Justifying Slavery in the Old South: An Interview with Lacy K. Ford

Lacy K. Ford is chair of the history department and professor of history at the University of South Carolina. A leading authority on the 19th-century South, Ford has authored a number of books and articles on slavery, sectionalism, economic history, and politics in antebellum America. His Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (Oxford University Press, 1988) won the Southern Historical Association's Francis Butler Simkins Book Prize.

In 2009 Oxford University Press published his incisive study Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South. In it Ford examines the white South's tormented justification of slavery and the debates that raged on the matter. Using newspapers, legislative records, pamphlets, government documents, and speeches, Ford recounts the diverse white southern reactions to the slave system. Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens interviewed Ford in late 2009 about his work on the 19th-century South, slavery, and race relations in America.

Randall Stephens:

What got you interested in how white Southerners perceived slavery?

Lacy K. Ford:

When I first got interested in southern history in graduate school, I wondered what white yeomen farmers thought about slavery and secession. Why did so many of them support secession? Over time I turned to the broader question of how white Southerners of all stripes tried to justify slavery.

Stephens:

Did white Southerners see race as the central social distinction?

Ford:

I think that prior to the 1830s many prominent Southerners would have said something other than race. But with the rise of Jacksonian Democracy, they began to see race as the easiest way to justify democracy for whites only. In the 1790s several aspects of a person's identity mattered with respect to social distinction, and certainly race was an important one. By the 1830s it was the only marker that whites believed could be admitted to in public. One might harbor all manner of class snobbery privately, yet never articulate it in public.

Stephens:

It seems that there's such a large gap between our era and that of the antebellum South. Were you struck by this as you worked on this book?

Ford:

I was struck by the fact that when I first became a historian, some of the arguments that I detail in my book were still used—with appropriate adjustments—by white Southerners to criticize the civil rights movement. There were very strong echoes of the antebellum South in the 1970s that I and many others could identify. Thirty years later those echoes are much fainter.

Undergraduates often say to me: "Slaveholders were wrong, they were brutal, they were despicable human beings. Why would you want to study them?" The answer is that there are always malevolent forces at work in society, and trying to understand them is what historians need to do. It's not enough to denounce slaveholders, you have to try to understand them. It doesn't have to be a sympathetic understanding, but you have to try to understand them. We wouldn't give, I suppose, Saddam Hussein a sympathetic understanding, but if we had understood him better, we might have made fewer mistakes in dealing with him.

An illustration from E. Benjamin Andrews, History of the United States from the Earliest Discovery of America to the Present Day, Vol. III (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895).

The world of the Old South was not as different from ours as you might think. The reactions of white Southerners to the Denmark Vesey scare, Nat Turner's rebellion, and abolitionist pamphlets were a lot like Americans' reactions to 9/11. The public was willing to go along with anything its political leaders said for a year or two. The threat of terror was so great that Americans did things they had never done before. Lock people up at Guantanamo Bay, have the mail looked at—these were very sharp departures from our past. Our fears are easily played upon, and that doesn't change. Don't assume that 21st-century Americans are that much different from Charlestonians of the 1820s...