southern evangelical culture, and to have a limited curriculum and a short school year. In 1860, northern children attended school for an average of more than 50
days a year; white children in the South attended school for an average of 10 days annually.
By 1860, every slave state except Florida and the Carolinas had built prisons
modeled on the Auburn system. Southern prisons, however, stressed punishment
and profits over rehabilitation. Some southern Whigs favored northern-style
reforms, but they knew that voters would reject them. Popular votes in Alabama
in 1834 and in North Carolina in 1846 brought in resounding defeats for propo-
sals to build or reform penitentiaries in those states. While northern evangelicals preached that criminals could be reformed, southern preachers demanded Old
Testament vengeance, arguing that hanging, whipping, and branding were inex-
pensive, more effective than mere incarceration, and sanctioned by the Bible.
Other southerners, defending the code of honor, charged that victims and their
relatives would be denied vengeance if criminals were hidden away in prisons.
Some southern prisons leased convict labor (and sometimes whole prisons) to
private entrepreneurs, and the dream of reforming criminals was never taken
seriously in the South.
The South did participate in temperance. By the 1820s, Baptists and Methodists
had made deep inroads into southern society. Southern ministers preached against
alcohol, while churchgoing women discouraged their husbands, sons, and suitors
from drinking. (An Alabama man complained that “the women our way seem de-
termined to deprive us of all of our privileges; if I offer to take a drink of whiskey as I used to do, my wife tells me of the Temperation Society, and says its mean, and low, and sinful.”) Many southern men either stopped or reduced their drinking, and the South contributed its share to the national drop in alcohol consumption. During the 1840s, the Washington Temperance Society and other voluntary temperance
groups won a solid footing in southern cities and county-seat towns, with leaders who included Whigs and Democrats alike. But legal prohibition, which became
dominant in the North, got nowhere in the South. In the 1850s, while 17 northern
legislatures passed statewide prohibition, the only slave state to follow was tiny, northern-oriented Delaware.
At bottom, southern resistance to social reform stemmed from a conservative,
Bible-based acceptance of suffering and human imperfection and a commitment to
the power and independence of white men who headed families—“families” that
included their slaves as well as their wives and children. Any proposal that sounded like social tinkering or the invasion of paternal rights was doomed to failure. To make matters worse, many reforms—public schools, Sunday schools, reform-oriented prisons, prohibition, humane asylums—were seen as the work of well-
funded missionaries from the Northeast who wanted to shape society in their own
image. The Virginian John Randolph spoke for many southerners when he warned
against the Yankees’ “meddling, obtrusive, intrusive, restless, self-dissatisfied spirit,” exhibited in “Sunday schools, Missionary Societies, subscriptions to Colonization Societies—taking care of the Sandwich Islanders, free negroes, and God
knows who.” The southern distrust of reform was powerfully reinforced after
1830, when northern reformers began to call for the abolition of slavery and equality of the sexes—reforms that most white southerners found unthinkable.
forum 1 week 2 mat The
e Politics
rial of Slavery and Race 429
THE POLITICS OF SLAVERY AND RACE
Most whites in antebellum America believed in “natural” differences based on sex
and race. God, they said, had given women and men and whites and blacks differ-
ent mental, emotional, and physical capacities. Because humankind (female and
nonwhite more than others) was innately sinful and prone to disorder, God or-
dained a fixed social hierarchy in which white men exercised power over others.
Slaves and free blacks accepted their subordinate status only as a fact of life, not as something that was natural and just. Some women also opposed patriarchy,
but before 1830, hierarchy based on sex and race was seldom questioned in pub-
lic, particularly by persons who were in a position to change it.
In the antebellum years, as southerners and most northerners stiffened their de-
fense of white supremacy (see Chapter 10), a radical minority of Whig evangelicals began to envision a world based on Christian love and individual worth and accomplishment, not “natural” differences. They also questioned the more virulent
forms of racism. While conservative Christians insisted that relations based on
dominance and submission were the lot of a sinful humankind, reformers argued
that such relations interposed human power, too often in the form of brute force, between God and the individual spirit. They called for a world that substituted spiritual freedom and Christian love for every form of worldly domination. The result was a community of uncompromising radical reformers who attacked slavery as
America’s great national sin. In doing so, they assaulted the white republic and the core compromise of the American political system.
Democratic
Whigs and Democrats both wanted to keep slavery and race
Racism
out of politics, and neither encouraged the aspirations of
slaves or free blacks. But it was the Democrats who incor-
porated racism into their political agenda. Minstrel shows, for example, often reflected the Democratic line on current events, and Democratic cartoonists featured minstrelsy’s bug-eyed, woolly-haired caricatures of blacks. By the time of the Civil War, Democrats mobilized voters almost solely with threats of “amalgamation”
and “Negro rule.” Meanwhile, educated Democrats learned to think in racist
terms. Among most scientists, biological determinism replaced historical and environmental explanations of racial differences; many argued that whites and blacks
were separate species. Democrats welcomed that “discovery.” John Van Evrie, a
New York doctor and Democratic pamphleteer, declared that “it is a palpable and
unavoidable fact that Negroes are a different species,” and that the story of Adam and Eve referred only to the origin of white people. In 1850 the Democratic
Review confided, “Few or none now seriously adhere to the theory of the unity of
the races. The whole state of the science at this moment seems to indicate that there are several distinct races of men on the earth, with entirely different capacities, physical and mental.”
As whites came to perceive racial differences as God-given and immutable,
they changed the nature of those differences as well. In the 18th and early 19th
centuries, whites had stereotyped blacks as ignorant and prone to drunkenness
and thievery, but they had also maintained a parallel stereotype of blacks as loyal and self-sacrificing servants. From the 1820s onward, racists continued to regard 430