Naturalizing affection, securing property: Family, slavery, and the courts in Antebellum South Carolina, 1830–1860

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Gwendoline M. Alphonso
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Development ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
White Male ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
White Family ◽  
Antebellum Period

Abstract The scholarship on race and political development demonstrates that race has long been embedded in public policy and political institutions. Less noticed in this literature is how family, as a deliberate political institution, is used to further racial goals and policy purposes. This article seeks to fill this gap by tracing the foundations of the political welding of family and race to the slave South in the antebellum period from 1830 to 1860. Utilizing rich testimonial evidence in court cases, I demonstrate how antebellum courts in South Carolina constructed a standard of “domestic affection” from the everyday lives of southerners, which established affection as a natural norm practiced by white male slaveowners in their roles as fathers, husbands, and masters. By constructing and regulating domestic affection to uphold slavery amid the waves of multiple modernizing forces (democratization, advancing market economy, and household egalitarianism), Southern courts in the antebellum period presaged their postbellum role of reconstructing white supremacy in the wake of slavery's demise. In both cases the courts played a formative role in naturalizing family relations in racially specific ways, constructing affection and sexuality, respectively, to anchor the white family as the bulwark of white social and political hegemony.

Paths Out of Dixie

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Mickey
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Development ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
National Party ◽  
Agricultural Labor ◽  
Governance Challenges ◽  
The American South

The transformation of the American South—from authoritarian to democratic rule—is the most important political development since World War II. It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's democratization. This book illuminates this sea change by analyzing the democratization experiences of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. It argues that Southern states, from the 1890s until the early 1970s, constituted pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy. These enclaves—devoted to cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy—were established by conservative Democrats to protect their careers and clients. From the abolition of the whites-only Democratic primary in 1944 until the national party reforms of the early 1970s, enclaves were battered and destroyed by a series of democratization pressures from inside and outside their borders. Drawing on archival research, the book traces how Deep South rulers—dissimilar in their internal conflict and political institutions—varied in their responses to these challenges. Ultimately, enclaves differed in their degree of violence, incorporation of African Americans, and reconciliation of Democrats with the national party. These diverse paths generated political and economic legacies that continue to reverberate today. Focusing on enclave rulers, their governance challenges, and the monumental achievements of their adversaries, the book shows how the struggles of the recent past have reshaped the South and, in so doing, America's political development.

Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society. Edited by Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 400. $49.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 273-274
Author(s):  
Peter A. Coclanis
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
University Of South Carolina ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
To Come ◽  
Plantation Society

The “problem” of South Carolina has long fascinated historians of the antebellum period, particularly political historians. Why were Palmetto State politicians always so fiery, confrontational, and eager to come to blows? Many fine scholars have attempted to answer such questions over the years, and, as a result, we know more about the politics of South Carolina than we do about the politics of any other state in the antebellum South.

Enslaved Financing of Southern Industry: The Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina, 1836–1850

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
SHARON ANN MURPHY
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Profit Maximization ◽  
Market Value ◽  
Financial Assets ◽  
Market Exchange ◽  
Loan Contracts ◽  
Company Stock ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Manufacturing Company ◽  
Panic Of 1837

Incorporated on the eve of the Panic of 1837, the Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina owned and hired enslaved individuals to labor in their ironworks, but they also leveraged the market value of this enslaved property by exchanging them for shares of company stock and offering them as collateral in loan contracts. These slaveholders actively experimented with increasingly sophisticated financial tools and institutions in order to facilitate investment, market exchange, and profit maximization within the system of enslavement. Although historians have examined the role of enslaved labor in industrial concerns, they have largely ignored their role in the financing of these operations. Understanding the multiple ways that southerners were turning enslaved property into liquid, flexible financial assets is essential to understanding the depth and breadth of the system of enslavement. In doing so, we can move beyond questions of whether slavery was compatible with industrialization specifically and capitalism more broadly, to an understanding of how slavery and capitalism interacted to promote southern economic development in the antebellum period. At the same time, the experience of the Nesbitt Company reveals the limits of enslaved financing. The aftermath of the Panic of 1837 demonstrated that the market value of enslaved property was much more volatile than enslavers cared to admit. Although southerners could often endure this volatility in the case of enslaved laborers working on plantations or in factories, it made the financialization of slavery a much riskier endeavor for an emerging industrial regime.

scholarly journals Just Mothering: Amy Coney Barrett and the Racial Politics of American Motherhood

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
H. Howell Williams
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
White Family ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Republican Motherhood ◽  
A Site ◽  
Confirmation Hearings

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination and confirmation featured frequent references to her role as a mother. This article situates these references within the trajectory of American political development to demonstrate how motherhood operates as a mechanism for enforcing a white-centered racial order. Through a close analysis of both the history of politicized motherhood as well as Barrett’s nomination and confirmation hearings, I make a series of claims about motherhood and contemporary conservatism. First, conservatives stress the virtuousness of motherhood through a division between public and private spheres that valorizes the middle-class white mother. Second, conservatives emphasize certain mothering practices associated with the middle-class white family. Third, conservatives leverage an epistemological claim about the universality of mothering experiences to universalize white motherhood. Finally, this universalism obscures how motherhood operates as a site in which power distinguishes between good and bad mothers and allocates resources accordingly. By attending to what I call the “republican motherhood script” operating in contemporary conservatism, I argue that motherhood is an ideological apparatus for enforcing a racial order premised on white protectionism.

The Textile Industry in Antebellum South Carolina

1969 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 666
Author(s):  
Harry N. Scheiber ◽  
Ernest McPherson Lander
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Antebellum South

Colombian Parties and Political Development

1976 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Peeler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Political System ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Authority Relationships ◽  
Latin American Countries

Colombia remains one of a very small group of countries in Latin America which retain competitive, liberal-democratic political institutions at this writing. Indeed, Colombia's civil government, recognizing a modicum of individual liberties and conducting periodic elections, has been shattered on relatively few occasions since the mid-nineteenth century, a record equalled or surpassed by few other Latin American countries. The Colombian political system is still dominated by the two traditional political parties (Liberal and Conservative) which arose in Colombia and elsewhere in the region in the nineteenth century. In almost every other country they have long since passed into oblivion or insignificance. This continued dominance by the traditional parties is commonly attributed to their successful mobilization of mass support, especially among the peasantry. The Colombian parties (unlike their counterparts elsewhere) early moved beyond being mere elite factions by using traditional authority relationships, clientelistic exchanges and ideological appeals to develop durable bases of mass support.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document