This chapter examines the values, social structure, and institutions of the Old South—that is, the South before the Civil War. Despite the popular image of the region as a land of elegant planters and obedient slaves, the Old South in fact was a much more complex society. The chapter begins with several case studies that illustrate the diversity of southern life. By exploring the complexity of society in the Old South, the introduction reveals some of the complications of a culture in which white and black southerners, planters, and yeoman farm families lived together.

The Social Structure of the Cotton South

Cotton was not the only crop grown in the Old South, but it increasingly became the crop that fueled the southern economy and drove the slave population steadily westward and southward. As cotton prices boomed on the world market and the government forcibly removed southern Indian tribes, white settlers poured into the fresh lands of the Southwest, eager to take advantage of economic opportunities. A boom mentality gripped these migrants, and cotton quickly became the region's major staple crop. At the same time, though, the upper South became more diversified agriculturally, as exhausted soils encouraged planters and farmers to switch to new crops, especially wheat. These crops required less slave labor; consequently, planters from this region annually sold surplus slaves to sugar, cotton, and rice planters in the lower South.

The prosperity of southern agriculture helped keep the South overwhelmingly rural. Few cities and towns developed, and southern wealth depended heavily on agricultural exports. The lack of cities, the low population density, and slavery hindered the development of a domestic market to stimulate economic growth, and the South lagged well behind the rest of the nation in manufacturing.

Slaves and plantations did not proliferate everywhere in the South. Instead, they most frequently emerged in regions where good agricultural land had a ready access to market. Slaves became concentrated along the old eastern seaboard (the Tidewater) and in the new plantation areas of the Deep South. Other than white farm families, slaves remained the major source of agricultural labor in the Old South. They provided tremendous profits for their owners and made the entire plantation system possible.

The Class Structure of the White South

Slaveowners stood at the top of the class structure of the Old South, although, as the story of James Henry Hammond reveals, they had to work to maintain their status through rituals of patronage and services. Still, only one white southerner in four belonged to a slaveowning family, and fewer than 2 percent were members of the wealthy planter class who owned 20 or more slaves. Most slave owners owned only a few slaves. The refined, genteel plantation society of the Tidewater, with its elegant homes and strong sense of family, differed dramatically from the raw society found on the cotton frontier, in which planters often lived in unpretentious homes and utilized aggressive business tactics.

Plantations were complex business operations managed by the master. Defenders of slavery stressed the paternalistic elements of the relationship between the planter and slaves, but this theory reflected more idealism than reality. Plantation mistresses also had important duties and responsibilities and hardly led lives of leisure. Some women felt overwhelmed by these duties. Indeed, a number complained of their lack of legal rights and especially of the sexual relationships between white men and slave women, although they hardly suffered from the same oppression as slaves.

The majority of southern whites were non-slaveowning independent yeoman farmers, who owned their own farm and worked it with their family labor. They formed the middle class of the South. Slavery hurt these families both socially and economically, although in most cases it did not impoverish them. Nevertheless, yeomen farmers generally supported the institution out of racism and deeply ingrained fears of emancipation. Poor whites, poverty stricken and disdained by other southern whites, constituted the lowest class of white society. Unlike the more prosperous yeoman farmers, the poor whites resented planters, but they disliked blacks even more intensely and thus remained strongly opposed to emancipation.

The Peculiar Institution

Most black southerners were enslaved. They worked long hours and were subject to strict discipline, including physical punishment. Their standard of living generally ranked below that of workers in the North: Conditions varied widely, but in general slaves had a monotonous diet, crude housing, coarse and sometimes inadequate clothing, and limited medical care. As a result, slaves had a shorter life expectancy and a rate of infant mortality twice that of whites. Slaves resisted the institution in many ways—some overt, most subtle—but power still rested in the hands of the owner and the overseer. The most famous of the few major slave revolts occurred in 1831 under the leadership of Nat Turner, a Virginia slave preacher. Most slaves resisted in less dramatic ways, such as destroying or stealing property, working poorly, and running away. Slavery taught slaves to distrust whites and to hide their true feelings in the presence of masters and even non-slaveholding whites.

Slave Culture

Excluded from white society, slaves developed their own culture that helped them cope with the pressures of bondage. They tried to preserve a sense of family, sang songs that expressed their joy and sorrow as a people, and, most importantly, developed a Christianity of their own that emphasized their dignity as a people and promised them release from the pain of bondage. Slave songs, both spiritual and secular, expressed their innermost feelings, often in symbolic ways, as did folk tales, which in their moral lessons taught young slaves how to survive in a crushing institution like slavery. Slavery divided blacks according to occupation and color, but white racism and the oppression of slavery drove slaves together in a common bond.

Free African Americans overwhelmingly lived in the Upper South, were disproportionately female, and mostly lived in rural areas, not near plantations. Subject to intense discrimination, they enjoyed few economic opportunities and thus for the most part struggled in poverty. Laws restricting their activities grew more stringent over time, leaving them trapped in a society that had no place for them; they were not slaves, but neither were they truly free.

Southern Society and the Defense of Slavery

As slavery came increasingly under attack, white southerners rallied to defend their "peculiar institution." In 1832, in the aftermath of Nat Turner's rebellion, the Virginia legislature reconsidered the future of slavery. In the end the majority opted to take no action. This debate constituted the last full-scale consideration of slavery in a southern state before the Civil War. In the ensuing years, southern writers developed a series of arguments to defend slavery. These defenders directed these opinions toward southern whites, and especially slave owners, in order to ease their consciences. This movement also required southern politicians to defend slavery, and in national campaigns each party tried to charge the other with abolitionism. By 1830, the South had developed a regional identity with some distinct cultural features. Yet it was also becoming increasingly anachronistic as the combined and often contradictory pressures of the industrial and democratic revolutions spread across the United States and Europe.