The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities
Lloyd Benson, "Planters and Hoosiers: The Development of Sectional Society in Antebellum Indiana and Mississippi," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1990.

SYNOPSIS:

Benson's study describes the Southern state as more localized, atomized, and locally uniform than the Northern state, and he posits a localistic culture in the South compared to an institutional, structural culture in the North. One important difference between the two places was their relative ability to sustain businesses within local communities. Benson points to extensive landholding in the Southern communities and the consequences of consistent out-migration. Slavery, he suggests, determined the difference between these communities in ways more structural than ideological. Benson's study finds that the most competitive counties had the largest number of schools and newspapers, the greatest diversity of churches, the least inequality in agricultural landholding, and the highest population density. (278)

EXCERPT:

"Without slavery the North became differentiated and complex in the ways that the South could not. The North's highly populated countryside could support a tight mesh of factories, canals, and railroads not possible in the South." (22)

"The most crucial economic differences between Indiana and Mississippi were not as much a consequence of ideology as of structural circumstances. Not a lack of entrepreneurial values, but a slavery-induced limitation on the local market size prevented Mississippi from becoming a commercial, urban, and middle class society as did Indiana." (187)

RELATIONSHIP:

Benson's dissertation helped lay the foundations for our own study, demonstrating the benefits of disciplined statistical analysis of sectional societies. Like Benson, we focus on the material contexts in which cultural expression and political action operated.

Points of Analysis to this Historiography:

"Slavery was ubiquitous and systemic in Augusta County's economy and society. No town or place in Augusta was without slavery, no person distant from it. Slavery extended into every corner of the county, concentrating in no one area."

"Newspapers in Franklin championed agricultural production as the means to future wealth and prosperity."


Citation: Key = H002
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