089 - Colonial Status: The World Of The Antebellum South

 

 

 

About this episode: 

Sometime in 1861, the young Georgia poet Sidney Lanier, a recent Confederate Army enlistee, attended a mock medieval tournament in Kinston, NC. Watching mounted Confederate officers dressed as knights competing for the honor of a local belle, he was moved…even enraptured. To him, the scene was a metaphor for the war itself. The South was a gallant knight battling against dark Northern materialistic forces. Defending hallowed chivalry. As Lanier put it, the Confederacy’s war had “the sanctity of a religious cause” arrayed in “military trapping.” These men, this image of knights in shining armor, this lifestyle are what most remember of the antebellum South. Indeed, what many still want to remember. But they represented only a very thin slice of Southern society. About only one half of 1% of a total population of some nine million. And unlike royalty of old, those planters… those knights were part of  an aristocracy sired by property, not birth. Most of them self-made men from ordinary backgrounds whose influence was measured in the number of slaves they owned and the acreage of their plantations. Enjoying leisure and wealth, those few had the time and energy to pursue politics and, in positions of economic and political power, they enjoyed deference from the masses that made up the majority of the Southern white population. Deference which meant that majority followed the leadership and adopted the views of something they would never attain over the course of their entire existence. For this episode, we tell the story of a 19th century world filled with magnolia and cotton…populated with planters, yeomen farmers, “crackers” and the enslaved.  Taken together, the completed picture of a world…a culture that in five years would truly be “gone with the wind.” This is the story of the Antebellum South on the eve of civil war.

 

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

John C. Calhoun

Eli Whitney

Edgar Allan Poe

Stephen Foster

James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow

William L. Yancey

 

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Producer: Dan Irving