Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A. in History
Department
Arch Dalrymple III Department of History
First Advisor
April Holm
Second Advisor
Paul Polgar
Third Advisor
John R. Neff
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
Due to their marginalized role in southern society, landless white southerners have often been overlooked by historians who study social class, politics and intellectual culture in the antebellum south. But depictions of landless white southerners were prominent in contemporary elite literature and their place was debated extensively by social commentators. These depictions marginalized landless whites from southern honor culture and marked them as a people who were not quite white in a social and biological sense. This characterization was both a cause and effect of elite southern unease with the presence of a class of poor landless whites. This unease manifested itself in the intellectual debate over slavery. Southern elites feared a political revolt as antislavery messages aimed at poor laboring southerners began to grow. Interaction between landless whites and slaves also magnified elite unease with the class. They were often seen as conduits for illicit actions by slaves, and most importantly as a comcatalyst for insurrectionist plots. In the post-Nat Turner south, fear of slave rebellion dominated elite concerns over the future of slavery and hastened the development of proslavery ideology. Poor whites were a crucial part of concern over the protection of slavery, and proslavery ideology would often highlight the role the slave labor system could have in curing their ills, or in preventing the development of an antislavery class consciousness. These fears were a clear impetus in the development of antebellum proslavery ideology, which sought to illustrate the positive good that slavery promised to southern non-slaveholders. The inconsistencies between elite southern ideology, white supremacy, and the social realities that landless whites faced, intensified elite worries about the loyalty that these people had for the south and the institution of slavery, ultimately resulting in arguments that stressed secession as a way to separate southern landless whites from potential class and political allies in the antislavery north.
Recommended Citation
Glossner, Jeffrey, "Cavaliers And Crackers: Landless Whites In The Mind Of The Elite Antebellum South" (2016). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1051.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1051