planter aristocracy

Examples of planter aristocracy in the following topics:

• Plantation Masters and Mistresses

  • The owner of a plantation was called a planter.
  • In the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama and Mississippi, the terms ""planter" and "farmer" were often synonymous; a "planter" was generally a farmer who owned many slaves.
  • Planters are often spoken of as belonging to the planter elite or planter aristocracy in the antebellum South.
  • The historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman define large planters as owning over 50 slaves and medium planters as owning between 16 and 50 slaves.
  • Campbell classifies large planters as owners of 20 slaves and small planters as owners of between 10 and 19 slaves.

• The Plantation Economy and the Planter Class

  • The owner of a plantation was called a planter.
  • The wealthiest planters, such as the Virginia elite with plantations on the James River, had more land and slaves.
  • In the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama and Mississippi, the terms "planter" and "farmer" were often synonymous.
  • A "planter" was generally a farmer who owned many slaves.
  • Planters are often spoken of as belonging to the planter elite or planter aristocracy in the antebellum South.

• Lincoln's Plan and Congress's Response

  • Most moderate Republicans in Congress supported the president's proposal for Reconstruction because they wanted to bring a swift end to the war, but other Republicans feared that the planter aristocracy would be restored and the blacks would be forced back into slavery.
  • Radical Republicans hoped to control the Reconstruction process, transform southern society, disband the planter aristocracy, redistribute land, develop industry, and guarantee civil liberties for former slaves.

• The Colonial Elite

  • In New England and the Mid-Atlantic colonies, the elite were wealthy farmers or urban merchants; in the South, they were wealthy planters.
  • The British American gentry modeled themselves on the English aristocracy, who embodied the ideal of refinement and gentility.
  • The Southern elite consisted of wealthy planters in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina.
  • In terms of the white population of Virginia and Maryland in the mid-18th century, the top five percent were estimated to be planters who possessed growing wealth and increasing political power and social prestige.
  • By the end of the 1600s, a very wealthy class of rice planters who relied on slaves had attained dominance in the southern part of the Carolinas, especially around Charles Town.

• Social Classes in the Colonies

  • Led by Virginia, the Southern Colonies resisted the British policy of taxation without representation, and they supported the American Revolution, sending wealthy planters like George Washington—to lead the armies—and Thomas Jefferson—to declare the principles of independence, as well as thousands of ordinary people to form armies.
  • Americans were increasingly fascinated by and increasingly adopted the political values of republicanism—which stressed equal rights, the need for virtuous citizens, and the evils of corruption, luxury, and aristocracy.

• Slavery in the Rice Kingdom

  • In the 17th century, wealthy planters from Barbados, accompanied by their African slaves, immigrated to South Carolina looking for arable lands.
  • The planters were well aware that African slaves had skills and attributes well suited to the semi-tropical environment of South Carolina.
  • By 1850, a South Carolinian rice planter, Joshua John Ward, was the largest American slaveholder, with an estate that held 1,130 slaves and gave him the title "King of the Rice Planters."
  • It is no coincidence that white planters in the region starting importing African slaves as rice cultivation was introduced into the South, as the first English planters in South Carolina knew little about rice cultivation.
  • The planters relied on the expertise of their African slaves imported from the Rice Coast.

• Maryland

  • The charter created an aristocracy of lords of the manor who bought land from Baltimore and held greater legal and social privileges than the common settlers.
  • Tobacco was sometimes used as money, and the colonial legislature was obliged to pass a law requiring tobacco planters to raise a certain amount of corn as well, in order to ensure that the colonists would not go hungry.

• Multiracial Individuals

  • Sometimes planters used mixed race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their own children or the children of their relatives.
  • Planters who had mixed race children sometimes arranged for their children's education, even sending them to schools in the North, or securing their employment as apprentices in crafts.
  • Some planters freed both the children and the mothers of their children.
  • Free blacks in the Deep South were often mixed race children of planters and were sometimes the recipients of transfers of property and social capital.
  • Though fewer in number than in the Upper South, free blacks in the Deep South (especially in Louisiana and Charleston) were often mixed race children of wealthy planters.

• Plain Folk of the Old South

  • The Plain Folk of the Old South were a middling class of white farmers who occupied a rung between rich planters and poor whites.
  • SThe Plain Folk of the Old South were white subsistence farmers who occupied a rung between rich planters and poor whites in the Southern United States before the Civil War.
  • The nostalgic view of the South emphasized the elite planter class of wealth and refinement who controlled large plantations and numerous slaves.
  • The major challenge to the view of planter dominance came from historian Frank Lawrence Owsley in Plain Folk of the Old South (1949).
  • Planters with numerous slaves had work that was essentially managerial, and often they supervised an overseer rather than the slaves themselves.

• Chesapeake Slavery

  • As the demand for Chesapeake cash crops continued to grow, planters began to increasingly invest in the Atlantic slave trade.
  • As the headright system attracted more and more settlers to the Chesapeake, an increasing divide between coastal planters and farmers on the frontier began to emerge, with those in the westernmost areas usually poorer than planters in the east.
  • These wealthy slave-owning planters came to dominate the top of the social and political hierarchy in the Chesapeake, placing pedigree and wealth as significant social identifiers.
  • The class division between wealthy planters and small farmers continued well into the 19th century, until the Civil War united these factions together against the Northern states.
  • Discuss how planters in the Chesapeake region increasingly invested in the Atlantic slave trade to support their rural tobacco-based economy.