The South developed a new sense of
“nationalism” that was rooted in its sense of distinctiveness and its
perception that it was ringed by enemies from the North, where militant
abolitionism had emerged. Southern
travelers who ventured into the North regarded it as a “strange and distant
land”.
By the late of 1840s, a new and more explicit
racist rationale for slavery had emerged.
White southern argued that it was a beneficial institution that created
a hierarchical society superior to the leveling democracy of the North. By the
same time, a growing number of southern ministers and politicians began to
denounce the North’s form of capitalism as “wage slavery”. The condition of
free labor, they argued, was actually “worse than slavery”, “Northern workers
were simply “slaves without masters”. More
and more
Southern defended slavery on explicitly racial grounds, drawing on new pseudoscientific theories of racial inferiority.
Southern defended slavery on explicitly racial grounds, drawing on new pseudoscientific theories of racial inferiority.
Seeking
to free their region from cultural, economic, and religious dependence on the
North, southern “nationalists” sought to promote southern economic self-sufficiency,
to create southern-oriented educational and religions institutions, and to
develop a distinctive southern literature. Beginning in 1837, southern leaders
held the first of a series of commercial conventions in an attempt to diversify
the southern economy and to rescue the South from Northern “pecuniary and
commercial supremacy”
Regional
independence was also called for in religion. Due in large part to fear of
antislavery agitation, southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians sought
to sever their denominational affiliations with northern churches. In the early
2000s, only the Baptists remain divided. Southerners also called for a
distinctive and peculiarly southern literature. More than 30 periodicals were
founded with the word “Southern” in their title, all intended to “breathe a
Southern spirit, and sustain a strictly Southern character.” Authors such as
Nathaniel Beverly Tucker and William Gilmore Simms called on the South to write
on southern themes and to overcome the taunts of “Englishmen and Northern men”
that they were intellectually inferior. [1]
America
continued to expand its ethnic diversity during the 19th century,
with many Germans and Irish coming to America. Not everyone was happy about the
changes and the fear of Irish in particular as they were very poor and came in
large numbers. [2]. Many Southerns, especially elite women, did not see Irish
servants as whites. Northerns stigmatized them much as Southerns stigmatized
blacks [3]
The
differences between the North and South are remarkable in so many aspects, the
most significant exponent, is the American Civil War (1861–1865), also known as
the "War Between the States". Eleven southern slave states manifested
their secession from the United States to form "the Confederacy”, the
other 25 states supported the federal government (the Union). After four years
of struggle, the Confederacy gave up, and slavery was abolished absolutely in
the nation.
Click
on the following video to know about the origins of slavery in America:
[1] Mintz,
S., & McNeil, S. (2012). Digital
History. Retrieved
09/13/2012 from http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/
[2] Enloe, Karin. Google Sites, Last modified
2012. Accessed September 10, 2012. https://sites.google.com/site/drecultural/home/early-republic-through-civil-war.
[3] Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old
South (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2011), 41.
