Slavery and Freedom by James Oakes

Author:James Oakes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307828149
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-08T21:00:00+00:00

ITS BASIS in the traditional family, its community orientation, its suspicious stance toward concentrated economic and political power, the priority it gave to the relative safety of subsistence agriculture—all of these marked the southern yeomanry’s ties to a pre-industrial world and its affinities with peasant culture. But in its embrace of individualism, of political and economic self-interest, in its equation of commerce with cultural superiority and its concern to increase its marketable surpluses, the southern yeomanry placed itself within the more modern setting of liberal capitalism. With the commercialization of the upcountry, yeomen farmers were less a peasantry than a petite bourgeoisie. And like the lower middle class throughout nineteenth-century Europe and America, the yeomanry’s politics were an unstable mixture of radical populism and bourgeois individualism. Southern yeomen could be as fearful of the propertyless masses beneath them as they were disdainful of “aristocrats” of wealth—slaveholders or capitalists, they saw little difference—above them.

Marx had no patience for such ambivalence. “The proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class,” he insisted. “The lower middle classes, the small manufacturers, the shopkeepers, the artisans, the peasants, all these fight against the bourgeoisie in order to save from extinction their existence as parts of the middle class … they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.” Historians have been no less categorical. Faced with a yeomanry that lashed out in contradictory directions, careening wildly from radical democracy to racist paranoia, from hair-brained panaceas to trenchant critiques of concentrated economic power, scholars have habitually chosen to emphasize either the radical or the reactionary elements, but rarely both. No account of antebellum politics can be complete, however, if it ignores the fundamental ambivalence at the core of yeoman culture.

In this, at least, the yeomen were not so different from the slaveholders. The masters also lived in two distinct yet inseparable worlds, grounded in the ancient social relationship of master and slave, brought back to life by the revolutionary force of liberal capitalism. The slave economy was at once intensely commercial and resistant to technological development. The master class was drawn inescapably into the international economic order, yet lived in the rural isolation of the black belt. The slaveholders’ power was grounded in a relationship that systematically undermined the slave family, individualized relations within the master’s family, yet preserved the family farm as the organizing unit of economic life. Libertarian tyrants, enlightened patriarchs, frightened Whigs—the slaveholders spun out their world in a series of bewildering contradictions.

A culture with so wide an array of tangents had more than enough points at which could intersect. The centrality of the family farm, the fear of debt, the devotion to absolute property—these were substantial elements capable of politically unifying most free Southerners. And the American Revolution demonstrated the historical significance of such shared convictions. Consider, for example, meritocracy. It was, for all its contradictory implications, a profoundly significant point of agreement among free men in the South. It located masters and yeomen alike in a liberal world

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