The ruling race : a history of American slaveholders
This pathbreaking social history of the slaveholding South marks a turn in our understanding of antebellum America and the coming of the Civil War. Oakes's bracing analysis breaks the myth that slaveholders were a paternalistic aristocracy dedicated to the values of honor, race, and section. Instead they emerge as having much in common with their entrepreneurial counterparts in the North: they were committed to free-market commercialism and political democracy for white males. The Civil War was not an inevitable conflict between civilizations on different paths but the crack-up of a single system, the result of people and events
1 online resource (xix, 307 pages)
9780307828132, 9781299450790, 0307828131, 1299450792
563151406
Electronic reproduction, [Place of publication not identified], HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010