A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern FrontierThis book is about the different ways that men and women experienced migration from the Southern seaboard to the antebellum Southern frontier. Based upon extensive research in planter family papers, Cashin studies how the sexes went to the frontier with diverging agendas: men tried to escape the family, while women tried to preserve it. On the frontier, men usually settled far from relatives, leaving women lonely and disoriented in a strange environment. As kinship networks broke down, sex roles changed, and relations between men and women became more inequitable. Migration also changed race relations, because many men abandoned paternalistic race relations and abused their slaves. However, many women continued to practice paternalism, and a few even sympathized with slaves as they never had before. Drawing on rich archival sources, Cashin examines the decision of families to migrate, the effects of migration on planter family life, and the way old ties were maintained and new ones formed. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 9 | |
The Migration Decision | 32 |
Journey and Settlement | 53 |
Family Kinship and Economics | 78 |
Illustrations | 90 |
Independence Sex Roles and Slavery | 99 |
Conclusion | 119 |
A Note on the Tables | 122 |
Tables | 126 |
Notes | 144 |
Index | 195 |
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Common terms and phrases
Alabama Ambler Ambler and Barbour Ann Archer antebellum Archer Armistead Burt Barbour Family Papers Baton Rouge Bayne and Gayle Blassingame brother Calhoun Carolina to Alabama Caroline Gordon Carolinian census Chapel Hill County cousin DuBose Duncan McLaurin February female Finley frontier G. F. Townes Gayle Diary Gayle Family Papers Gordon and Hackett H. H. Townes Hackett Family Papers Happy Valley Henry Hickerson History household husband Israel Pickens James January kinfolk Lenoir lived Louisiana State University male Marengo Mary Migrated from North Mississippi North Carolina Press nuclear Old South Plantation Mistress planter family planter women Polk Rachel Townes Rawick relatives S. A. Townes S.C. census Samuel Townes seaboard sex roles slaveholdings Slavery slaves social sons South Carolina Southern Southwest Tayloe Tenn Tennessee Texas Townes Family Papers Townes to G. F. Townes to Rachel University of South University Press Virginia visits William young
Popular passages
Page 155 - Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Herbert G.
Page 165 - Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience, in: The William and Mary Quarterly 41.
Page 146 - WJ Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 392; Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968), 592; Thomas L.