Paternalism in a Southern City: Race, Religion, and Gender in Augusta, Georgia

Abstract

Power, male privilege, and southern social customs These essays look at southern social customs within a single city in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the volume focuses on paternalism between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, elites and the masses, and industrialists and workers. One essay looks at the subordinating effects of paternalism on women in the Old South - slave, free black, and white - and the coping strategies available to each group. Another essay focuses on maternalism, white male millworkers, and the Knights of Labor union in Augusta. Other essays discuss Augusta's aristocracy of color; missionary work in millworker communities; interracial cooperation in Colored Methodist Episcopal Church matters; and William Jefferson White, an African American minister, newspaper editor, and founder of Morehouse College. The varied and creative responses to paternalism discussed here open new ways to view relationships based on power and negotiated across lines of race, class, and gender.