Remaking Slavery in a Free State: Masters and Slaves in Gold Rush California

2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacey L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
American South ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Free State ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The American South

Hundreds of white Southerners traveled to Gold Rush California with slaves. Long after California became a free state in 1850, these masters transplanted economic and social practices that sustained slavery in the American South to the goldfields. At the same time, enslaved people realized that Gold Rush conditions disrupted customary master-slave relationships and pressed for more personal autonomy, better working conditions, and greater economic reward. The result was a new regional version of slavery that was remarkably flexible and subject to negotiation. This fluidity diminished, however, as proslavery legislators passed laws that protected slaveholding rights and vitiated the state's antislavery constitution. California's struggle over bondage highlights the persistence of the slavery question in the Far West after the Compromise of 1850 and illuminates slavery's transformation as it moved onto free soil.

Monuments to Absence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Denson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Tourist Attractions ◽  
Indian History ◽  
The Public ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
Cherokee Removal ◽  
Past Wrongs

The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites' authority to define the South's past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U.S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.

Family Crises or Home Remedies

Hurtin' Words ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 13-56
Author(s):  
Ted Ownby
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
White People ◽  
Family Problems ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Home Remedies ◽  
Stable Family ◽  
The American South

This chapter compares discussions of family problems among African Americans and whites in the American South in the early 1900s. Both African American and white southerners discussed an ongoing crisis among African Americans, with considerable disagreement about whether they should explain that crisis, fix the problems that caused it, or pass laws to protect white people against the consequences. By contrast, white southerners imagined that most whites had stable family lives, especially when they lived on farms, and perhaps needed occasional reform movements to address specific problems.

To Ensure Domestic Tranquility: The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and Political Discourse, 1964–1971

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN DRABBLE
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Ku Klux Klan ◽  
Action Program ◽  
Federal Bureau ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Covert Action ◽  
Federal Bureau Of Investigation ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The American South

Between September 1964 and April 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a domestic covert action program named COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This counterintelligence program endeavored to discredit, disrupt, and vitiate the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist vigilante organizations. While historians are quite familiar with the FBI's efforts to nurture anticommunism and to discredit civil rights and leftist movements, the FBI's role in discrediting KKK groups in the American South during the late 1960s has not been systematically assessed. This article provides an analysis of the first aspect of this three-pronged attack. It describes how the FBI secretly coordinated efforts to discredit Klan organizations before local Southern communities that continued to tolerate vigilante violence. Intelligence information on Klan activities, provided discretely by the FBI to liberal Southern journalists, politicians and other molders of public opinion, helped those white Southerners who were opposed to Ku Klux Klan activity to transform their private dismay into public rebuke and criminal prosecutions. The article also analyzes corresponding COINTELPRO operations that discredited Ku Klux Klan leaders before rank-and-file Klan members. FBI agents and their clandestine informants circulated discrediting information about KKK leaders among rank and file Klan members, inculcating disillusionment among Klansmen and prompting resignations from Klan organizations.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Locke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Ku Klux Klan ◽  
Frank Norris ◽  
Religious Politics ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The American South

The epilogue looks forward from the triumph of prohibition in Texas and the American South by exploring the rise of fundamentalism, the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the spread of a “Texas theology” across the nation. When white southerners poured out of the region during the remainder of the early twentieth century and settled especially in the Midwest and ever-rising West, they carried the clerical culture with them. Fundamentalist leaders such as J. Frank Norris and Robert Shuler exported the South’s fighting faith, normalized religious politics, championed a new hard-line theology, and laid the early groundwork for the coming rise of the religious right.

scholarly journals White Supremacy, Terrorism, and the Failure of Reconstruction in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-103
Author(s):  
Daniel Byman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American South ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
White Supremacists ◽  
The American South

Abstract Reconstruction failed in the United States because white Southerners who were opposed to it effectively used violence to undermine Black political power and force uncommitted white Southerners to their side. Although structural factors made it harder to suppress this violence, a series of policy failures proved most important. The Radical Republican-led U.S. government did not deploy enough troops or use them aggressively. Nor did it pursue alternative paths that might have made success more likely, such as arming the Black community. The violence caused Reconstruction to fail, and the victorious white supremacists embedded structural racism into the post-Reconstruction political and social system in the South. Reconstruction's failure illustrates the dangers of half measures. The United States sought to reshape the American South at low cost, in terms of both troop levels and time. In addition, the failure indicates the importance of ensuring that democratization includes the rule of law, not just elections. Most important, Reconstruction demonstrates that a common policy recommendation—compromise with the losers after a civil war—is often fraught, with the price of peace being generations of injustice.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

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