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On the causes and consequences of secession in Georgia, October 15, 2001
This review is from: From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies) (Paperback)
In this volume, Joseph Reidy traces the development of Central Georgia from the period of its earliest settlement following the Revolutionary War through Reconstruction, focusing on economic, political, and social changes. Prior to 1830, most Georgians were yeoman farmers seeking self-sufficiency, owning only a few slaves with whom they lived and worked in a familiar manner. During the cotton boom of the 1830s, large planters moved into the area, establishing the plantation system, large numbers of slaves, and the ganging method of production. The depression of the 1840s allowed the planters to make gains at the expense of yeomen, as they bought up land and slaves at low prices from debt-burdened farmers. The process of planter consolidation and domination continued into the 1850s when cotton prices rose. Reidy argues that to respond to increased demand, rather than practicing scientific agriculture to increase output, planters in central Georgia simply increased the workload of their slaves, hiring additional overseers from the newly dispossessed white lower class. The increased tensions between planters, struggling yeomen, overburdened slaves, and the new landless poor whites played out in the Secession crisis and period of Reconstruction.
Despite their claims that a slave republic was the only form of government capable of producing harmonious social relations, planters were aware that the growing poverty in the region undermined this argument and threatened to turn the yeomanry and poor whites against them. Evidence of this division could be seen in the growth of party politics, with planters, town dwellers, and immigrants preferring the Democratic Party, and yeomen and poor whites turning to the Know-Nothings. Planters hoped to alleviate social tensions by funding poor relief, public education, and internal improvements that would bring new jobs, but the yeomanry, while approving in theory of public works, rejected them out of opposition to the higher taxes such projects would entail. Once the Civil War broke out, planter actions only furthered the destruction of the social and economic relations they had hoped to save, as planters refused to devote all resources to winning the war at the expense of current profits. They continued to plant cotton when grain was needed to supply troops and would not contract out their slaves to war materiel producers at low prices, resulting in rising prices for yeomen families who could not maintain self-sufficiency with their household heads away fighting the war and decreasing purchasing power for white laborers. Planters were unable to feed or protect their slaves from Union troops, destroying slaves' faith in paternalism and forcing them to take care of themselves, which prepared them for independence following emancipation.
Following the war, planters hoped to exercise the same control over free blacks as they had over slaves, but with the help of the Freedman's Bureau and Radical Republicans, free blacks negotiated for more control over working conditions, their families, religious institutions, and rights as citizens. While facing legal discrimination at every turn, they were in many cases able to negotiate contracts as sharecroppers, educate their children, exercise their right to vote (though not to hold office), and establish their own churches and political movements. Yeomen also benefited somewhat in that they now had unprecedented ability to hire black laborers, but were harmed by new laws limiting hunting and fishing on unenclosed lands, which diminished their ability to subsist as much as it did that of freedmen. Both black and white non-planters increasingly turned to wage labor, marking central Georgia's transition to a capitalist economic system. Planters lost a good deal of their political and economic dominance, but maintained as much of their social power as they could under the newly bourgeois order.
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