HIS 236 The Old South: Planters, Yeoman, and the Enslaved
This course will be a sophomore-level general education course that provides a survey of the history of the southern colonies/states up through the Civil War. Crucial to understanding this region and its development is the race-based chattel slavery and the plantations that they supported. A major component of recent scholarship regarding American slavery has been examining its relationship with capitalism, both as it took root in the north in the form of increased industrialization and in the extractive form of staple crop agriculture that helped the southern states produce the largest accumulation of wealth in the nation by middle of the nineteenth century. Contained within the system of slave labor was a significant contradiction, wherein the very liberty so cherished by the extravagantly wealth planter as well as the lowly yeoman farmers was predicated on the enslavement of a quarter of the total population. This contradiction would be laid bare by internal class divisions that became magnified by war, the constant threat of slave uprisings, and the competition with the free labor system of the northern states.