Eugene D. Genovese, "Yeomen Farmers in a Slaveholders' Democracy," Agricultural History 49, no. 2, (April 1975).

SYNOPSIS:

Genovese's article focuses on the question of why yeomen farmers maintained allegiance to the slaveholding elite, "a social order that objectively oppressed them in a variety of ways." (332) He argues that it is important to distinguish between yeomen farmers of the upcountry and those of the plantation belt. Upcountry farmers held allegiance to the slave South not because they were "ignorant" but because they rejected an "outside world which threatened to impinge on the culture as well as the material interests of the local community." (336) Plantation belt yeomen accepted their position not because of ignorance or "racial fears," but because "they saw themselves as aspiring slaveholders or as nonslaveholding beneficiaries of a slaveholding world, the only world they knew." (340) Slaveholders maintained this loyalty by placing the slavery question "beyond discussion," creating "mutually desired silence and limited intercourse." (341, 336) The democratic movement in the South during the Jacksonian era assisted in erasing the slavery question from politics, thereby guaranteeing the slaveholders' property base.

EXCERPT:

"Plantation-belt yeomen either aspired to become slaveholders or to live as marginal farmers under the limited protection of their stronger neighbors. And there was nothing irrational or perverse in their attitude. White labor was scarce and unreliable, at least if a farmer needed steady help. Any farmer who wanted to expand his operations and make a better living had to buy slaves as soon as possible." (338)

RELATIONSHIP:

In our county slavery seems to have penetrated all geographic regions--from mountains to valleys. In Augusta County we find that nonslaveholders and slaveholders alike were acting within a matrix of national and local affairs. Far from rejecting the outside world to protect their locality, Augustans found themselves interlocked within larger mechanisms. Their struggle was how to negotiate these complex and intricate connections.

"In the first half of 1860 Republican editors in Franklin's Repository and Transcript attacked slavery as a violation of nature that stole from the workingman the fruits of his labor; they focused mainly on slavery's potential to undermine free labor."

"In the first half of 1860 Democratic editors in Franklin County emphasized slavery's compatibility with the Northern economy and society and Northern complicity in the South's institution."