Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Prologue
- PART ONE CRADLED IN THE STORMS OF REVOLUTION
- 1 “That Terrible Tragedy”
- 2 The Age of Revolution through Slaveholding Eyes
- 3 “The Purest Sons of Freedom”
- Entr'acte: The Bonds of Slavery
- PART TWO THE INESCAPABLE PAST
- PART THREE ANCIENT LEGACIES, MEDIEVAL SENSIBILITY, MODERN MEN
- PART FOUR A CHRISTIAN PEOPLE DEFEND THE FAITH
- PART FIVE AT THE RUBICON
- Epilogue: King Solomon's Dilemma
- Supplementary References
- Index
Entr'acte: The Bonds of Slavery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Prologue
- PART ONE CRADLED IN THE STORMS OF REVOLUTION
- 1 “That Terrible Tragedy”
- 2 The Age of Revolution through Slaveholding Eyes
- 3 “The Purest Sons of Freedom”
- Entr'acte: The Bonds of Slavery
- PART TWO THE INESCAPABLE PAST
- PART THREE ANCIENT LEGACIES, MEDIEVAL SENSIBILITY, MODERN MEN
- PART FOUR A CHRISTIAN PEOPLE DEFEND THE FAITH
- PART FIVE AT THE RUBICON
- Epilogue: King Solomon's Dilemma
- Supplementary References
- Index
Summary
Aristocracies often commit very tyrannical and very inhuman actions; but they rarely entertain grovelling thoughts; and they showa kind of haughty contempt of little pleasures, even whilst they indulge in them. The effect is greatly to raise the general pitch of society. In aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man.
—Alexis de TocquevilleSlavery grounded southern society and culture, differentiating the South from the North, to which it remained intimately linked. It had not always been thus. Although northern and southern settlement had been fed by slightly different currents – the one more Puritan, the other more Cavalier – both derived disproportionately from British stock and both included a large component of yeoman farm families. Slaveholding, like indentured servitude, was taken for granted by all. Only gradually did the two regions diverge, as slavery advanced in the South and receded in the North.
During the early years of the Republic, most Southerners lived comfortably with a kind of layered citizenship: citizens of the new United States but deeply rooted in their discrete states, which they were wont to call “my country,” and in their local communities and households. Many Northerners of the day did the same, but fault lines appeared in the early Republic. By the Missouri crisis of 1819–20, the growing regional divergence in interests and values was clear to those who cared to notice. Today, many academics slight the significance – or deny the existence – of southern distinctiveness, arguing that Southerners were Northerners by another name even during the first half of the nineteenth century: aspiring capitalists, cultivators of conventional middle-class mores, and racists.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Mind of the Master ClassHistory and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview, pp. 88 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005