The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1359: The Road to Civil War Pt. 7 - Ideological Divides - w/ George Bagby

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

93 MinutesSafe for WorkGeorge Bagby is a content creator and publisher of long-forgotten books. George joins Pete to continue a series detailing the long lead up to America's Civil War.George's Twitter AccountGeorge's Pinned Tweet w/ Links George's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekiniano show. George Bagby is back and we are going to continue our look at the road to America's Civil War. How are you doing tonight, Mr. Bagby? I'm doing great. I had a long conversation with a CIA agent. Coincidentally, tonight, a CIA agent who had never heard of Iran Contra. You can believe it.

That really just goes to show how, just how inept the government is at this point. I get that impression very often, and that that's maybe the most compelling argument against the very elaborate conspiracy ideas we have about what the government does, that there are people don't know the first thing about it. So you either have to have confidence there's a higher level of control or that they just simply couldn't pull it off. And that's a curious split. I'm more inclined with the former. I think that there must be a higher level of control. I think there's just too much evidence that they've had their hands in all sorts of of things. But at the end of my conversation, the CIA agent offered to recruit me.

And I was very sweet about it. And she was very nice person. And we had had a nice dinner and so on. And I said, I'm sorry, but I'm not that kind of patriot. She said, but they want your kind of patriot. I said, I'm sure you do, but that's not for me. It is really so refreshing. I couldn't possibly give up going into American history and talking about things where things really made so much more sense. And that's my forte. That's what I've dedicated myself to.

And with that in mind, tonight we're going to zoom out a bit. we're going to talk about the growth of sectionalism between the north and the south. So we're departing from our narrative, though I hope to go back into the narrative at the end of tonight's show and talk about the Missouri compromise. But we need to talk about the division between the north and the south. And this is something long cultivated in our history. It dates back to colonial times. And this is something well covered in our circles. The different groups of English settlers, mostly English, some Scottish and such,

who came to colonial North America. and what their divisions were. So we'll start out with cultural divisions, particularly religious divisions. Many of this or much of this has been gone over elsewhere, and yet it deserves touching on just for the sake of completing our survey. So the northern colonies, Pennsylvania and the New England colonies were particularly radical Protestants.

And there is a certain nobility to this. And I think that we both have an appreciation for the legacy of Oliver Cromwell and him, you know, clearing out the correct. erupt elites in England and so on. But we should go in a bit to the distinctive characteristics of the two major sects in the north. So in Pennsylvania, we have the Quakers. And our associate, Mr. Dutton, our English friend, has recently published a book. about the Quakers. I wonder if he was inspired by Curtis Yarvon's assertion that Quakerism is the unofficial religion of the West today. Something Yarvin wrote about way back in unqualified reservations

days when he was first starting his literary career. A really compelling assertion, that I think is quite convincing. Many of the things that the Quakers believe are just normal kinds of assertions that people make about religious matters these days. The Quakers believed in the doctrine of the inner light. They believed that every individual had a direct connection to God. They disavowed religious leadership. They disavowed religious authority. they disavowed traditional Christian doctrine.

They are not Trinitarian, for instance. They discount miracles. They disavow the corruption of sin in human nature, tending to attribute evil to experience. experience. So they, for instance, they thought that their children were spiritual purity and would even, they were famous for putting women in the pulpit to preach on street corners and in the religious services. They were some of the first to do such things, kind of early feminists in that sense, believing in in ideals of equality and so on, famously dissenters about slavery to the point where they would boycott goods that were related to slavery, but even calling on children to lead prayer and even hold forth in their religious services and such. So they're radically egalitarian, even at this very early stage of American history, very individualist in that they believed that God would enlighten individual believers and give them special insights into divine revelation and so on.

because of this, it was very difficult to pin them down on any dogmatic religious assertions. They believed in a radical kind of simplicity. They had sumptuary laws and such, laws prohibiting outward displays of wealth, though they were very prosperous. they had a slogan, they talked about things being needless, like the adornment of houses, the adornment of clothing, connected with their sumptuary laws and such. They had a doctrine of universal human brotherhood. and also pacifism, radical pacifism. Famously, they disavowed violence of all sorts.

They didn't believe that it was even legitimate to punish criminals with violence or excessive intervention. They were great proponents of the penitentiary as a reform for criminal justice, which of course now we all kind of take for granted more or less that that's what you do with felons. You lock them in a room and tell them, now you just think about what you've done. Their religious worship is also very peculiar. They disavows symbols and ritual virtually of all sorts. they were called Quakers because initially they were known for very expressive religious worship that they would shiver and shake in religious worship.

So they had a kind of charismatic approach by our standards. But then they became quietist later on. And so the Quaker meeting, this is a curious church construction where they put the women on one side and the men on the other, and there was no pulpit, there was no altar, because there was no order of service, there was no ritual that they came together to do, and anyone in the meeting that felt compelled could get up and speak. So they had no set leadership, they had no clergy, they had no ordination. So they are quite radical. by Christian standards, and that they're disavowing basically everything that Christians have ever done in public worship and also in dogmatic teaching.

More or less, they're disavowing these things. And they think that every individual has his own way to God, which should sound familiar to us. That's more or less the common perception of what religion amounts to in the West today. So they are one species of radical. Famously, they didn't get along with any other Christian sectarians in America at the time. The Puritans are the other force, and they are much more formidable for many reasons. They're very intellectual. They are Calvinist by tradition.

They're Trinitarian. They practice common Christian ordinances, though they wouldn't call them sacraments. They are iconoclastic to a remarkable degree. They don't recognize the church calendar. They don't celebrate religious holidays. Notably, they like the Old Testament primarily. So some have related them to the Judaizers of our own day, that they were very interested in the stories of the Old Testament, the covenant with the Hebrews in the Old Testament and so on. They like to give their children lots of Old Testament names, but also they would pick phrases out of the Bible and name their children according to phrases.

So they would name their children things like forsake fornication. And they would name their children things like kill sin. And if God had, or if Christ had not died for thy sins, that what's been damned, that was a given name in a Puritan family. they're related to the pilgrims the famous Plymouth Brethren they eventually combine of course the pilgrims who came on the Mayflower they do predate the Puritans in Massachusetts but they are a much less important group but just as an example William Brewster of

Plymouth in Massachusetts he named his son's love and wrestling. These are not at all normal given names for Englishmen. And it was a sign of their radical separation from their heritage, from their religious heritage. They were of the opinion that the Church of England was irreparably corrupted through its association with the Catholic Church. So they were very radical reformers and they highly emphasized the literary interpretation of Scripture. They were very intellectual in their focus. They were very famous for extremely long sermons in their churches, very intellectual orientation,

less emphasis on the sacramental nature of communal worship. They disavowed music, for instance. They ditched Gregorian notation, which is the origin of our musical scales, because that was too Catholic. And instead, they relied on what they called rote singing. So they did sing in their churches, but not according to musical scales. Instead, they encouraged everyone to sing to their own liking, which resulted in this cacophonous worship service that outsiders found quite remarkable and striking

and kind of appalling as well. But they set up our earliest institutions of higher learning to train the clergy. They train them in literary criticism of the Bible. They required everyone that went into Harvard or Yale to read Greek and Latin as their admission exam. And the focus of those schools was to train the clergymen for what became the congregational church. And so their intellectual tradition is one of their great contributions to American culture. They emphasized total depravity, very unlike the Quakers.

They believed that man's reason was utterly depraved, and that we needed divine intervention in order to see what was true. This corresponds to their Calvinism, of course. They found the New England colonies, all of them have connections to this diaspora. And they call New England a shining city on a hill that will be an example to the whole world. That they're going to build culture correctly. They're going to do it differently. They're setting themselves apart from England.

And they want to distinguish themselves from the culture of the old country and the religion of the old country, the Church of England. though Protestant, not nearly Protestant enough to their taste. So they're defined by cultural innovation, by a uncomfortable recognition of what they see to be the burdens of their ancestral inheritance. They're recognizing problems there and trying to distinguish themselves from it. Now as this progresses into the early republic, the congregational church falls into decay. They were formerly very strict Calvinists and Orthodox Christians in the sense that they believe in the Trinity, the virgin birth, the church ordinances, baptism, and the Lord's

table and such things. They have a very strict membership policy in their churches, reliant on personal experience of divine intervention in life. But they experience a major religious decline, and this is partly because of the emphasis on literary criticism. So in the schools that train their clergy, the students are encouraged, well, they're, you know, informed, you know, the tradition is faulty. You cannot believe the church fathers, the people who have historically interpreted the Bible, they got it all wrong, right, because that was Catholicism. So we must very carefully interpret along some lines, but in practice what this meant was the growth of Unitarianism. So there's this conflict between the intelligentsia in New England and the clergy in New

England as time progresses, so that you get the growth of the Unitarians and this becomes the religion of the most prominent citizens of New England, from John Adams to John Quincy Adams to later figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson. They're all Unitarians. And the congregational church becomes much more progressive over time, much less adherent to the doctrine of the Trinity and traditional strict Calvinism and the like. So that's interesting to keep in mind. We're going to return to that theme of religious innovation later, which is largely a northern phenomenon. It's not that the South is not affected by this.

It is to some degree, but it takes a very different form in the South. So the Southerners, the Southern diaspora from colonial days, is made of very different stock. We have a large number of the Scotch Irish, which are primarily Scottish by ancestry. They are called into the mountains of Pennsylvania by the Quakers originally because the Quakers are unwilling to fight, even when it means defending their own families from an Indian massacre. So they call in the Scotch Irish, who are of a different stock and different belief, and they believe that there is such a thing as legitimate violence, and they are the buffer for the frontier. The Scotch Irish are fiercely independent people. They are a Presbyterian, so they are a different variety of Calvinist.

They're not quite so iconoclastic, though historically we would relate, them to iconoclass. They do not have images. They do display the cross. They do celebrate Christmas, unlike the Puritans of Massachusetts. But they go out into Appalachia and they spread through the Appalachian South. Some of them go north and end up in Vermont and such places. But most of these people go south and and their folk culture is strongly related to southern culture. So they've kind of followed the Appalachians down in Tennessee and North Carolina and such. They are very independent people. They want to be left alone. They're historically very resistant to outside regulation. Don't like cities as a rule. They are. They are.

maligned for being a backwards people, this is not an accurate reflection of their real achievements. They are Protestants. They are believers in the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, that the Bible alone is the source of their faith and their connection to God. Therefore, they highly prize literacy. and at the time of American independence, the Scotch Irish as a specific people are more literate than are the regular peasant people, the regular farming folk of England or any Catholic country. And it's because of this specific religious belief that highly prizes literacy. So they're doing this on their own. They aren't living in towns or villages. They frequently don't even set up places of worship until some later period.

They kind of pioneer these back mountain areas and such, and they are settled rather far apart from one another. So it's kind of hard to get them together for things. but they do eventually build churches and you drive through Appalachia today and you can see kind of how that developed over time. You'll now find towns and such, but you'll frequently find churches that just stand alone in mountainous areas. And that reflects the Scotch Irish tradition where they would build a church and then they would go to, to the church, often from long distances, in order to have communal worship together. So this was something that develops over time, but they are a famous instance of that tradition of rugged individualism.

They are very rooted to their places where they settle, though it is often very poor for farming and they have a more affirmative sort of approach to their heritage and this is what I want to emphasize here the element of the cavaliers in Virginia are another very strong example of this these are people that are collectively far more comfortable with their heritage. The cavaliers of Virginia are primarily Episcopal or Church of England. They want to transplant English culture in the Americas. They like their heritage. They are more affirming of their heritage. Now, this manifests itself in many ways, in contrast, we can look at the Quakers and Puritans, for example. We talked about how the Puritans had jettisoned the musical tradition, the Gregorian notation, which is the origin of our musical scales, the way that we document music so we can reproduce it.

That was invented by Pope Gregory the Great. And it was disavowed by the Puritans because it had this very notable Catholic origin. The Cavaliers in Virginia, they preserve this. They like harmonious musical production. And so their church worship is very different. The Cavaliers, they display the cross. They like things like stained glass, so certain kinds of representation are for them permissible. They're hardly high church Anglican people.

But nevertheless, they are members of the Church of England, and they aren't out to purify it. They are not of the belief that it is very corrupt as of its origins and everything. They're more affirming of it. They like English culture. In the English Civil War, the Puritans, with their champion Oliver Cromwell, they abolish the monarchy in England. They cut off the head of King Charles. They shut down the theaters. They destroy stained glass windows, wherever they find them.

They haul out the icons out of the medieval churches and destroy them. They even attack the relics that were still extant in England in Reformation times. The Church of England did not destroy all of these relics. The Puritans went out and destroyed great many of these religious relics, the graves of saints in England, such as Saint Bede. of Yarrow, they utterly obliterate his relics and destroy his tomb. At the same time, the Cavaliers in Virginia with their governor, Berkeley, or Barclay, they are adherents of the king's cause in the English Civil War. So while the Puritans in Massachusetts celebrate the ascension of

Oliver Cromwell, the Cavaliers in Virginia are calling the Puritans regicides who have attacked the basis of their culture and so on. Governor Barclay invites the defeated faction in the English Civil War, the Cavaliers, to Virginia, and a great many of them come and settle in Virginia. And these are some of the famous families of Virginia, the Randolphs, the Washington's, the Tollivers, there are great many famous names that are prominent in the history of Virginia. Those families were partisans in the English Civil War and they lost and so they came to Virginia. And this has been a symbol of the Commonwealth of Virginia ever since. You can go to UVA, for instance, and their mascot, or the name of their sports team, they're the Cavaliers.

And this is a reference to the English Civil War. So we see here in the early roots of American history the prominence of English themes and English conflicts. They figure large in American history, and a great many historians have reflected on this that the American Civil War is a kind of rehash of English conflicts in previous centuries, which might strike us as a bit far-fetched, But when we look at the principal conflicts in American history, in the diasporas that came out of colonial British America, we can make some of these connections. Now, this is not to say that these were static institutions, these religious cultures in these sections. I've already mentioned the deterioration of the Puritan confession.

In Virginia, as an example, and this is comparable, the Episcopal established culture in Virginia had its own dissenters, and they were largely the Baptists and the Methodists. And this corresponds to the back country of Virginia, where centers of religious authority were much more far spread, and people were far more reliant on their own resources, rather like the Scotch Irish were up in the mountains. So this gives rise to a predominant low church Protestantism in the South,

which is still the most extant religious, Protestant tradition in the American South today. The Baptist churches, there are great many kinds of Baptist churches, they predominate in population by the time of independence. There are many more Baptists and Methodists in Virginia than there are Episcopalians, though the establishment remains largely Episcopalian, as George Washington was and and so on. It was the typical religious adherence of southern elites. Another very important difference is industry. So the north has a remarkably different climate than the south.

The north is very rocky. It's extremely difficult to farm. And if you go through old settled areas of New England, you will see rock wall. just going out in all directions that marked out the farms of the early settlers. They would hit these rocks in their fields, and they would haul them out, and they would build walls and boundaries between their farms. And this was rather a never-ending process. They had a very short growing season, and they had less arable land than did the more semi-tropical south. They have long winters. In the winters, they would devote themselves to other

kinds of productive activities. So very early on, this was a center for artisan activities of all sorts, the making of tools, the making of clothes, and so on. Even before New England was settled, John Smith, who has a famous career in Virginia, in Jamestown, John Smith voyaged along the coasts of New England and promoted New England for settlement, saying that the fall line, which is very close to the shore in New England, would be an ideal place to build all manner of mills. And of course, this was what happened in New England. They built mills all over the place, and it became a major center early in our history for things like textiles. They would import southern commodities like flax and cotton, also wool from

further inland in New England, where there was a large wool industry in places like New Hampshire and Vermont and upstate New York. And they would weave these into fabrics. And these mostly served the domestic market. And this was the origin of many of the early mill towns in New England. They got their start with textiles. They invested in industry. They invested in shipbuilding. They invested in sailing, in merchant trade, and also in finance. So a major part of of the development of the North was the early establishment of banks and the first American Stock Exchange in Philadelphia, which was something that the Quakers were particularly interested in. The Quakers were known to be financial whizzes and speculators. And Philadelphia

was our first banking center and also our first stock exchange, later displaced by New York, of course. Now, the South was from its earliest times interested in agriculture. After the Jamestown settlers, the adventurers from earliest American English settlement, they discovered there was no gold lying around, nor were there pearls readily available. John Rolf cultivated the first commercial crop of tobacco in Virginia. He had brought it from the Caribbean. And this became the first great cash crop of the South.

And the use of tobacco is rapidly increasing in the old world and it becomes a very lucrative investment. So this brings a lot of people to Virginia. It makes Virginia a profitable place to go and settle. Later on, you have the development of long fiber cottons, cotton crops, on the sea islands in South Carolina and Georgia. Now, this was a special crop. Later on, it expands inland, but for a good portion of our early history, it's something confined to the sea islands, places like Jekyll Island and Hilton Head Island off of Georgia and

South Carolina, they are growing lots of cotton out there, and they're populated and this is bringing people into the area. That particular variety of cotton only grew in that specific climate. There were other varieties of cotton, short fiber cottons that you could make clothing out of and the rest, and it had some value. But if you understand, like, the short fibers, you make a shirt out of short fiber cotton, it's not going to withstand much washing, right? It's going to come unraveled because the fibers, the natural fibers of the cotton are just too short. So the long fiber cotton was much more valuable. But the south was, as we have said before, very agrarian in its focus.

It was a very rural population broadly dispersed over the land, far more interested in land and commodities as the basis of their lives. And the cash crops were how they made money, but they're doing lots of other things there too. So they're raising hogs, they're breeding horses. They're growing lots of vegetables through their own consumption. They're cultivating other crops like flax, for instance, so they can make linen clothes for themselves. It's not a major export crop, but they are growing flax and such. It is more of a lifestyle.

They are less connected to business and the selling of commodities is something they typically only do once a year when they take their cash crops to market. And the vast majority of Southerners, even by the time of the Civil War, the vast majority of Southerners do not live in towns or cities. The South does not have big cities. The great exception is New Orleans, which is by far the largest city in the South at the time of the Civil War, but New Orleans is exceptional for so very many reasons. So they have a kind of antagonism to industry and also to the merchant class, as we've previously discussed in relation to John Taylor of Caroline and his agrarian philosophy. Now, something that we have not yet mentioned is the institution of slavery, which is what we initially think of when we think of the sectional divide. Now, slavery is a very important subject, and we will have far more to say of it. But for the moment, let's talk about the institution of slavery and how it develops in,

British America. In 1776, all 13 American colonies had legal slavery. This was far more prominent in agricultural regions than it was in New England, though every single New England state had legal slavery in 1776. The very first New England state to outlaw slavery was the Vermont Republic, which never had much of a presence of slavery. I believe there were all of six slaves in the region of Vermont in 1777 when Vermont declared its independence. Vermont has a remarkable history. Vermont is my favorite New England state. I'm rather partial to it. I spent a little time there right after college. Between 77 and 1791, Vermont was an independent republic, landlocked, of course, completely agrarian,

as modern-day Vermont remains rather agrarian, kind of outstanding among the states today. It's a state full of the most picturesque farms you've ever seen. And it is extremely beautiful. If you haven't been to Vermont, I highly recommend it. But in 77, they declared the total abolition of slavery with no indenture or apprentices. So this was a remarkable feature in the New England area. And it was not a major impact on the people that actually lived there. Because there were hardly any indentured servants and virtually no slaves in the region.

And those that did have such investments were advised to leave. So this is a remarkable thing. Massachusetts started a process of gradual emancipation in 1776. So this was not a decree, all slaves are liberated, and this also was not a really big reform in Massachusetts. Most of the slaves in Massachusetts were domestics. They served in households. But in 1776, Massachusetts declared a gradual emancipation. And the way that this worked was they would set a future date at which all slaves born after that date would be liberated at a certain age.

So just as an example, a little later, the state of New York declares gradual emancipation in 1799. So this is sometime later. The state of New York, which was the biggest gradual emancipation program, they actually set aside money for this and such. They were compensating people for the emancipation. they declared that after July 4th of 1799, all slaves born in the territory of New York would be manumitted. The men freed at the age of 28, the women freed at the age of 25. those born before July 4th, 1799, would remain slaves. So this is what gradual emancipation looks like.

In effect, what happened in New York was that people that owned slaves sold them southwards. Now, this becomes an issue, obviously, with the ratification of the Constitution, the debates about the Constitution. So I'll mention that in passing here. The Philadelphia Constitution is debated there in the 1780s in Philadelphia and then taken to the states. There wasn't as much debate about these points in the states, but the Constitution does recognize the institution of slavery. It never uses the word slavery, but it does recognize it legally. The Philadelphia Convention famously decided that the southern states would be apportioned representation for Congress. by a census and also by counting the slaves in the southern states for three-fifths credit for representation.

Now, this is not really what people think it was. They people today, they look at that and they say, oh, they only looked at slaves as three-fifths, the value. of a full citizen and this is white supremacy and so on. This is not at all what they were talking about. The Southerners wanted full representation for the slave population. The Northerners didn't want representation for the slave population because they were not citizens. Why should they have representation? And that's a very interesting contrast.

It's not at all what modern people think this debate was about or what this clause implied. So Southerners argued that slaves were members of households like women and children and the otherwise indisposed. You know, the elderly dementia patient is a member of the household. And though they do not have a say in politics, they are represented by the head of the household, which is, by the way, a very Republican idea. Republicans believe that people can be represented by a figure in their vicinity. We elect politicians that are supposedly representing our interests and so on. They believe that the authority of the individual can be delegated to a representative,

and that the family is a form of this. And we don't take votes among the children about what to do, what job to take, where to move, what to eat for dinner. The parents decide this. And the man is the head of the household. We are talking of an age after all in which there is no women's suffrage. The man has the final responsibility for his family unit and all those dependent on him, including the slaves.

So the southern position is that the slaves are represented by their masters, and they constitute a population of their communities. So they need representation. There are more people there. So this is a compromise agreed on for that end. Also, the Constitution provides that in 1808, Congress may regulate the slave trade or end it. Now, this is also a very interesting position

because in Philadelphia, for the debate about the Constitution, what exactly constitution would contain. The argument was mostly between the maritime interests plus the Deep South, such as South Carolina and Georgia, who were very interested in keeping the slave trade open. Because although New England states were abolishing slavery by this time, They were still very much invested in transporting the slaves. And they did not want to end that activity.

It was a very profitable trade for them. The deep south, South Carolina and Georgia mainly in the Constitutional Convention, were adamant to keep the slave trade open as well. It was the middle states. It was New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and so on, that we're arguing to end the slave trade early, to give Congress authority to end it, in fact. So the compromise was to postpone that for some time,

for a couple decades till 1808, when Congress actually did ban the international slave trade. The last element in the Constitution is fugitive slaves. So the Constitution provides that the slaves will be if they run away to a state that has outlawed slavery or whatever, that the states will cooperate in returning fugitives from labor. So that is yet another compromise between the areas that were in the process of abolishing slavery in the areas that still had very large slave populations. So the southern experience of slavery is quite distinct from the

that of the north where they never had a sizable cash crop economy. They had small farms mostly for local consumption of food, and they had a more industrial sort of focus for their economy. In the south, cash crops predominate the major element of the economy and obviously the major element of American exports. Just as an example, in 1860, cotton from the southern states was the largest and most valuable of all American exports. And also the primary source of money coming into the economy because it was such a huge export. It dwarfs all industrial exports at this stage.

There's a huge labor demand in the South from colonial days because these crops are very labor intensive. They don't have machinery to plant and harvest these crops. They need hands on the field to do all of it. Now, this is also seasonal, right? There are two periods of time where there is a tremendous amount of manpower needed on the spot, and that is at planting and harvest. So they have a radically different rhythm of life and activity in these cash crop growing regions and the cotton and tobacco and sugar areas in the south,

where everyone is incredibly busy in the spring and in the fall. And the rest of the year, it is quite languid in comparison. So they are not nearly so busy while the crops are growing or in the winter when the land is just lying, waiting for the spring planting. But you have to have an awful lot of hands available for those busy seasons. So this leads to really strange innovations to bring labor in. Initially, we have a large element of indentured labor.

And these are mostly from the British Isles. they have a term of service and also a land grant once their term of service is done. And so this has the effect of settling the back country eventually. In the meantime, the indentured servants are more or less like slaves on the plantations. They do not have personal liberty. They may not make decisions for themselves. They may not marry and start families. while they're in their indenture.

Remarkable in comparison because slaves typically were married and had families. It was one of the things that made slavery in America quite different than slavery elsewhere. For an example in the Caribbean, the main import of slaves into the Caribbean, which is far, far larger than the amount of slaves brought in to North America proper to the United States. In the Caribbean, most of the slaves imported were male. They didn't even bring females in in large numbers. They also worked them far harder. There is not a downtime in the Caribbean.

It's a tropical environment and they grow crops year round. out, and most of those slaves did not reproduce. In the American colonies and what becomes the United States, the slaves not only reproduce, they reproduce at a higher rate than the white population. The slaves also have comparable life expectancies to the white population, which is very interesting. And we know a lot about this. We have the the federal census records, which is where we get this information from.

So we have, just as an example of this, if you're wanting to read more about the southern agrarian culture and the nature of the cash crops and slavery, I recommend Francis Simpkins' History of the South, which was published in 1947. So that's a standard resource. for these things. We have the plantation system in the south, and this is a remarkable thing. It's very important because the plantation gentry, they disproportionately produce a great number of generals and statesmen in American history. We can look at the record just of presidents, for instance, and we see a long procession of these men. Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Tyler, Taylor, Harrison.

They are all Virginians by birth. They are all plantation gentry. They are all slaveholders. And we can go in to that more, it's probably worth going into this more at a later point, owning a plantation and being the master of a community of slaves in addition to your own family obligations. They frequently had their extended family there on the plantation with them, including, you know, the orphaned cousin, the deadbeat cousin, the aged great-grandmother. and so on, they would all populate these estates, and this was just a commonplace of the time.

But the head of the household, the plantation owner, he was accustomed to being the executive. Not only was he wealthy, given his social station, not only was he expected because of his station and because of his record of responsibility and management, he was expected to lead men into battle, and he was well fitted for that, coming from his social standing and having his experience. But he was the executive of justice on his state. When there was crime,

He was the man that all matters were brought to. And this was a minority in the South. There is a common impression that the South was filled with these plantations, that this was the predominant way of life. They were, in fact, the wealthiest people in America. And they were a distinct minority, though a very important one, as we see. They are all over the place in politics up until the Civil War, and all over the place in the army. They made very good executives from this particular training.

They were expected to lead in battle. All of the matters that arose from their estate would be brought to them. Rather like King Solomon's subjects come to his. him with all of their disputes and he has to arbitrate. So they weren't calling the police when there was a misdemeanor or a felony. They were instead going to the head of the household who had the ultimate authority there. So if there was an assault, a wounding, a murder, an adultery, this would be brought to the head of the household and he had to arbitrate these things. This made them well-fitted for

executive action, which is precisely why we see this sort of man going into politics and doing such a good job of it. I mean, we can like or dislike these executives from this period and say, oh, well, you know, this man was a better leader than the other and so on. Just the fact they made it into that position was enough of a sign of evidence of their of their fluency with these matters they were trained executives and they were used to sitting in judgment of what was right now this was also a time where you you don't have you don't involve the civil authorities with these local matters when these these felonies and misdemeanors take place on the plantations This is the origin of the famous systems of punishment that we see associated with the Annabellum South, with whippings, with rationing food, with confinement.

That was a measure, though certainly not the most prominent, of branding. All of these, certainly the more outrageous ones to the modern mind, are associated with felonies. So men get into a fight. One wounds another. Say they're slaves. What is the punishment? Well, it might involve bread and water for a month and a severe whipping. There is a murder or a manslaughter.

There is adultery. This might involve a brand. This might involve whipping. This might involve rations, strictures, confinement. You aren't allowed to leave, you know, this area, or so on. This is not the predominant experience, not any more than it is today. So maybe we should make an exception for today where we have such a large, number of malefactors that don't seem to be getting punishment or rehabilitation for that matter.

It was certainly a much more physical sort of interaction with all deal of wrongdoing. We are certainly more today more accustomed, if not oriented, towards the Quaker solution to these. which is to lock them in a cell and believe this spiritually refines them in some way. That was innovative at the time. These are people of a distinctly more medieval mindset that believe in confronting evil with force and violence. These Southerners, they do believe in legitimate violence. So that is their brief anyway for these elements of slavery.

The plantations, however, they do not dominate the southern economy. The small farmers predominate. And we'll talk about the distribution of slavery, the slave population and slave owners in just a moment. But the majority of the southern population does not own slaves. And it is a significant majority. We're talking about 75% that have no holdings in slaves. They are small farmers. They are in contrast and frequently in conflict with the plantation class,

the elites in the south, though they frequently do vote for these elites of various stripes, you know, from Henry Clay, the Whig, to Jefferson Davis, the Democrat, both of them being southern elites and large slave owners. They had very different political ideas, but nevertheless, they were the statesmen. So the small farmers, what Frank Owlsley called the Plainfolk, he wrote a landmark study, a very important little book called Plainfolk of the Old South in 1949, where he is doing a major investigation with a tremendous amount of evidence about the size of the southern middle class, the non-slash-slash- slave-owning class, very important work. This is in contrast with an impression, still a very popular impression, from the likes of Olmsted. I'm trying to remember the guy's full name now.

Do you remember Olmsted, the historian and landscape architect? What was his name? I don't remember what his first name was. Well, I don't have a way to look it up right here. But anyway, Olmsted, famous for designing Central Park in New York. Also a prolific travel writer and kind of amateur historian. Frederick Law Olmsted. There we go. I was getting confused.

We have Frank Lawrence Owsley and we have French. Frederick Law, Olmsted. So we have the same initials for both of these gentlemen. And Owlsley is out for Olmstead's thesis. So Olmstead was an antebellum writer. He travels far and wide. He's really very valuable to learn about the old South. But Olmstead's thesis was that the South was made of rich planters

and backwards, hopelessly illiterate, poor white track. And this was his impression in his wide travels through the South. And he wrote a number of books about his travels and they make very interesting reading and I do recommend them. But his opinion of Southern culture was that there were two distinct classes in the South, outside of the slaves, of course, and that was the hopeless poor white country trash and the aristocrat statesman planters. And what Owsley was doing was he was illustrating the huge southern middle class

and ultimately illustrating that they could compete with the planters for resources, for land and so on. The key for the southern middle class was the raising of hogs, which was a major cash commodity. All southerners ate pork. It was very widespread food stuff. Salt pork and bacon were a major staple in the south and eaten all over the place. Really struck European travelers to the South, they were just flabbergasted with the amount of animal proteins that Southerners, of all descriptions, including the slaves, ate on a regular basis, which wasn't comparable to any description of people in Europe at the time. So the raising of hogs, which could not be done at scale. It had to be done on a small level was one of the ways that,

the southern small farmers the plain folk used to sustain themselves and also to compete very effectively for resources with those of great wealth and and large numbers of slaves so it's important to note that most that the slave owners themselves also tended to own small numbers of slaves even the even those that did own slaves were using slaves at a much smaller level um now this this varies across the south so in um 1790 where we have our very first federal census in south carolina there are 140 000 free whites in south carolina and a hundred and seven 7,000 slaves. So in the coastal areas of South Carolina, those that had been most long developed, the slaves actually outnumber the whites. Now in South Carolina in 1790, the ratio of ownership of

slaves was 34%. Now compared to Virginia, and Virginia is very interesting here, in 1790, 49442,000 free whites in Virginia, 292,000 slaves, of which only 25% of the white population were slave owners. So the small holders predominate in the slave-owning classes. the average number of slaves owned in 1860 to jump ahead a bit was eight so this this is a very small unit maybe two families of slaves and they are most often living in the same quarters under the same roof most slave owners live in very close proximity to their slaves, share their resources with their slaves, and that they sleep in the same room together. They share the same table. They eat the same food. Something very remarkable about slavery in the South is that they cannot segregate under this system.

segregation is antagonistic to the institution of slavery. You can't send the slaves off to their own institutions to do their own thing because this is antagonistic to the control inherent in the system of slavery. This means that they are doing a lot of things together. So the average Southern slaveholder lives his entire life with his slaves in direct proximity to them. The average southern slaveholder, especially when we get into the 1800s, this is something that he's known his entire life. This is not a lifestyle he has chosen. It's a lifestyle he's inherited, which makes a difference. The average southern slaveholder is not buying

and selling slaves. He is not involved in the slave trade. He has a has inherited the slaves he owns. This is the average. Now, that's not to say there isn't plenty of buying and selling of slaves going on. And frequently, well, we have many examples of this. We have entrepreneurs who are striking it rich in new lands in southern Louisiana or Arkansas or such places. They might bring resources. them they might bring slaves with them they may have come from played outlands in south carolina or tidewater virginia where the ground is not uh the ground is exhausted and it can no longer be effectively planted with the cash crops and they might move their entire household with all the

slaves to a new holding on the arkansas river somewhere and set up operations there and then they may go down to New Orleans and buy more slaves and transport them up the river and so on. So there are great many examples of people who did precisely that, and this is involved in the Westward movement. There is also the displacement of the older slave populations on the East Coast with the development of Western lands, the conquest of Alabama in 1814, the opening up of the black belt of Alabama, which becomes a major cotton producing area, the opening of the Tennessee Valley, the Louisiana Purchase, the settlement of Arkansas and Missouri. The established populations in Tidewater, Virginia, with their tobacco culture, tobacco being extremely detrimental to soil nutrition, they would sell their slaves west. And there is a huge migration that that accompanies the opening of these Western

lands. So there is buying and selling going on, but the average experience of the slaveholder is the inheritance of slaves from his forbearers. These are people he's known his entire life and close proximity to them. They do not worship in different churches. They worship in the same church. Segregation in worship was a norm from colonial days in New England. There was segregation there from colonial days. They did not bury in the same graveyards. They did not worship in the same services. They did not eat at the same table. It was a very different experience and also a far less prominent one. There never were very many slaves there.

But segregation remained a feature there. Segregation was not a feature in the South. And that corresponds with the element of control and proximity necessary in slavery. There is a certain level of segregation in the big plantations. So the slaves in the big plantations, most of them are field hands. Most of them have cabins or even larger dormitory-like facilities in relation to the fields where they worked. They might organize slave churches on those plantations and may even patronize black preachers or even slave preachers. at those plantations, though that was all according to the call of the head of the household.

He made those decisions. The lifestyle on these farms was the routine that I described before, the planting, the harvest, really large amount of leisure time in the year where there is not any, prescribed hours. Instead, what they had was a system is called the task system. So the slaves were given various tasks. Once the task was complete, the rest of the time was theirs. And they were strongly encouraged to develop their own arts and even their own garden patches. This is an obvious benefit because the more they do for themselves, the less has to be done for them. So if they're growing their own vegetables, making their own food and clothes, making crafts of all sorts, which they were encouraged to do, and this was a source of

money for them as well, they could sell things. In South Louisiana, for instance, one of the famous slave crafts was the collection of Spanish moss for pillows. mattresses. So they would stuff pillows and mattresses with the spongy Spanish moss that hangs from our trees down here. And this was an export item. They would actually sell these to wholesalers and they would take them far and wide because this was in the days before foam rubber. It was highly desirable. It was one of the softer things that you could sleep on with your pillow and all the rest and that was a source of money private money that the slaves could earn for themselves um so the the private sphere there the farm routine of this is the regular

experience in the rural south relations to plants and animals of features of farms of farms It's not a single crop economy, though the main emphasis at a plantation would be cotton. That's not the only thing they're doing there. If we take Mount Vernon, Washington's estate on the Potomac, you have not only the tobacco, which is the cash crop at Mount Vernon, you have a millworks there. They're bringing in lumber. They are turning the lumber and making furniture out of it. You have a distillery.

They're brewing cider. They are making whiskey. And they're selling that in the surrounding area. There's all sorts of things going on at a big plantation. A big plantation is quite comparable to a village. and everything you might see going on in a village, you might see going on in a plantation. There is a specialization of labor.

There are craftsmen of various sorts. Washington had brewers and distillers. These are slaves, some of these people. Sometimes Washington would hire a specialist at wages for these positions. But the slaves are often apprenticed to these things. You have weavers, makers of textiles. You have people that are making clothes.

You have people who are making shoes. These are all activities on a plantation, which is aiming to be a self-sufficient community to do all of the various things that human beings require for living. So they're fascinating and very complex places, and they're comparable to a medieval fiefdom, and that they have an aristocrat, though he doesn't have a title necessarily. He might be called colonel due to his station in the militia, but he is not called baron. He might as well be a baron, because he has this big community that all anthony. to him. And he's also expected to defend them in battle. So there's interesting

correspondence there and that that's a part of the culture there. This also corresponds to that southern cultural attitude of affirming the old culture of Europe, a sense of inheritance and comfortableness with that tradition. Now, the discipline we talked about previously, the main problem with the discipline and the fear are runaways and rebellions. Now, runaways frequently did not go very far. I'll have information in a future episode about the famous Underground Railroad, of which Tremendous amount of nonsense is frequently said. I was talking to someone recently.

She was describing an area of her city where there were great coal shoots and coal storage, like underneath businesses and households and such that formed a system of tunnels. And then she mentioned that it was all part of the Underground Railroad. which is not on the face of it, clearly untrue or preposterous. Runaway slaves may in fact have hidden out in such spaces. But her argument was because it was underground, which was precisely not the element of the Underground Railroad. Just because it's called Underground, it doesn't mean that it involved tunnels.

Wherever Americans find tunnels in the antebellum times, they like to imagine it was part of the underground railroad. And this is just preposterous and ridiculous. And they had trains down there too, right? That's what they think. And they think that Harriet Tubman was some kind of engineer driving a locomotive as well. But I'll have more to say about that at a later date. And she had a browning machine gun too. We've had a lot of propaganda about that over the years.

But the main question was rebellions. That was the paranoia, the fear. And there were grounds for this. These are very interesting events. They are blown out of proportion and very perversely celebrated in American history, maybe partly because of our very deep-seated discomfort with the fact that most slaves in the United States

never contemplated rebellion. That we find extremely disturbing, maybe because of our own cultural conceptions, well, I would never put up with something like that. American Indians typically did not, and thus were very ill-suited as slaves. They were much more inclined to assert themselves and also much more inclined to at least passively rebel

by refusing to cooperate. This was not the experience with African American slaves in American history. Most of them did not rebel or conspire. Most of them complied with the institution. We can make of that what we will. That is the record. There were several famous rebellions,

just as an example of a few early ones In 1712, there was a slave revolt in New York City. There was the murder of several white civilians. There was the arson of several private homes. There were nine white victims in total. 21 slaves were arrested in relation to this conspiracy and executed. This is 1712 in New York. In 1739, there is a famous rebellion in South Carolina, the Stono Rebellion.

There are 20 white victims in the Stono Rebellion. The object of the rebels was to leave South Carolina and make out for Spanish, Florida, where many runaways attempted to go because it was outside of American jurisdiction. And so it was a common object of runaways. There were other rebellions and conspiracies. These were the origins of a great many paranoias and such in the Old South. The most famous of all the rebellions is Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia, which we will get to at a later date. but there are very infrequent rebellions and conspiracies often involving things like murder and arson, the murder of women and children, and so on.

All of these conspiracies were betrayed by other slaves, which is why they didn't get very far. There were great many conspiracies that never resulted in maskers because they were betrayed by fellow slaves. This really is striking because this is comparable to the famous Indian massacre in Virginia in 1622 when the brother of Pocahontas, Opa Chokano, he conspires to wipe out the colony of Virginia with a coordinated simultaneous assault at high noon. So he sent his warriors out into the communities of colonial Virginia. And when the sun reached its zenith in the sky, they were all to take their weapons and strike. He succeeded in murdering a large proportion of the population. I forget just how much it was.

It was like a quarter of the population or one, third of the population. This was men, women, and children. But even in that instance, the only reason Opachocono did not go further than he did was because of friendly Indians who betrayed that conspiracy. And this is also something curious about modern conceptions about this. There was a time in which the loyalty of slaves who did not want to see all the white people they'd ever known, gruesomely murdered or tortured, see their homes burned, and so on,

where that loyalty was celebrated as a grounds for coexistence, as a grounds for friendship between the races. And we have seen the exact opposite, I know in your lifetime and mine, the exact opposite has been celebrated. So we see statues of Nat Turner in Richmond, Virginia, today, for instance. So that is an initial overview of slavery.

We're going to have much more to say of it, but I see I've already gone for an hour and a half. I've got tons more information about the Missouri compromise, but we will pitch that for our next encounter. sounds good that was that was extremely thorough and i think a lot of people are going to get a lot out of that so um thank you you're very welcome my pleasure as i ask you to do at the end of every episode plug your work yes indeed so you can find my my little publishing house at www. tall menbooks.com and there you'll find about 50 volumes that I've republished of American history. I've got a bunch of new titles that are on their way. I've got several biographies that I'm working on right now. I've been working on James K. Polk and Sam Houston.

so I'm hoping to announce a couple new titles here in the near future. But I've got a lot of good stuff in the works. Go check out my material. I've got a lot there about the Civil War. I've got a lot of Civil War memoirs there. I've got Richard Taylor's memoirs. He was the son of President Zachary Taylor and Louisiana Confederate General. and he has a really remarkable account of his service in the Civil War.

That's just one of many books that you can find on my website. All right, Mr. Bagby. Until the next time, thank you very much. Thank you very much.