(Cont. from Part 4) While only 1/3 of white Southerners may have owned slaves, and only a tiny minority were among the wealthy plantation owners who dominated Southern society, there was widespread support of slavery among free whites - though not universal. But, beginning in the early 1830s with the formation of abolitionist societies, Southern states began active repression of any discussion of abolishing slavery in the South.
Some of the leading white abolitionists, like James Birney and the Grimké sisters, were Southerners themselves, familiar with the South's "peculiar institution" from close acquaintance. But active abolitionists were effectively driven out of the South, and free speech among whites was effectively banned on the subject of slavery for the thirty years preceding secession. This not only prevented many whites from hearing abolitionist arguments. In the South, this led to a spirit of fanaticism and a political and intellectual isolation that made it easier for the pro-secession Fire Eaters to demonize abolitionists and Republicans.
In his 1939 Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States, historian Dwight Lowell Dumond gave an excellent description of the factors that led many non-slaveowning Southern whites to support the institution of slavery. Noting also that fewer than one third of Southerners had any "direct connection with slavery" (as mentioned in the opening quotation in Part 1 of this series of posts), free white Southerners nevertheless on the whole supported the institution, a compliance which the lords of the lash achieved achived among their fellow whites "partially by a paralysis of public morality, partially by tolerance on the part of the non-slaveholder, and partially by repression."
(Cont. in Part 6)
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