Old South

Last updated

Regional definitions vary from source to source. Geographically, the states shown in dark red are usually included, though their modern boundaries differ from the boundaries when a part of the Thirteen Colonies. Those borders are shown on the map. Map of USA Old South With Historical Borders.png
Regional definitions vary from source to source. Geographically, the states shown in dark red are usually included, though their modern boundaries differ from the boundaries when a part of the Thirteen Colonies. Those borders are shown on the map.

Geographically, the U.S. states known as the Old South are those in the Southern United States that were among the original Thirteen Colonies. The region term is differentiated from the Deep South and Upper South.

Contents

From a cultural and social standpoint, the "Old South" is used to describe the rural, agriculturally-based, slavery-reliant economy and society in the Antebellum South, prior to the American Civil War (1861–65), [2] in contrast to the "New South" of the post-Reconstruction Era.

Culture

The social structure of the Old South was made an important research topic for scholars by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips in the early 20th century. [3] The romanticized image of the "Old South" tells of slavery's plantations, as famously typified in Gone with the Wind , a blockbuster 1936 novel and its adaptation in a 1939 Hollywood film, along with the animated Disney film, Song of the South (1946).

Historians in recent decades have paid much more attention to the enslaved people of the South and the world they made for themselves. [4] [5] To a lesser extent, they have also studied the poor subsistence farmers, known as "yeoman farmers", who owned little property and no slaves. [6]

Politics

The Old South had a vigorous two-party system, with the Whigs being the strongest in towns, in the business community, and in upscale plantation areas. The slightly more numerous Democrats were strongest among common farmers and poor western districts. After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, black Republicans were largely disenfranchised, leaving the Republican Party a small element based mainly in remote mountain districts within the South. The region was now called "the Solid South", where Southern states would mainly vote Democrat, and lasted through the 1964 presidential election. [7] [8]

Religion

Historians have explored the religiosity of the Old South in some detail. [9] Before the American Revolution, the Church of England was established in some areas, especially Virginia and South Carolina. However, the colonists refused to allow any Anglican bishops, and instead established a practicing layman as head of the vestry in each Anglican church, which then allowed for policy determinations as if the parish were a unit of local government. Thus it handled community issues such as welfare, cemeteries, and local infrastructure.

The Church of England was disestablished during the American Revolution under the leadership of people such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The 18th century had the First Great Awakening, while the early 19th century saw the Second Great Awakening make a powerful influence across the region, especially with poor whites but also with black slaves. The result was the establishment of many Methodist and Baptist churches. In the antebellum period, large numbers of open air revivals converted new members and strengthened the resolve of established members. By contrast in the North, revivals sparked a strong interest in abolition of slavery, a forbidden topic South of the Mason-Dixon line. Additionally during the antebellum period, social issues such as public schools and prohibition, which grew rapidly in the North, made little headway in the South. Most Southern church members used their religion for intense group solidarity, which often involved intimate examinations of the sins and failures of their fellow parishioners. At a deeper level, religion served as a temporary relief, with a promised permanent relief from all the hardships and oppressions of this world. Missionary activity was a controversial issue in the South, with strong support for missionaries mostly among the Methodists, while the Baptists vacillated between movements for and against missionary activity. [10]

Honor

Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown has emphasized how a very strong sense of honor, rooted in European traditions, shaped ethical behavior for men in the Old South. The rigid unwritten code guided family and gender relationships and helped provide a structure for social control. A highly controversial aspect of the honor system was the necessity to fight in duels, under rigidly prescribed conditions, whenever a man's honor was challenged by an equal. If one's honor was challenged by an inferior person, it sufficed to beat him up. Men had the duty of protecting the honor of their women as well. Honor became an important ingredient in differentiating manhood versus effeminacy and patriarchy versus companionate marriage. [11] College authorities strictly forbade violent duels. In response, undergraduates revised the code, dropping the duels, and set up a system whereby fellow students would dictate punishment when misconduct violated college rules or the code of honor. By claiming such control over their college environment, students reshaped the honor code and bridged the awkward gap between dependence and independent adulthood. [12] So many talented people were being killed that anti-dueling associations were organized which challenged the honor code. [13]

Old South Day

Since 1976, the city of Ochlocknee, Georgia has celebrated 'Old South Day' in November each year. [14]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">White trash</span> American English slur for poor white people, especially in the American South

White trash is a derogatory term in American English for poor white people, especially in the rural areas of the southern United States. The label signifies a social class inside the white population and especially a degraded standard of living. It is used as a way to separate the "noble and hardworking" "good poor" from the lazy, "undisciplined, ungrateful and disgusting" "bad poor". The use of the term provides middle- and upper-class whites a means of distancing themselves from the poverty and powerlessness of poor whites, who cannot enjoy those privileges, as well as a way to disown their perceived behavior.

The Methodist Episcopal Church, South was the American Methodist denomination resulting from the 19th-century split over the issue of slavery in the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). Disagreement on this issue had been increasing in strength for decades between churches of the Northern and Southern United States; in 1845 it resulted in a schism at the General Conference of the MEC held in Louisville, Kentucky.

Sectionalism is loyalty to one's own region or section of the country, rather than to the country as a whole. Sectionalism occurs in many countries, such as in the United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mountain white</span> White settlers of the rural Appalachian Mountains in the United States

Mountain whites were white Americans living in Appalachia and the inland region of the Antebellum South. They were generally small farmers, who inhabited the valleys of the Appalachian range from western Virginia spanning down to northern Georgia and northern Alabama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the Southern United States</span>

The history of the Southern United States spans back thousands of years to the first evidence of human occupation. The Paleo-Indians were the first peoples to inhabit the Americas and what would become the Southern United States. By the time Europeans arrived in the 15th century, the region was inhabited by the Mississippian people, well known for their mound-building cultures, building some of the largest cities of the Pre-Columbian United States. European history in the region would begin with the earliest days of the exploration. Spain, France, and especially England explored and claimed parts of the region.

The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and although many Northern states had them, the Southern U.S. states codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of these laws were passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and in order to compel them to work for either low or no wages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antebellum South</span> Historical period in the Southern United States from 1815 to 1861

The Antebellum South era was a period in the history of the Southern United States that extended from the conclusion of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. This era was marked by the prevalent practice of slavery and the associated societal norms it cultivated. Over the course of this period, Southern leaders underwent a transformation in their perspective on slavery. Initially regarded as an awkward and temporary institution, it gradually evolved into a defended concept, with proponents arguing for its positive merits, while simultaneously vehemently opposing the burgeoning abolitionist movement.

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips was an American historian who largely defined the field of the social and economic studies of the history of the Antebellum South and slavery in the U.S. Phillips concentrated on the large plantations that dominated the Southern economy, and he did not investigate the numerous small farmers who held few slaves. He concluded that plantation slavery produced great wealth, but was a dead end, economically, that left the South bypassed by the industrial revolution underway in the North.

Social class is an important theme for historians of the United States for decades. The subject touches on many other elements of American history such as that of changing U.S. education, with greater education attainment leading to expanding household incomes for many social groups. The overall level of prosperity grew greatly in the U.S. through the 20th century as well as the 21st century, anchored in changes such as growing American advances in science and technology with American inventions such as the phonograph, the portable electric vacuum cleaner, and so on. Yet much of the debate has focused lately on whether social mobility has fallen in recent decades as income inequality has risen, what scholars such as Katherine S. Newman have called the "American nightmare."

Frank Lawrence Owsley was an American historian who taught at Vanderbilt University for most of his career, where he specialized in Southern history and was a member of the Southern Agrarians. He is notorious for his essay "The Irrepressible Conflict" (1930) in which he lamented the economic loss of slavery for the defeated Confederacy and of the "half savage blacks" that had been freed. He is also known for his study of Confederate diplomacy based on the idea of "King Cotton" and especially his quantitative social history of the middling "plain people" of the Old South.

Plain Folk of the Old South is a 1949 book by Vanderbilt University historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, one of the Southern Agrarians. In it he used statistical data to analyze the makeup of Southern society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought.

The health of slaves on American plantations was a matter of concern to both slaves and their owners. Slavery had associated with it the health problems commonly associated with poverty. It was to the economic advantage of owners to keep their working slaves healthy, and those of reproductive age reproducing. Those who could not work or reproduce because of illness or age were sometimes abandoned by their owners, expelled from plantations, and left to fend for themselves.

<i>The Slave Community</i> 1972 book by John W. Blassingame

The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South is a book written by American historian John W. Blassingame. Published in 1972, it is one of the first historical studies of slavery in the United States to be presented from the perspective of the enslaved. The Slave Community contradicted those historians who had interpreted history to suggest that African-American slaves were docile and submissive "Sambos" who enjoyed the benefits of a paternalistic master–slave relationship on southern plantations. Using psychology, Blassingame analyzes fugitive slave narratives published in the 19th century to conclude that an independent culture developed among the enslaved and that there were a variety of personality types exhibited by slaves.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown was a noted historian of the Southern United States. He was the Richard J. Milbauer Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, where he taught from 1983 to 2004; he also taught at Case Western University for nearly two decades. He studied the role of honor in southern society, in all classes, and wrote a family study of the Percy Family, including twentieth-century authors William Alexander Percy and Walker Percy.

<i>The Peculiar Institution</i> Book by Kenneth M. Stampp

The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South is a non-fiction book about slavery published in 1956, by Kenneth M. Stampp of the University of California, Berkeley, and other universities. The book describes and analyzes multiple facets of slavery in the American South from the 17th through the mid-19th century, including demographics, lives of slaves and slaveholders, the Southern economy and labor systems, the Northern and abolitionist response, slave trading, and political issues of the time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Invisible churches</span>

Invisible churches among enslaved African Americans in the United States were informal Christian groups where enslaved people listened to preachers that they chose without their slaveholder's knowledge. The Invisible churches taught a different message from white-controlled churches and did not emphasize obedience to slave masters. Some slaves could not contact invisible churches and others did not agree with an invisible church's message but many slaves were comforted by the invisible churches.

Thomas Erskine Clarke is a Professor Emeritus of American Religious History at Columbia Theological Seminary, best known for his books Dwelling Place and By the Rivers of Water.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plantation complexes in the Southern United States</span>

Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poor White</span> United States social caste and ethnic group

Poor White is a sociocultural classification used to describe economically disadvantaged Whites in the English-speaking world, especially White Americans with low incomes.

Caesar Blackwell (1769–1845) was an enslaved African-American preacher in Alabama, one of several black preachers in the Southern United States who preached to a mixed congregation. He was either bought or freed by the Alabama Baptist Association, and preached in the Antioch Baptist Church in Montgomery County, Alabama.

References

  1. ↑ "File:United States Central map 1784-03-01 to 1784-05-12.png - Wikipedia". commons.wikimedia.org. August 29, 2016. Retrieved October 26, 2022.
  2. ↑ "United States - Old South to New South".
  3. ↑ Charles C. Bolton, "Planters, Plain Folk, and Poor Whites in the Old South." in Lacy Ford, ed., A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (2005), pp 75-94.
  4. ↑ John W. Blassingame, Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (2nd ed. 1979)
  5. ↑ Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1999)
  6. ↑ Samuel C. Hyde, Plain Folk Yeomanry in the Antebellum South (2004).
  7. ↑ Burton W. Folsom, "Party Formation and Development in Jacksonian America: The Old South". Journal of American Studies 7.3 (1973): 217-229.
  8. ↑ William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (2004).
  9. ↑ A leading source is Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the old South (1979).
  10. ↑ Dickson D. Bruce, "Religion, Society and Culture in the Old South: A Comparative View." American Quarterly 26.4 (1974): 399-416. Online
  11. ↑ Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 'Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982)
  12. ↑ Robert F. Pace and Christopher A. Bjornsen, "Adolescent honor and college student behavior in the Old South." Southern Cultures 6.3 (2000): 9-28.
  13. ↑ William S. Cossen, "Blood, honor, reform, and God: anti-dueling associations and moral reform in the Old South." American Nineteenth Century History 19.1 (2018): 23-45.
  14. ↑ Turner, Alicia (November 12, 2015). "Annual 'Old South Day' in Ochlocknee". WCTV. Retrieved June 2, 2018.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.