Cotton is King: The Antebellum South, 1800–1860

This is Unit Twelve, part three, in which the South makes its case in print and then tries to expand by private force. Part two closed by promising you would hear the South argue in print. Here are those arguments. Two things to carry. The first is a question this course deliberately leaves open — whether the plantation system was capitalism — because the sources read for it disagree, and the entry teaches the disagreement rather than a verdict. The second is a correction. The intellectual defence of slavery was not only southern. Its most influential scientific version came out of Harvard, and a course that locates racism entirely in the South leaves you unable to explain what happens to Reconstruction in Unit Sixteen. By the end you will be able to state what each side of the capitalism argument is measuring. To explain how one household ideology produced opposite effects on two groups of women. To say where scientific racism was produced. To explain the concurrent majority. And to explain why filibustering sits in this chapter at all.

Three entries on reach and interpretation, and the third is the longest in this lecture.

A southerner arguing the point.

USH1 1699 Hundley's Southern Yeomen

D. R. Hundley, a Harvard-trained lawyer from an Alabama slaveholding family, published Social Relations in Our Southern States in eighteen sixty, arguing that the southern yeomanry formed a distinct middle class, as intelligent as northern farmers. He recorded that although not financially invested in slavery as a class, the southern yeomanry were almost unanimously pro-slavery in sentiment.

How far planter power reached.

USH1 1700 Planter Power in Washington

Seven of the first eleven presidents were enslavers, and more than half of Supreme Court justices from the Court's inception through the Civil War came from slaveholding states. A minority section held a durable majority in two branches of the federal government, which is what the free states eventually organised against.

Whether this was capitalism.

USH1 1701 Was It Capitalism?

The anchor raises the question and declines to settle it. Planters operated inside a capitalist society while using a labour system resembling feudalism and serfdom, and because enslaved people reaped no earnings, some economic historians consider the antebellum plantation system pre-capitalist. That phrasing is deliberate. It reports a scholarly position rather than adopting one, and the witnesses read for this course disagree with each other. One is emphatic that the system was capitalist, calling it capitalism with its most colonial, violent and exploitative face, and pointing to banks in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and London extending credit for southwestern land, to enslaved people counted as the largest expense of any cotton operation, and to their prices tracking the cotton market upward from seven hundred seventy-five dollars to over sixteen hundred. The other declines the frame entirely and stresses backwardness, recording that southern cities failed to develop diversified economies and were not centres of commerce, finance or manufacturing, that the transport network was primitive, and that illiteracy ran at twenty percent against eight percent nationally. Hold the disagreement rather than resolving it, and know what each side is measuring. The capitalist reading looks at credit, commodity pricing, insurance and world markets. The backwardness reading looks at cities, railroads, schools and manufacturing. Both are describing the same South. What neither witness claims is that slavery was dying of its own economic weight. One rejects that explicitly, saying there is no reason to think slavery was doomed for economic reasons. All three sources agree on that much, and it is the part that matters for explaining why the institution had to be ended by a war.

Two entries on the code that governed southern gentlemen, and the second is it failing in public.

The code.

USH1 1702 The Honour Code

A code of honour among privileged White southerners dictated what gentlemen and ladies believed and did, and maintaining reputation was supremely important, with honour tied to control over dependents, meaning enslaved people, wives and relatives. Duelling had largely disappeared in the North by the early nineteenth century and remained integral in the South through the Civil War.

The case that broke it.

USH1 1703 Hammond and Hampton

Before his election as governor in eighteen forty-two, James Hammond engaged sexually with the four teenage daughters of Wade Hampton the Second, his nieces by marriage. Hampton attempted to destroy Hammond politically instead of demanding a duel, itself a violation of the code. Hammond served as a United States senator from eighteen fifty-seven. The four Hampton daughters never married.

Three entries on the household, and the third is the strongest gender material in this course.

The household the code governed.

USH1 1704 Gender and the Household

The antebellum South was especially male-dominated, and wealthy planters in particular acted as patriarchs and household sovereigns, with labour and daily ritual among White members conforming to rigid gender delineations. White women were relegated to the household and lived under the thumb and protection of the male patriarch.

The ideal they were held to.

USH1 1705 The Southern Lady

Thomas Roderick Dew of William and Mary derived woman's virtue from natural weakness, piety, grace and modesty, and Louisa Cheves McCord's eighteen fifty-three poem urged her sister not to stoop to be a man. Against that ideal, women's own accounts describe the trauma of childbirth, the loss of children, and the loneliness of the plantation.

The same ideology, applied to enslaved women.

USH1 1706 Enslaved Women and the Same Ideology

For White slaveholders the male-dominated household protected gendered divisions and norms. For enslaved women the same system exposed them to brutality and frequent sexual domination. The labour demanded of enslaved women made the idealised domestic role impossible, and slaveholders placed them in fields performing traditionally male work, which reflected nothing of the gentleness and delicacy reserved for White women. Their roles as daughters, wives and mothers received no patriarchal protection at all. The cult of White womanhood required Black women's labour and their rape in order to function, and the anchor states both halves. Teach the southern lady without the enslaved woman and you are teaching an advertisement. Both halves come from the same pages.

Four defences of slavery now, and watch where the fourth was written.

The constitutional argument.

USH1 1707 Calhoun's Concurrent Majority

Calhoun became slavery's leading political theorist, seeing the South as an increasingly embattled minority, and advanced the concurrent majority — a regional majority, though a national minority, holding a veto over legislation hostile to it. His eighteen fifty Disquisition on Government held that where government turns hostile, concurrent majorities may form new governments. The anchor calls the argument profoundly anti-democratic.

The comparison they drew.

USH1 1708 Wage Slavery

Defenders of slavery attacked northern wage labour, arguing the Industrial Revolution had created wage slavery, far worse than southern plantation slavery, while Virginians blamed William Lloyd Garrison for instigating Nat Turner's rising. The comparison is an argument about the North rather than a defence of the South, which is what makes it effective in print.

Its fullest statement.

USH1 1709 Fitzhugh

George Fitzhugh published Sociology for the South in eighteen fifty-four, arguing laissez-faire capitalism benefited only the quick-witted and disadvantaged the ignorant, and claiming that slaveholders cared for enslaved people from birth to death. He wrote that the negro is but a grown up child and must be governed as a child, the master occupying the place of parent.

Where else that argument was made.

USH1 1710 Agassiz and Polygenism

The North produced defenders of slavery too. Louis Agassiz, professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, popularised polygenism, the claim that human races originated separately and that Black people constituted a wholly separate race. The idea gained ground in the eighteen fifties with the publication of Types of Mankind by George Gliddon and Josiah Nott in eighteen fifty-four, one advocate placing Black people between the Greeks and chimpanzees on an evolutionary scale. The anchor says polygenism codified racism and gave notions of Black inferiority scientific credibility. Note where it came from. Scientific racism in this period was Harvard's as much as the plantation's, and locating racism solely in the South misstates the anchor and leaves you unable to explain the North's own record. This matters again in Unit Sixteen, where northern support for Reconstruction collapses.

Three entries on where the South wanted to go next.

The goal.

USH1 1711 The Expansionist Goal

Southern expansionists had backed the Louisiana Purchase, Native American removal, Texas annexation and the Mexican-American War, and proslavery expansionists sought to repeat Texas by taking Cuba and other territory. The anchor gives their aim as enlarging the American empire of slavery, which is their framing rather than a later characterisation.

The men who tried it privately.

USH1 1712 Filibustering in the 1850s

Filibusters were men who led unofficial military operations intended to seize land from foreign countries or foment revolution there, forming themselves into private armies to annex land without their government's approval. An eighteen eighteen federal law criminalised such expeditions. Unit Eleven covered the earlier wave; this is the proslavery one.

The island they wanted most.

USH1 1713 Cuba and Haiti's Shadow

Spanish Cuba was the main object of American slaveholders in the eighteen fifties, with annexationists arguing Cuba must be taken to prevent it going the route of Haiti, with enslaved people overthrowing their captors. They also feared British intervention, Britain having outlawed slavery in its colonies in eighteen thirty-three, which would have freed Cuba's enslaved people.

Three entries on the attempts, and none of them worked.

The man who tried five times.

USH1 1714 Narciso López

Narciso López, a Venezuelan seeking to end Spanish control of Cuba, attempted the island five times with American support, his last effort in the summer of eighteen fifty-one, leading an armed group from New Orleans as thousands cheered. No Cuban uprising materialised, and Spanish authorities captured and executed López and the American filibusters with him.

The secret memo.

USH1 1715 The Ostend Manifesto

In eighteen fifty-four American diplomats met at Ostend in Belgium and produced a secret memo, thought written by James Buchanan, claiming that if Spain refused to sell Cuba, the United States was justified in taking it as a national security measure. The contents leaked, northern outrage followed at what looked like a Slave Power scheme, and European powers were angry too.

How two presidents handled it.

USH1 1716 Pierce and Buchanan

President Franklin Pierce had announced expansionist intentions at his eighteen fifty-three inauguration, and retreated from the Cuba plan after the leak, while Louisiana's legislature requested federal action in eighteen fifty-four and former Mississippi governor John Quitman raised slaveholder funds for an invasion. Buchanan, once elected, denounced filibustering as the action of pirates, having been thought the memo's author.

Two entries to close the unit, on the one filibuster who succeeded.

William Walker.

USH1 1717 William Walker

William Walker, born in Tennessee, conquered Nicaragua in eighteen fifty-five with about sixty mercenaries, having earlier invaded Mexico and named his conquest the Republic of Sonora. Nicaragua's appeal was twelve miles of land separating the Pacific from Lake Nicaragua and its Atlantic-draining river. Cornelius Vanderbilt controlled the Nicaraguan shipping traffic, and Walker's adventure upset his business while exciting proslavery southerners.

What he did with his conquest.

USH1 1718 Walker Legalises Slavery

In eighteen fifty-six Walker legalised slavery in Nicaragua, where it had been illegal for thirty years, in order to gain southern support, and reopened the slave trade there. He became president of Nicaragua that year and was expelled in eighteen fifty-seven. Returning to Central America in eighteen sixty, he was captured by British forces, handed to Honduran authorities and executed by firing squad. Filibustering widened the North–South gulf, which is why it belongs in a chapter about the antebellum South rather than one about foreign policy. Northerners read Cuba, Nicaragua and the Ostend Manifesto as evidence that the Slave Power intended to expand without limit and would use private violence where politics failed. Unit Fourteen opens with a decade in which that suspicion governs everything.

Look at what you can now do. You can state what each side of the capitalism argument measures — credit and commodity markets on one side, cities and railroads and schools on the other — and you can state what all three sources agree on, which is that slavery was not dying of its own economic weight. You can explain how one household ideology produced opposite effects, protecting White women inside the home while exposing enslaved women to the field and to rape, with the first requiring the second in order to work. You can say where scientific racism was produced, which was a Harvard professorship as much as a plantation. You can explain Calhoun's concurrent majority, a veto held by a regional majority that is a national minority, which the anchor calls profoundly anti-democratic. And you can explain why filibustering belongs in this chapter, because it widened the sectional gulf and convinced northerners that the Slave Power would use private violence where politics failed.