 Southerners remained localistic and culturally conservative  Prospects for most Southern whites: inherited land and family  Southerners were grounded in authority of patriarchs and integrity of families  Paternalistic Society

 Family members: representatives of families, rather than individuals – duty to their family  Reputation and defense of the family name and honor  Family honor more important than wealth  Southern code of honor  Honor the obligations to which one is born

 Rural character of South meant fewer commercial entertainments  English literature preferred  Sir Walter Scott and Chivalry  Hunting and fishing  Commercial entertainment  Showboats along river towns  Horse racing  New Orleans

 Misfortune is divine punishment  Southern cultural conservatism was rooted in:  Religion  The family  A system of fixed family roles

 By 1830 South was minority in a democratic and capitalist nation  Northern middle-class: made a connection between material and moral progress  Individual autonomy and universal rights  Radical northern minority advocated abolition of slavery  Southern response: moral and religious defense of slavery  Rejects Jefferson’s “self-evident” equality of man

 Plantation slaveholders knew their success depended on slaves’ labor and obedience in exchange for allowing slaves some privilege and autonomy

 Most precious slave privilege: right to make and maintain families  Slave marriages  Slave families vulnerable  Slaves used for sex by owners  Slaves were assets that were sometimes liquidated  Slaves modified their relations in anticipation of uncertainties  Extended kinship

 Missions to slaves  Owners responsible for spiritual welfare of slaves

 Slaves ignored much of missionary teachings  Slaves embraced Christianity:  transformed it into an independent African American faith  Incorporated social and ritual practices passed down from West Africa

 Slave revolt rare  Running away common form of rebellion  Christianity convinced slaves that justice would come to them  Denmark Vesey  Vesey plot (1822)

 Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831)  Instrument of God’s wrath  Virginia: 60 slaves killed 55 whites  Deeply troubling for Southern whites

 Traditional view: God gave white males power over others  Whig evangelicals  Marriage changes from rank domination to sentimental partnership  The emergence of a radical minority envisioning a world without power  Attacked slavery and patriarchy as national sin

 North: states began to abolish slavery  Revolutionary idealism  Slavery was inefficient and unnecessary  Gradual emancipation (Pennsylvania model)  Free black populations grew and moved into the cities  Many took stable, low-paying jobs

 Discrimination rises  White workers drive blacks out of skilled and semi- skilled jobs  Blacks increasingly politically disenfranchised  Segregated schools  Blacks build their own institutions  African Methodist Episcopal Church (1816)  Black Anti-slavery activism  David Walker: Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)  Harriet Tubman  Frederick Douglass

 First anti-slavery efforts die out in early 1800s  American Colonization Society (1816)  Gradual, compensated emancipation  “Repatriation” to Liberia  Slavery abolished many places outside the U.S.  Toussaint L’Ouverture and Haiti  South American Republics  British Caribbean

 William Lloyd Garrison  The Liberator (1831)  American Anti-Slavery Society (1833)  Abolition a logical extension of middle class evangelicalism  American Anti-slavery Society demands:  Immediate emancipation  Full civil and legal rights for African-Americans