(no subject)
The Cotton Economy
● The most important economic development in the mid nineteenth century South was the shift of economic power from the “upper South” to the “lower South”.
○ Much of the Upper South in the nineteenth century relied on the cultivation of tobacco.
○ Tobacco was notoriously unstable, with frequent depressions and price alternations.
- Tobacco also exhausted the soil and it was difficult for most growers to stay in one place for very long.
- By the 1830's most tobacco growing farmers in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina were shifting to other crops like wheat.
- The center of tobacco cultivation was moving westward, into the Piedmont area.
● The southern regions of the costal south continued to rely on rice, which demanded substantial irrigation and needed an exceptionally long growing season *Nine Months*
● Sugar growers along the Gulf Coast enjoyed a reasonably profitable market for their crop.
○ Sugar labor requires intensive labor and long growing time. Only rich planters could afford to engage in it and they faced major competition from the sugar plantations of the Carribean.
● The decline of the tobacco economy in the upper South, and the inherent limits of the sugar, rice and long staple cotton economies farther south, night have forced the region to shift its attention in the nineteenth century to other, nonagricultural pursuits, had it not been for the growing importance of the new product: short staple cotton
● Short Staple Cotton was hardier and coarser strain of cotton that could grow successfully in a variety of climates and in a variety of soils. It was harder to process than the long staple variety, its seeds were more difficult to remove from the fiber.
○ Cotton production dominated the more recently settled areas of what come to be known as the “Lower South”
○ With more business, they needed more slaves. Struggling planters of the north found business in selling slaves to the deep south.
Southern Trade and Industry
● There was growing activity in flour milling and in textile and iron manufacturing, particularly in the Upper south. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, for example, compared favorably with the best iron Mills of the Northeast.
● The nonfarm commercial sector was largely to serve the needs of the plantation economy.
○ Particularly important were the brokers or “factors” who marketed the planters crops.
- These merchants tended to live in such towns as New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile and Savannah where they worked to find buyers for cotton and other crops and where they purchased goods for the planters they served.
- Factors also served as bankers
● Professionals other than planters were relatively unimportant in comparison with the manufacturers, merchants and professionals of the North, on whom the southerners were coming more and more and increasingly unhappily to depend.
● Inadequate Regional Transportation System
The south had a very inadequate transportation system. They had no canals, roads or railroads like the North.
● If there were roads, they were crude and unsuitable for heavy transportation.
● Such towns as Charleston, Atlanta, Savannah, and Norfolk had direct connections with Memphis, and thus with the Northwest
- Most of the South however, remained unconnected to the railroads and the northwest.
● The principle means of transportation was : Water.
● De Bow’s Review
○ The most prominent advocate of southern economic independence was James B D De Bow, a resident of New Orleans.
- He published a magazine advocating southern commercial and agricultural expansion, De Bow’s Review.
- He made his journal into a tireless advocate of southern economic independence from the North, warning constantly of the dangers of the “colonial “ relationship.
- The journal was published in New York and was full of North advertisements.
● Sources of Southern Differences
○ The agricultural economy was booming, and ambitious people eager to profit from the emerging capitalist economy had little inventive to look beyond it.
○ Another reason was that wealthy southerners had so much capital invested in their land and particularly, their slaves that they had little left for other investments.
○ Some historians have said that the hot weather in the south was not good for industrial investments.
○ Still, others have gone so far as to claim southern work habits (perhaps a reflection of the debilitating effects of climate) impeded industrialization, some white southerners appeared at least to northerners not to work very hard to lack the strong work ethic that fueled the northern economy
● The Cavalier Image
Many white southerners liked to think of themselves as representatives of a special way of life: One based on traditional values of chivalry, leisure, and elegance.
● White southerners were, they argued “cavaliers” people happily free from the base, acquisitive instincts of the “Yankees” to their north.
● Southern white people, they believed, were more concerned with a refined and gracious way of life than with rapid growth and development.
● Appealing as the cavalier image was to southern whites, it conformed to the reality of southern society in very limited ways.
White Society in the South
● Only a small minority of southern whites owned slaves. No more than a quarter of whites owned slaves, and only a proportion owned them in substantial amounts.
● The Planter Class
● They stood at the apex of society, determining the political, economic, and even social life of their region. Enriched by vast annual incomes, dwelling in palatial homes, surrounded by broad acres and many black servants, they became the class to which all others deferred.
● White southerners liked to compare the Upper Class to old upper classes in England and Europe: True aristocracies. Long entrenched.
○ In fact, however, southern upper class was in most cases not at all similar to the landed aristocracies of the Old world.
○ Even the most important planters in the cotton growing areas of the South were, new to their wealth and power.
● Plantation Management
● Planters had to supervise their operations carefully if they hoped to make a profit. They were, in many respects, just as much competitive capitalists as the industrialists of the North whose lifestyles they claimed to hold in contempt.
○ Even rather affluent planters lived modestly, their wealth so heavily invested in land and slaves that there was little left for personal comfort.
● Wealthy southern whites sustained their image of themselves as aristocrats in many ways.
○ They avoided such “course” occupations as trade and commerce, those who did not become planters often gravitated toward the military, a “suitable” career for men raised in a culture in which medieval knights, were a powerful and popular image.
○ The aristocratic ideal also found reflection in the definition of a special role for southern white women.
“Honor”
● Above all perhaps white males adopted an elaborate code of chivalry, which obligated them to defend their “honor”, often through dueling, which survived in the South long after it had vanished in the North.
● Anything that seemed to challenge the dignity, social station, or “manhood” of a white southern male might be the occasion for a challenge to duel, or at least stern public rebuke.
○ When the South Carolina congressmen Preston Brooks strode into the chamber of the United States Senate and savagely beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane to retaliate for what he considered an insult to a relative, he was acting wholly in accord with the idea of southern honor.
- In the north, he was reviled as a savage. In the south, he became a popular hero.
● The Southern Lady
● White woman in the south’s role was generally the same as white women of the middle class in the north.
○ Their lives generally centered around the home and they served as companions to and hostesses for their husbands and as nurturing mothers for their children.
- Even less frequently than in the North did “genteel” southern white women engage in public activities or find income producing employment.
● Differences with the South and North Women
○ For one thing, the cult of honor in the south meant in theory that southern white men gave particular importance to the “defense” of women. In practice, generally meant that white men were more dominant and white women more subordinate in southern culture then they were in the North.
○ The vast majority of females in the region lived on farms, isolated from people outside their families which made it hard for them to look beyond their roles as mothers and wives.
○ Because the family was the principle economic unit on farms, the dominance of husbands and fathers over wives and children was even greater than in those northern families in which income producing activities had moved out of the home and into the factory or office.
○ For many white women, living on farms of modest size meant a fuller engagement in the economic life of the family than was becoming typical for middle class woman in the North.
- These women engaged in spinning, weaving and other production. They did agricultural tasks and surveyed the slaves
- Women became more an ornament for her husband than an active part in economy or society.
● Southern white woman had less access to education. Nearly a quarter of all white women over twenty could not read.
● Other burdens: birth rate was nearly twenty percent higher than of the nation as a whole
● The Plain Folk
● The typical white southerner was not a great planter and slaveholder, but a modest yeoman farmer. Some owned a few slaves with whom they worked and lived far more closely than did the larger planters. Three quarters did not own slaves at all.
● Devoted largely to substantial farming, some did cotton
● The southern educational system provided poor whites with few opportunities to learn and thus limited their chances of advancement.
● For the sons of wealthy planters, the region provided ample opportunities to gain education.
● The elementary and secondary schools were fewer and inferior to schools in the north.
● Hill People
● They were the most isolated from the mainstream of the regions life. They practiced a simple form of subsistence agriculture, owned practically no slaves and had a proud sense of seclusion.
○ They were unconnected to the new commercial economy that dominated the great cotton planting region of the south.
○ They produced almost no surplus for the market, had little access to money, and often bartered for the goods they could not grow themselves.
○ They did not agree with slavery: because it threatened their sense of their own independence.
- The mountain region was the only part of the south to defy the trend toward sectional conformity, and it was the only part to resist the movement toward secession when it finally developed.
■ Even during the Civil War itself, many refused to support the confederacy and fought with the Union.
Other Southerners
● Far greater in number were the non-slave owning whites who lived in the midst of the plantation system.
○ Many perhaps most accepted that system because they were tied to it in important ways.
- Small farmers depended on the local plantation aristocracy for many things: access to cotton gins, markets for their modest crops and their livestock, credit or other financial assistance in time of need.
● Some poor and rich farmers were even related, which helped mute what might otherwise have been pronounced class tensions.
● The most important economic development in the mid nineteenth century South was the shift of economic power from the “upper South” to the “lower South”.
○ Much of the Upper South in the nineteenth century relied on the cultivation of tobacco.
○ Tobacco was notoriously unstable, with frequent depressions and price alternations.
- Tobacco also exhausted the soil and it was difficult for most growers to stay in one place for very long.
- By the 1830's most tobacco growing farmers in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina were shifting to other crops like wheat.
- The center of tobacco cultivation was moving westward, into the Piedmont area.
● The southern regions of the costal south continued to rely on rice, which demanded substantial irrigation and needed an exceptionally long growing season *Nine Months*
● Sugar growers along the Gulf Coast enjoyed a reasonably profitable market for their crop.
○ Sugar labor requires intensive labor and long growing time. Only rich planters could afford to engage in it and they faced major competition from the sugar plantations of the Carribean.
● The decline of the tobacco economy in the upper South, and the inherent limits of the sugar, rice and long staple cotton economies farther south, night have forced the region to shift its attention in the nineteenth century to other, nonagricultural pursuits, had it not been for the growing importance of the new product: short staple cotton
● Short Staple Cotton was hardier and coarser strain of cotton that could grow successfully in a variety of climates and in a variety of soils. It was harder to process than the long staple variety, its seeds were more difficult to remove from the fiber.
○ Cotton production dominated the more recently settled areas of what come to be known as the “Lower South”
○ With more business, they needed more slaves. Struggling planters of the north found business in selling slaves to the deep south.
Southern Trade and Industry
● There was growing activity in flour milling and in textile and iron manufacturing, particularly in the Upper south. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, for example, compared favorably with the best iron Mills of the Northeast.
● The nonfarm commercial sector was largely to serve the needs of the plantation economy.
○ Particularly important were the brokers or “factors” who marketed the planters crops.
- These merchants tended to live in such towns as New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile and Savannah where they worked to find buyers for cotton and other crops and where they purchased goods for the planters they served.
- Factors also served as bankers
● Professionals other than planters were relatively unimportant in comparison with the manufacturers, merchants and professionals of the North, on whom the southerners were coming more and more and increasingly unhappily to depend.
● Inadequate Regional Transportation System
The south had a very inadequate transportation system. They had no canals, roads or railroads like the North.
● If there were roads, they were crude and unsuitable for heavy transportation.
● Such towns as Charleston, Atlanta, Savannah, and Norfolk had direct connections with Memphis, and thus with the Northwest
- Most of the South however, remained unconnected to the railroads and the northwest.
● The principle means of transportation was : Water.
● De Bow’s Review
○ The most prominent advocate of southern economic independence was James B D De Bow, a resident of New Orleans.
- He published a magazine advocating southern commercial and agricultural expansion, De Bow’s Review.
- He made his journal into a tireless advocate of southern economic independence from the North, warning constantly of the dangers of the “colonial “ relationship.
- The journal was published in New York and was full of North advertisements.
● Sources of Southern Differences
○ The agricultural economy was booming, and ambitious people eager to profit from the emerging capitalist economy had little inventive to look beyond it.
○ Another reason was that wealthy southerners had so much capital invested in their land and particularly, their slaves that they had little left for other investments.
○ Some historians have said that the hot weather in the south was not good for industrial investments.
○ Still, others have gone so far as to claim southern work habits (perhaps a reflection of the debilitating effects of climate) impeded industrialization, some white southerners appeared at least to northerners not to work very hard to lack the strong work ethic that fueled the northern economy
● The Cavalier Image
Many white southerners liked to think of themselves as representatives of a special way of life: One based on traditional values of chivalry, leisure, and elegance.
● White southerners were, they argued “cavaliers” people happily free from the base, acquisitive instincts of the “Yankees” to their north.
● Southern white people, they believed, were more concerned with a refined and gracious way of life than with rapid growth and development.
● Appealing as the cavalier image was to southern whites, it conformed to the reality of southern society in very limited ways.
White Society in the South
● Only a small minority of southern whites owned slaves. No more than a quarter of whites owned slaves, and only a proportion owned them in substantial amounts.
● The Planter Class
● They stood at the apex of society, determining the political, economic, and even social life of their region. Enriched by vast annual incomes, dwelling in palatial homes, surrounded by broad acres and many black servants, they became the class to which all others deferred.
● White southerners liked to compare the Upper Class to old upper classes in England and Europe: True aristocracies. Long entrenched.
○ In fact, however, southern upper class was in most cases not at all similar to the landed aristocracies of the Old world.
○ Even the most important planters in the cotton growing areas of the South were, new to their wealth and power.
● Plantation Management
● Planters had to supervise their operations carefully if they hoped to make a profit. They were, in many respects, just as much competitive capitalists as the industrialists of the North whose lifestyles they claimed to hold in contempt.
○ Even rather affluent planters lived modestly, their wealth so heavily invested in land and slaves that there was little left for personal comfort.
● Wealthy southern whites sustained their image of themselves as aristocrats in many ways.
○ They avoided such “course” occupations as trade and commerce, those who did not become planters often gravitated toward the military, a “suitable” career for men raised in a culture in which medieval knights, were a powerful and popular image.
○ The aristocratic ideal also found reflection in the definition of a special role for southern white women.
“Honor”
● Above all perhaps white males adopted an elaborate code of chivalry, which obligated them to defend their “honor”, often through dueling, which survived in the South long after it had vanished in the North.
● Anything that seemed to challenge the dignity, social station, or “manhood” of a white southern male might be the occasion for a challenge to duel, or at least stern public rebuke.
○ When the South Carolina congressmen Preston Brooks strode into the chamber of the United States Senate and savagely beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane to retaliate for what he considered an insult to a relative, he was acting wholly in accord with the idea of southern honor.
- In the north, he was reviled as a savage. In the south, he became a popular hero.
● The Southern Lady
● White woman in the south’s role was generally the same as white women of the middle class in the north.
○ Their lives generally centered around the home and they served as companions to and hostesses for their husbands and as nurturing mothers for their children.
- Even less frequently than in the North did “genteel” southern white women engage in public activities or find income producing employment.
● Differences with the South and North Women
○ For one thing, the cult of honor in the south meant in theory that southern white men gave particular importance to the “defense” of women. In practice, generally meant that white men were more dominant and white women more subordinate in southern culture then they were in the North.
○ The vast majority of females in the region lived on farms, isolated from people outside their families which made it hard for them to look beyond their roles as mothers and wives.
○ Because the family was the principle economic unit on farms, the dominance of husbands and fathers over wives and children was even greater than in those northern families in which income producing activities had moved out of the home and into the factory or office.
○ For many white women, living on farms of modest size meant a fuller engagement in the economic life of the family than was becoming typical for middle class woman in the North.
- These women engaged in spinning, weaving and other production. They did agricultural tasks and surveyed the slaves
- Women became more an ornament for her husband than an active part in economy or society.
● Southern white woman had less access to education. Nearly a quarter of all white women over twenty could not read.
● Other burdens: birth rate was nearly twenty percent higher than of the nation as a whole
● The Plain Folk
● The typical white southerner was not a great planter and slaveholder, but a modest yeoman farmer. Some owned a few slaves with whom they worked and lived far more closely than did the larger planters. Three quarters did not own slaves at all.
● Devoted largely to substantial farming, some did cotton
● The southern educational system provided poor whites with few opportunities to learn and thus limited their chances of advancement.
● For the sons of wealthy planters, the region provided ample opportunities to gain education.
● The elementary and secondary schools were fewer and inferior to schools in the north.
● Hill People
● They were the most isolated from the mainstream of the regions life. They practiced a simple form of subsistence agriculture, owned practically no slaves and had a proud sense of seclusion.
○ They were unconnected to the new commercial economy that dominated the great cotton planting region of the south.
○ They produced almost no surplus for the market, had little access to money, and often bartered for the goods they could not grow themselves.
○ They did not agree with slavery: because it threatened their sense of their own independence.
- The mountain region was the only part of the south to defy the trend toward sectional conformity, and it was the only part to resist the movement toward secession when it finally developed.
■ Even during the Civil War itself, many refused to support the confederacy and fought with the Union.
Other Southerners
● Far greater in number were the non-slave owning whites who lived in the midst of the plantation system.
○ Many perhaps most accepted that system because they were tied to it in important ways.
- Small farmers depended on the local plantation aristocracy for many things: access to cotton gins, markets for their modest crops and their livestock, credit or other financial assistance in time of need.
● Some poor and rich farmers were even related, which helped mute what might otherwise have been pronounced class tensions.