This social history examines the westward migration of US farming families from the southern seaboard in the years before the American Civil War.

In this text, Joan Cashin explores the profoundly different ways that planter men and women experienced migration from the Southern seaboard to the antebellum Southern frontier. Migration was a family venture in the sense that both men and women took part. But they went to the frontier with competing agendas: many men tried to escape the intricate kinship networks of the seaboard, while women worked to preserve them if they could. Drawing on archival sources and using the perspectives of several disciplines, Cashin explores the effects of the migration experience on sex roles, the nature of slavery, race relations and a variety of other issues.

This 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.

One of the most elegant mansions in Florida, Goodwood was built over a century ago and stands today as one of Tallahassee's grandest historical monuments. It was once the center of a thriving plantation founded by the Croom family of North Carolina, who in the 1820s sought to revive their fortunes in the newly opened Florida territory. William Warren Rogers and Erica R. Clark tell the story of this family and their legacy, shedding new light on many aspects of antebellum family life, plantation management, and race relations. They describe how brothers Hardy and Bryan Croom developed Goodwood Plantation to over four thousand acres with nearly two hundred slaves before Hardy and his family were killed in a shipwreck, and how a twenty-year lawsuit, complicated by questions of survivorship and residency, denied Bryan control of the estate. This meticulously detailed account, drawing extensively on family correspondence and court records, is a story of humaneness, hard work, and family values—but also of selfishness and greed—that reveals an intriguing chapter of southern history.

Between the generations of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, the culture of white Southerners experienced significant changes, including the establishment of a normative male identity that exuded confidence, independence, and power. Southern Sons, the first work in masculinity studies to concentrate on the early South, explores how young men of the southern gentry came of age between the 1790s and the 1820s. Lorri Glover examines how standards for manhood came about, how young men experienced them in the early South, and how those values transformed many American sons into southern nationalists who ultimately would conspire to tear apart the republic they had been raised to lead. This was the first generation of boys raised to conceive of themselves as Americans, as well as the first cohort of self-defined southern men. They grew up believing that the fate of the American experiment in self-government depended on their ability to put away personal predispositions and perform prescribed roles. Because men faced demanding gender norms, boys had to pass exacting tests of manhood—in education, refinement, courting, careers, and slave mastery. Only then could they join the ranks of the elite and claim power in society. Revealing the complex interplay of nationalism and regionalism in the lives of southern men, Glover brings new insight to the question of what led the South toward sectionalism and civil war.

Offers information on finding female ancestors in each state, highlighting those laws, both federal and state, that indicate when a woman could own real estate in her own name, devise a will, and enter into contracts. In addition, entries contain information on marriage and divorce law, immigration, citizenship, passports, suffrage, and slave manumission. Material is included on African American, Native American, and Asian American women, as well as patterns of European immigration. Period covered is from the 1600s to the outbreak of WWII. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

“A well-written, nicely comprehensive, and inclusive social history of Alabama before and immediately after statehood.”—H-AmIndian Alabama endured warfare, slave trading, squatting, and speculating on its path to becoming America’s twenty-second state, and Daniel S. Dupre brings its captivating frontier history to life in Alabama’s Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. Dupre’s vivid narrative begins when Hernando de Soto first led hundreds of armed Europeans into the region during the fall of 1540. Although this early invasion was defeated, Spain, France, and England would each vie for control over the area’s natural resources, struggling to conquer it with the same intensity and ferocity that the Native Americans showed in defending their homeland. Although early frontiersmen and Native Americans eventually established an uneasy truce, the region spiraled back into war in the nineteenth century, as the newly formed American nation demanded more and more land for settlers. Dupre captures the riveting saga of the forgotten struggles and savagery in Alabama’s—and America’s—frontier days. “An introduction to the interaction of European powers, the United States, and Indian tribes in Alabama and the Southeast.”—Western Historical Quarterly