These conferences get my brain roiling. Every time I go I end up finding new ways to think about my project, or reconceptualize its organization and argument. Not surprisingly, it happened again. Here’s what I have (at least until the next conference.)
It may be heretical to suggest that some white southerners prioritized something other than hierarchies of race and gender when ordering their private and public world, and catalogues of conditions and apologias apply. The mastery and power whites exerted over blacks and men wielded over women were factors so important and prevalent that ordinary* white southerners assumed them. I will argue that religious practice formed the primary experience** of many white people. Adherence to a variety of Protestant denominations in a southern region (Piedmont North Carolina) not socially and politically dominated by wealthy planters, taught, or caused, people to behave socially and domestically in ways that diverged from the examples of the wealthy so well, but so often, described by historians.
Evangelical religion, however, did not deflect the currents of the national market in goods and ideas. In fact, religion served, for ordinary southerners, as a critical channel for then-modern ideas about social relations.
Christianity and its ideals worked upon people in three ways. First, the imperative to achieve and maintain salvation activated individuals to behave with modesty, grace, restraint, and affection***, thrift and industry.**** In other words, the opposite of what the social elite prescribed for an honor-bound or anxiety-driven man and woman. Second, maintenance of a disciplined***** Christian community and the needs of institutionalizing churches promoted an ethos****** that embraced current ideas about education of children, the structure of families, and social reforms like missions and temperance. Third, public religious discourse, particularly in print culture, informed ordinary people of the latest ideas about middle class behaviors (before the arrival of industrialization) like child-rearing, affectionate nuclear families, and how to behave in a marriage.
A few things missing here… well, a lot missing here, and it doesn’t sound quite as articulate or coherent as when I blurted it out to Joseph Moore Saturday morning. I’ve got a good base of material to make a portrait of the general population, but I think my arguments will be made convincing through the use of narrative to describe the lives of a small number of individuals (based on their diaries)…which should aid the readability of the whole thing, if I can learn to write well.
The most important part is the whole so what? thing. So what? Well, how should I know!?!?!? Actually, I haven’t figured that out yet, but the conclusion to all this, I believe, will allow fresh answers to the problem of the North Carolina Piedmont, and other areas that maintained slavery, and indeed, a slave society, but did not have a planter elite. Why did the region countenance both vague and strident anti-slavery activism prior to the war? How far did the influence of slaveholding elites over society and culture extend down into social and economic classes and across geographic regions? (Why did the ethos I’m describing sometimes fail in moments of crisis?) Why did this place largely support the Confederacy? Why was it, at the same time, so ambivalent about the Confederacy? Why did this region gain a (well-deserved) reputation for deserters and dissenters? Then, there are the larger questions about how do Americans prioritize and order what is important in their lives, and all that.
This current/new outline will require that I completely rewrite what I’ve already done (boy, that’s never happened in a dissertation before.) But I do think it’s better for it. I should be doing that, but here I am, playing on blogs.
*This is my current term and obviously does not mean everyone. Missing are black people, and marginalized and elite white people.
**This is an analytical term borrowed from Daniel Wickberg.
***Use any adjective derived for nineteenth century western Christianizing or Amy Greenburg’s concept of restrained manhood.
****Not always successfully, but that’s part of the story.
*****This definition includes, but is much larger, than the use of church courts to enforce social norms.
******Brazenly stolen from V. Bynum’s Unruly Women.*******
*******This footnoting system brazenly stolen from Got Medieval.