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20
Jan
2025

Understanding the American South: Slavery, Race, Identity, and the American South

Lacy K. Ford

As the United States recently completed a bitter and divisive national election, Americans find themselves in the middle of the third decade of the twenty-first century searching for new understandings of their history. We all look for explanations of chronic political polarization, rampant social media addiction, heightened concern over global warming, armed global conflict, widening cultural gaps between states and regions, persistent racial tensions, growing gender divides, deep tensions concerning public schools, abortion rights, and affirmative action policies. But arguably most of all, Americans worry about the recent forty-five year pattern of increasing economic inequality in the United States, inequality that grows more visible almost yearly. Concerned Americans are looking to understand a past not easily rendered usable for partisan advantages and brief news bites, but one that can help them make sense of the divided and fractious present of American life. Americans are grappling with the state of the American nation as it now stands, not thirty, fifty, or seventy-five years ago. Instead, they are searching for new and more complex understandings of the nation’s history to help them wrestle with and comprehend its present.

The enduring question remains: will we, as Americans, learn from our history? And, if so, how? The best answer was and is that any effort to understand our nation’s present and future challenges inevitably leads both citizen and scholar alike into an examination of history, including an examination of the American South’s critical role in making that history. It is no doubt better to learn from our history, however complicated, burdensome, and even painful than to forget, ignore, or try to erase that history. The past should never be our only guide, but it is a valuable, and arguably indispensable one, and one we ignore at our individual and collective peril.

The original essays that appear in my new book contribute to a deeper understanding of the American South’s complicated relationship with that of the rest of the nation. They explore new interpretations and use them to shape our understanding of the present. They may even lead us to ask new and different questions about both the past and the present. Such questions not only emerge from new understanding of current trends but also from probing unexamined corners of the past and seeking new connections with it. All essays in the volume similarly start by reevaluating a landmark work by a well-known scholar or writer dealing with a pivotal question about the nature of the American South, its history, and its impact on the nation. Each of the essays not only explicates the major arguments, but also explores how these interpretations have fared over time.

Moreover, the assembled essays use the present to interrogate the past and the past to interrogate the present and do so more openly and directly than traditional historical scholarship typically allows or encourages. These essays do not pretend to cover every important facet of the history of the American South and its full impact on the American nation, but rather emphasize political and economic history as well as slavery to help bring a deeper understanding of American history, and of the American South’s complicated relationship with its history, bringing it to bear on our twenty-first century world and its many challenges.

The lead essay explores a hardy but often revealing perennial –the meaning of the American Civil War– from the standpoints of the nineteenth, twentieth, and, most importantly the twenty-first, centuries. To do so, the lead essay evaluates historian David Potter’s 1968 assertion that, from an international perspective, the defeat of the American South’s bid for independent nationhood and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks, the American Civil War resulted in an unprecedented marriage of liberalism and nationalism, a union unique in the formation of nineteenth century nation-states. This fortuitous marriage not only gave liberalism a strength it might otherwise have lacked but also lent nationalism a democratic legitimacy, and even a morality, that it may not otherwise have deserved. The essay foreshadows how the end of the Cold War and the emergence of multiple decentralizing technologies (including cell phones and social media) and other polarizing forces raise serious questions about whether a more than 150-year-old marriage of nationalism and liberalism will survive the alluring centrifugal temptations and frustrations of the new century.

Another timely piece explores the rapid and dramatic “coming apart” of white working-class communities across the American South as the New Age of Inequality (post-1980) settled in, bringing stagnation and decline to rural areas, small towns, and even medium-sized cities. As the economic doldrums took hold across swaths of the American South and its diaspora during the decades since 1980, social dysfunction emerged with a vengeance in white working-class communities, a phenomenon that recently captured national attention through the now newly elected Vice-President J. D Vance’s depiction in his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy (2016). While some southern urban areas boomed and diversified into attractive “brain hubs,” other cities, small towns and rural areas became mired in economic stagnation and decline. The many challenges the faltering economy presented white southern workers and their communities stimulated a visceral response from disaffected workers, a response manifest in angry efforts to reclaim white privilege and the aggressive championing of “traditional” values, and ultimately an unprecedented level of death and despair among white working-class southerners during the opioid epidemic. The complex story of disruptive economic forces, lingering racial resentments, and fierce atavistic loyalties led white southern workers to cling to cultural values over building alliances that might redress their economic grievances.

Another essay addresses the critical historical contributions of W.E. B. DuBois, one of the most important, and most radical, American intellectuals of the twentieth century, and his influence on historical scholarship to the present day. His Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his Black Reconstruction (1935) created a field in Black history with particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of the American South. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk (1903) lyrically introduced the idea of the “two-ness” of the black experience in the United States, and lent DuBois prestige he used as a co-founder of the NAACP.  Later in his life, DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (1935) stood as a bold interpretive challenge to much of the existing historical literature. DuBois emphasized the democratic achievements of Black politicians and their allies during Reconstruction, achievements which were later eroded and dismantled by white supremacist politicians of the post-Reconstruction era. Decades later, as the direct-action phase of the postwar Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, a new generation of scholars turned to DuBois’ work on Reconstruction as example of how Black agency in history could be recognized and serve as the impulse for new understandings of slavery as well as Reconstruction. DuBois’ work inspired impressive later work on slave resistance, slave communities, slave religion, the slave family, slave political awareness, as well as reinterpretation of the Reconstruction era as one of expanding democracy and the era’s end as the dawn a truly tragic era in southern and American history.

The book’s final (of ten) essay returns to the larger but crucial point of what we can expect to learn from history. The late dean of southern historians, C. Vann Woodward, once asserted that the poor, defeated, and pessimistic South could serve as a counterpoint to the overweening confidence and optimism expressed by the rest of the American nation. Later Woodward conceded that rather than offer a counterpoint to the national myths of virtue and prosperity, white southerners, at least, emerged as avid champions of American power and eager boosters for American capitalism, despite the region’s history of poverty, defeat, and racial antagonism. This essay suggests that the irony of history should explode our innocence, chasten our arrogance, scold our self-righteousness, and alert us to the folly of ignoring inconvenient history. In sum, these essays, as a package, should give us a keen awareness of the irony embedded in the human experience, and, as it does, it should temper our pride when showing mercy and our zeal when seeking justice.

Understanding the American
South by Lacy K. Ford

About The Author

Lacy K. Ford

Lacy K. Ford is a Scholar-in-Residence at the Institute for Southern Studies, University of South Carolina, where he served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2016–...

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