How did slavery shape southern politics?

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Figure false: James Chesnut
Figure false: James Chesnut came from a family with a large number of slaves and thus represents the power of slaveholders in southern politics. He served in the South Carolina state legislature for years before becoming a U.S. senator in 1858. He resigned in 1860 and became a colonel in the Confederate army during the Civil War. Courtesy of South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

BY THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, all southern white men — planters and plain folk — and no southern black men, even those who were free, could vote. The nonslaveholding white majority wielded less political power than their numbers indicated. The slaveholding white minority wielded more. With a well-developed sense of class interest, slaveholders engaged in party politics, campaigns, and officeholding, and as a result they received significant benefits from state governments. Nonslaveholding whites were concerned mainly with preserving their liberties and keeping their taxes low. They asked government for little of an economic nature, and they received little.

Slaveholders sometimes worried about nonslaveholders’ loyalty to slavery, but most whites accepted the planters’ argument that the existing social order served all Southerners’ interests. Slavery rewarded every white man — no matter how poor — with membership in the South’s white ruling race. It also provided the means by which nonslaveholders might someday advance into the ranks of the planters. White men in the South argued furiously about many things, but they agreed that they should take land from Indians, promote agriculture, uphold white supremacy and masculine privilege, and defend slavery from its enemies.

KEY FACTORS

  • Suffrage was extended throughout the South to all adult white males by 1850.
  • Slaveholding white men were most active in politics and were far more likely to hold political office than those without slaves.

CHAPTER LOCATOR

Why did the South become so distinctly different from the North?

What was plantation life like for masters and mistresses?

What was plantation life like for slaves?

How did nonslaveholding southern whites work and live?

What place did free blacks occupy in the South?

How did slavery shape southern politics?

Conclusion: How did slavery come to define the South?

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