The Rhetoric of Authority: The Making of Social Values in Planter Family Correspondence

Abstract

The southern planter family has lately emerged as central to our understanding of how personal life nourished the social authority of that powerful class. We have new visions of the ethic of honor, the role of the plantation mistress, the definition of gender, and how all of these were rooted in planters' expectations of family and family relationships. But as more comes to light, new interpretive problems arise about how planters actually shaped family relationships into a domestic sphere that, often uneasily, united private life and public power. In what specific ways, for instance, did planter family members create the personal values that supported their social dominance during the antebellum years, and how may those ways be seen as a kind of work similar to their other efforts to dominate southern society? What may we learn about the conflicts in that work if we reconstruct the inner lives of families? This essay looks at the relationship between parents and adolescent children as one aspect of the planter family at work creating its domain. The primary aim is to cast light on a significant tension between authority and intimacy in this process and on the crucial role played by family letters. The tension was related to a change in elite southerners' understanding of the connection between personal traits and class authority. From the eighteenth century planters inherited an assumption that external signs -wealth, public prominence, and an air of control both marked and justified social leadership. In the nineteenth century planters sent their adolescent children to academies, expecting the schools to help them acquire the signs of class leadership. But academy life often led youths to prize personal expression more than patrician reserve and egalitarian, intimate friendships more than hierarchical, formal relationships. Thus youths came to expect that the expressive individuality and intimacy they had learned to value would enhance their authority as members of the South's ruling class. However, the reality was not so straightforward. As they wrote to their families young southerners of the planter class discovered a tension between their preferences for intimacy and the claims of master-class responsibility.