Slavery

1850s

Indeed, planters and yeomen joined together to support secession in large part out of a perceived sense that only by making a strike for independence could they protect household patriarchy from the corrosive forces that threatened it.

These forces, it should be stressed, were not simply the product of a fevered southern imagination.

Especially during the 1850s a sense of uncertainty about the future gathered momentum in the black belt areas of the South as wealth in land and slaves became increasingly concentrated, slave prices rose beyond reach of many aspiring planters and railroad construction integrated even greater areas of the cotton South into a market economy over which individuals exercised little control.

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