Civil War, black freedom, and social change in the upper South : Middle Tennessee, 1860-1870

Author

Stephen V. Ash

Date of Award

8-1983

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

History

Major Professor

Paul H. Bergeron

Abstract

Middle Tennessee was one of the most prominent subregions of the antebellum South. A land of prolific farms, widespread slaveholding, and broad prosperity, It represented a "third South" which stood apart from both the plantation-dominated Deep South and the highland South of subsistence farms and slaveless yeomen. Prosperity, rural communalism, and the existence of a black slave caste all helped to unite Middle Tennessee whites before the Civil War, despite their society's glaring class distinctions and unequal distribution of wealth.

In the ensuing years Middle Tennesseans white and black saw the transforming fury of war at first hand, for the region was a fiercely contested battleground and one of the North's first conquests. They suffered devastation and privation on a scale matched in few other parts of the South and exceeded in none. More than that, they witnessed the virtual obliteration of the underpinnings of their society: slaves took advantage of military Invasion by seizing their freedom; the aristocracy was humbled. Impoverished, and exiled by Federal authorities; danger and disorder in the countryside disrupted rural Institutions and communalism. The result was widespread social chaos, crime, and violence, epitomized by the rise of banditry.

Peace In 1865 restored order, hierarchy, and community, but not slavery or prosperity; and the years that followed consummated the transformation of Middle Tennessee society. Blacks withdrew from white families, churches, and communities, and (despite their eventual political and economic subjugation) founded an autonomous, egalitarian culture centered in the towns. Whites conceded their inability to prevent the partition of their formerly biracial society and withdrew into their own culture, which remained rooted in the past. Whites in 1870 were as firmly committed as ever to their traditional class ideology; and (as quantitative analysis of census data reveals) they were even more agrarian than before, for many had moved from town to farm after 1865 to take up work the freedmen had abandoned. Thus, the years of Civil War and emancipation in Middle Tennessee had liberated black society and pointed it toward the future, only to immure white society and point it toward the past.

Recommended Citation

Ash, Stephen V., "Civil War, black freedom, and social change in the upper South : Middle Tennessee, 1860-1870. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1983.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/12999