Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Manuscript Collections Cited
- List of Abbreviations
- Slavery in White and Black
- Introduction
- 1 The Impending Collapse of Capitalism
- 2 Hewers of Wood, Drawers of Water
- 3 Travelers to the South, Southerners Abroad
- 4 The Squaring of Circles
- 5 The Appeal to Social Theory
- 6 Perceptions and Realities
- Afterword
- Index
3 - Travelers to the South, Southerners Abroad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Manuscript Collections Cited
- List of Abbreviations
- Slavery in White and Black
- Introduction
- 1 The Impending Collapse of Capitalism
- 2 Hewers of Wood, Drawers of Water
- 3 Travelers to the South, Southerners Abroad
- 4 The Squaring of Circles
- 5 The Appeal to Social Theory
- 6 Perceptions and Realities
- Afterword
- Index
Summary
There is no country, not even the countries in which this relation [slavery] is wholly unknown to the laws, in which the difference of rank and of wealth does not put the labor of the poor at the disposal of the rich.
—Benjamin Henry LatrobeFamiliarity Breeds Disquiet
Europeans and Northerners traveled to the South; Southerners traveled to Europe and the North. Supposedly, if Northerners and Southerners visited each other more, sectional antagonisms would abate. Southerners urged Northerners to see for themselves the humanity of slavery in practice. During the congressional debate of 1819–1820 on Missouri, Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina wished that an antislavery northern colleague “would go home with me, or some other Southern member, and witness the meeting between slaves and the owner, and see the glad faces and the hearty shaking of hands.” In Virginia in the mid-1830s, Lucian Minor and Edgar Allan Poe followed suit in Southern Literary Messenger. Minor concluded a series of five articles: “The North and South need only know each other better, to love each other more” – a theme advanced by Poe in a review of J. H. Ingraham's The South-West. By a Yankee. Southerners appealed to Harriet Martineau and others to stay long enough to observe slavery closely. If they stayed awhile – so went the refrain – they would embrace the southern point of view. The Reverend Adiel Sherwood, a New Englander, offered a pleasing illustration.
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- Slavery in White and BlackClass and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order, pp. 97 - 151Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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