The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (2 page)

If the planters as a neofeudal ruling class did indeed represent the last gasp of a landed order against Northern capitalism, then the Old South represented a denial of the middle-class democracy that has characterized American society.
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To the degree that the antebellum South was a planter-dominated, working aristocracy, the Old South was more Southern (perhaps more European) than American.

That planter interests prevailed in the South and that this denoted an un-American aristocratic tradition is a matter of observation, not theory; yet qualification is necessary. The planters exercised hegemony in Southern society because nonplanter whites deferred to their social “betters” and because Southern plain folk in the main accepted planter values and ideology.

Southerners as a people blended the traits of aristocracy and democracy within the same social structure. They did so in part because of the ambitions of the plain folk to become planters and because of the
noblesse oblige
of the planters toward their farmer neighbors. Kinship was important too, as was economic interdependence. Class consciousness existed among some nonplanters but was slow to develop among the masses. Resentment came hard to a farmer who yearned for a big house like his neighbor’s, who appreciated the neighbor’s inquiries about the health of an ailing child, who claimed kinship with his neighbor, and who sold the neighbor hogs and hay several times a year.

Beyond these factors was also the existence of a persistent folk culture in the Old South. Compared with other Americans, white Southerners were a homogeneous people ethnically and culturally. And compared with other Americans, Southerners tended to retain the more primal relationship with people and place characteristic of folk culture. Personal, as opposed to institutional, values and relationships were pervasive.
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Southerners of all social stations were mobile people; significantly, they measured wealth in terms of moveable slaves instead of immobile acres of land. But when Southerners moved, they tended to recreate in a new location the same sort of society and folk culture they left.

In terms of social structure, consideration of the South as an expression of a unique folk culture permits the rejection of both the moonlight-and-magnolia fantasy and the conception of Southern society as middle-class democracy. However powerful the Southern planter class, it could not ignore the more numerous and often prosperous yeomen. However numerous the Southern middle class, in accepting planter leadership, it hardly pursued traditional middle-class interests. United by the series of personal relationships which characterize folk culture, planters and plain folk formed an essentially solid Southern society.
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Southern folk culture was an adhesive factor that bound people together and offered them identity with each other and with geographical location in the Old South. The presence of 4 million black slaves within the Southern body social was another matter.

Racial slavery was the most distinctive feature of Southern life. The slave system conditioned the whole of existence for nearly 4 million black Southerners, who were its victims. And the black presence in the South incalculably affected the lives of both slaveholder and nonslaveholder whites in ways far beyond the purely economic impact of slave labor.
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So important was slavery to the Old South’s ideological cause that in 1861 Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens pronounced it the “cornerstone” of the Southern nation.
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The black presence in the South was at once a source of general tension and of white adhesion: slavery and the system of racial subordination were always prone to insurrection and racial upheaval within the South and under increasing attack from outside the South.
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White Southerners believed that slavery was crucial to their life style and, correctly, that powerful elements in the Republican Party were committed to the extinction of the institution.
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The slave system was the most threatened feature of ante-bellum life, and as such it was the most heavily defended. Planters believed that they would remain planters only so long as slavery persisted, and they had no interest in committing class suicide.

The South’s plain folk, too, generally recognized their stake in the slaveholders’ world. When in 1859 North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote his
Impending Crisis in the South,
he tried to tell his fellow plain folk how the planters were “using” them, and he tried to show how the slave system worked to keep rich people rich and poor people poor. Helper contended that slavery was a class weapon in that the system allowed planters to work their extensive acreage and barred others from access to both land and labor. His case was convincing—in the abstract. Certainly the violent response of the planter leadership in suppressing the book indicated that it had struck an exposed nerve.
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In the real world of the Old South, however, plain folk and planters were bound by ties of self-interest and racial solidarity. Freeing a captive population of 4 million would injure the plain folk economically and perhaps physically as well. The slave system was hard and often brutal, and as an institution, slavery fed the basest desires of masters and degraded the humanity of slaves.
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Racism was a national character flaw in nineteenth-century America which differed in degree, not in kind, from section to section;
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northern whites might have done the same as Southerners had they been able to adapt the slave system to their enterprises. But slavery remained a Southern institution. Not only did the South’s “peculiar institution” differ from the Northern system of labor; it differed from contemporary slave regimes in other parts of the Western world as well. Slavery was the South’s unique answer to twin demands for labor and racial subordination.
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Slavery in the American South tended to be more personal than institutional. While the authoritarian features of the abstract system tended to destroy black identity and personality, investigations of the human reality reveal the presence of a strong black identity and community. At its root, racial slavery in the Old South was a basic human relationship: the relationship between master and slave predates human history. And because it was human, it existed in an infinite variety of modes. It was grounded in love, hate, and indifference. Within the framework of the peculiar institution, blacks and whites interacted in ways that were servile, oppressive, cruel, friendly, cooperative, and gentle—all human. On this basis only could Southern whites rationalize slavery and face the threats to it from outside the South. Slavery, as Stephen Vincent Benét wrote, was “the unjust thing that some tamed into mercy, being wise, but could not starve the tiger from its eyes.”
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Agriculture lay at the base of the Old South economy, but as with social structure, a central issue was the degree of Americanness of that economy. Just as Southern society was a blend of landed aristocracy and American-style social democracy, so the Southern economy was a mixture of precapitalist seigniorialism and laissez-faire capitalism. The result was an enigma—not a never-never world of courtly agrarians or a mere mutation of American capitalism but something
sui generis.
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Like most areas of the world in the nineteenth century that produced raw materials for more diversified, industrialized areas, the South occupied a disadvantageous economic position in relation to the North and western Europe. Southern plantations produced mostly staple raw materials, and planters had to sell them on an open world market. For manufactured items, Southerners depended upon the protected industries of Europe and the North. The vicissitudes of agriculture—droughts, floods, diseases, and soil exhaustion—combined with this unfavorable market position to render the South a colonial appendage of the North and an underdeveloped nation to European capitalists.
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Nevertheless the South produced ample wealth: sugar, rice, tobacco, hemp, and assorted grains in quantity, and in any given year after 1845 an estimated two-thirds of the world’s cotton supply.
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Most of these staples left the South raw; Southerners seemed content to produce crops without all but the most elemental processing, such as the ginning of cotton. As a result, capital flowed out of the South and into the hands of more sophisticated capitalists in the North and Europe. Southern planters, when they were able to accumulate capital or command credit, tended to invest in more land and slaves. Consequently the South expanded production of raw staples without broadening its economic base.
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By 1860, industrial capitalism had made few inroads in the South. Isolated centers, chiefly on the seaboard and in the upper South, took advantage of the section’s industrial potential, and a few Southern industrialists were able to adapt slavery to factory conditions and thus demonstrate novel potential for the South’s peculiar institution, but these were exceptions. On the whole, the Southern economy was agrarian.
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One reason for the South’s industrial lag was top-heavy income distribution. Manufacturers require markets, and the majority of Southerners, slaves and plain folk, were not consumers in any significant sense. Members of the planter class had money and were often conspicuous consumers, yet planter tastes were either too sophisticated or too crude for home-grown manufacturing. Infant Southern industry offered little to compete with European luxury items or Northern agricultural implements, and, for apparent reasons, slaveholders had little need of labor-saving devices. However much the South suffered from a dearth of industry, market realities offered small encouragement to those in a position to remedy the situation.
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This analysis seems to support the agrarian view of the Old South: that Southerners were marginal to American capitalism and simply produced for a world that exploited them. In fact, though, the supposedly prodigal planters were making a better return on their investment in land and slaves than they could have made in almost any other venture.
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A good reason why planter class Southerners did not commit their energy and resources to industrialization was that they could make substantially more money planting. Even when all the variables were counted—factors such as the high initial cost of slave labor, maintenance of slaves too young and too old to work, losses owing to deaths and runaways—the weight of evidence, statistical and otherwise, indicates that slaveholding paid in the Old South. There is even reason to believe that slave labor on Southern plantations was more efficient than free labor on Northern farms.

Exploding the agrarian myth of profitless plantations does not necessarily establish the existence of cotton capitalism in the Old South. Southern planters, and indeed many subplanters, did employ the tools of capitalism. They depended upon credit in the money market, produced cash crops, sold those crops in a free market, made profits, and reinvested part of those profits in capital improvements—more land and slaves. Southerners were not mystical agrarians who subordinated the nineteenth-century priorities of getting and spending to romanticizing their mint juleps, but neither was the planter class in the mainstream of American capitalism.
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The Southern economy was basically precapitalist due to three salient features. First and most important, Southerners employed slaves instead of free labor. The use of slave labor limited flexibility in the size and skills of a work force. Planters did buy, sell, and rent slaves, but seldom in strict accord with seasonal labor demands. Both economically and emotionally, buying and selling involved more than hiring and firing. One of the striking characteristics of slavery was a sense of paternalism almost completely absent in free-labor capitalism. Paternalism did not necessarily involve kindness—a. paternalistic slaveholder could be authoritarian or indulgent in the process of caring for “his” people—but merely a sense of responsibility of master for slave. This sense of responsibility extended, of course, beyond working hours and often encompassed more than physical needs. In the free-labor North, not only was the worker unbound, the employer was also free to hire and fire at will and free, except for wages, from personal obligations toward his workers. Slaveholding, then, was more than a degenerate mutation of capitalism. The South’s peculiar institution was the base of an equally peculiar economic structure.
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A second factor that made the Southern economy unique was its overwhelming dependence upon agriculture. Although the North was still predominantly agricultural and industry was mostly domestic, American capitalism was becoming industrial and urban. The Old South shared neither tendency and so stood apart from the thrust of the national economy. This is not to suggest that capitalism can never exist in a rural setting, but that the Old South at this stage of economic development did not ride the dominant currents of the American economic mainstream. True, during the 1850s Southern cities and industries grew faster than before—perhaps the Southern economy was simply following national trends at a great distance—but even allowing for dynamic factors in the Southern economy, the Southern experience differed from the national norm in kind as well as degree.
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Finally, American capitalism in the nineteenth century, like slaveholding in the South, was not an economic system in a cultural vacuum; there was cultural baggage associated with it. However much the South employed some of the economic tools of capitalism, Southerners as a whole did not adopt its culture. In what one recent scholar has termed the “lazy South,” addiction to the work ethic never became widespread. Thrift was not a virtue of the planter class, and they seem to have honored Poor Richard’s sayings most in their breach.
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In sum, the social economy of the Old South was significantly at odds with American trends and traditions during the midnineteenth century. Differences alone, however, cannot explain the cause—cannot explain the intensity with which Edmund Ruffin and people like him pursued revolution. The cause was grounded in the raw materials of Southern life: slavery and race, planters and patricians, plain folk and folk culture, cotton and plantations. But to become the cause and inspire revolution, the elements of Southern social economy had to affect the Southern mind and emotions.