How "Modern" Was the Old South?

Southern slaveholders went to great lengths to portray themselves as custodians of a backward-looking, noble society, one that drew its strength from the past and fought against the recklessness of the modern future of free wage labor and democracy. In their architecture, literature, and in the institution of slavery itself, they fashioned themselves as feudal lords, heirs to a past they admired and cherished. Beneath this facade, however, was a modern, highly exploitative system of labor, one that gave rise to one of the most “progressive” societies in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century. This lecture explores how, beneath the gloss of genteel aristocracy, the Old South pioneered some of the most modern, even capitalistic innovations in the world.