These notes are part of the Black Reconstruction Reading Group‘s study material.
Book: Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. DuBois
Chapter: 3 – The Planter
Pages 32-54
Time period: ___1800-1865________________ Location: ___The South_____
Main Topic: The composition and character of the Planter class, an oligarchic landowner and plantation owner class that owned most of the slaves and land, and comprised 7% of the population of the South.
Main Subject/Person/People: Planters, enslaved black people, poor white people, white people aligned with planters, expansion of the slave empire.
Themes: planters political power perpetuating slavery; slavery’s negative effects on planters, who were of an ignorant, lazy, and crass character; the contradictions between stated morality and facts of slavery; the anti-democratic character of the planter oligarchy; competition between Northern industrial capitalism and Southern agricultural oligarchic capitalism.
Notable Quotes:
“How seven per cent of a section within a nation rules five million white people and owned four million black people and sought to make agriculture equal to industry through the rule of property without yielding political power or education to labor.”
32. 7% of the South owned 3mil/3.9mil slaves, or 75% of slaves.
Excepting Virginia, the Southern states were all against the idea of broad democracy.
33. “Into the hands of the slaveholders the political power of the South was concentrated, by their social prestige, by property ownership and also by their extraordinary rule of the counting of all or at least three-fifths of the Negroes as part of the basis of representation in the legislature. It is singular how this “three-fifths” compropmise was used, not only to degrade Negroes in theory, but in practice to disfranchise the white South.”
All kinds of rules were set up to prevent franchise for many non-planter whites.
33. gets into Southern gentility. Not that educated, but great manners, and pretensions of being European nobility.
35. The planter was fixated on consumption, taking the wealth created by the enslaved. They had “harems” of slaved women, and enslaved women were subjected to polyandry, to increase master’s wealth.
“The leaders of the South had leisure for good breeding and high living, and before them Northern society abased itself and flattered and fawned over them. Perhaps this, more than ethical reasons or even economic advantage, made the way of the abolitionlist hard.”
36. Continued about the (rape) sexual relations and children of white slaveowners and enslaved black people. Then about the rise of industrialism in the North putting the squeeze on profits of planters in the South.
37. Slavery was an old system, the lag of the 16th century brought into the 19th. The planter wanted high wealth and an easy life – they were lazy – while the North was industrious. The South wanted low tariffs so they could sell crops. The North wanted high tariffs to protects it’s nascent industries.
39. “The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected political urge necessary to support slave industry; but to the watching world it sounded like the carefully thought out result of experience and reason; and because of this it was singularly disastrous for modern civilization in science and religion, in art and government, as well as in industry.”
“The hurt to the Negro in this era was not only his treatment in slavery; it was the wound dealt to his reputation as a human being.”
40. Free labor compared to slave labor. Free labor as being motivated by wages. Slave labor as a capital investment that had expenses. Overall, slave labor as less productive, and compelling Planters to use political power to fend off industrial progress and maintain slavery.
41.
42. Motivation for westward expansion of slave states. Expansion into the Caribbean.
Opposition in the border states, because they were raising slaves for sale. The Border States supported ending the importation of slaves. The planters in the South Southern states wanted to open up the importation of slaves.
45. more about boder states breeding and its social effects. Social politeness was opposed to breaking up families to sell people, and also opposed to breeding for sale. Reality was, it was done.
47 . political power fugitive slave law
48. Radical abolition, 1860 crisis, Lincoln’s election. John Brown in Kansas.
49. slavery is the reason for the war
50. “Our new [Confderate] government is founded upon exactly the oposite idea [to the equality of the races], it’s foundations are laid, its corner-stonre rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.”
“The Negro, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for the condition which he occupies in our system.” – Alexander H. Stephen, VP of the Confederacy.
Continues about rift between Border States and South Southern states over resumption of the slave trade.
52. psychological effects of dehumanizing slaves
“[Slavery] tended to inflate the ego of most planters above all reason; they became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets; they issued commands; they made laws; they shouted their orders; they expected deference and self-abasement; they were choleric and easily insulted.”
53. “The planter who could not stand slavery [went to] the North; and there, removed from contact with the evils of slavery, the planter often became the “copperhead”, and theoretical champion of a system which he could not himself endure.”
moral social decay
54. “With the Civil War, the planters died as a class…Men talk today as though the upper class in the white South is descended from the slaveholders; yet we know by plain mathematics that the ancestors of most of the present Southerners never owned a slave nor had any real economic part in slaver. The disaster of war decimated the planters; the bitter disappointment and frustration led to a tremendous mortality after the war, and from 1870 on the planter class merge their blood so completely with the rising poor whites that they disappeared as a searate aristocracy. It is this that explains so many characteristics of the post-war South: its lynching and mob law, its murders and cruelty, its insensibility to the finer things of civilization.”
———————————– Meeting notes
j- motivations for Northern entry into Civil War. South wanted expansion of slavery to the west. North wanted expansion of “free soil” to the west. Both the north and confederacy had these white supremacist ideas of empire. North: genocide and theft, Manifest Destiny. Confederacy: genocide and replace with slaves.
t- how would you describe this Planter class to a layperson?
1. they weren’t the slaveowners after the Civil War – the system of slavery was overthrown, but they wanted to take advantage of the lower status of the slaves and reap the economic benefit of that relative privilege.
2. Rape of slave women for profit. Not just “regular rape of women,” but steeped in inequality….middle-class white feminism often fails to get into this type of thing. Notions of “compassionate slave owner” but to be “caring for their slaves,” including offspring born of rape, but could also sell those children as slaves for profit. C
3. Was “Gone With the Wind” referencing the ending of the Planter Class/slave aristocracy culture/class status?
4. D.W. Griffith – propaganda film for KKK to drive overthrow of Reconstruction. Considered a “great film” by many for its innovative formal film editing techniques. There were riots after the film came out – fascist terror by white supremacists – precursor to Emmit Till – the idea of white women being raped by a black man. There’s actually a middle school in that was named after him.
j2 – they weren’t always separating families, it came later in the Border States. What they were doing and thinking was interesting. The part about separations down the river was hard to read. The whole desire to expand to South America and dreams of empire – they were corproate dreams. How was Chiquita banana related to this? Then the class disappeared “Gone With the Wind“.
Recommended supplementary readings:
Octavia Butler’s “Kindred.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Europe_Underdeveloped_Africa
t- Texas – last slave state, largest border with Mexico…related to slaveholders aspirations to expand into Central and South America….
j2 – John Brown – crisis in 1860, Lincoln being elected. How the Planters wanted to re-open the importation of slaves.
t- read Octavia Butler’s Kindred.
j3- is this like colonialism?
j – compared to the Caribbean and Congo is a level of torture is terrible. (From American history textbook, material from Spaniards observing torture in the Caribbean.) The main reason why the slave trade was ended was British colonization in Africa. Britain needed the labor for the mines. (See How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.)
The spiritual thing – thinking about the Confederacy being really strong in the Alabama Mississippi area – the newer part of the Conf – a history of soil erosion, so the planters in VA in 100 years prior boomed with tobacco, and depleted the soil. Moving slavery inland to the South was a search for better soil. After a couple years of cotton crops, the soil would be depleted. So the Planter class would need to do land speculation. They’d have to get loans, but this would depends on the international price of cotton. They could go bankrupt. They’d have to sell the slaves down the river. A spiritual person could feel like the earth had a hand in the failure. Once you exploit and area long enough, the soil is depleted.
The Planter class wasn’t long lived – they were relatively short lived – new even by the time of the Civil War. The mythology of the South posits that the Planters were nobility but they were not – they just emerged and then vanished.
j2 and j- discussing finance capital and planters – Northern finance would make money from slavery expansion.
Link – Birth of a Nation videos.
j- during the 1930s, the CP is organizing sharecroppers in MS. The capitalist drive to organize workers.
t- the CP used to have Black equality as part of their work and African Americans in leadership (e.g. Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson), but this changed when the USSR was starting to become expansionist. This caused the NQ to be back burnered by USSR-aligned parties. With the advent of “revisionism” CPUSA turned away from the the demand for Full Equality (read “The Outsider” by Richard Wright), the vacuum was later filled by the Civil Rights Movement and then later Malcolm X, initial nationalist impulses, then the Black Panther Party, and eventually the new left, culminating with the formation of the League of Revolutionary Struggle, which dissolved along with most of the new left internationlly in the late 80’s.
j- you see all the CP organizing in the South. The Feds were infiltrating the CP and doing all these purges. One of the leaders was Black and purged Richard B Moore, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Moore, by the 50s 30% of the CP was federal agents.
T – Read Richard Wright’s The Outsider.
EROLs.
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