--Currier and Ives, 1884, after William Aiken Walker, The Big B Cotton Plantation

What was a plantation? Look at the picture above; note that the planter's mansion (the "big house") does not appear at all. What we see is the plantation as a workplace, indeed as a factory: fields teeming with harvesters, steam venting from the cotton gin, smoke billowing from the steamboat at the dock awaiting the cotton bales. From the very beginning of the European settlements that ultimately became the American South, these factories in the field-assembling large, involuntary labor forces from other parts of the world, producing massive quantities of (mostly) inedible but highly profitable crops to sell to far-flung markets–were central to the lives of masters and slaves, and cast deep shadows over that majority of the population that didn't live on the plantation.

With the plantation came (though not immediately) African slavery, and with slavery racism and an obsession with keeping whites on top of the social heap, an obsession uniting whites across social and economic divides. Paradoxically, with the plantation and slavery also came an equally deep devotion to liberty (for whites) and the ideals of republicanism, leading these European colonies to join with those to their north to wrest independence from the Mother Country, Great Britain. Later, the politics of liberty would engender among white male southerners a rough-and-tumble "democratic" political culture, albeit one as devoted to white male supremacy as it was to white male equality.

But, needless to say, the relationship between American slavery and American freedom was conflictual as well as symbiotic–a tension increasingly made manifest in the divergence between the "southern states" and those that abolished slavery after the Revolution–i.e. "The North." As we shall see, the course of the conflict between North and South was hardly simple; white northerners, too, were white supremacists, and most were even pro-slavery, at least so long as slavery stayed away from them. But North and South increasingly came to see in each other the image of their fears: that the "land of liberty" would become corrupted and dominated by an oppressive, bullying cabal of "aristocrats." Tensions came to a head in 1860, "and the war came."

And, yes, the South lost it. And not just the military conflict; the Civil War demolished the social underpinnings of the entire slave plantation system. The American South and its people, black and white, experienced the most fundamental social revolution ever experienced by Americans–an earthquake whose aftershocks persist to our own time.

Course Schedule and Assignments

December 12(Friday)--ALTERNATE FINAL EXAMINATION, Noon, Wilson 122

Nuts 'n'Bolts

     There will be two examinations in the course of the semester; the midterm examination will count 25 per cent of the final grade, while the final examination will count 30 per cent of the final grade. In addition, each student will write three (3) short (4-5 pp.) papers in the course of the term, on topics to be assigned in due course by the instructor; these will count 15 percent each. Six opportunities to write will be provided in the course of the term, keyed to the units between discussion sections. Each paper that you choose to write will be due on the date of the appropriate discussion section, marked above with an * and in boldface type. Except in clear medical or family emergencies, extensions will be granted only if applied for at least one day in advance; past due papers will lose one Vanderbilt grade point for each day overdue (weekends count for one day). If a student chooses to write more than three papers, the three highest grades will be used in computing the final grade.

     Your attention is called to Chapter 2 of the Vanderbilt University Student Handbook, dealing with the honor system. Note in particular that it is the student's responsibility to understand the principles of intellectual honesty as they apply to this course (to say nothing of how they apply to life in general). Feel free to consult the instructor if issues of genuine moral ambiguity arise.

Readings

Paul D. Escott, David R. Goldfield,  Sally G. McMillen, and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Major Problems in the History of the American South, Volume I: The Old South, Second Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999).

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).

John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984).

William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson, eds., Secession Debated: Georgia's Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat (Cambridge, MA: Harcard University Press, 1997).

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Updated April 5, 2009.