Wealth and Culture in the South

Although a small White elite owned the vast majority of enslaved people in the South, and most other White people could only aspire to slaveholders’ wealth and status, slavery shaped the social life of all White southerners in profound ways. Southern culture valued a behavioral code in which men’s honor, based on the domination of others and the protection of southern White womanhood, stood as the highest good. Slavery also decreased class tensions, binding White people together on the basis of race despite their inequalities of wealth. Several defenses of slavery were prevalent in the antebellum era, including Calhoun’s argument that the South’s “concurrent majority” could overrule federal legislation deemed hostile to southern interests; the notion that slaveholders’ care of their chattel made the enslaved better off than wage workers in the North; and the profoundly racist ideas underlying polygenism.            All images referenced in this podcast can be found at https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/12-3-wealth-and-culture-in-the-south            Welcome to A Journey into Human History.    This podcast will attempt to tell the whole human story.       The content contained in this podcast was produced by OpenStax and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.     Access for free at https://openstax.org/details/books/us-history Podcast produced by Miranda Casturo as a Creative Common Sense production.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/a-journey-into-human-history--5860966/support.