In this Virginia History Blog, we look at elements of the Virginia Antebellum society.
Progress in a slave society is examined in “Railroads in the Old South”. White male culture is explored in “Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class” and in Brothers of a Vow” about secret fraternal orders.
The slaveholder’s perspective of slavery is found in “Slavery in White and Black” of the southern world order, “Slavery on Trial” is about criminal justice in Richmond, “Deliver Us From Evil” explains southern justifications for slavery, and “The American Dreams of John B. Prentis” concerns a Richmond slave trader with a freed wife in Philadelphia.
The enslaved’s perspective of slavery is seen in “Strategies for Survival”, recollections of antebellum slavery, “The Quarters and the Fields” examines slave families in the non-cotton south, and “The Imperfect Revolution” tells the story of Virginian slave Anthony Burns’ escape to Boston, his re-enslavement and his subsequent manumission.
Railroads in the Old South
Aaron W. Marrs wrote Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society in 2009. Available from the Johns Hopkins University Press, Kindle and online new and used. See also L. Diane Barnes The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (2011), Tom Downey Planting a Capitalist South (2009), John Majewsky Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (2009).
There were Antebellum Southerners who valued technological innovation and industrial modernization, including the introduction and expansion of railroads. But there were also those who allowed them only as additional ways to strengthen cash crop agriculture and enable the perpetuation of slavery. Railroad boosters in the South lacking ready access to capital relied more heavily on state sponsored support, and manpower came chiefly from rented and company owned slaves.
Both North and South had similar experiences with railroads, politically, technically, and commercially. Culturally they helped standardize time and work, establish cities and connect into regional markets. Economically they increased the importance of efficiency and profit both in free labor management and enslaved workloads.
Marrs discusses the development of four regional Virginia railroads connecting Richmond north by rail and steamboat to Baltimore, east to the port of Norfolk, west to Lynchburg and Tennessee, and south to Danville, where the North Carolina legislature refused to allow a railroad connection to Goldsboro.
Buy “Railroads in the Old South” on Amazon here. A companion to Robert H. Gudmestad Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom: Race and Class in Modern Society (2011)
Military Education
Jennifer R. Green wrote Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South in 2008. Available from the Cambridge University Press, Kindle and online new and used.
See also Rod Andrew Long Gray Lines: The Southern Military Tradition, 1839-1915 (2004), and Jonathan Daniel Wells The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1860 (2005). A companion to Tim Lockley addressing southern common schools in Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South (2007).
The first among a distinctive feature of antebellum southern education was the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) founded in 1839. There followed twelve state military academies and more than seventy private ones in the South before the Civil War. Modeled on West Point, they were post-primary but most were not collegiate, offering non-elites in the South an avenue into the middle class. Ninety-five percent of their graduates went into civilian careers. State schools required scholarship recipients to teach in the state for two years after graduation.
In this book, Green ties southern history, military history and education history together to explain how the South’s military academies contributed to modernization and upward class mobility in the antebellum period. Curriculum emphasized science, mathematics and the practical rather than a classical education, leading alumni to become engineers, doctors, merchants, lawyers and other non-agricultural professionals. While the southern middle class was not as urban or as industrial as the northern, social networks created as cadets extended into their professional careers, along with the middle class values of self-discipline and industry, religiosity and sobriety.
Buy “Military Education” on Amazon here.
Brothers of a Vow
Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch wrote Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia in 2010. Available from the University of Georgia Press, and online new and used. A TVH top 300 pick for Virginia history resources. See also Lorri Glover Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (2004), and Jonathan Daniel Wells The Origins of the Southern Middle Class (2004).
In antebellum Virginia, thousands of working and middle class men joined white fraternal orders such as the Sons of Temperance, Freemasons, and the Independent Order of Oddfellows. They were “secret” in their rituals but public in their parades and charitable works among orphans and widows and public education. They promoted a civic brotherhood among white men of self-discipline, moral character, and a good day’s work that downplayed partisan differences and class division. Secret societies were expressions of manhood and identity in community. They advanced evangelical humanitarianism, market individualism, and a regard for civic virtue.
By the end of the 1850s, Virginia had experienced a transportation revolution, rapid urban growth, and the emergence of distinct working and middle classes. Membership in these organizations were a way for men outside of the planter class to achieve professional recognition, measure their social success and define white manhood. They attracted shopkeepers, artisans and mechanics who did not join contemporary lyceums, debating societies and historical societies. Through their interstate networks, Virginians made cultural, commercial, and political connections with nearby states to its north in ways distinct from urban centers in the Deep South.
Buy “Brothers of a Vow” on Amazon here.
Slavery in White and Black
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese wrote Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order in 2008. It is available from the Cambridge University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. A companion to the Eugene Genovese book about Virginian George Fitzhugh, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (1988). See also Peter C. Carmichael The Last Generation: Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (2005).
In this book, Fox-Genovese extends the thesis developed with her husband that the antebellum world of elite southerners in the Deep South were not reactionary and pre-modern, but pre-capitalist and capitalist. Apologists such as George Fitzhugh of Virginia and James Henry Hammond of South Carolina argued for “slavery in the abstract”, arguments that were eventually taken up by professionals, teachers, ministers, editors, and the literati and reflected in southern theology, political economy and history.
Opposing abolitionist reformers who saw slavery as an abomination to Christianity, they advanced a defense of slavery as an economic and social institution that was said to be progressively modern, morally justified, and commercially efficient. The black slaves of the South were better off than most of the world’s free industrial workers and agricultural peasants, white or black. Accepting slavery as an economic and social good became pervasive, a “social question” set apart from racial considerations, and that perspective resonated in print, sermons and political discourse. Printed matter in the form of books and pamphlets made up most of the material sent by U.S. mail. Especially in the South where there were fewer newspapers, many political speeches were produced as pamphlets for constituent home consumption.
Buy “Slavery in White and Black” on Amazon here.
Slavery on Trial
James M. Campbell wrote Slavery on Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia in 2007. Available from the University Press of Florida, and online new and used. A TVH top 300 pick for Virginia history resources. See also Dickson D. Bruce Jr. The Origins of African American Literature (2001).
Campbell’s investigation of Richmond court records from 1830 to 1860 confirms that slavery and mastery had a major influence on the application of the law during the antebellum period. However marginalized persons such as free blacks, slaves and poor whites frequently could find some relief and even some agency in light of court accommodations to industrialization, immigration and slavery.
Industrialization in Richmond allowed free African Americans and hired slaves many freedoms that were not available in traditional slave societies. Slaves could secure independent lodging alongside free blacks and poor whites. Crossing and mixing racial lines among free blacks, immigrants, slaves and poor whites became a major issue in Richmond politics resulting in the ascendancy of Mayor Joseph Mayo in 1853. Richmond court cases became more conflicted, and free black communities sometimes turned to local black church courts for justice.
Buy “Slavery on Trial” on Amazon here.
Deliver Us From Evil
Lacy K. Ford wrote Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South in 2009. It is available from the Oxford University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. See also Robert H. Gudmestad A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (2003), a TVH top 300 pick for a Virginia history resource.
The South’s ideological landscape concerning slavery underwent a profound change in the half century following the adoption of the Constitution. The southern response to the “slavery question” unfolded over time in the New Nation era, through the abolition petition and mail campaigns of the 1830, into the secession crisis. The larger questions were reduced to the defense of slavery in national forums and the future expansion of slavery in the American republic. A key distinction among slaveholding states developed between the upper South and the lower South. Differences related to the role of paternalism in plantation administration, preparations for and responses to slave revolts, the scope of the slave trade, the desirability of gradual emancipation, and the practicality of slave removal by African colonization.
Ford sees three distinctive phases in the South’s answers to the slavery question. From the founding in the 1780s until the closing of the international slave trade in 1808, upper Southerners were ambivalent to slavery, and lower Southerners had a growing commitment to slavery as access to the international cotton boom.
The second phase ran until the 1930s with Nat Turner’s Rebellion and the northern abolitionists attack on slavery. Southerners sought an internal reconfiguration of domestic slavery. The upper South advocated diffusing slavery into the territories, exporting slaves to the Deep South, and paternalism. The lower South following the Denmark Vesey rising of 1822 began to reject paternalism for harsh plantation discipline. In the third phase 1830-1865, the two southern sections could agree on opposition to abolition, and they defensively adopted the ideal of master paternalism that benignly assured the slave’s spiritual and material welfare. White supremacy was seen as the guarantor of white political independence and the foundation of republican government.
Buy “Deliver Us From Evil” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (1991).
The American Dreams of John B. Prentis
Kari J. Winter wrote The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader in 2011. It is available from the University of Georgia Press, and online new and used. A TVH top 300 pick for a Virginia history resource. See also Daina Ramey Berry The Price for Their Pound of Flesh (2017).
Although three generations are considered in the colonial to antebellum Prentis family, John Prentis, a domestic slave trader 1819-1848 is the focus of the book. The son of a wealthy Virginia judge and brother to a Suffolk attorney, John chose an artisan workingman’s life as an architect’s apprentice to an anti-slavery Philadelphia Quaker, then on his return to Virginia became a horse trader, jail keeper, and pirate chaser.
On turning to slave trading, his wife Catherine assisted in the family business preparing meals, sewing clothing and nursing slaves to health before their sale. Though he was prosperous enough to periodically loan his brother money, he died in 1848 with a self-drafted will including a plea to be recognized as a gentleman. Winter concludes that the personal slaves he emancipated at his wife’s death were probably his own children.
Buy “The American Dreams of John B. Prentis” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 (2010).
Strategies for Survival
William Dusinberre wrote Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia in 2009. It is available from the University of Virginia Press, and online new and used.
In describing the everyday life of a Virginian slave, Dusinberre seeks to explain the balance between the master’s power and enslaved agency from the perspective of the slaves themselves. He uses the 1937 interviews by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of former Virginia slavers conducted by African American interviewers. The slave population in Virginia was the largest in the antebellum South, and they held a variety of jobs from agricultural field hand and house servant to urban laborer and artisan.
The picture is both a grim story of oppression and a narrative of limited autonomy sometimes leading to manumission. “Good” masters provided the necessities of food and clothing and were somewhat removed from day to day life. The arbitrary actions of the cruel brought on hardships of grinding labor, broken families and harsh punishments.
Buy “Strategies for Survival” on Amazon here.
The Quarters and the Fields
Damian Alan Pargas wrote The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South in 2010. It is available from the University Press of Florida, on Kindle and online new and used. A TVH top 300 pick for a Virginia history resource. See also Herbert G. Gutman The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976), Wilma Dunaway The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (2003).
Enslaved people in the American antebellum South were historical actors who lived within boundaries imposed by external factors of enslavement, region and employment, and they also created opportunities.
Pargas studies non-cotton economies in wheat growing Fairfax County, Virginia, sugar growing St. James Parish, Louisiana, and rice growing in Georgetown District, South Carolina. His conclusion is that when economic conditions were either booming or declining, slave family stability was threatened. When conditions were stable, economic conditions fostered family stability.
Families in Fairfax County were more likely than the others to live apart from their families, be forcibly separated, and have fewer independent economic activities. The intent of enslaved people was to maximize time with their families, better their material conditions and protect their loved ones from sale away. But the Virginians studied were subject to long term hiring out and separation of partners and children by the domestic slave trade.
Buy “The Quarters and the Fields” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (2014), and Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America (2018).
The Imperfect Revolution
Gordon S. Barker wrote The Imperfect Revolution: Anthony Burns and the Landscape of Race in Antebellum America in 2010. It is available from the Kent State University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. A companion to Albert J. von Frank The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (1998). See also Earl M. Maltz Fugitive Slave on Trial: the Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage (2010).
Anthony Burns was a Virginian fugitive slave to Boston in 1853 who was supported by the citizenry there, returned to Virginia, and finally bought by abolitionist friends for his manumission. Burns had become a literate Baptists preacher at the Falmouth Union Church in Famouth, Virginia, when he escaped to Boston.
After being apprehended as an escaped slave, Burns famously went on trial defended by Richard Henry Dana Jr. The case received national attention, and on his conviction, the federal government had to provide a military escort and passage for his return on a warship. The Reverend Leonard A. Grimes, an African American abolitionist and pastor of Boston’s Twelfth Baptist Church raised money for Burns purchase.
On attaining freedom, Burns attended Oberlin College and became a preacher at the Zion Baptist Church in Upper Canada. After 1854, Virginians increasingly urgently defended slavery as a “positive good”, extolling the South’s way of life as superior to the industrialized North. More citizens turned to secession as a way to protect both domestic slavery and sectional agriculture.
Buy “The Imperfect Revolution” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Fugitive Slaves and the Unfinished American Revolution (2013).
TVH Era Webpage
The TVH webpage for Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction Eras, 1824-1883, features our top title picks taken from the bibliographies of three surveys of Virginia History’s 400 years.
The Table of Contents divides Political and Economic Virginia, 1824-1883 into (a) Antebellum Virginia Policy 1820-1850, (b) Antebellum Virginia Economics 1820-1850, (c) Sectionalism and Civil War 1850-1865, and Reconstruction Virginia Policy 1865-1883. Topical history is treated under headings of Social History, Gender in Virginia, and Religious Virginia.
African American Virginia, 1820-1883 is divided into (a) Plantation Slavery 1820-1865, (b) Free Blacks, Artisans and Slave Hires 1820-1850, and (c) Reconstruction African Americans 1863-1883. Finally, wars are featured under (1) Mexican War, (2) Civil War Combat and (3) CivilWar Home Front.
See Also
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.