The Routledge History of the American South

Maggi Morehouse, Maggi M. Morehouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317665342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

The Routledge History of the American South looks at the major themes that have developed in the interdisciplinary field of Southern Studies. With fifteen original essays from experts in their respective fields, the handbook addresses such diverse topics as southern linguistics, music (secular and non-secular), gender, food, and history and memory. The chapters present focused historiographical analyses that, taken together, offer a clear sense of the evolution and contours of Southern Studies. This volume is valuable both as a dynamic introduction to Southern Studies and as an entry point into more recent research for those already familiar with the subfield.

1
History of the American South

Rebecca Brannon

When Barbara Fields addressed the Southern Historical Association in her 2015 presidential speech, she noted that “what has made the notion of ‘the South’ coherent is a history, localized to an identifiable place, in which slavery, racism, and the Civil War and Reconstruction figure in a particular way.”¹ While Fields argues that other regions of the United States also practiced slavery, she demonstrates how that “peculiar institution,” with its practices, values, and global impact, was strongly tied to the notion of southern identity and was integral to the history of the region. The enslavement of people of African descent provided an essential ingredient for the modernizing world; it was the backbone of the global trade in the Atlantic world, providing for cultural and commodity exchanges at a soaring level. These exchanges and interactions occurred in the American South on a scale not experienced in other regions, and became the source of global human and economic development that marked the area as a distinct and identifiable place. It is the complex history of the area—more than geography, more than slavery, and more than war—that has created the region identified as the American South. As Barbara Fields noted:

A sense of history does not arise, and cannot survive, as a mental essence. It arises and survives through the collective ritual actions that define it, render it intelligible to disparate members of the population, and make it portable from generation to generation.²

This chapter highlights the history of the American South throughout three major epochs: the Old South, the New South, and today’s Contemporary South. The history begins with the indigenous people who inhabited the region, and identifies the colonial powers that scouted and settled in the southeast region of what would become the United States. To understand the evolution of this region, the earliest glimmer of distinction created in the colonial or Old South epoch begins our journey into the creation of the American South as a place whose people are convinced they are a distinct culture within the nation.

Before the English ever got to the American South, Native Americans had built empires there. The French and Spanish had settled small colonies within the region, around the Native American empires. Europeans brought diseases that decimated the Native American populations. The rapid depopulation of the Americas made it much easier for Europeans to conquer and settle these lands—especially the attractive agricultural lands of the American South, with their long growing season. By the seventeenth century, Native American groups were already fighting off intrusions by Europeans, but often losing. James Hart Merrell notes how a “new order emerged in several overlapping stages” for the Native Americans.³ Native American groups did engage in a lucrative trade in deerskins, although this also got them into huge debts to European merchants. Europeans increasingly captured and sold Native Americans into slavery in the Caribbean. Native Americans in the South were rapidly either exterminated or sold profitably. Exploitation of labor and peoples was part and parcel of the colonial enterprise, including in the formation of the American South.

Jamestown in the American South and the flinty New England Puritan settlements were founded at the same time. The American South was an integral part of a British empire founded on the extraction of riches around the world through settled colonies developing agricultural products for the European export market. While no one who settled Jamestown knew what they would find to fulfill this goal, they were confident they would find something to make the original settlers rich. As Betty Wood makes clear: “Initially, neither the Virginia Company nor those who settled at Jamestown envisaged that agriculture would contribute much to the[ir] wealth.”⁴ Within a few years, they had discovered that the native plant tobacco, used by the Native Americans, was a luxury product that Europeans would be willing to pay plenty for. Tobacco’s addictive qualities undoubtedly helped fuel a nascent market for the smoke—a market that drove colonial expansion in the American South based on a model of mono-crop agricultural production intended for the international market. From the beginning, the way prosperity was created in the American South was through the relentless and pitiless exploitation of workers. Early southern settlers in both Virginia and South Carolina flirted with using enslaved Native American labor, and then turned to exploiting young white laborers who were already in the charity relief system of England.⁵ When settlers from the Caribbean sent their second and third sons to South Carolina with capital and slaves in order to find yet another agricultural product they could sell to the world, they were fitting in with the evolving southern expectation of exploited labor in the service of lucrative trade for those at the top. South Carolinians quickly seized on rice (which they learned about from their own enslaved population) and later the dye plant indigo in order to fuel their expansion. Rice was so profitable that on the eve of the American Revolution, Charleston was the wealthiest and most sophisticated city in the thirteen American colonies. What we should conclude is that from the beginning, exploited labor was crucial to the export economy the South was building.

Slavery had fallen out of favor centuries before in England and throughout the rest of Europe; thus colonial Americans did not transplant to the New World a ready-made legal system regarding governance of slaves. Instead, they gradually instituted new laws regulating and codifying the status of enslaved people, and guaranteeing that slavery in the South would be passed from generation to generation. While the status of slaves was originally more flexible, at least in Virginia, it is clear that only people of African heritage were singled out as befitting a permanent underclass in law and custom. Slaves in the seventeenth century lived with small numbers of other Africans, and often found it hard to maintain African traditions. In the eighteenth century, slave importations to the South increased, such that between 1720 and 1780, 60 percent of all the slaves brought to the United States were imported. Under these conditions, and the rapid growth of large-scale plantations in Virginia’s tobacco regions and South Carolina’s Lowcountry rice-growing region, slave populations grew in such a way as to allow more Africans to maintain at least some African-European mixed languages, religious traditions, and specific skills in cuisine, boat-making, and music, among other cultural expressions. South Carolina’s Lowcountry was a black majority population, where enslaved Africans could go days without seeing a white face.

In the eighteenth century, the white and black populations of the American South diversified through new immigration, and the population swelled. Such population growth was also aided by the decline of Native American populations east of the Appalachian Mountains through both disease and a series of wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (The wars were intended to drive Native Americans off the land, and often these strategies worked.) The first slaves in the South came to Jamestown in 1619, and slave imports grew slowly until the end of the seventeenth century, at which point the number of slaves brought to the American South began to increase precipitously. These slaves came from new regions of West Africa, and as more came they represented different ethnic and language groups. At the same time, in the eighteenth century the mostly English population of white southerners saw new immigration of a much more diverse group of people into the backcountry of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. The backcountry attracted Scots-Irish in large numbers, but also German-speaking religious minorities such as the Moravians. Backcountry whites increasingly challenged the eastern elite planters for control over colonial southern governments. The most serious challenges to planter hegemony such as Bacon’s Rebellion (1675–1676) in Virginia and the Regulator Movement in the Carolinas (1764–1771) came from disgruntled backcountry whites. Class conflict and ethnic tension was alive and well in the eighteenth-century American South. The backcountry was the frontier in the eighteenth century, and it encouraged frontier values such as individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and an embrace of violence in the service of family honor. While elite planters in the South imagined themselves as English gentry, with fine manners and classical learning, many white backcountry residents would recognize the gritty world country music has long celebrated.

Southerners were crucial to the American Revolution. While in the key years of ferment in the 1760s and 1770s, Massachusetts often took the lead, Virginia voices were also outspoken against hated British tax and administrative policies. White southerners were central to the Revolution, with the first five presidents from Virginia, with a Virginian as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army (George Washington), with a Virginian as the author of the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson), and another Virginian (James Madison) as the primary author of the Constitution. Other southerners were also instrumental in anti-tax resistance before the war, as well as eight years of fighting in the War for Independence. Historians have rarely argued that there were fundamental differences between regions in their approach to the issues underlying the Revolution or to pursuing it, with the exception that the southern states were rarely willing to go as far in their remonstrances and demonstrations against hated British acts. If anything, the question has long been why elite slaveholders were willing to risk a revolution that could upend their plantation regimes and turn into a slave rebellion—all over the question of the legitimacy of legislative power and paying taxes that were less than most people living in the British Isles paid at the time. Woody Holton has argued that elite planters were dangerously in debt, and saw in anti-consumption efforts a chance to void debts and control their own consumer drives. Further, they were pushed from below by white yeoman farmers, restive slaves, and angry frontier Native Americans, not fully masters of their own fate.⁶ Elites across the South were being challenged by the agitated masses, such as poor and middling evangelicals and backcountry anti-authoritarian Scots-Irish.

Among southerners, Virginians provided much of the intellectual and political leadership, while South Carolinians provided much of the on-the-ground military contributions. Despite the fact that the war mostly culminated on Virginia’s soil, much of the fighting that happened in the South took place on the soil of the Carolinas. South Carolina contributed notable guerilla leaders such as Francis Marion, known as the Swampfox, as well as many troops in both guerilla and continental forces. The Revolutionaries worked to forge a powerful nationalism sufficient to bind all colonial Americans together into an effective fighting force and a governable nation, despite painful regional stereotypes of each other. Southerners were integral to this process, and to the efforts that created the experiment in republican government called the United States of America. Yet even in the Revolutionary era, as they were creating a conjoined nation, there were signs of a separate regional identity among southerners. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention southerners defended the continuing importance of slavery as an economic institution, and made it clear they would not join a union that did not protect property in slaves. Southerners also identified themselves as a people dependent on export in a national union with consumers and traders of their goods. Southerners were suspicious of the motives of the Federalists in pushing commercially oriented policies in the Early Republic, and Thomas Jefferson became the intellectual leader of the opposition party that southerners saw as a better guarantor of their position as a rural and agricultural society. At the same time, all states north of Maryland ended slavery after the American Revolution (however inelegantly in some cases), making slavery an exclusively regional institution by 1800. Southerners redoubled their commitment to slavery at the same time everyone else in the nation backed away, which would serve to isolate them and inspire a greater sense of regional identity.

Thomas Jefferson’s vaunted “empire for liberty” would become an empire for slavery. After the successful end of the American Revolution, the American population spilled west—and took slavery with them. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 made titles secure in a huge swath of southern agricultural lands. The lands of the Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, east Texas, Georgia, upstate South Carolina, and Arkansas—became the best places to make a fortune, with the invention of the cotton gin making widespread cotton production across the South possible and increasingly profitable. Edward Baptist has shown that as masters drove slaves ever harder across the cotton belt, the white planters of the Mississippi Delta became the richest men in America, and more cotton was produced per acre during the last thirty years of slavery than ever before or since.⁷ The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s opened up these new lands for cotton cultivation, and drove the forced migration of millions of enslaved peoples on deadly marches into the delta lands of the Deep South. Americans united in forcing the removal and migration of Native Americans west of the Mississippi River, and by 1840 Native Americans had been stripped of their claims to southern lands, freeing them up for striving, ambitious white southerners to plant new plantations and to ascend into the moneyed elite.

By the 1830s white southerners were self-identified as southerners, and consciously understood themselves as being a distinct people. Southerners developed a states’ rights philosophy and cast a regional role in national politics with the nullification crises of the 1820s and 1830s. John C. Calhoun became the leading figure of southern politics with his articulated defense of southern interests and states’ rights in the South Carolina Exposition and Protest. He is now regarded as the foremost American political philosopher of the nineteenth century. Antebellum white southern culture celebrated European music, art, and luxury goods, while relying on enslaved black labor to produce cotton and other commodities profitable enough to pay for all of it. In every generation, new people from the middle class made fortunes and moved up into the elite strata. White southerners practiced an honor culture, in which preserving public face was essential. Duels were an accepted part of political and social life. By the antebellum era, elite white southerners had come to believe they were all “Cavaliers,” meaning all the descendants of aristocratic supporters of the royals in the English Civil War, who had been purged during Cromwell’s Puritan ascendancy. This helped reinforce their sense of themselves as unique within the larger nation, and destined for wealth from the beginning. The fact that this mythologizing was total revisionist thinking did not deter the adherents of the ideology. White southerners idealized the Jeffersonian ideal of independent farmers, even as yeoman farmers actually were firmly under the political control of the planters, and men like Jefferson had others perform the physical labor they idealized but shrank from. Yeoman farmers themselves were a majority of white people in the American South. They valued self-reliance, material prosperity, private property rights, and honor. Their values were influenced by the strong Scots-Irish culture of many southern whites. They sometimes battled with and resented elite planters, but their shared sense of white superiority in a society with a permanent racial underclass of slaves ultimately muted open class conflict.

The South became the Bible Belt, a place saturated in and shaped by evangelical Protestant Christianity, in the early nineteenth century. In overwhelming numbers, many southerners converted to Methodist and Baptist approaches to faith, and both black and white southerners would be largely evangelical by the time of the Civil War. Black southerners were originally attracted to the way in which early Baptists and Methodists were hostile to the institution of slavery, and preached the equality of all converted souls, white and black. Yet these denominations quickly backed away from antislavery views as the cost of converting white souls.⁸ By the 1840s, both the Methodists and Baptists would split into regional denominations over the issue of slavery.

Slavery shaped every aspect of life in the pre-Civil War South, despite the fact that only 25 percent of white southern families owned even one slave. Large slaveholding was concentrated in the hands of a few, so the majority of enslaved people lived with many other enslaved people on large plantations, with most doing agricultural work. Some urban slaves had greater autonomy, and were able to hire themselves out and save money in return for paying their owners a weekly fee. Yet all enslaved people found their lives severely circumscribed by the reality that law and custom dictated very limited autonomy, little access to the cash economy, personal and family relationships routinely disregarded by their owners, and no access to education, among other limitations. Historians have veered between emphasizing the creativity of slave culture in the villages just out of sight of the master’s Big House, or what has been called the world of sundown to sunup, and emphasizing the brutality visited upon slaves and the world of constant work, or what has been called the world of sunup to sundown. Currently, the pendulum has swung back to emphasizing the dehumanizing brutality and totality of the slave regime, as epitomized by the work of historians such as Edward Baptist and Walter Johnson.⁹ Certainl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: The Text and Context of the History of the American South
• 1 History of the American South
• 2 Politics, Southern Style
• 3 Southern Identity
• 4 Southern Language and Linguistics
• 5 Gendered Worlds
• 6 War and Warriors
• 7 Business and Work in the South
• 8 Religious Practices
• 9 Church Music in Black and White
• 10 Songs of the South: Southern Music
• 11 Southern Foodways
• 12 Architecture and Landscape Art
• 13 The Cinematic South
• 14 Southern Literature
• 15 Divided by a Common Past: Race and the Unfinished Revolution of Reconstruction
• Selected Bibliography
• Index