01:512:205 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: White Southerners, Aristocracy, Jousting
18 May 2018
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Chapter 16: The South and the Slavery Controversy,
1793-1860
1. Cotton Is King!
1. As time passed, the Cotton Kingdom developed into a huge agricultural
factory, pouring out avalanches of fiber; quick profits drew planters to the
virgin bottomlands of the Gulf states; as long as the soil was still vigorous,
the yield was bountiful and rewards high
1. Caught up in an economic spiral, the planters in the South bought
more slaves and land to grow more cotton, so as to buy still more
slaves and land
2. Northern shippers reaped a large part of the profits from the cotton
trade; they would load bales of cotton at southern ports, transport
them to England, sell their cargo for pounds, and buy needed
manufactured goods for sale in the United States
3. The prosperity of both North and South rested on the backs of
southern slaves
2. Cotton accounted for half the value of all American exports after 1840—
the South produced more than half of the world’s supply of cotton—a fact
that held foreign nations in partial bondage; Britain was then the leading
industrial power, whose most important single manufacture in the 1850s
was cotton cloth, from which 20% received work
3. Southern leaders were fully aware that Britain was tied to them by cotton
threads and this dependence gave them a heady sense of power; in their
eyes Cotton was King, the gin was his throne and the black bondsmen
were his henchmen (cotton was a powerful monarch as if war ever broke
out, the South could cut off its outflow of cotton)
2. The Plant Aristocracy
1. Before the Civil War, the South was in some respects not so much a
democracy as an oligarchy—or government by the few—heavily
influenced by a planter aristocracy
1. In 1850 only 1,733 families owned more than 100 slaves each, and
this select group provided the cream of the political and social
leadership of the section and nation
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2. In the tall-columned and white painted plantation mansion, dwelt the
cottonocracy
2. The planter aristocrats enjoyed a lion’s share of southern wealth
1. They could educate their children in the finest schools, often in the
North or aboard
2.
3. Their money provided the leisure for study, reflection, and statecraft,
as was notably true of men like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis
4. They felt a keen sense of obligation to serve the public; it was no
accident that Virginia and the other southern states produced a higher
proportion of front-rank statesmen before 1860 than the dollar-
grubbing North
3. But even in its best light, dominance by a favored aristocracy was
basically undemocratic
1. The gap between rich and poor widened and hampered tax-supported
public education, because rich planters could send their children to
private institutions
2. A favorite author of elite southerners was Sir Walter Scott, whose
manors and castles, helped them idealize a feudal society, though
their economic actives were capitalistic
3. Southern aristocrats, who sometime staged jousting tournaments,
strove to perpetuate a type of medievalism that he died out in Europe;
Mark Twain accused the British novelist of arousing the southerners to
fight for a decaying social structure (sham)
4. The plantation system also shaped the lives of southern women; the
mistress of a great plantation commanded a sizable household staff of
mostly female slaves
1. She gave daily orders to cooks, maids, seamstresses, laundresses,
and body servants
2. Relationships between mistresses and slaves ranged from
affectionate to atrocious; some mistresses showed tender regard for
their bondswomen and some slave women took pride in their status
as members of the household but slavery strained women
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3. Virtually no slaveholding women believed in abolition and relatively
few protested when the husbands and children of their slaves were
sold (whipping was common)
3. Slaves of the Slave System
1. Plantation agriculture was wasteful, largely because King Cotton and his
money-hungry subjects despoiled the good earth; quick profits led to
excessive cultivation, or land butchery, which in turn caused a heavy
leakage of population to the West and NW
2. The economic structure of the South became increasingly monopolistic;
as the land wore thing, many small farmers sold their holdings to the
prosperous and went north or west; essentially, in the South the big
plantations got bigger and the small got smaller
3. Another cancer in the bosom of the South was the financial instability of
the plantation system; the temptation to overspeculate in land and slaves
cause many planters to plunge in beyond their depth; slaves represented
a heavy investment of capital (perhaps $1,200 each in the case of prime
field hands and they might injure themselves or run away)
4. An entire slave quarter might be wiped out by disease or even by
lightening
5. Dominance by King Cotton led to a dangerous dependence on a one-crap
economy, whose price level depended on world conditions—system
discouraged diversification
6. Southern planters resented watching the North grow fat at their expense;
they were pained by the heavy outward flow of commissions and interest
to northern middlemen, banks, agents, and shippers (South spent their life
in servitude to Yankee manufacturing)
7. The Cotton Kingdom also repelled large-scale European immigration,
which added so richly to the manpower and wealth of the North; in 1860
only 4.4% of the southern population was foreign born, as compared with
18.7% for the North
8. German and Irish immigration to the South was generally discouraged by
competition of slave labor, by the high cost of fertile land, and by
European ignorance of cotton growing
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Document Summary
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