examples, one from the Old South and the other far from its shores, help to illustrate what it means to say that there were multiple paths to modernity in the nineteenth century. Between the late 1700s and the Civil War the proportion of white Southerners who fit the definition of middle class went from almost none to one in ten.32 Helping that growth were state-funded military academies, which were nearly absent in the North but taught thousands of poorer young Southern men the bourgeois values of self-improvement and “restrained manhood.” As state-run, rather than private, elite-funded institutions, these military academies helped create what historian Jennifer Green describes as “a separation between the emerging middle class and the elite” and were “a bureaucratic replacement of traditional community relationships.”33 If one works from Northern-inspired models, military academies, which were associated with a hierarchy of ranks and were created in part to staff slave-patrolling militias, were unlikely spawning grounds of the middle class.
A second example of the many routes to modernity lies beyond the borders of the United States. By 1850 the Ottoman Empire had moved away from traditional hierarchical governance driven by personal fealty towards a rationalized bureaucracy that operated according to uniform rules that were applied horizontally across the polity by interchangeable officials. Contrary to western European states that had systematized government from the top down, however, the Ottoman road to a modern nineteenth-century state flowed through local notables, the roadblocks to change in other societies. Dynastic families that had mediated between the imperial center and its subject people in places like Egypt and northern Anatolia transformed traditional privileges, like tax farming, into modern economic institutions, including private property. They created prototypes of bureaucratic uniformity through public works projects that broke down ethnic and occupational barriers in the name of community progress.34 From a perspective that treats western Europe as the standard of modernity, military academies look like poor training grounds for egalitarian bourgeois family men, just as tax-farming landlords seem improbable stewards of modern property rights and the nation-state. Their place in the making of modernity shows how a broader definition of the term expands its reach and changes its trajectory.
More inclusive and less teleological understandings of modernity make better sense of how antebellum Southerners charted their own modern course, one that resembled British and Northern examples in some particulars, but that also was distinctly shaped by the depth of the region’s commitment to liberal-capitalism and race-based slavery.35 Antebellum Southerners understood their way of life to be the product of unique and dynamic modern processes, perhaps dating back to the seventeenth century but taking on new urgency in a rapidly changing nineteenth-century world. Chief among those processes were struggles over the nature and meaning of sovereignty, a heightened sense of the individual as an agent of historical change, and expanded trade and commerce within and between vast empires and new nation-states that spanned continents. To be sure, Southerners appealed frequently to “ancient” and “medieval” societies for inspiration and occasionally for comfort in the face of these dizzying changes, but few, if any, wished to remake their society in the image of those examples. They respected traditions, but unlike their premodern ancestors they refused to be bound by them.
The essays in this volume showcase these perspectives on the Old South, joining with other scholars who, as noted at the outset, have reconsidered the region’s place in national and world history. In part one, contributors use both national and world contexts to draw the Old South out of its conventional role as the North’s foil and into the main currents of national and international history. Peter Onuf begins by considering the importance of American nationalism to Southerners and of Southerners’ contribution in return to national identity before the Civil War. Onuf argues that the desire for a separate Southern nation came not from an underdeveloped sense of nationalism but from an “exalted conception of themselves as American patriots” and the transatlantic-informed (and modern) belief that a distinct people could rightfully determine their own destiny. Where Onuf locates the South at the crossroads of national history, Matthew Mason places the region’s political leaders in a transatlantic conversation with British moral reformers. Proslavery Southerners confronted European abolitionists to argue that slavery and the society it created provided antidotes for newly emerging ills. But instead of shunning the humanitarian initiatives that spurred British emancipation, Mason finds Southern political leaders debating how to harness the spirit of benevolence to their plans for slavery’s survival. Brian Schoen’s chapter develops another aspect of slave-holders’ interest in global change by highlighting how a diverse planter class responded to world market conditions, a central feature of which was the emergence of competitors from the Pacific rim. Their crop-specific embrace of new technologies and labor strategies and their pursuit of specific government policies suggest that a multitude of political economies emerged in the South, one of which enabled a large number of cotton planters to feel emboldened by their perceived place at the forefront of modern agriculture.
Moving from slaveholders’ efforts to shape modernity toward their own economic, political, and intellectual ends, part two considers slavery as a modernizing institution. In an examination of the internal economy of slaves, Larry Hudson shows that their “natural instincts toward economic independence and property accumulation” forced concessions from masters and that, despite the many barriers to accumulating cash and accessing markets, slaves participated in the capitalist marketplace as consumers. Recent scholarship has also emphasized that the laws that granted property rights in slaves enabled owners to use slaves themselves, as opposed to the things they produced, as sources of wealth. Steven Deyle uses the concept of the market revolution to rethink the slave trade and demonstrate how central slave traders were to the region’s economy. These traders proved remarkably accepting of recent business innovations, suggesting that commodities held in slaves, as a kind of investment for future profits, were at the forefront of capitalist practices that spawned or supported life insurance, interregional markets, complex chains of credit, and cultural assumptions about modern identity that mediated sex, race, and consumerism.
If slavery was not a system that predated—or prevented—modern economic development, historians must then reconsider the common assumption that slavery would have died-out sooner or later. James Huston takes up this challenge in his thought-provoking conjectures about the future of slavery in the border South had there been no Civil War. In speculating about an alternative future, Huston draws attention to the patterns of regional trade emerging in the late-antebellum era. Had those trends continued, he argues, the border South would have become a slave-based industrial economy, and slavery would have acquired a new vitality capable of extending the system well beyond the nineteenth century. Slavery emerges from the essays in part two as a more brutal but no less dynamic manifestation of the vast expansion of antebellum capitalism.
Such perspectives were difficult to imagine in earlier historiographies that defined free labor markets and capitalism as coterminous, ignored culture entirely, and assumed the incompatibility of slavery and economic modernization. Yet recent critics of this all-or-nothing approach to slavery and capitalism validate the approaches taken here. In the late 1990s historians started to bridge the divide suggesting that capitalist structures and precapitalist ones overlapped to explain tensions within the South.36 More recent work has further linked slavery with modern economic processes, with one historian going so far as to argue that the combination of property rights in humans and a racial ideology that treated black bodies as legitimate objects of unrestrained sexual desire meant that “slaves, along with sugar, may have been the first modern commodities.”37 Another recent commentary distinguishes a “second” slavery that broke from its eighteenth century predecessor in terms of output, new techniques, greater scales of production, and the “sheer mobility and adaptability of slave labor.”38 A third commentary asks historians “to think about the political economy of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Atlantic as a single space, its dimensions defined by flows of people, money, and goods, its nested temporalities set by interlocking (though clearly distinct) labor regimes, cyclical rhythms of cultivation and foreign exchange, and shared standards of calculability and measurement.”39 In this integrated understanding of slavery’s place within modernity, the antebellum South—which provided upwards of two-thirds of the world’s cotton supply, owned (if slaves are included) over half of the United States’ wealth, and demonstrated strong expansionist impulses—must surely feature prominently. Within the United States, territorial conquest combined with the global demand for Southern staples catalyzed the removal of Native Americans and the forced westward migration of one million enslaved African Americans from the states of the Atlantic coast to the lower Mississippi River valley between 1800 and 1860.
This story of slavery counters interpretations of it as an archaic institution that prevented the South from achieving the higher level of modernization obtained by the North. Those interpretations rest not only on the absence of slavery in the North but also on the North’s greater number of conventional markers of nineteenth-century modernity, particularly cities, railroads, and factories. In part three, contributors reconsider the Old South’s experience with these long-time standard measures of modernization. Frank Towers uses a broad comparative context to understand the Old South’s distinctively slavebased path to modern cities. He finds that the South resembled the North and Britain in some ways—all were at the forefront of worldwide urban growth—but, in other respects, looked more like Cuba, a fellow slave society which shared the South’s pattern of urban dwellers concentrating in cities at the expense of towns. Asking whether the North’s cities were bigger than the South’s or vice versa, Towers argues, may tell historians less than asking how their sectional differences manifested alternative versions of the modern metropolis. In an examination of Southern railroads, William Thomas demonstrates that modern slavery incentivized a widespread transportation network, which in turn introduced other examples of modernity, including timetables and new technology, into southern life. Using Petersburg, Virginia, as a case study of industrial development in the Old South, Diane Barnes examines how Southerners incorporated an ethos of modern manufacturing into existing traditional social structures that prioritized slavery and agriculture. Together these essays avoid a sectional-scorecard approach to cities, railroads, and factories to ask how the South encountered these conventional markers of economic development on its own terms, thus creating a slavery-based road to an urban-industrial future.
Moving from bricks, steam, and metal to faith, ethnic identity, and sexuality, part four considers how national and global cultural trends manifested themselves in the Old South and, in turn, how antebellum Southerners reinterpreted cultural modernity to fit local circumstances. Black Southerners longing for freedom counted on progress, the rallying cry of those who believed that human action, usually inspired by divine providence, could create a better future. The idea of progress permeated the spirituals black Southerners sung, the narratives they wrote, and—as Charles Irons’s chapter reveals—the complicated contributions they made to intraregional reform movements and biracial mission work at home and abroad. Irons shows how interracial benevolent work became the front line upon which evangelical whites and blacks pursued sometimes overlapping but often contested versions of how to achieve spiritual progress at home and in Africa. Native Americans, also victims of white notions of progress, had every reason to be skeptical of the idea of positive change, and many were. Yet, on their own terms, Native Americans, as Andrew Frank demonstrates, synthesized traditional and newer methods, trusting that collective and individual advancement was both necessary and desirable.
The modernization of Southern culture had many meanings and sometimes met unexpected foes. As it did with racial identity, modernity’s emphasis on difference and exclusion drew new lines for gender identity in the South and forced a rethinking of traditional sexuality. Bringing to light the history of sexual contact between planter men, Craig Friend considers the role of sex as performance and the ways that planters such as the notorious James Henry Hammond used sex as “a way to establish power over others,” whatever their gender or race. As Friend argues, the place of homosexuality in making Southern manhood is difficult to see through the modernist assumption that heterosexuality was normative everywhere and promoted in the South by the ethics of honor. Breaking from this framework, Friend joins Irons and Frank in blurring lines of difference that have long dominated the study of antebellum Southern culture.
In part five, the final set of essays offers different reactions to the broad question of the Old South’s relationship to nineteenth-century modernity. In a counterpoint to other essays that look at the South in transnational and globalcomparative terms, Marc Egnal reconsiders the sectional comparison that consumed the attention of antebellum Americans: how the South measured up to the North. For Egnal, the South’s failure to achieve modernity on the North’s terms was the critical test and the underlying cause of the Civil War. His essay offers students an alternative to the general rethinking of the Old South presented in the rest of the volume, and it is written in an effort to spark debate about the merits of moving towards transnational and global perspectives. Pivoting from Egnal’s conclusions about the causes of the Civil War, Edward Ayers projects the story outward and forward in time, discussing the meaning of the Civil War and emancipation for a blood-stained nation and a global audience that watched with dismay. In so doing he reveals that many of the dynamics discussed in earlier chapters—from cotton’s prominence in world markets, to the rise of nationalism, to the modernity of slavery—culminated in a cataclysmic conflict that ended legalized slavery in the United States but not the modern tensions that had sustained slavery or made the war possible. This discussion is brought full circle by Michael O’Brien in an afterword that provides context both for the critical concept of modernity and for the changing perspective on the Old South held by those who lived in it and those who more than a century and half later continue to study it. His contribution gets to the heart of questions about periodizing both Southern history and the history of modernity and about drawing borders around a region while still thinking about it in global terms.
Part five’s reflections on how best to study the Old South, what its institutions left to the future, and how to think about the protean concepts of modernity and globalization bring the volume back to its original insight that thinking about the Old South as being in step with its times rather than behind them has important implications for histories of that region, the United States, and the world. For one thing we discern the Old South as not purely static or exceptional and are better able to chart how transformative change happened. We also appreciate that the region’s diverse inhabitants expected and in most cases pursued additional advancement. As one Southern intellectual observed in 1837, “All worlds . . . are in one perpetual progress of organization, increase, dissolution, reproduction, change . . . . On the existence of this mutability does our happiness, or, at least our pleasure depend.”40 Disproportionately influential in southern society, the planters and politicians who shaped national policy understood that their often tenuous control over others resulted from and depended on their ability to accept and harness change, not to deny or resist it. Like their abolitionist adversaries, they proved quite willing to selectively embrace the new and attack developments that did not comport with their vision of present and future demands. To be sure, Southerners often criticized the North for unwisely embracing new ideas that pulled people out of established relationships and threw them into transitory and ultimately empty roles. Modernity, they claimed, left Northerners (but not Southerners) prone to utopian thinking, but spiritually ignorant and unrealistic; profit-driven, but uncertain of financial security; sexually liberated, but denied the protection of marriage; and free of slavery, but bereft of the order necessary to preserve and enjoy freedom. Rather than resisting change, however, Southern leaders, encouraged their followers to join the march of progress, confident that their slave institution allowed the South to enjoy the blessings of modernity: expanded and freer commerce, democracy (for whites), cultural refinement, and (for many) spiritual fulfillment through Christ without modernity’s emerging ills. At home, in national politics, and even abroad, white Southerners trumpeted their regionally distinct understanding of modernity and its socioeconomic fruits, not because they believed it rooted in the past but because they believed it well-suited for the future.
Thinking and acting within rather than outside nineteenth-century global norms, white Southerners were often successful in convincing others of the utility, if not always the justness, of their views. This perspective brings into focus how the Old South helped make America and how so much of antebellum Southern history can be understood as national history. To take one example, with the exception of the Oregon boundary dispute in 1846, the United States’ major territorial acquisitions between 1788 and 1860 were made with no restriction on slavery and under the leadership of slaveholding presidents with enthusiastic support from proslavery congressmen. Like so many other features of American society, manifest destiny included arguments for the uniquely redemptive quality of slavery as practiced by the Old South’s progressive, evangelically minded masters, a vision that historian Robert Bonner has recently termed “proslavery Americanism.”41 Appreciating the power of this Southern-tinctured version of American modernity should make us all the more interested in knowing more about alternate ones that rose to challenge it.
Attention to Southerners’ engagement with the trends of their times also opens up historical understanding of the ways that Southerners interacted with the wider world, drew motivation from developments far from the United States, and impacted distant lands through migration, trade, and conquest.42 For example, Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works has long been known for things distinctively Southern: using slaves in industry and making Confederate armaments. A recent exploration of its business dealings in Cuba and other Latin American slave societies shows non-Southern contributions to Tredegar’s success and the Old South’s role in spreading industrial slavery across the hemisphere.43 In both its national and international dimensions, the Old South played a formative role in creating the modern world.
In making these comparisons and appreciating the effects of global forces on the South, and vice versa, we should be reminded that modernity does not have an independent life outside of lived experiences. It exists in context. While a new emphasis on being “up with the times” was felt in China as well as New York and while trade in cotton fibers brought Indian farmers into competition with Southern planters, the process of modernization looked different depending on the local context. For wealthy, well-traveled planters like South Carolina’s Manigault family, the Old South was a platform for cosmopolitanism: summers in Paris, years at a time in Philadelphia, and the best food, books, music, and company that a person of refined taste could enjoy and keep.44 For a slave on the Manigaults’ Gowrie plantation, modernity meant misery: a bad diet, a life span shortened by overwork and endemic disease, illiteracy, and shackles (both literal and figurative).45 An Irish-born seamstress working in a Baltimore clothing factory would have known little about either the rice swamps or the wine cellars of the South Carolina Lowcountry, yet she too lived in the Old South. The different ways that these people experienced modernity and divided Southern society are too numerous to enumerate fully. Poor whites resented rich ones. Rich cotton planters resented rich sugar planters. Men followed a different ethos than women. City dwellers thought about the South in ways unfamiliar to rural folk. Protestants distrusted Catholics, especially i mmigrants. Whigs distrusted Democrats. Most of all, black and white Southerners shared a mutual disdain and divergence of interests that created the preconditions for secession, Civil War, and eventually emancipation. These tensions highlight how detached from reality the New South mythmakers’ harmonious image of the “Old South” truly was.
Rethinking antebellum Southerners’ relationship to modernity still maintains their regional identity but avoids making Southern exceptionalism the analytical start or finish. It allows us to appreciate distinctiveness, but in a way that opens up the opportunity to explore new comparisons and new forms of connectedness both within the region and outside of it, and it opens questions that did not fit comfortably within the dichotomies that have historically defined the literature of the antebellum South.
NOTES
1. In addition to the works cited below and in the conclusion, see Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) ; and more recently Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 131–145 ; and J. William Harris, The Making of the American South: A Short History, 1500–1877 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006).
2. James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 98 ; John B. Gordon, The Old South (Augusta, Ga.: Chronicle Publishing Co., 1887), 7, 13 ; John C. Reed, The Old and New South (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1876), 5–6 ; “The New South and the Old South,” The American Missionary 5:46 (May 1892): 142.
3. Cobb, Away Down South, 22; Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and Sectional Identity in Antebellum America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 42 ; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961), 115, 133, 149; Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life in the American South, 1810– 1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1:127, 1:147– 148, 2:598.
4. Intercot, Walt Disney World: Inside & Out, http://www.intercot.com/resorts/disney/riverside/default.asp (accessed October 2010).
5. Bryant Preserving Company, http://www.oldsouth.com/products.asp?id=101&;topcat=1 (accessed October 2010).
6. Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 41–90.
7. Scott Romine, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 9. See also Leigh Ann Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Larry J. Griffin, “Southern Distinctiveness, Yet Again, or, Why America Still Needs the South,” Southern Cultures 6 (Fall 2000): 47–72, esp. 68.
8. Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929; repr., Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1963), 336. See also William E. Dodd, The Cotton Kingdom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1919); Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
9. Louis B. Hartz quoted in C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 22.
10. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 30.
11. Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Fruits of Merchant Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 5.
12. See especially Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974), 4 (quotation); Genovese and Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
13. Laura F. Edwards, “Southern History as U.S. History,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009): 563–564.
14. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1989); Edward Pessen, “How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?” American Historical Review 85 (December 1980): 1119–1149, 1147; Carl Degler, Place Over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 93.
15. Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949); William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 100; J. Mills Thornton, III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Lacy K. Ford, Jr., The Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Knopf, 1990).
16. See Genovese and Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital; Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, chap. 1; and Carl Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971)
17. C. A. Bayly, “The Second British Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol 5: Historiography, ed. Robin Winks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 68.
18. Anthony Webster, The Debate on the Rise of the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
19. Smith quoted in Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 20–21.
20. For the classic application of this thesis to New World slavery, see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Russell and Russell, 1944). Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels (1861; repr., New York: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1906), 684 (quotation).
21. Robin I. M. Dunbar, “Evolution and the Social Sciences,” Human Sciences 20:2 (2009): 29–50, esp. 32.
22. James M. McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question,” Civil War History 50:4 (2004): 418–433, 433 (quotation). See also C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 17–22.
23. Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang with Supriya Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern Historiography (New York: Pearson Longman, 2008), 368–369.
24. Webster, Debate on the Rise of the British Empire, 145; William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 63.
25. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 253, 266–267, 272.
26. Sewell, Logics of History, 84. See also Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2002), 63.
27. S. N. Einsenstadt, “Multiple Modernities” Daedalus 129 (Winter 2000): 1–29.
28. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 10 (quotation); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffins, and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2000), 145; Michel Foucault, “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” trans. Colin Gordon, Economy and Society 15 (February 1986): 88–96.
29. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 13; Zygmunt Baumnan, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Robin Blackburn, The Making Of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (New York: Verso, 1997), chap. 8.
30. Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity, Racism, Extermination,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, ed. Les Back and John Solmos (New York: Routledge, 2000), 215.
31. Jan de Vries and Ad Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 693; Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 230; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6–7.
32. Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 8.
33. Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class of the Old South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5, 55 (quotation), 101.
34. Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 256–262.
35. Oakes, Slavery and Freedom.
36. See, for example, Christopher Morris, “The Articulation of Two Worlds: The Master-Slave Relationship Reconsidered,” Journal of American History 85 (December 1998): 982–1007; Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
37. Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” The American Historical Review 106 (December 2001): 1619–1650, 1650 (quotation).
38. Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009): 628 (quotation); Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
39. Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004): 299–308, 304 (quotation).
40. S. A. Roszel, “Pleasurable Sensations,” Southern Literary Messenger 3 (February 1837): 148, quoted in O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 1:1.
41. Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 69, 83–84. See also Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 334.
42. 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.
43. Daniel Brett Rood, “Plantation Technocrats: Industrial Epistemologies: A Social History of Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2010).
44. Daniel Kilbride, An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).
45. William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (1996; repr., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 55–57.