1 / 12

Southern Agrarian Tradition

Southern Agrarian Tradition. Agrarian ( adj ) Pertaining to agriculture or rural matters. Labor History. Crops. “King Cotton” . More profitable than tobacco by 1850 Two factors = 60% of American export Cotton gin (1793) and Europe’s industrial revolution, esp. England’s textile factories.

acton
Download Presentation

Southern Agrarian Tradition

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Southern Agrarian Tradition Agrarian (adj) Pertaining to agriculture or rural matters

  2. Labor History

  3. Crops

  4. “King Cotton” • More profitable than tobacco by 1850 • Two factors = 60% of American export • Cotton gin (1793) and Europe’s industrial revolution, esp. England’s textile factories

  5. Why slave labor? • Enterprising businessmen ship slaves across Atlantic • Planters • No longer needed to exploit other whites (indentured servants) • Slaves = captives for life (no contracts of servitude) • Easy to spot if a runaway • Plantation labor = all blacks • Sentiment of “White” as superior race grows • Plantation = minimum of 20 slaves

  6. Yeoman Farmers • Most slaveholders (70 percent) belonged to the mid-level yeoman farmer class. • A Yeoman farmer might have owned as many as ten slaves, but usually work alongside them. • 75 percent of all southerners held no slaves at all.

  7. Southern Agrarian Culture • Commonalities between farms and plantations • Food crops and tobacco • Black labor supply • Farming is most virtuous way to live life • Plantation lifestyle • Romanticized view • Beauty of nature • Country life • Slow rhythms of nature • Traditions worth preserving • “Legitimate” culture

  8. Thomas Jefferson Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive the sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age or nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who, not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandmen, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. -Notes on the State of Virginia Morgan, Edmund, American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1975.

More Related