The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities

View : The Debates | Modernity in the United States Context | Geography and Difference | Politics and Slavery | The Case Studies: Augusta and Franklin | Comparing Economies | Comparing Social Structures | Politics and the Election of 1860 | Conclusion

Two sets of observations emerge from this article, one about its subject matter and another about its form. Both sets point to the necessity of integrating things often kept apart. We hope to have shown that slavery and modernity need to be seen as parts of the same process in the United States, just as they had been for the preceding three centuries throughout the Atlantic world. Rather than a fight of modernity against slavery, the American Civil War could be seen as a fight between variants of modernity, not as the inevitable clash of the future against past. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have shown all too clearly that forms of modern life can be adapted to forced labor and racial domination. The American South pioneered in this fusion.

Augusta County and Virginia were far from being the only places where slavery and modernity combined. To see the machinery of the modern age working most directly in the service of slavery, one might look much farther south to the sugar plantations of Louisiana, the rice plantations of the Sea Islands, or the cotton plantations along the Mississippi River. There, advanced forms of transportation, communication, and commercial rationalization worked in conjunction with people enslaved for perpetuity to create the most profitable economic engines and the most dominating class in the United States. Augusta's mixed agriculture of corn and wheat would have seemed old-fashioned indeed to those who used steam-driven engines for sophisticated processing machinery and steamboats capable of great speeds on both rivers and seas. Staunton's weekly newspapers, lyceums, and intermittent railroad traffic would have seemed sadly deficient compared with the daily newspapers of New Orleans, the rich cultural life of Charleston, or the industrial clamor of Richmond. Slavery and modernity coalesced in many ways.

This article has tried to show, too, that the history of regional identity and conflict cannot be told only from one side of the border. Too often, broad generalizations about the North and the South have been made from the grossest measurements. When historians talk about the South, it is easy to imagine the North as a perfect counterpoint, thoroughly industrialized, urbanized, and full of autonomous people on the move. When we talk about the North, it is easy to imagine the South as rural and fixed, a place virtually without history. When we have bothered to compare the two directly, we have often used the most extreme places-Boston versus Charleston, say, or Massachusetts versus South Carolina-to confirm the dualistic notions we held before we began.

This article has tried to demonstrate that integration might be useful in its form as well as its content. We have tried to recover aspects of social science history-explicitly framing and testing questions with quantitative and spatial evidence-that have fallen into disfavor over the last few decades. We have also experimented with a combination of social science history and political history that is not as common as it might be. Too often, social historians and political historians talk past one another. Combining the two can strengthen both.

By encouraging us to recast our arguments into new forms, digital history may lead us to revisit some old questions in new ways, as we have done in this article. As historians grow more fluent in its use, the digital environment may offer bold new ways of understanding the vast record of the human past.


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