Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie

Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie
Author: R. Douglas Hurt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN:

Although Missouri has strong cultural ties to the Upper South and major economic links to the Deep South, most historians have focused their agricultural studies on states other than Missouri. In Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie, Douglas Hurt provides the first systematic study of agriculture and rural life in one of the most vital sections of Missouri prior to the Civil War. This seven-county area along the Missouri River known as Little Dixie was the most important hemp-, tobacco-, and live-stock-producing region of the state, as well as a major slaveholding area. The people who settled Little Dixie had emigrated primarily from Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. They brought southern culture with them and adapted it to their new environment economically, socially, and politically. Although the settlers began as subsistence farmers, unlimited opportunities and access by river to New Orleans and St. Louis made commercial farming possible almost immediately. Hurt provides the reader with a broad discussion of land acquisition, settlement, and town development in the region. He surveys the major agricultural endeavors of the southerners who settled there, considering technological change, agricultural organization, breed improvement, and transportation. Hurt also traces the development of rural life, emphasizing the importance of religion, education, and mercantile activities. Slavery permeated all aspects of society in Little Dixie. Hurt discusses the acquisition and sale of slaves, their management, and the political protection of slavery, and he relates the significance of slavery in Little Dixie to the Deep South. One of his most important findings concerns theextensive trade of slave children in Little Dixie. Farmers and planters, driven by the struggle for profit, supported both slavery and the Union. Consequently, political division in the state mirrored the national debate over slavery but also showed the uniqueness of Missouri, both geographically and culturally. This book will prove useful for anyone interested in American agricultural history, the economic and social history of the Upper South, and Missouri. Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie provides a much-needed overview of the region's past.

On Slavery's Border

On Slavery's Border
Author: Diane Mutti Burke
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2010-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820337366

On Slavery’s Border is a bottom-up examination of how slavery and slaveholding were influenced by both the geography and the scale of the slaveholding enterprise. Missouri’s strategic access to important waterways made it a key site at the periphery of the Atlantic world. By the time of statehood in 1821, people were moving there in large numbers, especially from the upper South, hoping to replicate the slave society they’d left behind. Diane Mutti Burke focuses on the Missouri counties located along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to investigate small-scale slavery at the level of the household and neighborhood. She examines such topics as small slaveholders’ child-rearing and fiscal strategies, the economics of slavery, relations between slaves and owners, the challenges faced by slave families, sociability among enslaved and free Missourians within rural neighborhoods, and the disintegration of slavery during the Civil War. Mutti Burke argues that economic and social factors gave Missouri slavery an especially intimate quality. Owners directly oversaw their slaves and lived in close proximity with them, sometimes in the same building. White Missourians believed this made for a milder version of bondage. Some slaves, who expressed fear of being sold further south, seemed to agree. Mutti Burke reveals, however, that while small slaveholding created some advantages for slaves, it also made them more vulnerable to abuse and interference in their personal lives. In a region with easy access to the free states, the perception that slavery was threatened spawned white anxiety, which frequently led to violent reassertions of supremacy.

Race to the Frontier

Race to the Frontier
Author: John Van Houten Dippel
Publisher: Algora Publishing
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 0875864236

Table of contents available via the World Wide Web.

Food and Agriculture during the Civil War

Food and Agriculture during the Civil War
Author: R. Douglas Hurt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2016-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1440803269

This book provides a perspective into the past that few students and historians of the Civil War have considered: agriculture during the Civil War as a key element of power. The Civil War revolutionized the agricultural labor system in the South, and it had dramatic effects on farm labor in the North relating to technology. Agriculture also was an element of power for both sides during the Civil War—one that is often overlooked in traditional studies of the conflict. R. Douglas Hurt argues that Southerners viewed the agricultural productivity of their region as an element of power that would enable them to win the war, while Northern farmers considered their productivity not only an economic benefit to the Union and enhancement of their personal fortunes but also an advantage that would help bring the South back into the Union. This study examines the effects of the Civil War on agriculture for both the Union and the Confederacy from 1860 to 1865, emphasizing how agriculture directly related to the war effort in each region—for example, the efforts made to produce more food for military and civilian populations; attempts to limit cotton production; cotton as a diplomatic tool; the work of women in the fields; slavery as a key agricultural resource; livestock production; experiments to produce cotton, tobacco, and sugar in the North; and the adoption of new implements.

The Roots of Rough Justice

The Roots of Rough Justice
Author: Michael J. Pfeifer
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252093097

In this deeply researched prequel to his 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, Michael J. Pfeifer analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. Pfeifer examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. He addresses the transformation of ideas and practices of social ordering, law, and collective violence in the American colonies, the early American Republic, and especially the decades before and immediately after the American Civil War. His trenchant and concise analysis anchors the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching of slaves in antebellum America. Pfeifer also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context, from the early modern British Atlantic to the legal status of collective violence in contemporary Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Seamlessly melding source material with apt historical examples, The Roots of Rough Justice tackles the emergence of not only the rhetoric surrounding lynching, but its practice and ideology. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, Pfeifer shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.

Rebels on the Border

Rebels on the Border
Author: Aaron Astor
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2012-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807143006

Rebels on the Border offers a remarkably compelling and significant study of the Civil War South's highly contested and bloodiest border states: Kentucky and Missouri. By far the most complex examination to date, the book sharply focuses on the "borderland" between the free North and the Confederate South. As a result, Rebels on the Border deepens and enhances understanding of the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. After slaves in central Kentucky and Missouri gained their emancipation, author Aaron Astor contends, they transformed informal kin and social networks of resistance against slavery into more formalized processes of electoral participation and institution building. At the same time, white politics in Kentucky's Bluegrass and Missouri's Little Dixie underwent an electoral realignment in response to the racial and social revolution caused by the war and its aftermath. Black citizenship and voting rights provoked a violent white reaction and a cultural reinterpretation of white regional identity. After the war, the majority of wartime Unionists in the Bluegrass and Little Dixie joined former Confederate guerrillas in the Democratic Party in an effort to stifle the political ambitions of former slaves. Rebels on the Border is not simply a story of bitter political struggles, partisan guerrilla warfare, and racial violence. Like no other scholarly account of Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War, it places these two crucial heartland states within the broad context of local, southern, and national politics.

The Captive's Quest for Freedom

The Captive's Quest for Freedom
Author: R. J. M. Blackett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 531
Release: 2018-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108311105

This magisterial study, ten years in the making by one of the field's most distinguished historians, will be the first to explore the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, Richard J. M. Blackett traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves.

Freedom by the Sword

Freedom by the Sword
Author: William A. Dobak
Publisher: Department of the Army
Total Pages: 582
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN:

From late 1862 to the spring of 1865, the federal government accepted more than 180,000 black men as soldiers, something it had never done before on such a scale. Known collectively as the United States Colored Troops and organized in segregated regiments led by white officers, some of these soldiers guarded army posts along major rivers; others fought Confederate raiders to protect Union supply trains; and still others took part in major operations like the siege of Petersburg and the battle of Nashville. After the war, many of the black regiments garrisoned the former Confederacy to enforce federal Reconstruction policy. This book tells the story of these soldiers' recruitment, organization, and service.

Westerners in Gray

Westerners in Gray
Author: Phillip Thomas Tucker
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2007-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786431121

Few infantry regiments in the Civil War compiled a more distinguished record than the Fifth Missouri. The unique blending of fiery Irish Confederates from St. Louis with rural pro-Southern Missourians forged an unshakable esprit de corps, making the unit the crack infantry regiment in the western sector. Most of Colonel James C. McCown's troops were young men in their 20s, and their good health and physical conditioning allowed them to carry out their "shock" missions throughout the region. From the perspective of the common soldiers and the unit's leaders the activities and battles of the Fifth Missouri are recounted here.

Bluegrass Renaissance

Bluegrass Renaissance
Author: James C. Klotter
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2012-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813140439

Originally established in 1775 the town of Lexington, Kentucky grew quickly into a national cultural center amongst the rolling green hills of the Bluegrass Region. Nicknamed the "Athens of the West," Lexington and the surrounding area became a leader in higher education, visual arts, architecture, and music, and the center of the horse breeding and racing industries. The national impact of the Bluegrass was further confirmed by prominent Kentucky figures such as Henry Clay and John C. Breckinridge. Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852, chronicles Lexington's development as one of the most important educational and cultural centers in America during the first half of the nineteenth century. Editors Daniel Rowland and James C. Klotter gather leading scholars to examine the successes and failures of Central Kentuckians from statehood to the death of Henry Clay, in an investigation of the area's cultural and economic development and national influence. Bluegrass Renaissance is an interdisciplinary study of the evolution of Lexington's status as antebellum Kentucky's cultural metropolis.