University of Alabama in Huntsville Job Talk (Spring 1997)
Thank you for inviting me. I’m happy to have an opportunity to visit the University of Alabama in Huntsville and to share some of my thoughts on teaching and research with you.
Today I’m to give you a brief 25 minute description of my research as I might present it to a class of incoming freshmen, although with the limited time I won’t give as many examples or stop to define terms like staple crop in the way in which I would with an actual class.
I’ve worked on several different things, from fleshing out the economic ideas and behavior of 17th-century Englishmen in England and Virginia, to why dueling became so popular in the South after the Revolutionary War. Rather than focus on one of these projects in detail, I will address what they all share. They all challenge in some way a narrative that historians have been telling for a long time about the South before the Civil War. Historians have been doing a lot of excellent work of late to improve our understanding of the social, economic, and cultural history of the early American South but my findings suggest there is still a lot of work left to do.
Let me sum up this storyline for you. Once upon a time in the early 1600s, times were pretty bad in England. A bunch of younger sons of English merchants heard about the opportunity to get rich quick in Virginia growing tobacco and decided to go there. Now these planters were a tough, unsentimental, quick-tempered, and crudely ambitious lot. They were aggressive in whatever they did, whether it had to do with planting tobacco, gambling, drinking, horse racing, or whatever. If you looked at them the wrong way or said a disparaging word, so the storyline goes, they would knock you aside the head.
But mostly they wanted to make as much money as they could by growing as much tobacco as they could as fast as they could. Of course what they needed most were workers who they could drive. They couldn’t get Native Americans to work for them, so they imported a lot of young men and boys (and a few girls) from England. These were the indentured servants who were willing to sacrifice their freedom for a few years to escape poverty and for the opportunity to enrich themselves (they hoped) after they earned their freedom. But when times got better in England in the late 1600s and workers no longer wanted to come to Virginia, the planters, still needing workers that they could drive, imported enslaved people from Africa.
As the story goes, the switch to African slavery transformed Virginia society. Small farmers, unable to compete with slaves in the production of tobacco, were driven to the frontier, where they turned to self-sufficient farming. At the same time planters with lots of slaves got so wealthy that they started living like feudal lords on their great estates, all the while retaining their earlier commercially-oriented, hard-working spirit. Although the lower classes continued their rough-and-tumble ways of fighting on the frontier, the great planters, especially after contact with British and French officers during the Revolutionary War, switched to the more refined combat of dueling.
This same cycle of transformation, so the story goes, repeated itself over and over along the moving frontier as these Virginians and their descendants moved south and west after the American Revolution, as the frontier extended first to the Carolinas and Georgia, Kentucky and Tennesse, through Alabama and Mississippi, and out to Missouri and Texas. The more entrepreneurial of the yeomen and planters, facing rough times in the older settled regions, moved to the frontier where they could pursue their goal of making as much money as they could as fast as they could using whatever means necessary. The road to wealth meant, as it had for earlier Virginians, using slave labor to grow some sort of staple crop‑-whether it was hemp, sugar cane, or cotton‑-rolling over all their profits to acquire ever more land and ever more slaves so they could produce more and more. Over time these settlers acquired enough wealth to take on aristocratic airs, moving out of their ramshackle houses into those lovely antebellum mansions, challenging each other to duels, while the poorer yeomen farmers were pushed up into the mountains or off to the latest frontier.
There are other storylines I could give you: the South from the enslaved people’s perspective, the South from the perspective of white women, the one about the coming of the Civil War, but this one, about the origins of the Virginia and Southern aristocracy, has been the focus of my research.
In my research efforts, I have been nibbling away at the foundations of this narrative. Let me begin with 17th-century Virginia, the subject of one of my major projects. Historians believe that planters were the ultimate in industrious maximizers‑-taking advantage of every reasonable opportunity to maximize income. But in fact, these planters were anything but industrious maximizers. This becomes clear when we see the way planters responded to changes in tobacco prices. A standard economic supply-demand diagram would suggest planters should have grown more tobacco when tobacco prices rose. But in fact when prices rose these Virginia planters actually grew less. They only grew more when tobacco prices fell.
A lot of quantitative and qualitative evidence shows that tobacco productivity rose during the seventeenth century while tobacco prices were falling. But to analyze the data well I had to do what statisticians call multiple regression analysis. And the result is clear. The lower the price the more they raised. The higher the price the less they raised.
For those of you who wondered whether planters might not have purchased more servants or slaves when prices rose, I can tell you that they actually reduced their demand for labor (the price they were willing to pay for a servant) when tobacco prices rose. When prices fell they increased their demand for labor.
Now things would have been better for them if they had had another staple like wheat. Then they could have switched to wheat when tobacco prices dropped and switched back to tobacco when tobacco prices rose. And that’s undoubtedly what they would have done if they had the choice. But there wasn’t a choice because they couldn’t find another staple in the 1600s. Tobacco dominated every aspect of Virginia life. Tobacco was even used as money. Although Virginians throughout the 1600s would curse the way they had to depend on tobacco and would dream of a more balanced economy with alternative staples, they couldn’t find another feasible staple until wheat became a practical cash crop in the late 1700s.
These findings turn on its head the view of most historians that early Virginians were industrious maximizers. But how should we understand such behavior? For people reared to believe in a work ethic and rational economic behavior this sounds perverse. Were these planters lazy? Economically backward? Somehow different than later Americans? I don’t think so. Actually they were establishing a pattern still obvious today. There are a lot of studies that show that modern farmers, modern business firms, and people in general tend to knuckle down only when the pressure is on. And when the pressure is off, do they continue to knuckle down? No, they take it easy, slack off a little bit, enjoy life.
Indeed, I have found a vast literature that shows that people at all times and places respond to rising wages with reduced labor and respond to falling wages with increased labor, what economists call a backward-sloping supply curve of labor. For example, what happened in the United States as wages rose through the greater part of the 20th century? Americans worked fewer hours per day, [pause] fewer days per week, [pause] started work at an older age, [pause] retired younger, [pause] and took more holidays and longer vacations, again all while wages were steadily rising. Or in the life experience of many of us, in the last couple of decades, as wages have stagnated or fallen, you see both parents working, moonlighting, and searching for other ways to increase their incomes.
Virginians in the late 1600s had a lot in common with Americans facing hard times today. Farmers and planters in the late 1600s experienced a tremendous cost-price squeeze as tobacco prices bottomed out. They responded by driving themselves, their families, and their servants to increase tobacco production, [pause] by importing more indentured servants, [pause] by cutting back on imports, [pause] by increasing production of household manufactures, [pause] by diversifying their crops, [pause] by undertaking new income-producing enterprises, [pause] by migrating to other colonies or back to England, [pause] by getting married later, [pause] by searching for more efficient production and transportation techniques, [pause] and, most significantly for the course of American history, by switching from English indentured servants to enslaved Africans. Even though some larger planters had earlier found that slave labor could be more profitable than servants, most planters resisted the switch to the slave system because they were far more familiar and comfortable with English servants. It wasn’t until the depression of the 1690s that the great bulk of planters overcame their resistance to enslaved labor.
There is another equally intriguing part of the traditional storyline about the South before the Civil War that is the focus of much of my latest research. If seventeenth-century Virginians were anything but industrious maximizers, they were also hardly the unprincipled bunch of violent frontiersmen that most historians have made them out to be. They certainly didn’t think of themselves in that way. Indeed their language was typical of the English middle classes, emphasizing powerful notions of correct conduct that they called “gentility,” the way an English gentleman should behave. They believed that an English gentleman by definition was a servant of the community and had to place the common good above any narrow self-interest. Over and over again they would justify their behavior in terms of benefiting the common good. They could be quite cynical at times about how everybody else was not living up to such high ideals. There could also be a lot of argument over what the common good was and who was going to define it. But that did not seem to weaken their great faith in the ideal of gentility.
A study of way that these early Virginians settled their disputes provides a very concrete example of this ideal of gentility in action and demonstrates that they were not violent in the way that historians have made them out to be. The English middle classes condemned people who too readily turned to violence to defend their honor (or reputation) or settle their disputes, an idea they associated with the Dark Ages. They saw such violence as a threat to public order and thus contrary to the common good. Although dueling had come to be popular among the English aristocracy in the 1600s, anybody who sent a challenge in Virginia was dragged into court and charged with disturbing the peace or contempt of authority. From a modern perspective they could be extremely cruel when it came to dealing with Native Americans, servants, slaves, and criminals. But what violence there was was strictly controlled by the colonial elite in order to maintain social and political stability. Indeed the number of trials of free persons for homicide in Virginia never amounted to more than two or three a year and for manslaughter no more than one or two a year over the colonial era.
Nevertheless sometime in the eighteenth century this “intensely governed society” began to fall apart. By mid-century there were reports out of the Virginia backcountry of gouged eyes and chewed-off ears in vicious rough-and-tumble contests. By the early nineteenth century dueling had become firmly entrenched among the Virginia elite. How had this transformation in attitudes toward honor violence come about?
One interesting possibility emerges out of the work of some historians that traces the roots of Southern violence not to the first English settlers but to the Scotch-Irish who began arriving in the Virginia backcountry in large numbers in the mid-1700s. These Scotch-Irish were the descendants of people from Scotland who had settled in Northern Ireland in the 1600s where they had long enjoyed a reputation for being quite violent. Although dueling was practically unknown in Northern Ireland, the no-holds-barred fighting which shocked so many colonial commentators was clearly imported by these Ulstermen. Nevertheless, by the 1760s, many of the English common folk in Virginia had adopted Scotch-Irish modes of fighting.
As for dueling, which didn’t really take off in Virginia until the 1790s, I don’t believe it was as direct an outcome of contact with British and French officers during the Revolutionary War as historians have supposed. It is hardly true that colonial Virginians didn’t know about dueling. The gentlemen of Virginia throughout the colonial era well understood the general rules of dueling although they may have been uncertain about the fine particulars. To answer the question of why there was such a proliferation of dueling after the American Revolution we would do best to focus on what numerous observers at the time saw as the root of the problem: public opinion. Sermons, essays, and private letters, critics and advocates of dueling alike, in the early 1800s noted the power of popular opinion to force even men opposed to dueling to engage in duels. The more difficult question, of course, is identifying the causes of this change in such a notoriously tricky subject as public opinion in this pre-Gallup poll era. For example, was this only the opinion of duelists, as some suggested, or the opinion of the ignorant masses imposing their notions of honor and violence on their politicians, as others suggested?
One of the ways that I am trying to study this change in public opinion is by focusing on college students, young Virginians who in the late 1700s and early 1800s attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, which was the place to go especially if you wanted to be a lawyer as so many of the youth of Virginia did after the American Revolution. Indeed I think at William and Mary in these years you can see played out in microcosm the forces that would play the greatest role in shaping what we think of as the Old South, the antebellum South. On the one hand, you had no-nonsense Scotch-Irish youth coming down from the backcountry asserting their right to a stake in Virginia society and not about to take any guff from the condescending sons of the traditional elite. On the other hand, you had these sons of the traditional elite who acted like a bunch of manic depressives, swinging wildly from one cause to the next, from avid support of the most democratic excesses of the French Revolution to the most conservative defense of slavery and the traditional order. There was a sort of romantic melancholy hanging over Williamsburg after the capital of Virginia was moved to Richmond, a melancholy that would eventually envelop the entire South, a longing for some earlier Golden Age when the best and brightest reigned in the land and everything was good. These were the first hints of the chivalric romanticism that would sweep Europe and America in the 1800s and accompany the introduction or revival of dueling in many parts of the world, including the College of William & Mary where students took up dueling with a vengeance in the early 1800s.
Well that’s a brief summary of a central thread in my past and present research. I’d like to reiterate that historians have been doing some wonderful work of late to improve our understanding of the social, economic, and cultural history of the early American South. But I believe there is still a lot of work left to do. I hope that my work can contribute to the effort.
Thank you very much.
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