A Short History of the South, Part 2

Originally published at Reckonin.com

We can only paint in very broad strokes a period that was marked by a vast expansion of the South and the U.S. in territory, population, economy, and culture. The Era of Expansion is an apt name.

A major aspect of this period is the westward movement. New States admitted to the Union: 1790s: TN and KY; 1810s: LA, MS, and ALA; 1820s: MO; 1830s: AR; 1840s: FL and TX. The South moved west and re-established itself constantly in new lands. In 1860, half the people born in the Carolinas, black and white, were living somewhere further south or west. Southerners played a major role also in the early settlement and government of OH, IN and IL until they were outnumbered in the 1850s by northeastern and German incomers.

So the westward experience, settling a raw land and bringing it into settled Southern civilization was a widespread experience. This is really what the work of the talented “Southwestern humourists,” much of William Gilmore Simms’s work, and other Southern literature of the time is all about. Southerners were pioneering realistic American literature while New Englanders like Longfellow, Bryant, etc. were writing about brooks and rills and sleigh rides to Grandma’s house; or like Emerson, egotistical essays explaining the universe. The Southerner Poe was certainly the first great creative genius of American literature.

This was also a period, at least to the 1850s, when Southerners dominated national politics, the most honourable and uncorrupt period of the U.S. government. Southerners were responsible for the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession. Southerners thought of the Union in terms of republican virtue. Northerners thought of it as a source of profit. Eight of the first twelve Presidents were Southern plantation owners, and another, Harrison, though elected from the Midwest, was Virginia-born. Most of the prominent statesmen and soldiers and explorers, as well as the leaders and bulk of the rank and file of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy were Southern.

During the period 1815-1860, Southern cotton and other products made up 60 per cent or more of the value of exports from the United States. The foreign commerce of the U.S. was Southern. New York enjoyed the shipping, financing, and insuring of Southern agricultural products and enjoyed good relations with the South. There was some industry in the South but not a lot—not because Southerners were too stupid and lazy to imitate New Englanders but because they didn’t need to. They could enjoy more prosperity and a better way of life without it. Some Northerners liked to claim then and now that the South was impoverished and dominated by a small elite of the wealthiest planters, which they called “the Slave Power.” This is not true. The South had universal white male voting and widespread property ownership and prosperity. The large planters had less power than the bankers and industrialists did in the North and they were often non-political.

Slavery

Slavery died out gradually in the North, though this did not indicate any benevolence toward the black people. In fact, free blacks in the North had almost no rights and some States, like Lincoln’s IL, refused even to allow them to settle there. There were more black people living in freedom in the South than the North in 1860. The foreign importation of slaves was forbidden after 1808, which Southerners favoured and forwarded. The black population grew greatly by natural increase almost equal to the white, more than anywhere else in the world. The slaves in the Caribbean and South America did not naturally increase and more were constantly imported right up to the Civil War and after. New England ship owners engaged extensively in this trade to Cuba and Brazil though it was illegal for Americans.

It would be good if some Southern defenders would stop saying that only 1 in 10 of Confederate soldiers owned slaves. There were plenty of sons and brothers-in-law of slaveowners in the Confederate army. The correct way to view the Old South is that about 1/4th of families held slaves. Most of them owned only a few families who lived and worked with the owners. There can be no doubt that the end of slavery would have come in due time in a form infinitely better than emancipation as a war measure.

A basic economic conflict between the North and South was evident to everybody from the early 1790s when Alexander Hamilton proposed and pushed through his national debt and national bank. The political program of many Northerners from Hamilton to Lincoln was what was called “the American System.” The American System was fought by the South from Jefferson onward because it clearly profited industry and banking at the expense of agriculture. The tariff meant that high taxes were put on manufactured goods imported from outside the country. This forced Southerners (and others) to buy from New England factories at higher prices and also discouraged foreign buyers of Southern exports. The “national bank” was not really national but was to be a cartel of government-empowered private bankers, i.e., Northern capitalists, who would have control of credit and currency expansion and contraction for the whole country. “Internal improvements” involved spending the tax money from Southerners to build up the infrastructure of the North and buy political support with patronage. These issues went back and forth for years. When the Southerners left Congress in 1861, the Republicans put in “the American System” permanently. By the 1850s the business interests of the North were determined to break the political power of the South as an obstacle to Northern “progress,” i.e., profit. Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, which had been insignificant villages not long before, had become burgeoning industrial centers run by capitalists who demanded a helpful government.

The way to do that was to make sure that Southerners had no more new States to settle. Thus the issue of “free soil.” The face of this was to forbid slavery in all territories not yet States. This did not free a single slave and was also designed to keep black people out of the North whether slave or not. But it guaranteed that Southern influence would grow less and less. There were some sincere abolitionists in the North, but they were a small group. Much of the history of this period is a struggle over control of territory, which was really a struggle about political control of the federal government between opposed interests. Abolitionists filled the air with malicious hate of everything Southern with never a constructive suggestion. The Northern interest is restricting slavery had NOTHING to do with the welfare of African Americans.

In the midst of the economic and political conflicts the two sections became more and more aware of cultural differences, not to mention a great gap in Constitutional interpretation as well. When The U.S. was founded nobody doubted that the sovereign people of a State could decide to leave the Union just as they had decided to enter it, but the North increasingly opposed this idea—national centralization was one of the great tendencies of the 19th century, in Europe as well as America. Germany and Italy were unified by force in the same decade that the U.S. Civil War was fought. The Union meant a confederacy of States with a central government of limited powers. Lincoln did not save the Union but made the federal government eternal and all-powerful over the people and the States and the object of mystical worship. And remember, the federal government is nothing more than the instrument of the leaders of the political party that controls it.

The sections grew apart in other ways. The South remained overwhelmingly rural. The South, though divided into many denominations, became more and more conservative and orthodox in its Christianity, while the North moved in the opposite direction, developing Unitarianism, Mormonism, and other radical sects. The South received small and manageable immigration. After 1848 the North received immense numbers of new people from Ireland and Germany who had no sense of American traditions and Constitutional understandings and knew nothing about the South except hostile propaganda. In the North education became more utilitarian— public schools were developed to provide a disciplined work force and to “Americanise” immigrants. In the South education remained more classical and decentralized.

By 1860, with Lincoln’s election, thoughtful Southern realized that they were caught in a “Union” with those, no longer fellow countrymen, who intended for the South economic exploitation and everlasting slander. Southerners were conservative in inclination and except in the Deep South were hesitant about decisive action like secession. But when Lincoln called for troops, treating the solemn acts of the people of States as some bunch of criminals to be put down, the issue became clear.
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This merely touches a few high points in a complex and interesting period of American history in order to put Southern culture and thought of the time in context.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Clyde Wilson

Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews and is co-publisher of www.shotwellpublishing.com, a source  for unreconstructed Southern books.

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