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Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country
In this innovative study of the South Carolina Low Country, author Stephanie McCurry explores the place of the yeomanry in plantation society--the complex web of domestic and public relations within which they were enmeshed, and the contradictory politics of slave society by which that class of small farmers extracted the privileges of masterhood from the region's powerful planters. Insisting on the centrality of women as historical actors and gender as a category of analysis, this work shows how the fateful political choices made by the low-country yeomanry were rooted in the politics of the household, particularly in the customary relations of power male heads of independent households assumed over their dependents, whether slaves or free women and children. Such masterly prerogatives, practiced in the domestic sphere and redeemed in the public, explain the yeomanry's deep commitment to slavery and, ultimately, their ardent embrace of secession.
By placing the yeomanry in the center of the drama, McCurry offers a significant reinterpretation of this volatile society on the road to Civil War. Through careful and creative use of a wide variety of archival sources, she brings vividly to life the small worlds of yeoman households, and the larger world of the South Carolina Low Country, the plantation South, and nineteenth-century America.
By placing the yeomanry in the center of the drama, McCurry offers a significant reinterpretation of this volatile society on the road to Civil War. Through careful and creative use of a wide variety of archival sources, she brings vividly to life the small worlds of yeoman households, and the larger world of the South Carolina Low Country, the plantation South, and nineteenth-century America.
344 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
Stephanie McCurry
4 books18 followersStephanie McCurry is a specialist in nineteenth-century American history, with a focus on the American South, the Civil War era, and the history of women and gender.
McCurry attended college in Canada at the University of Western Ontario and moved to the United States for graduate school. She received her M.A. from the University of Rochester and her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She taught at the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania before becoming Professor of History at Columbia University. In 2006-2007 she was a visiting professor of history at Princeton University.
McCurry attended college in Canada at the University of Western Ontario and moved to the United States for graduate school. She received her M.A. from the University of Rochester and her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She taught at the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania before becoming Professor of History at Columbia University. In 2006-2007 she was a visiting professor of history at Princeton University.
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August 21, 2015
In “Masters of Small Worlds”, historian Stephanie McCurry traces the macro-forces of national politics that lead America to Civil War to the infinitesimally small domestic politics of South Carolina yeomen farmers who endorsed their state’s secession from the Union. Although the question may, at first, seem myopic in its focus, McCurry’s book helps to answer one of the Civil War’s must enduring riddles – given that the war was about slavery and only a small fraction of Southern soldiers were slaveholders, why did non-slaveholding Southern men rush to fight (and die) for the Confederacy – a regime whose overarching ideological principle was that all men most certainly were not created equal and whose economic foundation was rooted in a system of unpaid slave labor against which the white yeoman and poor white Kracker could never compete and would never prosper.
Throughout the antebellum period, South Carolina politicians such as John C. Calhoun, Robert Barnwell Rhett and James Henry Hammond stood at the vanguard of Southern anti-Federalist, pro-slavery ideology. South Carolina was the first state to succeed from the Union, and throughout the war its citizens were the most ardent advocates of Southern State independence. In focusing her inquiry on South Carolina, McCurry joins a list of other historians in recent years who have sought to explain the depth of Southern radicalism by exploring the political economy of the Confederacy’s most extreme advocate.
While the allure of slavery, monstrous though it was, is perhaps understandable in economic terms to the extent that one actually owned slaves, a system as brutal and cruel as slavery can hardly be expected to exist when its sole beneficiaries are wealthy elites. To survive and prosper, the system required the support (or at least, the quiescence) of the community’s non-wealthy (and so, non-slavehoding) members. Beginning in the last third of the 17th century and continuing through to the end of the Civil War, this support was secured by means of limiting the definition of “community” to include only white males, and then creating a cast of black slaves over which all whites, regardless of their station in life, were automatically presumed to be superior. While to be sure there were profound class distinctions between wealthy and poor whites, the cohesion of “whites” as a group was ensured and conflict between rich and poor was avoided by the introduction and systematic oppression of another group – African Slaves – who all whites were the free to marginalize, denigrate, belittle and exploit without the slightest fear of social consequence or moral sanction. The desire to have African slaves to exploit coupled with the need to maintain community support led elites to do something in the American South that was done nowhere else in the European world – to accept poor whites as something like political peers and to accord them rights, privileges and a degree of nominal social deference that were elsewhere unheard of.
While this status bargain emerged to become the defining feature of Southern society throughout the 18th and first half of the 19th century, nowhere was the balancing act between rich and poor whites so scrupulously tended as in South Carolina’s lowcountry counties. The grease that lubricated the class skids of South Carolina wasn’t lip service paid by elites to their poor cousins. Regard for the rights and privileges of all white whites was a thing taken seriously by rich and poor alike, as such system reinforcing deference in a world whose economic foundation was largely based upon unfree slave labor made it necessary to enforce customs and practices that ensured that what a man, regardless of his station in life, did on his own property with his own “dependents” was his own business.
A large part of the status payday for poorer white males, slaveholding and non, was a profound, community reinforced sense of masterly identity that he was free to enjoy and those with whom he lived – wives and children, as well as slaves – were compelled to acknowledge. The laws, customs and religion of the community imposed certain duties of care on the man, but also accorded him vast and largely uninterrogated power over those who lived under “his” roof – slaves, of course, but also their wives. Under the strictly enforced rules of this society, it was the men who engaged with the world, both commercially and socially, while women were relegated to hearth and home and expected to submit to their husband’s authority. And how could she do otherwise? The laws of coverture ensured that her husband controlled any property she may have through inheritance and provided her only nominal legal protections over he safety, while religious institutions imposed upon her strict obligations of wifely submission as a duty due to no less than God himself. Indeed, one of McCurry’s most interesting observations surrounds the extent to which the various structures enforcing the regime of white male dominance necessary to control enslaved blacks also acted to subjugate and marginalize women. The white male head of household truly was, as McCurry’s book title suggests, the master of his own small world.
McCurry goes on to demonstrate how South Carolinian planter elites came to exploit the white male identity politics of the region to achieve their own anti-Federalist ends. Within the North’s challenge to slavery was embedded, so the elites argued (and also, probably believed), a profoundly personal attack on the social, political and religious identity of Southern white males. In a world where a man’s home was his castle and his wives, children and slaves were all his abject and socially powerless subjects, the Northern project to eliminate slavery in favor of free labor was perceived as an intolerable and deeply insulting attempt to deprive white males of the status their culture instructed them that they were naturally due. As the forms of this culture had also come to be embedded in South’s uniquely conservative brand of Evangelical religion – slavery and male dominance over women were structures endorsed by scripture – encroachment upon slavery was seen as an attempt to dethrone God. In furtherance of the planter elite’s project of achieving absolute, aristocratic control over what they had come to see as “their” dominion, they played these perceived Northern assaults on white male identity with the poor and yeoman class white male polity for all they were worth. When the call for succession came, white males lent their support – in defense of slavery, yes, but more importantly, in defense of their identities as free, independent and powerful men.
While I enjoyed the book tremendously, I also need to point out that it is, at its heart, a history book written for other historians. McCurry discusses what was going on behind the social scenes of, for example, the Nullification Crisis or the Compromise of 1850 assuming that those who are reading her book know what those things were, how they came to become issues and how those issues were ultimately resolved. To someone who is not knowledgeable about the details of American history, her consistent refusal to provide elementary background information about these and other events can make reading her book challenging. While there is nothing wrong with a book by historians for historians, her approach limits the accessibility of her fascinating and well-articulated insights to those who are history wonks.
Having said this, I nonetheless enjoyed her book tremendously. It gave me many new things to think about with respect to America’s racial history, the dynamics of status and the means by which those dynamics can be created, perpetuated and, most importantly, exploited.
Throughout the antebellum period, South Carolina politicians such as John C. Calhoun, Robert Barnwell Rhett and James Henry Hammond stood at the vanguard of Southern anti-Federalist, pro-slavery ideology. South Carolina was the first state to succeed from the Union, and throughout the war its citizens were the most ardent advocates of Southern State independence. In focusing her inquiry on South Carolina, McCurry joins a list of other historians in recent years who have sought to explain the depth of Southern radicalism by exploring the political economy of the Confederacy’s most extreme advocate.
While the allure of slavery, monstrous though it was, is perhaps understandable in economic terms to the extent that one actually owned slaves, a system as brutal and cruel as slavery can hardly be expected to exist when its sole beneficiaries are wealthy elites. To survive and prosper, the system required the support (or at least, the quiescence) of the community’s non-wealthy (and so, non-slavehoding) members. Beginning in the last third of the 17th century and continuing through to the end of the Civil War, this support was secured by means of limiting the definition of “community” to include only white males, and then creating a cast of black slaves over which all whites, regardless of their station in life, were automatically presumed to be superior. While to be sure there were profound class distinctions between wealthy and poor whites, the cohesion of “whites” as a group was ensured and conflict between rich and poor was avoided by the introduction and systematic oppression of another group – African Slaves – who all whites were the free to marginalize, denigrate, belittle and exploit without the slightest fear of social consequence or moral sanction. The desire to have African slaves to exploit coupled with the need to maintain community support led elites to do something in the American South that was done nowhere else in the European world – to accept poor whites as something like political peers and to accord them rights, privileges and a degree of nominal social deference that were elsewhere unheard of.
While this status bargain emerged to become the defining feature of Southern society throughout the 18th and first half of the 19th century, nowhere was the balancing act between rich and poor whites so scrupulously tended as in South Carolina’s lowcountry counties. The grease that lubricated the class skids of South Carolina wasn’t lip service paid by elites to their poor cousins. Regard for the rights and privileges of all white whites was a thing taken seriously by rich and poor alike, as such system reinforcing deference in a world whose economic foundation was largely based upon unfree slave labor made it necessary to enforce customs and practices that ensured that what a man, regardless of his station in life, did on his own property with his own “dependents” was his own business.
A large part of the status payday for poorer white males, slaveholding and non, was a profound, community reinforced sense of masterly identity that he was free to enjoy and those with whom he lived – wives and children, as well as slaves – were compelled to acknowledge. The laws, customs and religion of the community imposed certain duties of care on the man, but also accorded him vast and largely uninterrogated power over those who lived under “his” roof – slaves, of course, but also their wives. Under the strictly enforced rules of this society, it was the men who engaged with the world, both commercially and socially, while women were relegated to hearth and home and expected to submit to their husband’s authority. And how could she do otherwise? The laws of coverture ensured that her husband controlled any property she may have through inheritance and provided her only nominal legal protections over he safety, while religious institutions imposed upon her strict obligations of wifely submission as a duty due to no less than God himself. Indeed, one of McCurry’s most interesting observations surrounds the extent to which the various structures enforcing the regime of white male dominance necessary to control enslaved blacks also acted to subjugate and marginalize women. The white male head of household truly was, as McCurry’s book title suggests, the master of his own small world.
McCurry goes on to demonstrate how South Carolinian planter elites came to exploit the white male identity politics of the region to achieve their own anti-Federalist ends. Within the North’s challenge to slavery was embedded, so the elites argued (and also, probably believed), a profoundly personal attack on the social, political and religious identity of Southern white males. In a world where a man’s home was his castle and his wives, children and slaves were all his abject and socially powerless subjects, the Northern project to eliminate slavery in favor of free labor was perceived as an intolerable and deeply insulting attempt to deprive white males of the status their culture instructed them that they were naturally due. As the forms of this culture had also come to be embedded in South’s uniquely conservative brand of Evangelical religion – slavery and male dominance over women were structures endorsed by scripture – encroachment upon slavery was seen as an attempt to dethrone God. In furtherance of the planter elite’s project of achieving absolute, aristocratic control over what they had come to see as “their” dominion, they played these perceived Northern assaults on white male identity with the poor and yeoman class white male polity for all they were worth. When the call for succession came, white males lent their support – in defense of slavery, yes, but more importantly, in defense of their identities as free, independent and powerful men.
While I enjoyed the book tremendously, I also need to point out that it is, at its heart, a history book written for other historians. McCurry discusses what was going on behind the social scenes of, for example, the Nullification Crisis or the Compromise of 1850 assuming that those who are reading her book know what those things were, how they came to become issues and how those issues were ultimately resolved. To someone who is not knowledgeable about the details of American history, her consistent refusal to provide elementary background information about these and other events can make reading her book challenging. While there is nothing wrong with a book by historians for historians, her approach limits the accessibility of her fascinating and well-articulated insights to those who are history wonks.
Having said this, I nonetheless enjoyed her book tremendously. It gave me many new things to think about with respect to America’s racial history, the dynamics of status and the means by which those dynamics can be created, perpetuated and, most importantly, exploited.
January 25, 2019
White male fragility: the ultimate unifier in the antebellum South. That's the essential thesis of Stephanie McCurry's brilliant book on the tensions between yeoman farmers and aristocratic planters in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina in the antebellum era. If we need to look to a particular moment in which personal politics became public politics, it is here, where the prevailing notions of the yeoman household found new resonance in the emergence of evangelical Christianity, and then the push toward Nullification and then secession. McCurry's central argument is that, before the emergence of evangelical religion, yeomans and planters found themselves on opposite sides of a class divide. Even though most of the Southern white population did not count themselves as slave-holding plantation owners (indeed, that was the minority), planters held the greatest amount of viable/diverse land, the greatest amount of market power, and the greatest amount of political influence. This may be because yeoman farmers located their own power in the small but significant exercise of power within the domestic sphere, exerting control and domination over the women and enslaved people in their small regimes. McCurry does amazing work, particularly in chapters 2 and 4, at demonstrating how systemic messages of control and domination were in the key cultural spaces of yeoman life--the household, and the church. This prevailing logic, and the requirements of upholding white masculinity as the "natural", God-given order of the world, became subsumed in the politics of the day--once planters realized that in order to move their political agendas forward to protect slavery, they had to articulate such protections in the language of the evangelism the yeoman had adopted: a language that was keenly focused on securing white masculine control over his own dominion. (Such rhetoric was, of course, heavily dependent on framing both the domination of women and the existence of slavery as both the proper order of the day.)
If there is a critique to leverage against this amazing and highly readable book, it is its high degree of dependency on secondary sources. (Though some of that dependency is fun--note McCurry's hilarious critiques of accounts provided by Northerners such as Frederick Law Olmsted who utterly disdained the culture of the non-aristocratic South.) It is also sadly an account that pays little attention to the relationships between yeomans and enslaved people as African-Americans would have seen them. But nevertheless, it provides an important intervention against monolithic treatments of the antebellum South as a unified herrenvolk democracy, and insists that the particularities of class, gender, and religion are important factors in understanding the period.
If there is a critique to leverage against this amazing and highly readable book, it is its high degree of dependency on secondary sources. (Though some of that dependency is fun--note McCurry's hilarious critiques of accounts provided by Northerners such as Frederick Law Olmsted who utterly disdained the culture of the non-aristocratic South.) It is also sadly an account that pays little attention to the relationships between yeomans and enslaved people as African-Americans would have seen them. But nevertheless, it provides an important intervention against monolithic treatments of the antebellum South as a unified herrenvolk democracy, and insists that the particularities of class, gender, and religion are important factors in understanding the period.
August 4, 2020
Historian Stephanie McCurry gets down to social history cases in the antebellum Low Country of South Carolina, arguably the harshest and most alien American social environment this side of Massachusetts at the height of the Puritan theocracy. Over half of the population were enslaved Africans, reaching seventy percent of the population in some places. This skewed the already warped Southern social fabric. Here, instead of a non-slaveholding white majority like you saw in many southern states, even the “small” “yeoman” farmers owned upwards of ten slaves. McCurry doesn’t discuss landless white agricultural workers in this work, which suggests they were only present in very small numbers, unlike in the rest of the country.
No, the Low Country was something of a propertarian dream (as, indeed, the antebellum south is generally for a clade of right-wing libertarians). The small farmers, caught between the system of massive cotton and rice plantations run by ultra-wealthy elite planters and the abyss, more or less, found a place in the system based on what they had: ownership and mastery over a small amount of land, a small number of slaves, most importantly over their families and especially wives and daughters. Ownership, mastery, and their inevitable counterpart, submission, became the master metaphors of the Low Country, governing everything from how the people related to the Almighty in the evangelical churches to how electoral politics functioned.
McCurry tries to address the paradox between the universal white manhood suffrage South Carolina embraced and the aristocratic control exercised by Low Country planters. There could be no republican governance without a subject working class- the “mudsill” of civilization, as they called it. By being routinely recognized as not part of this mudsill, as (lesser) masters in their own right, the yeomen were essentially flattered into taking part in an otherwise deeply undemocratic system where the planters held the balance of power through gerrymandering, property requirements on offices, and so on. This is a good enough answer, and an explication of the “psychic wage” theory of white supremacy. I do wonder, though- elites everywhere would give a lot for the kind of control the antebellum planter elite had in South Carolina. Why did it work out so diabolically well for them there and not elsewhere? Is it just happenstance, or a founder effect from the Barbadian planters that settled the country in the late seventeenth century? Or are the differences exaggerated? Either way, this is good spadework done on a difficult and counterintuitive subject. ****
No, the Low Country was something of a propertarian dream (as, indeed, the antebellum south is generally for a clade of right-wing libertarians). The small farmers, caught between the system of massive cotton and rice plantations run by ultra-wealthy elite planters and the abyss, more or less, found a place in the system based on what they had: ownership and mastery over a small amount of land, a small number of slaves, most importantly over their families and especially wives and daughters. Ownership, mastery, and their inevitable counterpart, submission, became the master metaphors of the Low Country, governing everything from how the people related to the Almighty in the evangelical churches to how electoral politics functioned.
McCurry tries to address the paradox between the universal white manhood suffrage South Carolina embraced and the aristocratic control exercised by Low Country planters. There could be no republican governance without a subject working class- the “mudsill” of civilization, as they called it. By being routinely recognized as not part of this mudsill, as (lesser) masters in their own right, the yeomen were essentially flattered into taking part in an otherwise deeply undemocratic system where the planters held the balance of power through gerrymandering, property requirements on offices, and so on. This is a good enough answer, and an explication of the “psychic wage” theory of white supremacy. I do wonder, though- elites everywhere would give a lot for the kind of control the antebellum planter elite had in South Carolina. Why did it work out so diabolically well for them there and not elsewhere? Is it just happenstance, or a founder effect from the Barbadian planters that settled the country in the late seventeenth century? Or are the differences exaggerated? Either way, this is good spadework done on a difficult and counterintuitive subject. ****
December 11, 2012
Makes sense to me. McCurry argues for the importance of bringing gender into the conversation about the antebellum south, particularly when we are considering the connections between the big plantation slave holders and the small yeoman farmers. The small farmers were not nearly as dependent on slave labor, and some of them had no slaves at all, but they ended up on the same page politically as the big plantation owners. And by the time the secession crisis came up, they jumped right on board. Why? In part because the gender politics of the south made every white man the "master" of his own small world. Rich plantation owners asserted very strong property rights for themselves, and though they didn't care much about the yeoman they couldn't deny him the same strong property rights. Yeomen may not have had much property, and they may have be forced to farm the marginal land, but they had virtually unlimited rights over their own property and family members. So by the time the nullification and secession crises roll around, these men feel like they are defending not just slavery, but this whole system of white male supremacy over home and property.
It does get a little frustrating at times that McCurry is focusing on such a small geographic area here. It's not the south, but South Carolina, and it's not South Carolina, but just lowcountry South Carolina. Were the gender regimes just the same everywhere else in the south? Maybe this helps to explain yeoman support for secession in this one place, but what about in all the other states that eagerly seceded? I guess it is too much to ask for this monograph, but I would read another book that jumped off from this to examine multiple states, including some in the northern parts of the U.S.
It does get a little frustrating at times that McCurry is focusing on such a small geographic area here. It's not the south, but South Carolina, and it's not South Carolina, but just lowcountry South Carolina. Were the gender regimes just the same everywhere else in the south? Maybe this helps to explain yeoman support for secession in this one place, but what about in all the other states that eagerly seceded? I guess it is too much to ask for this monograph, but I would read another book that jumped off from this to examine multiple states, including some in the northern parts of the U.S.
December 12, 2014
Looking at a small parish town in South Carolina, Stephanie McCurry reconstructs the household and local politics of the Old South to reveal how the upper class plantation minority elite was able to convince small and non-slaveholding white southerners (she defines them as "yeoman farmers": owning 9 slaves or less) to vote with them in secession and in defense of slavery. Her answer: gender. Slavery was wedded to the ideology of patriarchy and paternalism. Even if they only had a few slaves--nay--even if they only had their wife and kids to lord over, they were "masters of small worlds" whose way of like was in equal jeopardy with the elite plantation slaveholders with scores of slaves. This ideology based on hierarchy was reinforced by religious and class understandings. Ideology has power. McCurry's work is fairly convincing (though the microcosm does not seem to always speak for the macro-world in this case all together) and thought-provoking.
(pp. 5-129; 208-304)
(pp. 5-129; 208-304)
August 17, 2013
An important argument, but painfully dry.
Read
September 29, 2015An excellent study of yeoman farmers in South Carolina which examines the idea of dependency in Southern male culture. Excellent view of gender politics and slavery in the antebellum era.
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