The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities
Vernon O. Burton, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985)

SYNOPSIS:

Burton's detailed study of Edgefield, South Carolina, examines family, religious, class, and social structures to understand the differences and similarities between blacks and whites in the nineteenth-century community. Burton finds that the main difference was between the "town-dwelling black family and all the rest, black and white." Burton locates family patterns in the context of political power, pointing out that as black Republicans were defeated at the end of Reconstruction, for example, the incidence of female-headed black families increased in the towns. Black men, he discovers, continued their patriarchal authority in the rural areas. Exclusion from nonagricultural employment, then, not legacies of slavery or Africa, according to Burton, kept men from heading households in these urban places.

EXCERPT:

"By examining variations in family culture and structure, both black and white, free and slave, this study attempts to specify which elements in those variations are race specific and which derive from the general social and cultural environment that affected whites and Afro-Americans equally. In My Father's House searches for the origins of the prejudices and stereotypes of southern black and white families and explores what difference family and community made in the course of events in nineteenth-century Edgefield." (13)

"Neighborhoods within the various areas of Edgefield were often centered around church buildings, and the boundaries of these settlements, or communities within the larger community, were areas served by the church." (21)

"In 1860 there was one church building for every 252 white people in Edgefield." (21-22)

"Compared to the Northeast and Midwest, with their emphasis on towns and urban developments, the South was a land of farms and plantations. The county or district, not the town, was the unit of government. But towns did exist, and townlike centers dotted the rural countryside. Towns and villages provided economic and political focus for the countryside." (28)

"Southern elite families began to feel a need for increased privacy. The houses provided privacy through controlled access, and unlike the inhabitants of common houses, husbands and wives on the great plantations had their own bedrooms and apartments." (39)

"Average size and number of farms is deceiving. The number of farms operated by landowners actually decreased and when one excludes farms with no reported acreage, the average farm size increased from 1850 to 1860." (41)

"The census statistics on literacy for Edgefield, however, also suggest that most white Southerners were literate, though a striking correlation existed between illiteracy and poverty on the eve of the Civil War." (89)

RELATIONSHIP:

Burton's finding (48) that rich and poor whites lived in proximity to one another corresponds to Augusta County. Burton's emphasis in his study is on social structures--especially family and kinship--and how they change over time, not on the Civil War, politics, or the relationship between structures and events. Our study concentrates, instead, on the social and economic logic of the communities by which they would align themselves in the flow of events. Edgefield's proportion of slaveowners in 1860 was nearly double that of Augusta, though the distribution of slaves and slaveownership in Augusta was more concentrated in the smaller slaveholders (fewer than 10 slaves). Despite these distinctions, Burton's study of Edgefield's family and social structures corresponds to ours, though there were many important differences. Edgefield was bigger than Augusta in 1860 and had a majority black population. But both places cultivated industries, were organized around small towns and villages with a county seat of roughly the same size, built elaborate road and railroad infrastructures, nourished a growing professional class, harbored steep inequities in wealth distribution, devoted most of their resources to agriculture, and practiced widespread slavery.

Points of Analysis to this Historiography:

"The visible differences that slavery made in the arrangement of the landscape were apparent to many observers, but Northerners and Southerners interpreted them differently. Northerners focused on land value per acre and Southerners on the dollar value of their crops."

"The white literacy rates and educational opportunities in both places were relatively high, but substantially better in Franklin."

"Franklin was slightly more churched than Augusta. Its denominations were more concentrated in the German traditions, but Augusta's churches were larger and more expensive."


Citation: Key = H012
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