Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

To: BroJoeK; DiogenesLamp
Sure, but the claim is made, erroneously, that in 1860 the US South was some kind of "backwater", less advanced, less industrious and less prosperous than Northerners. I'm here to argue that simply is not the case.

I know. It's ridiculous to say: "New York, Boston, Chicago, etc. hated and despised the Southern people, considering them uneducated, backwards and immoral."

If you were a wealthy New Yorker or Philadelphian in 1830 or 1840, you did business with wealthy Southerners. You socialized with them. Your family intermarried with theirs. They were your peers. You didn't think yourself superior to them. If they had more money or older money or didn't have to work, you might even have felt inferior to them.

You probably wouldn't be aware of non-elite White Southerners and didn't think about them much. If you did, you probably didn't consider them worse than Blacks or the Irish or your own backwoods cousins. What people forget is that before the Civil War, even states like Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey had large rural populations which included many poor people.

Easterners in those days did look down on Westerners. Bostonians or Philadelphians or New Yorkers who were horrified by Andrew Jackson hated him because he was an uncouth Westerner, not a Southerner. They felt differently about the Virginians and South Carolinians they knew.

It's particularly laughable to say that Chicagoans would have looked down on Charleston or Savannah, or Richmond. Chicago had been a swamp in 1830. By 1860 they still weren't snobbish. Illinois politicians often came from Kentucky or Virginia or Carolina families or married into wealthy Southern families -- as Lincoln and Douglas did. Those Southern families usually had more social pull than commercial Yankee families.

Things changed as slavery entered the picture. You did begin to find Northerners who regarded the South as immoral because of slavery. Intellectuals also began to deplore the lack of public schools and libraries in the slave states. But even then, a fiery abolitionist like Bronson Alcott had fond memories of the cultured Southern families he met when he was a poor and awkward Yankee peddler traveling through the South.

Northerners forgot that slavery had been a part of Northern history as well and that the North still benefited from the Southern plantation economy, and that was unfortunate, but really, don't we in some way feel "superior" to cultures that still have slavery or some other abuse, like genital mutilation? Wouldn't it be surprising if a free society didn't feel that they'd gotten something right that a slave society got wrong.

The idea that the "Tobacco Road" picture of the South as poor and backward was a constant in American history just isn't accurate. That's something that took off after the Civil War when the South really was impoverished and lasted for decades, in fact for a century, but it wasn't much of a factor before the war.

And what about the other side of the coin? In the 1850s Southern planters looked down on the "mudsills" of the North -- the Northern working people who were "slaves without masters" in George Fitzhugh's view. There was plenty of contempt for the North among Southern elites.

62 posted on 01/09/2017 3:08:56 PM PST by x
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 57 | View Replies ]


To: x
If you were a wealthy New Yorker or Philadelphian in 1830 or 1840, you did business with wealthy Southerners. You socialized with them. Your family intermarried with theirs. They were your peers. You didn't think yourself superior to them. If they had more money or older money or didn't have to work, you might even have felt inferior to them.

I don't think prosperous N.Y. attorney George T. Strong got that memo. In the 1840's and 50's he was downright contemptuous of southerners, upper or lower class.

63 posted on 01/09/2017 5:50:41 PM PST by Homer_J_Simpson ("Every nation has the government that it deserves." - Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies ]

To: x

Very well said, sir.


64 posted on 01/10/2017 7:14:37 AM PST by BroJoeK (a little historical perspective...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies ]

To: x
There was plenty of contempt for the North among Southern elites.

Sorry to be late to the dance, but I will agree that the contempt flowed one way, South toward Northern Abolitionists and their supporters.

This actually was the platform that David Aitchison was trying to use to win back his Senate seat against his deadlock with Thomas Hart Benton.

Having spent much of my life prior to retirement in Johnson County and Douglas County (Lawrence), Kansas and Platte County, Missouri as well has having a great grandfather that "rode with" John Brown, the stories of the Missouri-Kansas Border war are near to my heart.

The hatred that David Aitchison felt and used in setting up the Blue Lodges and the other Ruffian efforts led to Bleeding Kansas as surely as his dismantlement of the Missouri Compromise.

66 posted on 01/10/2017 4:57:31 PM PST by KC Burke (Consider all of my posts as first drafts. (Apologies to L. Niven))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson