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The Fall of the House of Dixie
Southern farms and plantations yielded handsome profits to their owners, who were some of the wealthiest people in the country, and the southern elite had also controlled all three branches of the federal government during most of its existence. At the root of this all this economic and political power lay the institution of slavery an institution which, as the former slave Frederick Douglass would later recall, then "seemed impregnable." Few could then have imagined, he noted, "that in less than ten years from that time, no master would wield a lash and no slave would clank a chain in the United States."
But what almost no one foresaw in 1860 is exactly what came to pass. In Mark Twain's words, the Civil War and its aftermath "uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country." The most important and dramatic of these transformations was the radical destruction of slavery. One out of every three people in the South suddenly emerged from bondage into freedom, a change of such enormous significance and full of so many implications as almost to defy description. For the South's ruling families, meanwhile, the war turned the world upside down. It stripped them of their privileged status and their most valuable property. It deprived them of the totalitarian power they had previously wielded over the men, women, and children who produced most of the South's great wealth. "The events of the last five years," a Memphis newspaper editor summarized in 1865, "have produced an entire revolution in the entire Southern country. The old arrangement of things is broken up." The ex Confederate general Richard Taylor lodged the same complaint that year. "Society has been completely changed by the war," he wrote. Even the stormy French revolution of the previous century "did not produce a greater change in the 'Ancien Regime' than has this in our social life."[i] Abraham Lincoln applauded this "total revolution of labor" as "a new birth of freedom."[ii] Black South Carolinians cheered this "mighty revolution which must affect the future destiny of the world."
Even as it upended society in the South, the Civil War era transformed the shape of national politics in the United States as a whole. Beginning with Lincoln's election in 1860, it finally broke the southern elite's once iron grip on the federal government and drove its leaders into the political wilderness. Into the offices that planters and their friends had previously occupied there now stepped northerners with very different values, priorities, and outlooks. These new men used their political might to encourage the growth and development of manufacturing, transportation, finance, and commerce and thereby speed the country's transformation into the economic colossus familiar to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the hands of these same men, meanwhile, the post Civil War federal government assumed key roles previously assigned to the states, including the power and the responsibility to safeguard the freedom and rights of the nation's citizens citizens whose ranks now expanded to include millions of former slaves. Constitutional amendments adopted in the war's aftermath laid the legal basis for and pointed the way towards transforming the United States into a multi racial republic.
Relatively few people today are aware of just how all this happened. Although "the military movements connected with the Civil War are well known," a witness to those events commented decades afterward, "the great mass of American people know but little, and so think less" about the destruction of slavery and all that it entailed. That observation holds true after the passage of another century and more.
The Fall of the House of Dixie was written to help fill that gaping hole in our collective memory. It traces the origins and development of America's "second revolution," explaining why it occurred and how it unfolded especially how this great and terrible war undermined the economic, social, and political foundations of the old South, destroying human bondage and the storied world of the slaveholding elite. In recent years many scholarly books and articles have analyzed the Civil War's momentous consequences. But bookstore shelves allotted to the Civil War are to this day filled principally with detailed accounts of armies, officers, and the battles they fought, great and small. Nearly every major study of the Civil War as a whole especially those aimed at a wide audience continues to take the military story as its organizing principle and narrative spine.
The Fall of the House of Dixie by no means ignores that subject. The slave based society of the American South required powerful external blows to break it along its lines of internal stress. Union armies delivered those blows blows that therefore make up a crucial part of the story told in this book. But the chapters that follow focus especially upon the transformation of that war from a conventional military conflict into a revolutionary struggle. And they emphasize the ways in which very different groups of people slave owners, slaves, the great mass of slaveless southern whites, and soldiers both Union and Confederate, black as well as white experienced and helped to bring about what one newspaper at the time called "the greatest social and political revolution of the age."
From The Fall of The House of Dixie by Bruce Levine. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc.
THE HOUSE OF DIXIE
The House of Dixie was an imposing thing indeed. Senate to emphasize the slave states wealth, power, and solidity to northern colleagues who were then challenging some of their prerogatives.
One of the things that Hammond boasted of that day was the South sheer physical size, which had grown greatly since the nation founding. The number of southern slave states more than doubled over those years with the creation of Kentucky (in 1792), Tennessee (in 1796), Louisiana (in 1812), Mississippi (in 1817), Alabama (in 1819), Missouri (in 1821), Arkansas (in 1836), Florida (in 1845), and Texas (in 1845). we never acquire another foot of territory for the South, Hammond summarized, at her. Eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles. As large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain combined. Here, surely, Hammond trumpeted, was enough to make an empire that might the world. But the American South was more opulent and formidable than even its great size suggested. Of the more than twelve million souls who resided there, almost one out of every three was enslaved outright by others. As commodities that could be (and were) freely bought and sold, slaves themselves were immensely valuable. At prices quoted on the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion immense sum, especially at that time, a sum that exceeded the value of all the farmland in all the states of the South, a sum fully three times as great as the construction costs of all the railroads that then ran throughout all of the United States.
Still more important to southern wealth than even the enormous potential sale price of these human beings was the work that they could be made to perform. The efforts of slaves yielded more than half of all the South tobacco; almost all of its sugar, rice, and hemp; and of its cotton.
The last item on this list, cotton, was in aggregate the single most valuable commodity produced in the United States. It was a key raw material for the international Industrial Revolution and therefore of commerce. By 1860, in fact, the American South was producing of all the commercially grown cotton in the world and about of the cotton that Great Britain mammoth textile industry consumed every year. The cotton trade was just as important to the national economy of the United States. The ubiquitous bales that were hauled down to coastal wharves and there packed into the holds of big ships destined for European markets accounted for about half the value of all the United States exports, as they had since the 1830s.
Small wonder, then, that most of the country richest men lived in the slave states and that the nation dozen wealthiest counties, per capita, were all located in the South.
Slaves were by far the most valuable properties one could own in the southern states. But only a minority of white southerners (about one fake van cleef Perlee bracelet price owned human beings in 1860, and among those who did, the size of their property holding varied dramatically.
The typical master owned between four and six slaves. That much human property made him or her many times as prosperous as the average southern farmer but considerably less wealthy than those masters who owned at least twenty slaves, for whom the federal census bureau reserved the title of Only one out of eight southern masters belonged to this thousand in total. But as a group, they controlled more than half of all the South slaves and an even larger share of its total agricultural wealth.
Some planters were far richer than others. The true planter aristocracy embraced ten thousand families that owned van cleef ahambra bracelet gold replica fifty or more slaves apiece.10 These were the people who, as the former North Carolina slave William Yancey later recalled, shape to the government and tone to the society. They had the right of way in business and in politics. Among these people were Patrick M. Edmondston and his wife, Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, who owned two plantations in northeastern North Carolina. Jefferson Thomas and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas owned Belmont, a plantation in Georgia that by 1861 boasted ninety slaves. In Virginia, Edmund Ruffin, a agricultural innovator and a tireless exponent of slavery merits, also claimed a place in this charmed circle. So did Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Fitzhugh Custis Lee. Both came from old Virginia planter families. father, George Washington Parke Custis, was one of the state largest planters. He left the Lees one of his three plantations (Arlington) and sixty slaves to work it.
About one in fifteen planter families enjoyed wealth that dwarfed the holdings of even the Ruffins, Lees, Edmondstons, and Thomases. Each of these three thousand or so families owned at least 100 slaves in 1860. The family of Louisiana Katherine Stone was one of these. to thirty miles south of the Stones Brokenburn plantation lay Davis Bend, a peninsula formed by the twists and turns of the Mississippi River. It contained Jefferson Davis cotton plantation, named Brierfield, and the 113 slaves who lived and labored on it. Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, who spearheaded the campaign to bring a proslavery form of Christianity to southern bondspeople, owned 129 slaves on three plantations in coastal Georgia Liberty County. Robert Toombs, who became the Confederacy first secretary of state, held 176 slaves and 2,200 acres of land in three counties.
And even richer than these moneyed masters were about three hundred planters who each owned at least 250 people. House of Representatives, and secretary of the Treasury, and went on to become the Speaker of the Confederacy provisional Congress. A third was James Henry Hammond. The son of a teacher and minor businessman who had married into the planter class, by 1860 he owned 338 people. Another South Carolinian, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr., published the Charleston Mercury; Rhett owned at least two rice plantations and more than 400 slaves. Other Palmetto State planters of comparable wealth included Colonel James Chesnut, Sr., master of the grand Mulberry plantation in Kershaw County. Congress and later became a Confederate brigadier general and aide to Jefferson Davis.
At the very apex of the South social pyramid stood about fifty southern planters, each of whom owned at least five hundred slaves. Some owned considerably more than that. The richest planter in North Carolina was Thomas P. Devereux, the father of Catherine Dev Edmondston, referred to earlier. He owned more than one thousand people. Georgia James Hamilton Couper owned fifteen hundred.
In the words of North Carolina plantation mistress Gertrude Thomas, members of the planter elite enjoyed the of luxury and ease. Many lived in homes that were palatial by the standards of their day. In eastern Virginia, John Armistead Selden presided over the venerable Westover plantation. Its mansion boasted a great hall, a dining room that regularly hosted more than fifty, a grand stairway, multiple fireplaces, a lush garden, and a lawn that carpeted the 150 feet between the mansion and the James River. In Virginia Chesapeake region, Richard Baylor neoclassical mansion, Kinloch, boasted rooms, eighteen fireplaces, four great halls, an imposing front portico, and an observation deck that overlooked the valley of the Rappahannock River. James Hamilton Couper modeled his Hopeton plantation in Georgia on an Italian villa. Its main house was three stories tall and had rooms, elegant gardens, and a grand staircase descending from the entranceway. Here, if anywhere, were the mansions celebrated in Hollywood version of Gone with the Wind.
In some of the richest but more recently settled states, elite society was still too new and its members too preoccupied with assembling their slave workforces in 1860 to devote much time or money to elegance and ostentation. In northeastern Louisiana, for example, the Stone family was living in what its members considered a temporary dwelling on their Brokenburn plantation. It, too, was big, with long galleries and two great halls. But it was nothing compared with the structure they looked forward to building soon.
Such houses (as they were generally called) were not only grand; they were also furnished and filled everything that a hundred years or more of unlimited wealth could accumulate, much of it purchased in the North and in Europe. So noted the assiduous diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who was born into a prominent Mississippi planter family and who married James Chesnut, Jr. In addition to their rural residences, many of the larger planters also owned stately town houses in cities such as Charleston, Augusta, Savannah, Natchez, Mobile, and New Orleans. Those urban abodes commonly featured impressive gardens fronted by high walls and large iron gates, all of which spared owners the proximity to and shielded them from the gaze of less privileged passersby.
In their free time, families like the Stones of Louisiana always had going on (as Katherine put it). They entertained themselves with hunting, boating regattas, and horse races (using slave oarsmen and slave jockeys), lavish dinner parties, and balls. replica van cleef clover bracelets They summered at northern spas in Saratoga Springs, Cape May, Niagara Falls, Newport, and Montreal and at southern resorts such as Biloxi, Pass Christian, and the springs of western Virginia.
The southern states of the Union contained the nation least developed school system. But the planters children wanted for few educational advantages. Private tutors provided individual instruction. Daughters attended elite female academies. Sons went off to colleges in the South, in the North, and in Europe. A leisurely and luxurious tour of Europe often followed college, allowing future leaders of the southern elite to bathe in the high culture of the Old World.
At least as impressive as their sheer wealth and personal comfort was the slave masters political might. Robert E. Lee wartime Colonel Charles Marshall, later recalled controlling influence that owners of slaves enjoyed the management of affairs in the Southern States. In the capitals of nearly every state that would go on to join the Confederacy, slave masters occupied at least half the legislative seats in 1860. In Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina, more than a third of those seats belonged to planters. In South Carolina, planters claimed not a third but more than half of those positions.
But the masters writ ran far beyond the confines of their own states. They also exercised tremendous power over the United States as a whole, and they had done so for generations. James Henry Hammond put it bluntly in his Senate speech of 1858. the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy, led it to independence, and have since then continued her for sixty out of the seventy years of her existence. Since the Revolution, in fact, nearly all the occupants of the White House had been either slave masters (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk, and Zachary Taylor) or the allies and advocates of masters (Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan). Congress and the Supreme Court. The South four million slaves formed the core of its laboring population. are the source in large measure of our living, and comprise our wealth, the Georgia planter and Presbyterian minister Charles Colcock Jones reminded his fellow churchmen in 1861. Slaves and the profits that their labor yielded paid for education, our food, and clothing, and our dwellings, and a thousand comforts of life that crowd our happy homes. They also performed many other vital kinds of labor: From the slave quarters came boatmen the waters; our mechanics and artisans to build our houses, to work in many trades; prepare our food, and wait about our tables and our persons, and keep the house. As Jones noted, slaves toiled in all sectors of the southern society and economy. Some worked in the region relatively small urban economy, in workshops, factories, and a variety of commercial establishments. Others labored as household servants in the masters homes in town or country or as artisans of various kinds on their farms and plantations. But the great majority, perhaps worked the land. As Jones put it, they were agriculturalists to subdue our forests, to sow, and cultivate, and reap our land; without whom no team is started, no plough is run, no spade, nor hoe, nor axe is The 1860 census estimated that one in every ten slaves cultivated tobacco (centered in parts of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri), another one in ten raised sugar, rice, or hemp (in Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina). And more than half worked in the cotton fields (especially in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana).
Katherine Stone noted some of the characteristics of slave labor that made it most attractive to landowners anxious to turn a profit. Slaves could be made to perform especially heavy, intensive, and continuous work in return for just bare necessities of life. James Henry Hammond accounted for slavery importance in just those terms in a open letter to British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Only slaves, Hammond held, could be made to work as hard while costing the landowner so little. People who enjoyed the right to protest, resist, or simply refuse such terms would never tolerate such conditions.
The South slaves worked very hard indeed. It was uncommon thing, Katherine Stone remembered, for the more productive slaves in her family cotton fields to pick or six hundred pounds each day for maybe a week at a time. That was almost three times as much cotton as agricultural workers would pick after slavery was abolished.
Southern farms and plantations yielded handsome profits to their owners, who were some of the wealthiest people in the country, and the southern elite had also controlled all three branches of the federal government during most of its existence. At the root of this all this economic and political power lay the institution of slavery an institution which, as the former slave Frederick Douglass would later recall, then "seemed impregnable." Few could then have imagined, he noted, "that in less than ten years from that time, no master would wield a lash and no slave would clank a chain in the United States."
But what almost no one foresaw in 1860 is exactly what came to pass. In Mark Twain's words, the Civil War and its aftermath "uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country." The most important and dramatic of these transformations was the radical destruction of slavery. One out of every three people in the South suddenly emerged from bondage into freedom, a change of such enormous significance and full of so many implications as almost to defy description. For the South's ruling families, meanwhile, the war turned the world upside down. It stripped them of their privileged status and their most valuable property. It deprived them of the totalitarian power they had previously wielded over the men, women, and children who produced most of the South's great wealth. "The events of the last five years," a Memphis newspaper editor summarized in 1865, "have produced an entire revolution in the entire Southern country. The old arrangement of things is broken up." The ex Confederate general Richard Taylor lodged the same complaint that year. "Society has been completely changed by the war," he wrote. Even the stormy French revolution of the previous century "did not produce a greater change in the 'Ancien Regime' than has this in our social life."[i] Abraham Lincoln applauded this "total revolution of labor" as "a new birth of freedom."[ii] Black South Carolinians cheered this "mighty revolution which must affect the future destiny of the world."
Even as it upended society in the South, the Civil War era transformed the shape of national politics in the United States as a whole. Beginning with Lincoln's election in 1860, it finally broke the southern elite's once iron grip on the federal government and drove its leaders into the political wilderness. Into the offices that planters and their friends had previously occupied there now stepped northerners with very different values, priorities, and outlooks. These new men used their political might to encourage the growth and development of manufacturing, transportation, finance, and commerce and thereby speed the country's transformation into the economic colossus familiar to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the hands of these same men, meanwhile, the post Civil War federal government assumed key roles previously assigned to the states, including the power and the responsibility to safeguard the freedom and rights of the nation's citizens citizens whose ranks now expanded to include millions of former slaves. Constitutional amendments adopted in the war's aftermath laid the legal basis for and pointed the way towards transforming the United States into a multi racial republic.
Relatively few people today are aware of just how all this happened. Although "the military movements connected with the Civil War are well known," a witness to those events commented decades afterward, "the great mass of American people know but little, and so think less" about the destruction of slavery and all that it entailed. That observation holds true after the passage of another century and more.
The Fall of the House of Dixie was written to help fill that gaping hole in our collective memory. It traces the origins and development of America's "second revolution," explaining why it occurred and how it unfolded especially how this great and terrible war undermined the economic, social, and political foundations of the old South, destroying human bondage and the storied world of the slaveholding elite. In recent years many scholarly books and articles have analyzed the Civil War's momentous consequences. But bookstore shelves allotted to the Civil War are to this day filled principally with detailed accounts of armies, officers, and the battles they fought, great and small. Nearly every major study of the Civil War as a whole especially those aimed at a wide audience continues to take the military story as its organizing principle and narrative spine.
The Fall of the House of Dixie by no means ignores that subject. The slave based society of the American South required powerful external blows to break it along its lines of internal stress. Union armies delivered those blows blows that therefore make up a crucial part of the story told in this book. But the chapters that follow focus especially upon the transformation of that war from a conventional military conflict into a revolutionary struggle. And they emphasize the ways in which very different groups of people slave owners, slaves, the great mass of slaveless southern whites, and soldiers both Union and Confederate, black as well as white experienced and helped to bring about what one newspaper at the time called "the greatest social and political revolution of the age."
From The Fall of The House of Dixie by Bruce Levine. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc.
THE HOUSE OF DIXIE
The House of Dixie was an imposing thing indeed. Senate to emphasize the slave states wealth, power, and solidity to northern colleagues who were then challenging some of their prerogatives.
One of the things that Hammond boasted of that day was the South sheer physical size, which had grown greatly since the nation founding. The number of southern slave states more than doubled over those years with the creation of Kentucky (in 1792), Tennessee (in 1796), Louisiana (in 1812), Mississippi (in 1817), Alabama (in 1819), Missouri (in 1821), Arkansas (in 1836), Florida (in 1845), and Texas (in 1845). we never acquire another foot of territory for the South, Hammond summarized, at her. Eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles. As large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain combined. Here, surely, Hammond trumpeted, was enough to make an empire that might the world. But the American South was more opulent and formidable than even its great size suggested. Of the more than twelve million souls who resided there, almost one out of every three was enslaved outright by others. As commodities that could be (and were) freely bought and sold, slaves themselves were immensely valuable. At prices quoted on the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion immense sum, especially at that time, a sum that exceeded the value of all the farmland in all the states of the South, a sum fully three times as great as the construction costs of all the railroads that then ran throughout all of the United States.
Still more important to southern wealth than even the enormous potential sale price of these human beings was the work that they could be made to perform. The efforts of slaves yielded more than half of all the South tobacco; almost all of its sugar, rice, and hemp; and of its cotton.
The last item on this list, cotton, was in aggregate the single most valuable commodity produced in the United States. It was a key raw material for the international Industrial Revolution and therefore of commerce. By 1860, in fact, the American South was producing of all the commercially grown cotton in the world and about of the cotton that Great Britain mammoth textile industry consumed every year. The cotton trade was just as important to the national economy of the United States. The ubiquitous bales that were hauled down to coastal wharves and there packed into the holds of big ships destined for European markets accounted for about half the value of all the United States exports, as they had since the 1830s.
Small wonder, then, that most of the country richest men lived in the slave states and that the nation dozen wealthiest counties, per capita, were all located in the South.
Slaves were by far the most valuable properties one could own in the southern states. But only a minority of white southerners (about one fake van cleef Perlee bracelet price owned human beings in 1860, and among those who did, the size of their property holding varied dramatically.
The typical master owned between four and six slaves. That much human property made him or her many times as prosperous as the average southern farmer but considerably less wealthy than those masters who owned at least twenty slaves, for whom the federal census bureau reserved the title of Only one out of eight southern masters belonged to this thousand in total. But as a group, they controlled more than half of all the South slaves and an even larger share of its total agricultural wealth.
Some planters were far richer than others. The true planter aristocracy embraced ten thousand families that owned van cleef ahambra bracelet gold replica fifty or more slaves apiece.10 These were the people who, as the former North Carolina slave William Yancey later recalled, shape to the government and tone to the society. They had the right of way in business and in politics. Among these people were Patrick M. Edmondston and his wife, Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, who owned two plantations in northeastern North Carolina. Jefferson Thomas and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas owned Belmont, a plantation in Georgia that by 1861 boasted ninety slaves. In Virginia, Edmund Ruffin, a agricultural innovator and a tireless exponent of slavery merits, also claimed a place in this charmed circle. So did Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Fitzhugh Custis Lee. Both came from old Virginia planter families. father, George Washington Parke Custis, was one of the state largest planters. He left the Lees one of his three plantations (Arlington) and sixty slaves to work it.
About one in fifteen planter families enjoyed wealth that dwarfed the holdings of even the Ruffins, Lees, Edmondstons, and Thomases. Each of these three thousand or so families owned at least 100 slaves in 1860. The family of Louisiana Katherine Stone was one of these. to thirty miles south of the Stones Brokenburn plantation lay Davis Bend, a peninsula formed by the twists and turns of the Mississippi River. It contained Jefferson Davis cotton plantation, named Brierfield, and the 113 slaves who lived and labored on it. Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, who spearheaded the campaign to bring a proslavery form of Christianity to southern bondspeople, owned 129 slaves on three plantations in coastal Georgia Liberty County. Robert Toombs, who became the Confederacy first secretary of state, held 176 slaves and 2,200 acres of land in three counties.
And even richer than these moneyed masters were about three hundred planters who each owned at least 250 people. House of Representatives, and secretary of the Treasury, and went on to become the Speaker of the Confederacy provisional Congress. A third was James Henry Hammond. The son of a teacher and minor businessman who had married into the planter class, by 1860 he owned 338 people. Another South Carolinian, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr., published the Charleston Mercury; Rhett owned at least two rice plantations and more than 400 slaves. Other Palmetto State planters of comparable wealth included Colonel James Chesnut, Sr., master of the grand Mulberry plantation in Kershaw County. Congress and later became a Confederate brigadier general and aide to Jefferson Davis.
At the very apex of the South social pyramid stood about fifty southern planters, each of whom owned at least five hundred slaves. Some owned considerably more than that. The richest planter in North Carolina was Thomas P. Devereux, the father of Catherine Dev Edmondston, referred to earlier. He owned more than one thousand people. Georgia James Hamilton Couper owned fifteen hundred.
In the words of North Carolina plantation mistress Gertrude Thomas, members of the planter elite enjoyed the of luxury and ease. Many lived in homes that were palatial by the standards of their day. In eastern Virginia, John Armistead Selden presided over the venerable Westover plantation. Its mansion boasted a great hall, a dining room that regularly hosted more than fifty, a grand stairway, multiple fireplaces, a lush garden, and a lawn that carpeted the 150 feet between the mansion and the James River. In Virginia Chesapeake region, Richard Baylor neoclassical mansion, Kinloch, boasted rooms, eighteen fireplaces, four great halls, an imposing front portico, and an observation deck that overlooked the valley of the Rappahannock River. James Hamilton Couper modeled his Hopeton plantation in Georgia on an Italian villa. Its main house was three stories tall and had rooms, elegant gardens, and a grand staircase descending from the entranceway. Here, if anywhere, were the mansions celebrated in Hollywood version of Gone with the Wind.
In some of the richest but more recently settled states, elite society was still too new and its members too preoccupied with assembling their slave workforces in 1860 to devote much time or money to elegance and ostentation. In northeastern Louisiana, for example, the Stone family was living in what its members considered a temporary dwelling on their Brokenburn plantation. It, too, was big, with long galleries and two great halls. But it was nothing compared with the structure they looked forward to building soon.
Such houses (as they were generally called) were not only grand; they were also furnished and filled everything that a hundred years or more of unlimited wealth could accumulate, much of it purchased in the North and in Europe. So noted the assiduous diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who was born into a prominent Mississippi planter family and who married James Chesnut, Jr. In addition to their rural residences, many of the larger planters also owned stately town houses in cities such as Charleston, Augusta, Savannah, Natchez, Mobile, and New Orleans. Those urban abodes commonly featured impressive gardens fronted by high walls and large iron gates, all of which spared owners the proximity to and shielded them from the gaze of less privileged passersby.
In their free time, families like the Stones of Louisiana always had going on (as Katherine put it). They entertained themselves with hunting, boating regattas, and horse races (using slave oarsmen and slave jockeys), lavish dinner parties, and balls. replica van cleef clover bracelets They summered at northern spas in Saratoga Springs, Cape May, Niagara Falls, Newport, and Montreal and at southern resorts such as Biloxi, Pass Christian, and the springs of western Virginia.
The southern states of the Union contained the nation least developed school system. But the planters children wanted for few educational advantages. Private tutors provided individual instruction. Daughters attended elite female academies. Sons went off to colleges in the South, in the North, and in Europe. A leisurely and luxurious tour of Europe often followed college, allowing future leaders of the southern elite to bathe in the high culture of the Old World.
At least as impressive as their sheer wealth and personal comfort was the slave masters political might. Robert E. Lee wartime Colonel Charles Marshall, later recalled controlling influence that owners of slaves enjoyed the management of affairs in the Southern States. In the capitals of nearly every state that would go on to join the Confederacy, slave masters occupied at least half the legislative seats in 1860. In Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina, more than a third of those seats belonged to planters. In South Carolina, planters claimed not a third but more than half of those positions.
But the masters writ ran far beyond the confines of their own states. They also exercised tremendous power over the United States as a whole, and they had done so for generations. James Henry Hammond put it bluntly in his Senate speech of 1858. the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy, led it to independence, and have since then continued her for sixty out of the seventy years of her existence. Since the Revolution, in fact, nearly all the occupants of the White House had been either slave masters (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk, and Zachary Taylor) or the allies and advocates of masters (Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan). Congress and the Supreme Court. The South four million slaves formed the core of its laboring population. are the source in large measure of our living, and comprise our wealth, the Georgia planter and Presbyterian minister Charles Colcock Jones reminded his fellow churchmen in 1861. Slaves and the profits that their labor yielded paid for education, our food, and clothing, and our dwellings, and a thousand comforts of life that crowd our happy homes. They also performed many other vital kinds of labor: From the slave quarters came boatmen the waters; our mechanics and artisans to build our houses, to work in many trades; prepare our food, and wait about our tables and our persons, and keep the house. As Jones noted, slaves toiled in all sectors of the southern society and economy. Some worked in the region relatively small urban economy, in workshops, factories, and a variety of commercial establishments. Others labored as household servants in the masters homes in town or country or as artisans of various kinds on their farms and plantations. But the great majority, perhaps worked the land. As Jones put it, they were agriculturalists to subdue our forests, to sow, and cultivate, and reap our land; without whom no team is started, no plough is run, no spade, nor hoe, nor axe is The 1860 census estimated that one in every ten slaves cultivated tobacco (centered in parts of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri), another one in ten raised sugar, rice, or hemp (in Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina). And more than half worked in the cotton fields (especially in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana).
Katherine Stone noted some of the characteristics of slave labor that made it most attractive to landowners anxious to turn a profit. Slaves could be made to perform especially heavy, intensive, and continuous work in return for just bare necessities of life. James Henry Hammond accounted for slavery importance in just those terms in a open letter to British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Only slaves, Hammond held, could be made to work as hard while costing the landowner so little. People who enjoyed the right to protest, resist, or simply refuse such terms would never tolerate such conditions.
The South slaves worked very hard indeed. It was uncommon thing, Katherine Stone remembered, for the more productive slaves in her family cotton fields to pick or six hundred pounds each day for maybe a week at a time. That was almost three times as much cotton as agricultural workers would pick after slavery was abolished.
The Wall