Southern Social Structure

In the 19th century the same flag that had flown over the snowy banks of New England’s rocky cost waved over the South’s fields of cotton and seas of pine. Hills, swamps, and plains had yet to be littered with the lifeless bodies of soldiers; and sectional division had yet to tarnish the bucolic landscape of the American countryside. At this time in America, however, liberty had not yet graced the millions held in bondage by physical chains. Years before the the sectional divide violently disjointed the United States, disunion slowly crept in and corrupted the minds of law makers and average citizens alike. Decades of infighting and mutual distrust led the Southern United States to chart a different course than that of a “tyrannical” North.

Wealthy planters and elites who owned slaves were at the top the social hierarchy. Under the elites there were many poor white Southerners who owned no slaves nor had means to purchase them. In such a castigated and system of power, the slaves that occupied the lowest rung of the system provided a base to neutralize the animosity held by poor whites against the elites. Although they lacked the status their wealthy counterparts maintained, they could take solace in the idea that their standing remained above that of a slave. This social structure helped mitigate class conflicts within the South. As evidenced by Thomas Dew and his publication Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature in 1831 and 1832, slavery was the “cause of equality among southern whites” (83). A former slave, Charles Ball, echoes this sentiment. “No one who had lived in the South can fully understand the bonds that hold society together” (99). He goes on to say that there are “rules,” for these social partitions that, “prescribe the boundaries” in the “orders of men” (99). There are the “gentlemen,” or those who were able to “procure a subsistence without labor,” and the non-slave holders who were “intoxicated,” with the idea of rising societal ranks into the elite class of southern planters (99). Slavery was, therefore, the crux at which the social system maintained itself. Because of slavery, the poorer classes of whites felt a unity with the wealth planter class. Beyond a yearning of southern non-slave holders to retire their labored hands for the status of a gentleman, a deep rooted terror lay in the idea of the black race securing their freedom. In an image from a Kentucky newspaper, in a reaction to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a confident black man is portrayed perched on a small hill. In this depiction, the black man is seen conquering the very land on which