Stratification in the Ante-Bellum South

Abstract

ENEWED interest among sociologists in well-documented historical materials as a basis for comparative study of social systems has recently turned attention to the backgrounds of the American treatment of the Negro during the period of slavery. Such materials, however, can be of maximum utility to the science only through careful and systematic analysis in terms of basic elements and relationships as a foundation for general theory. The present paper attempts to present the principal features of the social structure of the ante-bellum South, particularly as exemplified in the system of social stratification, in such a way that the broader implications of the various more or less well known descriptive data may be seen. Formal structures and concrete social relationships thus become meaningful, not as isolated events or aspects of culture, but as related features of a complex social system. It may thus be possible, not only to provide examination and verification of available data, but to relate these data to the broader outlines of the society. Classes in the Dominant Caste. The pattern of social stratification in the ante-bellum South was fairly complex and by no means constant in time and space. Nevertheless, constant points of reference in social valuation are observable and it was about these well-understood criteria of rank and status that the major lines of demarcation are discernible. The slavery system, and the caste system which partially parallelled it, was the most common and the most certain fixed point of orientation in the stratification system. This becomes even more significant when it is recognized that, despite the general impression to the contrary, slaveholding was in no statistical sense typical of Southern whites. For the South as a whole, during the period for which census data are available, the slaveholders constituted only 35.3 percent of the total free population in I790 and this had declined to 26.i percent in i86o. All those immediately connected with the slavery system (combined slave and slaveholding population) formed only 57 percent of the entire population in I790 and precisely one half (So percent) in i860.' However, the significance of the plantation organization and of the slavery system was not dependent on numerical weight in a statistical computation. Aside from the direct economic function of the plantation as a prime example of commercial large-scale production of staple agricultural commodities and the manifest importance of the planter as a social type, there is the tremendously revealing fact of the dominance of the planter and plantation as an ideal and as a goal of aspiration. The cue to understanding one of the main elements of social stratification in this society is given by the high