In
the Old South, the plantation was the institution of greatest importance. The pattern of life there set the tone for the
rest of Southern society. Indeed, to
become a gentleman-planter was the goal to which many in the South aspired
(even among the clergy).
For
instance, writing of antebellum Mississippi
(which one may take as a microcosm of Southern life in general from this
period), Charles Sydnor wrote (Slavery in
Mississippi, Columbia,
S. Car.: U of SC Press, 2013):
As a cotton plantation seems to have been the aim
of most residents of the State, medicine and other professions were frequently
stepping-stones to this end. Ingraham
observed that “medico-planters are now numerous, far out numbering the regular
practitioners . . .” (p. 52)
And
again,
A number of planters were retired clergymen; for
some of these, as well as many physicians and lawyers, deserted their profession
and became planters (p. 57).
So
it is not surprising to see that plantation life was flourishing in the 19th
hundredyear:
According to the census of 1860 there were 3,552
plantations in Mississippi
of thirty or more slaves . . . (p. 67).
But
what was this life that one found there?
It was a self-sufficient, hierarchical society, focused on the
production of two kinds of goods, one kind material and one kind non-material: the material being agricultural products and kindred handcrafts of
various sorts and the non-material being an outward code of virtuous behavior.
Of
the organization of plantation life, there is this witness in Prof Richard
Weaver’s The Southern Tradition at Bay
(eds. Bradford and Core, Washington,
D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989, p.
35):
General John Mason, son of George Mason of Gunston
Hall, has testified regarding that division of labor which made each plantation
a relatively self-sufficient community:
“It was much the practice with gentlemen of slave and landed estates . .
. so to organize them as to have
considerable resources within themselves; and to employ and pay but few
tradesmen, and to buy little or none of the coarse stuffs used by them . .
. thus my father had among his slaves
carpenters, coopers, sawyers, blacksmiths, tanners, curriers, shoemakers,
spinners, weavers, and knitters, and even a distiller.”
At
the head of this stable social order in which ‘everyone had his place’ and in
which ‘even the humble could have the deep human satisfaction that comes of
being cherished for what one is’ (p. 36) was the gentleman, who, together with
his wife, the lady, embodied, for all the rest of Dixie to imitate, a set of
virtues that were very much directed towards the world outside themselves. Robert Calhoon wrote of the typical education
of men and women in the South,
The education of women in this model, then, began
with spiritual guidance and culminated in strategies for virtuous, pious
behavior while the moral training of males started with direct observation of
social reality and moved from that point toward a mature understanding of the
functioning of the culture (Evangelicals
and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740-1861, Columbia, S. Car.: U of SC
Press, 1988, p. 149).
In
the constellation of virtues that arose from this mindset, honor held a very
high rank.
No problem so vexed southern evangelical clergy,
therefore, as how to deal with pride in a proud culture. One solution was to envelope it in a larger
value system: the defense of honor.
Evangelicals believed that pride could be managed and even tamed through
an appeal to honor—the human passion superceding sensual gratification and ego
fulfillment. . . . Honor, as well as pride, meant respecting and
responding to one’s most elevated feelings, fulfilling deeply felt obligations,
and preserving the innocence of emotional bonds to superiors—especially to God
(pgs. 144-5).
Such
was Dixie’s life before the corruption that
set in after the War (and which still remains very much a part of her, however
much it has waned). How it may be brought
to a higher level of being through the leaven of the Orthodox Faith we hope to
write of next.
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