Slavery and Plantation Hegemony

¶ … Declining Significance of Race by William Julius Wilson: Questions

What is the major theme of the reading?

Southern society was profoundly unequal not just in terms of race but also because of the sharp divisions of its social classes: Southern plantation owners made up a tiny minority of the population yet owned the majority of slaves. While slavery has existed since the beginning of time, Southern slavery took on a unique character. Laws classified slave and slave-owners by race. The economic, political, and legal apparatus of the South was orchestrated to ensure that slaveholders retained their dominant status. Property requirements barred poor whites as well as blacks from voting. The lack of economic mobility created a vicious cycle which affirmed plantation owners' dominance: because the economy was slave and land-based, there were few opportunities for others to find ways of making a living and to generate power for themselves. The rise of the cotton industry's profitability and the end of the slave trade further increased the need to solidify the existence of a permanent slave class.

Q2. What evidence is marshaled in support of this theme?

The theme of the 'total' nature of Southern economics and Southern elite power is underlined by the fact that Southern political dominance was codified within the U.S. Constitution in the form of the 3/5ths compromise, whereby a slave was worth 3/5ths of a freedman in tabulating state populations. This gave Southern states greater influence in Congress than they might otherwise have possessed, had state populations been tallied according to population alone. The dominance of the South in getting its way during the antebellum period is testimony to the power of this small group of Southern landholders. The willingness to accommodate the South in Congress was manifested in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The domination of Southern interests is was even felt in the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, effectively declaring slaves property even when slaves crossed into 'free' states.

The calculated, political nature of Southern slavery is stressed in the readings by tracing its historical development from the 18th century onward, whereby the decline of white indentured servants and their costs caused Southerners to see slaves as a better economic investment. Changes in the law that coincided with this development support Wilson's thesis. Other laws were passed which upheld this cruel economic calculus: slave owners could not be punished for killing a slave when disciplining him or her, given the widespread acknowledgement that this was necessary to force slaves to labor.

Eventually, this law changed in the 19th century, reflecting more cultural anxiety about the status of slaves. But if conditions for slaves improved legally and materially on plantations this was mainly due to slaves' increased economic value for owners, not out of compassion. And "the enforced personal feeling of inferiority" was of course devastating for slaves (Wilson 32). Slave religion and slave kinship structures did provide slaves with some psychological sustenance, as well as ideological arenas of resistance. However, the relationship of slaves and masters remained a paternalistic one in the Deep South, despite the likely feelings of slaves: masters even protected slaves against the anger of poor whites who took out their rage against the unequal system of the South on blacks rather than against the wealthy whites who benefited from it.

In the upper, more urbanized South blacks had more mobility, could often find their own employment, and were less closely supervised given the different economic structure of the urbanized economy and therefore urbanized slavery. Segregation was also less rigidly enforced and blacks and whites of all classes had more contact, thanks to the different economic structure of the area.