A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier

Abstract

In this text, Joan Cashin explores the profoundly different ways that planter men and women experienced migration from the Southern seaboard to the antebellum Southern frontier. Migration was a family venture in the sense that both men and women took part. But they went to the frontier with competing agendas: many men tried to escape the intricate kinship networks of the seaboard, while women worked to preserve them if they could. Drawing on archival sources and using the perspectives of several disciplines, Cashin explores the effects of the migration experience on sex roles, the nature of slavery, race relations and a variety of other issues.