From the Back Cover
This pioneering study of the much-mythologized southern belle offers the first serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, Clinton sets before us in vivid detail the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master.
About the Author
CATHERINE CLINTON was born in Seattle and grew up in Kansas City. She is the Denman Professor of American History at the University of Texas San Antonio and is an International Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. She has served on several faculties in her more than thirty years of teaching, including the University of Benghazi, Harvard University, and the Citadel (the Military College of South Carolina). She is the author and editor of over two dozen volumes, including The Plantation Mistress, Harriet Tubman:The Road to Freedom, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, and edits her own series for Oxford University Press: Viewpoints on American Culture. She has served as a consultant on several film projects, including Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012). An elected member of the Society of American Historians, she remains a lifetime member of both the Lincoln Forum and the Southern Association for Women Historians. She is serving as the president of the Southern Historical Association (2015-2016).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter I
Women in the Land of Cotton
In 1620 ninety maids landed in Virginia, a gift from the proprietors to the colony. They were intended as brides for members of the planter class; only freemen could wed these available women upon payment of 120 pounds of leaf tobacco to defray transportation costs. Colonial authorities encouraged marriage by granting a freeholder an increased lot of land if he had a wife. English gentleman who supported these tactics argued that “the plantation can never flourish till families be planted and the respect of wives and children fix the people on the soil.” They ploy was successful. Virginia shortly received two other shipments of fifty women each from the colony’s sponsors. Thirty-eight more potential brides were supplied by private entrepreneurs, who raised the price per wide to 150 pounds of tobacco. By 1622 all these maids had married.
Women were an economic commodity. Much like slaves, these early women settlers were plucked from the Old World and deposited in the New. Shipped across the ocean like stock, they were sold off into marriage with little regard for their human status and dignity. This high “value” but chattel treatment put women in a complex position within plantation society. Under Colonial law, females found their political and economic situation somewhat better than it had been in England, but substantially worse than that of male colonists. And as in the Old World, women were locked into their dependent status. The Maryland assembly, for example, passed a “seven year” provision for women: females were required to marry or remarry within seven years of landholding. Daughters were subject to their fathers’ will, and a married female was by law wholly under her husband’s control. Despite this inferior status, females in early American were highly valued by the male authorities. Much like another disadvantaged group, African slaves, women immeasurably boosted prospects of success for these southern colonies. As the Virginia House of Burgesses had declared in 1619, “in a newer plantation it is not knowen whether man or woman be the most necessary.”
After the Revolution, tobacco was no longer a boom crop for southern planters. Erosion and soil exhaustion combined to disfigure the tidewater countryside, and with arable land in disrepair, Virginia estates were overstocked with slaves. Land depletion was not, however, as great a problem along the Carolina-Georgia coast, where planters still prospered.
Some historians have argued that slavery was a dying institution during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, kept alive only by the development of the cotton gin in the century’s last decade. But the slave population was dramatically increased during the 1780s and 1790s by slave imports. Despite any temporary short-term setbacks (panics and drops in cotton prices), slaveholders retained confidence in the cotton plantation system. Although their buoyancy might have been as misplaced as Scarlett O’Hara’s—in the scene from Gone With the Wind when, at war’s end, she remarks that “cotton with go sky high”—planters were optimistic and greedy for hard cash. They believed that cotton was a profitable crop and slave labor the most economical means to cultivate it. To expand both their “Cotton Kingdom” and the productivity of cotton plantations, planters pushed southwestwards. This geographical expansion, the increase in slave holdings, and the demand for cotton combined to accelerate settlement of the New South regions: western Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, northern Florida and Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.
From the Colonial era onward, southern settlement patterns had diverged from those of the North, and in the ante-bellum era these differentials increased. While the political center in New England remained the town, plantation society revolved around the country unit. Urbanization and industrialization, which made suck inroads into northern society, had little impact upon the plantation South. European immigrants avoided the region; the planters discouraged any influx of foreigners, from a xenophobic impulse to preserve their own homogeneity; and the recent arrivals shunned competition with slave labor. The economic differential between the two regions increased in these decades with the growth of manufacturing in New England and the boom in cotton in the Gulf states. Planter arrogance centered on the agricultural pre-eminence of the South; in 1858 South Carolina State Senator James Hammond boasted: “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years. . . . England would topple headlong and carry the civilized world with her save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war on it. Cotton is King.”
Political economy was not the only area in which North and South diverged. The cultures that had sprung from these two regions differed radically. Both Yankee and planter accepted these incompatibilities, each arguing for his own superiority. Thomas Jefferson articulated this line of thought in his catalogue of differences between Notherners—“cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion”—and Southerners—“fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous of their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous candid and without attachments or pretensions of any religion but that of the heart.” By the outbreak of the Civil War, Dixie ideologues had refined their racist doctrine, identifying Yankees as well as blacks as inferior. In 1861, the Southern Literary Messenger published an article the title of which proclaimed “The True Question: A Contest for the Supremacy of Race, as Between the Saxon Puritan of the North and the Norman of the South.”
In the great mass of evidence demonstrating the split between the ante-bellum North and South, one significant aspect has been repeatedly overlooked by historical scholarship: the role of women. Although the southern lady remains a staple of plantation legend, indeed an icon of the Old South, her symbolic impact seems to have overshadowed and indeed substituted for any assessment of her substantial contributions, much in the way the roles of blacks were ignored until recent scholarship.
That slavery provided for the exalted position of whites within society is a truism of southern history. What remains to be explored is how this system contributed to a parallel oppression of women, both black and white—for slavery and the plantation system imposed handicaps on the women of the owner classes. The challenge in evaluating this oppression is to assess the impact of slavery on the pre-existing patriarchal structure, not in the least unique to southern society.
The term “family” comes from the Latin word meaning all those included in a household—slaves, women, and children—who were subject to the master’s supreme will. Each huge southern household conferred proportionate authority on the “father” of the vast plantation family. These dependents, moreover, formed a solid base of power that extended into the apparatus of the state. The more dependents, the more power, and the more power, and the more power the larger the share of influence within the state apparatus. Thus slavery, while it did not alone create women’s oppression, did accentuate sex roles and perpetuated women’s subordinate status.
A free woman’s status within slave society was an extension of her family role; indeed, her status emphasized her dependency and inferiority. Without the oppression of all women, the planter class could not be assured of absolute authority. In a biracial slave society where “racial purity” was a defining characteristic of the master class, total control of the reproductive females was of paramount concern for elite males. Patriarchy was the bedrock upon which the slave society was founded, and slavery exaggerated the pattern of subjugation that patriarchy had established.
Women’s lives were also affected by plantation agriculture itself. Although northern society was slowly transformed by modernization (industrialization, urbanization, the growth of a market economy, and consumerism), southern society remained rural, provincial, and dependent upon staple-crop production. The household, not the marketplace, was the central focus of the southern economy.
When families on farms were the basic economic unit of society, the female portion of the population participated equally in domestic labor. Women, however, did not share equal credit for their work. Within agricultural production, chores were sex-differentiated. Women might do men’s work when the male was absent, and conversely, men might fill in for women, but farm labor was ordinarily divided along gender lines. Despite this partnership, only make work was highly rewarded with economic compensation, political recognition, and social esteem.
Relatively little is actually known of women’s work in the ante-bellum South. This leads to a fundamentally distorted view of the operations of the plantation economy. Slaves supplied the field labor, but wives generally provided the domestic labor for southern household management. Women administered food production, purchase, and distribution not only in the planter’s home but for the whole plantation. While their husbands supervised the raising of the cash crops, women managed the dairy, the garden, and the smokehouse. Although the overseer might have given some assistance in the barnyard, the critical food-production spheres were clearly those of “women’s work.” The plantation mistress held the keys as the symbol of her domain.
