Antebellum Period Summary & Analysis

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What Do We Do with All This Change?

Much of antebellum culture can be understood as a response to the dynamic and rapidly changing social, political, and economic context of the nineteenth century.

Long before the Civil War, Americans were building the industrial infrastructure, the competitive marketplace, the urban spaces, and the transportation system that they would expand further and come to rely upon in the latter half of the century.

They were grappling with many changes: 

1. the emergence of mass media and the newspaper, which rapidly developed in the urban centers and became an influential source of information for a broad audience in a highly literate society
2. new canals, roads, and railroads meant Americans became more mobile, and those who traveled for new job opportunities or to strike it rich in the California gold country relied upon letter writing and the new technology of photography to keep in touch with their loved ones
3. the rapid growth of cities in a world where most people still lived in areas of 2,500 people or less, and knew all or most of their neighbors
4. the emergence of hourly wage work conducted in large factories regulated by clocks, where people had previously worked from home or in small shops and were apprenticed to a trade
5. Ongoing industrialization, primarily in the North, led to an increasing stratification of classes and a higher standard of living, especially for the middle class, who had fewer children on average than families from poorer backgrounds, and who began developing a culture centered around childcare and the home.

Above all, they continued to wrestle with the contradiction at the heart of the era: the existence of chattel slavery in a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

A seriously huge elephant in the room.

These sometimes subtle but significant developments in communication, transportation, entertainment, economy, and family structure during the nineteenth century all affected every aspect of people's daily lives, from their work to their leisure time.

So You Think You Can Dance Like That?

White men crafted a political culture of avid partisanship and active participation in campaigning and voting. As citizens of a democratic republic, Americans had long harbored a suspicion and dislike of aristocracy, and their populist tendencies only increased with the birth of party politics and increased class stratification.

A cultural appeal to anti-elitism took the form of blackface minstrelsy, where whites performed in blackface (black makeup), even on stages across the North. It (a) impersonated and ridiculed Black people, but (b) also gave whites a kind of release in the process.

In Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery - An Autobiography, he says, "Great men cultivate love and only little men cherish a spirit of hatred."

Shots fired, little white men.

This twisted sentiment also appeared in plays that praised the "noble savage," who white settlers were in the process of combating and, they hoped, eliminating from existence.

The "noble savage" was a sort of an idealized, abstracted embodiment of all Indians, or at least the "best" ones in the eyes of whites. This figure was a romanticized element of nostalgia for the indigenous roots of the nation, which most whites implicitly assumed were forever lost to the unstoppable spread of "civilization."

But the thousands of indigenous peoples across the nation were not so conveniently disposed of in the decades to come, and slavery was not going anywhere, either.

Just as these forms of entertainment masked underlying problems in American life, the vibrant political culture was just a spectacle that undermined a truly independent and informed voting public. The bourgeois—er, uh, cough-money-mongering-cough—emphasis on "sincerity" paradoxically revealed an increasingly prevalent issue of deception.

But while whites hid behind a falsified democracy with ridiculous stage acts, racial tensions continued to simmer. Antebellum Americans may not have known their era would be defined by the war that ended it, but we know how this chapter ends. And it's not pretty.