SOURCE: Degler, Carl N. “The Foundations of Southern Distinctiveness.” The Southern Review 13, no. 2 (April 1977): 225-39.

[In the following essay, Degler outlines the economic and historical sources of Southern cultural distinctiveness, maintaining nonetheless that differences between Northerners and Southerners in the first half of the nineteenth century were a matter of degree, not kind, and that both groups shared an essential worldview.]

Whether one is interested in the early antebellum South or the modern South, the agricultural character of the region is fundamental. If today the South is the most rural region of the nation, in the years before the War for Southern Independence that description was even more appropriate. Although the Northwest was then often spoken of as an agricultural region, too, the South easily surpassed the West as well as the Northeast in its commitment to agriculture. About 52 percent of the nonslave labor force of the South was engaged in agriculture in 1860 as compared with 35.5 percent for the remainder of the country. Although the South constituted slightly less than 40 percent of the population of the United States, it raised 50 percent of the nation's cattle, 60 percent of the swine, 90 percent of the mules, 50 percent of the corn, 50 percent of the poultry, and 52 percent of the oxen. Only in regard to sheep, wheat, oats, and rye was the South behind the North in the production of specific farm commodities. And in the production of the great regional staples—tobacco, cotton, sugar, rice, and hemp—the South was not only without peer, but without serious competitors.

The deep and enduring involvement with agriculture and rurality implied by these figures flowed naturally from the South's unique commitment to slavery. Although slave labor was used principally in the production of the great staples, its success in producing those commodities encouraged, for reasons that will be apparent as we go along, a general interest in other kinds of agriculture as well. It was slavery, that is, legally coerced labor, that made the plantation possible. Given the great demand for the staples, principally cotton, it was to be expected that the South would turn to the growing of cotton and other farm commodities. But neither the high demand nor the readily available land could be fully exploited without slavery. Free men would not work for others at subsistence wages when so much land was readily accessible. Yet farmers working their individual farms were too few in number to take maximum advantage of both the demand for the South's agricultural commodities and the availability of land. It is quite likely that without slavery, the South, because of its warm and humid climate, would have been more slowly populated by Europeans than it was. In any event, slavery made the plantation a flourishing form of agricultural production; slavery and the plantation together made “mass production” in agriculture possible. In doing so, they laid the foundation for the South's distinctiveness. No other region of the nation was able to turn slavery to such good use, principally because no other region was so well suited to the growth of commodities in world demand.

The plantation began in the seventeenth century with white labor, held to the land by law, too, in the form of indentured servitude. But in the course of the colonial era it was entirely replaced by black Africans. The reason for the replacement does not really concern us here, though it would seem to have been a matter of economics. Blacks, who could be made to work for a lifetime and who produced offspring who were also slaves, were generally cheaper as laborers than white men and women whose terms were limited and whose children were born free. Whatever the reason for the shift in the racial character of the dependent cultivators, the shift decreed that the South would become the one region of the country in which black people made up a significant part of the population.

Slavery did much more than determine that the South would be a biracial society. It also shaped the economic and demographic patterns of the South for years to come. One of the principal reasons it was able to do this was because it was profitable. At one time historians were not at all sure that slavery as it was practiced in the South was competitive with free labor. Indeed, the nineteenth-century attack on slavery as a system of labor generally emphasized the allegedly inherent inefficiencies in any labor system that relied upon coercion rather than internalized incentives. And even Southern historian U. B. Phillips, who was certainly not hostile to the old regime in the South, argued that it was far from a profitable way to make cotton. The argument was not that the slave plantation failed to produce any profit, but rather that the profit it did produce fell far short of that which would be returned from other kinds of investments. Today, however, there are very few historians who argue that slavery was not profitable for the average planter, even though there were certainly individuals who received only a small or negligible return. Beginning with the seminal article of Alfred Conrad and John Meyer in 1958, economic historians have demonstrated from a variety of sources that on the average, the cotton plantations of the South earned on their capital about what would have been received if that same sum of money had been invested in enterprises outside the South, such as Northern railroads. Southern planters, in short, were making the best of their economic opportunities when they plowed their capital and profits back into land and slaves to make more cotton.

Clearly there is more than one reason why the South wedded itself to Negro slavery and the plantation. The evidence that slavery, on the average, produced a good profit for slave owners suggests that at least one of the reasons for that commitment was that it paid. But in receiving a handsome return Southerners also paid a social price. The slave and the plantation shaped the economy, the society, and the culture that surrounded them. And many of the results of that shaping remain today in the persistent distinctiveness of the South, which, in turn, has contributed heavily to the continuity of Southern history.

One of those distinctive aspects is that the South today has relatively fewer people of continental European and Asian origin than the remainder of the country. That pattern began in the nineteenth century and can be related to the success of slavery. Prior to the great immigration of Catholic Irish, Protestant and Catholic Germans, and Protestant Scandinavians in the course of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, the distribution of peoples in North and South was not conspicuously different. Scots-Irish, Huguenot French, Swiss, and Germans settled among the predominantly English in both regions. And even when large numbers of Germans and Catholic Irish came to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s some did go to the South as well as to the North. Significantly, however, the South became the permanent home of considerably fewer than the North. Moreover, virtually no Scandinavians settled in the South though hundreds of thousands took up land in the Northwest. In 1860 only 13 percent of the foreign born in the United States lived in the Southern slave states, though the South embraced almost 40 percent of the population and almost half of the settled area of the United States.

This antebellum demographic pattern is explained by the presence of slavery and the plantation in two ways at least. One is that European immigrants, coming to the United States to seek greater economic opportunity, would have perceived slave labor as a highly competitive rival, one that was absent in the free labor Northwest. Furthermore, a slave society appeared aristocratic and undemocratic to people fleeing from class distinctions and the aristocratic pretensions of Europe. The second, and more important reason why immigrants shunned the South is that opportunities for work in cities and factories were considerably fewer than in the North. Urbanization in the South lagged behind the rest of the country. In 1850, for example, out of fifteen slave states only Maryland, Delaware, and Louisiana—the last because of exceptional New Orleans—had a proportion of their populations living in cities equal to that of the nation at large. In 1860 Illinois and Indiana alone counted forty cities with over 2500 population; at that same date the seven states of the Deep South contained only thirty-three cities altogether.

Why the South had considerably fewer cities than the rest of the United States—even the agricultural Northwest—is related to another reason why immigrants did not go to the antebellum South: the small amount of manufacturing carried on there. There was some manufacturing in the Old South, to be sure. Clement Eaton has pointed out that the South's share of total national production of manufactures was actually higher in 1860 than in 1900. And during the 1850s the amount of manufacturing in the South rose 43 percent though the population increased only 20 percent. The work of Richard Griffin has demonstrated that textile manufacturing in the Old South was considerably more widespread and productive than many have said in the past. And certainly the tobacco and iron manufacturing industries in Virginia were among the major industrial activities of the country, not only of the region. Yet the fact remains that in 1860 the amount of capital invested in manufacturing in Indiana and Illinois—two states that were heavily agricultural and admitted to the Union at roughly the same time as Alabama and Mississippi—was greater than that of all the seven states of the Deep South put together.

The reasons for this lack of manufacturing is explained by the spread-out character of the plantation economy and the consequent lack of skills and effective demand. A few years ago economic historian Willian Parker showed statistically that the Southern antebellum economy, because it was based upon slave labor, lacked a middle sector, that is, that portion of the economy in which consumer wants were high, thus providing a basis for the development of local manufacturing. Parker calculated the per capita annual income for free nonslaveholder per square mile for the South Atlantic and East South Central states—that is, essentially the Old South. Then he did the same for the non-slaveholding population of the North Central states, that is, the agricultural Northwest. The difference in per capita income was dramatic: $985 per square mile for the South and $2000 for the Middle West, or more than double the South's figure. Since in those years the Old Northwest was primarily agricultural, it is evident that the demand for manufactures would be less in the South when related to density of free white population. Parker went on to say that the development of manufacturing lagged in the South not only because of lower per capita income by density, but also because the South lacked the middle-sector-manufacturing that provided a foundation of skills and technology that was necessary for the development of manufactures for a mass market. He argues that the potential for a mass market was there in the form of demand for crude and cheap necessities for the slaves, but the infrastructure for the development of mass manufacturing establishments was not.

Eugene Genovese has asserted that one of the major reasons for the South's failure to develop manufacturing was that the planter class was hostile to such enterprises. Some planters, it is true, did object to what they considered the wrong kind of development for an agrarian South. Such objections, though, have to be put into the context of the many spokesmen for the South who advocated more, not less, industrial development. Certainly no one can fault the Southern nationalism of J. D. B. DeBow, yet his journal DeBow's Review, edited in New Orleans, was in the forefront of the movement for the economic diversification of the region, a goal that included the development of industry. The so-called Commercial Conventions of the 1840s and 1850s also pressed for industrial development in the South. Leading defenders of a slave South, like Robert Hayne of South Carolina and George Fitzhugh of Virginia, also spoke out in support of industrial development of the region.

Moreover, modern historians' acknowledgment of the versatility of slave labor now makes clear that slavery as a system of labor exhibited little or no intrinsic hostility toward the development of industry. Robert Starobin has thoroughly documented the successful use of slave labor in a wide variety of manufacturing endeavors. And John E. Stealey in a recent article has shown that in certain industries, notably salt manufacturing in western Virginia, slave labor, precisely because it was coerced labor, could develop resources that would otherwise have lain dormant for lack of white labor willing or able to work as steadily and as efficiently.

On still another level, George Green in his detailed analysis of banking in Louisiana has shown that there was no contradiction between slave society and economic development. Income per worker in Louisiana, he points out, was the third highest in the country and its nonagricultural per capita income was the highest in the nation. He sees Louisiana making good use of the latest technology, contrary to the view that innovations were resisted or unappreciated by the allegedly anti-capitalistic planter-dominated South. In 1838, for example—the only year the figures are available—Louisiana led the nation in the use of steampower. Railroad construction in the state reached a high level and was not opposed by planters, as sometimes said.

The conclusion that seems to emerge, then, is that slave labor did not move into manufacturing, and manufacturing did not develop as rapidly in the South as in the rest of the nation because both capital and labor earned competitive returns from agriculture. Clement Eaton and others have pointed out that during the mild depression in cotton prices during the 1840s manufacturing jumped forward in the South as disenchanted planters shifted capital and probably labor in search of a better return. And when cotton prices turned upward in the fifties, the growth in manufacturing apparently slowed down. In short, it was the comparative advantage of the South in growing certain crops, particularly cotton, that kept its capital and labor concentrated in agriculture.

Many years ago Kenneth Stampp showed that slaveholders could easily have shifted capital from slaves into manufacturing if that is what they wanted to do. For so long as there was a good market for slaves that form of labor was capable of being turned into cash for investment in manufacturing. After Jane Pease's canvassing of the primary sources, we cannot take seriously the argument of some historians that conspicuous consumption by the planters ate up their surplus and thus left them little for investment in manufacturing. Indeed, as Morton Rothstein has pointed out, many planters were actively engaged in railroading, banking, ginning, and manufacturing of all kinds. Given this diversity of economic interests among the planters, particularly those of the Deep South where the so-called “essence” of the slave economy was located, it is hard to consider them as anti-capitalist in either outlook or actions. Indeed, that seems to be the more reasonable conclusion to draw from Eugene Genovese's enumeration of planters who were active in non-agricultural enterprises, which he set forth in his book The Political Economy of Slavery. They were not planters dominating industrialists, as he contends, but capitalist-planters seeking a good return on their surplus earnings from agriculture.

Thus, one of the most profound consequences of slavery was to lock the South into an agricultural economy in which the city was minor and the immigrant a relative rarity. The pattern of life begun under slavery persisted in subsequent years for a number of reasons, but not least among them was the success of agriculture in the antebellum years.

The slave plantation society made the South distinctive in another way. It helped to shape a myth of the Old South, which persisted long after slavery was gone and forgotten. Southerners themselves cultivated the myth of a genteel, aristocratic South, based upon great rural estates supported by slaves and dispensing cordial hospitality. And it is quite true that the ideal Southerner was a planter, not an industrialist or merchant and that even those planters who showed too much interest in making money could be stigmatized as “Southern Yankees.” But for a society that was still largely frontier and no more than a single generation removed from personal acquaintance with hoe and plow, the myth was more an aspiration than a reflection of social reality.

Yet, weakly rooted in social reality as the image of the genteel, aristocratic South may have been, that fact did not prevent the myth from further differentiating the region from the rest of the country. The very existence of slavery and the plantation spurred Northerners as well as Southerners to imagine the South as a society and people strikingly different from the North in a variety of ways and for reasons clearly connected to slavery. To some Northerners, as William Taylor showed in his book Cavalier and Yankee, the South represented that which their own region lacked; as a land of alleged gentility, of concern for personal relations and honor, the South was said to be the opposite of the moneygrubbing, commercial North. Lacking the North's burgeoning cities, multiplying factories, and rising tide of immigrants, the South was perceived as an alternative to all that was considered unattractive in the North.

The North also developed another image or myth of the South, one that was considerably less flattering, but no less differentiating and no less dependent upon the plantation and slavery for its origin. This second Northern myth of the Old South also emphasized the aristocratic aspects of Southern life, but now the focus was upon the violence, social pretensions, and economic backwardness that allegedly derived from its being a slave society. This myth was already in being at the opening of the nineteenth century, but by the 1850s it was widely held by Northerners. In fact, it was central, as Eric Foner and others have pointed out, to the growth of the Republican party in the North. As one Michigan newspaper in 1854 phrased the image, Southerners were “intolerant, not occasionally, nor by accident,—but habitually and on principle. … It is the slave driver's lash, differing little in shape, and applied to Northern white men, instead of Southern slaves, but wielded for the same end, the enforcement of their will, and by essentially the same means—brute force instead of reason and justice.” Increasingly, political historians are reminding us that a good bit of the political behavior of the North in the antebellum years is explicable only by reference to the hostility that some Northerners felt toward the South because the region had dominated national politics for so long and usually in behalf of slavery.

The growing hostility toward the South because it was a slave society goes a long way toward explaining its conservative outlook. Indeed, one might say that one of the consequences, as well as one of the continuing reinforcements of its distinctiveness, is that the South has persisted as the most conservative region of the nation. For beginning with slavery, the region has long been under one kind of attack or another because of its differences from the rest of the nation. Defensiveness and conservativism have become Southern habits of mind, almost reflexes, so often has the South been flayed for real or imagined deficiencies. The fact of distinctiveness has fed upon itself to the point where it has not been necessary always to specify the bases of that distinctiveness. One needs merely to note the tradition of difference in the minds of Northerners and Southerners alike. On the eve of secession many Southerners had come to use that sense of difference as justification for breaking out of what they considered the procrustean bed of the Union. At least one writer in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1860 was so convinced of the differences that he confidently traced them back to the alleged cavalier origins of Virginia and roundheads' settling of New England. Charles Jones, Jr., of Georgia wrote his father in January, 1861, that he believed “that in this country have arisen two races, which, although claiming a common parentage, have been so entirely separated by climate, by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite of all that constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer coexist under the same government.”

The conservative consequences growing out of the compulsion to defend slavery can also be observed in Southern religious developments. At one time in the beginning of the nineteenth century Thomas Jefferson had thought that Unitarianism had a bright future in his beloved South, but on the eve of the Civil War that radical version of Protestantism was confined to the North, where it was spawning many an abolitionist. By 1860 Southern religion was conspicuous for its traditional interpretation of Christianity and literal interpretation of the Bible. The blackout of reformist religion in the intervening years seems to be closely related to the need to defend slavery. Since both the Old and the New Testaments recognized the legitimacy of slavery, a literal interpretation of the Bible permitted the strongest religious defense of the institution, just as a literal and narrow construction of the Constitution, which also recognized the legitimacy of slavery, provided the strongest constitutional defense.

Other reformist tendencies in the South were similarly smothered by the need to protect slavery. During the 1840s and 1850s the North experienced a great ferment of social reform, but that challenge to the status quo failed to develop in the South. Increasingly, it was becoming clear to many Southerners that those reformers who favored temperance, peace, women's rights, and even vegetarianism were usually opposed to slavery as well. To reform or change any social institution might well call into question the South's peculiar institution itself. The roots of modern Southern social conservatism then can be traced to the antebellum defense of slavery. What slavery began, other aspects of the South's minority status in the nation would perpetuate when the peculiar institution had long since passed into oblivion.

Some historians have been so impressed with the way in which slavery shaped the life of Southerners, white as well as black, that they have talked not only of Southern distinctiveness, but of a special Southern world view, one that was fundamentally different from that of the North. Eugene Genovese has been the leading proponent of that interpretation of the Old South. Others, like C. Vann Woodward, who may not follow Genovese fully, also see antebellum Southern culture as so intertwined with slavery that the abolition of the institution is perceived as a major break in the continuity of Southern history.

Already, in examining the economy of the Old South, I have argued that the economic rationality of the slave economy that is implied by the high rate of return belies any fundamental difference in economic values between North and South. After all, if Southern planters were able to obtain a return on their economic activities equal to those in the bourgeois North, it seems reasonable to assume that they—the Southern planters—must have been working as hard at making profits as Northerners, unless one assumes it was all accidental. They were not, in short, proto-aristocrats who scorned business enterprise and profit-making. Important as that conclusion is, it does not end the matter if only because the question of a different world view is central to the issue of the continuity of Southern history. For if the Old South did develop a different world view from that of the North because of slavery, then it would follow that the overthrow of the slave system in the Civil War would mark a significant break in the flow of Southern history. Since my contention is that continuity is more characteristic than discontinuity, it is now time to examine the argument that the antebellum South developed a different world view from that of the North.

In his book The World the Slaveholders Made Eugene Genovese put the means to that end. And that is why Louis Hartz refers to Calhoun as a representative of the reactionary Enlightenment.

The more representative Southerner was clearly Calhoun, not Fitzhugh. Calhoun, after all, accepted states rights, a strict construction of the Constitution, and the perpetuation of an agricultural society—the well-known hallmarks of antebellum Southerners. Fitzhugh, on the other hand, had little use for states rights or strict construction of the Constitution. “With inexorable sequence,” he wrote in his book Cannibals All! “Let Alone is made to usher in No-Government. North and South our [conservatives'] danger is the same, and our remedies, though differing in degree, must in character be the same. Let Alone must be repudiated,” he wrote, referring to laissez-faire, “if we would have any government. We must, in all sections, act upon the principle that the world is ‘too little governed.’” Later, in the same book, he spelled out his basic disagreement with virtually all Southern politicians of his time. “Government is the life of a nation, and as no one can foresee the various future circumstances of social, any more than of individual life, it is absurd to define on paper, at the birth of either the nation or individual, what they shall do and what not do. Broad construction of constitutions is as good as no constitution, for it leaves the nation to adapt itself to circumstances; but strict construction,” he went on, “will destroy any nation, for action is necessary to national conservation, and constitution-makers cannot foresee what action will be necessary. … A constitution, strictly construed, is absolutely inconsistent with permanent national existence,” he concluded. Fitzhugh's may have been the attitude that the planters of the South ought to have espoused in defense of slavery, as Genovese argues, but it was not the outlook they did espouse.

The value of Fitzhugh as a Southern thinker is that through his ideas we learn the limits of Southern differences from the rest of the United States. He advanced a view, as Genovese has said, that well-suited a planters' defense of slavery, but the failure of those planters to follow him shows that they had not departed from the bourgeois, liberal values that characterized the rest of the nation.

If Fitzhugh fails to qualify as a representative Southerner and thus cannot provide support for the assertion that the planters' world view diverged from that of the North, there were other Southerners who were representative of the South and whose values were quite in agreement with those of other Americans. This is especially evident in their pro-slavery arguments. The defense of slavery as it was developed in the middle of the nineteenth century was primarily a Southern product. Some Southerners, however, went beyond a mere defense of slavery. They developed the proposition that slavery was justified because Negroes were biologically inferior to whites. It is true that some other Southerners, like Henry Clay, refused to accept the argument that slavery was a positive good because blacks were biologically suited to slavery. Indeed, at one point Clay went on the public record denying that most white Southerners thought so. But the issue is not whether all Southerners defended slavery on biological grounds. The point I wish to make is that no other society in the New World in which Negro slavery was established found it necessary to defend slavery on racial grounds to the extent that the American South did. All slave societies defended slavery, of course, but in all of them, except the South, defenses based upon the ground that blacks were natural slaves or racially inferior were rare.

A biological defense of slavery certainly set the South apart from other slave societies, but it also revealed how close in value structure the South was to the rest of the United States. For only if Southerners had not found it necessary to defend slavery on grounds of race would they have shown themselves to have a different value system from the North's. The reason the other slave societies of the New World did not find it necessary to arrive at a racial defense of slavery is that they saw no fundamental contradiction between slavery and the social order. Since in other slave societies political equality was not a widely-held, accepted value, as it was in the United States, slavery was only one of several forms of subordination, albeit a severe one. In the United States, on the other hand, with its emphasis upon equality and freedom, slavery seemed only an anomaly. It denied the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the practices of political democracy that rested on the idea of one man, one vote. In the face of such contradictions, one way to defend slavery was to assert that those who were slaves deserved to be slaves because of their race.

Many years ago Fletcher Green demonstrated that the antebellum South participated fully in the development of democratic political institutions. The movement for the abandonment of property qualifications for voting and office-holding and other democratic political reforms, for example, achieved as much success in the Southern as in the Northern states. The political equality of white men was as much an article of faith in the South as in the North. “In the South,” said Mississippi fire-eater Albert Gallatin Brown, “all men are equal. I mean of course white men; negroes are not men within the meaning of the Declaration.” Or as Henry Wise of Virginia put it, “break down slavery and you would with the same blow destroy the great democratic principle of equality among men.” T. R. R. Cobb of Georgia also testified to the agreement between Southerners and Northerners on the equality of white men. “It matters not that [the white voter] is no slaveholder; he is not of the inferior race; he is a free-born citizen; he engages in no menial occupation. The poorest meets the richest as an equal; sits at his table with him; salutes him as a neighbor; meets him in every public assembly and stands on the same social platform.”

Nor was the emphasis upon white men peculiar to the South, as Leon Litwack's study of the plight of blacks in the North demonstrates. In 1860 only six states of the North permitted blacks to vote. In all sections of the country the dominant elite, whether merchant and industrialist, as in the North, or planter and factor, as in the South, accepted the ideal of political equality among whites. No Southern politician, no matter how many slaves he owned, no more than any Northern politician, no matter how many workers he employed, dared to speak against white manhood suffrage.

Southerners were also in agreement with Northerners in regard to other social values. The ideal of social mobility and competitive independence, which Eric Foner discerned at the root of the ideology of the Northern Republican party, was quite evident south of the Mason and Dixon line. Foner justly points to the westward movement as at once a measure and a sign of the Northern belief in mobility and economic and social striving for individual improvement. It is worth recalling that the South, too, participated in that same westward movement and for the same reasons. The studies of the Owsley school provide many examples of social striving and social mobility in the rural South quite comparable to those in the rural Northwest. For the South, like the North, as we have seen, was an expanding economy in the antebellum years. Owsley's further finding that some 80 percent of farmers in the South owned their own land reveals, too, that the individualistic independence of most white Southerners was firmly grounded in property ownership, as Jefferson and the American liberal tradition advocated. And certainly no one can deny the fiercely individualistic character of the Southern yeoman during these years. In summary, save for the Southern defense of slavery, it is difficult to find social values that were dominant in the North that were not also widely present and deeply held in the South.

The endurance of slavery in the South and the defense of it there certainly caused the society and thought of Southerners to be different; after all, that is what made them distinctive. But that distinctiveness did not add up to a different world view. On the contrary, I would argue that the recourse to a racial defense of slavery on the part of the South was a response to the fear that the American—and therefore Southern—value of freedom and equality would be extended first to slaves and then to blacks. Today we recognize that the fear was unfounded. The Republican party's objection to the extension of slavery and even the Republicans' objections to slavery itself did not mean that Republicans necessarily stood for equality between the races. At the time, however, the limits of Republican egalitarianism were not appreciated by many Southerners; they mistook a difference in degree for a difference in kind.

It is certainly relevant, too, that those Southerners who were most interested in creating a separate South—that is, a Confederate South—were also among the most vigorous supporters of the racial defense of slavery. Less self-conscious Southerners, like Henry Clay, repudiated the positive good theory of slavery. That difference between Southern leaders suggests that even those who might be thought to have differed most in their world view from Northerners—because they argued for slavery and for secession so ardently—still accepted American values to the extent that they felt compelled to erect a defense that assumed those values among the Southern people. They asserted the racial inferiority of blacks because they could not successfully erect a class defense of slavery that would appeal to Southerners any more than that kind of defense would have won the support of Northerners. It violated American conceptions of equality and freedom. Even Genovese's favorite pro-slavery ideologue, George Fitzhugh, was ultimately driven to a racial defense of slavery, a belated recognition by him that in America an appeal to hierarchy or class subordination offered scant protection to the institution of human bondage.

As a consequence of slavery, the South on the eve of the Civil War was a different society from that of the North. And those differences certainly go a long way toward explaining why eleven Southern states broke away to form the Confederate States of America. Yet the way that break took place ought to give us pause in accepting the argument that the differences between North and South were so deep and divergent as to be called differences in world views. The popularity of secession was in such doubt in the first six of the seven founding states of the Confederacy that secessionists feared to risk popular referendums. Only Texas, the seventh state to join the Confederacy, permitted a popular vote on secession. And only after a long delay and strong provocation from the North could the remaining four states bring themselves to join the Confederacy. Indeed, as David Potter has pointed out, secession was probably not the will of the majority of the Southern people, even in the states of the Deep South. Finally, the character of the South after the war reminds us that the ending of slavery did not mark a major break in the continuity of Southern history any more than the existence of slavery had created a separate nation and a different world view within the Southern part of the United States.