Reconfiguring the Old South: "Solving" the Problem of Slavery, 1787-1838

Abstract

The Civil War, emancipation, and Confederate defeat stand among the pivotal moments in American history, moments that gave the nation, “conceived in liberty” yet marred by slavery, an elusive “new birth of freedom.” For many years, the importance of those events fostered an understandable historiographical preoccupation with the configuration and posture of southern society on the eve of the American Civil War. The scholarly fascination with the Old South at its antebellum maturity often slighted the earlier formation of that society, the making of the Old South. In recent years, however, the creation of the Old South through a unique set of choices, accommodations, and compromises made in the face of unpredictable historical contingencies has received increasing attention from historians. They are intrigued as much by the twists and turns of the Old South's evolution as by the undeniable drama of the late antebellum journey to secession and war. Building on his own work and that of other scholars, Ira Berlin has produced an impressive reinterpretation of American slavery that emphasizes its creation and evolution, not just its flourishing as a regional institution in the era of well-established cotton plantations and sectional conflict. Berlin and others have begun to restore a strong sense of chronology and variety to the study of the enslaved in the Old South. They have looked at generational change and regional variation in the slave population and in slavery as an institution, highlighting patterns of slave demography, work, and culture. Berlin's synthesis, with the earlier seminal scholarship on which it was built, has allowed historians to recapture dynamism and diversity in the experience of the enslaved in the United States.1

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