Family Values in the Old South

by Friend, Craig Thompson

• ISBN13: 9780813034188
• ISBN10: 0813034183
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-24
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Florida

Summary

"Will become a useful addition to our understanding of antebellum Southern families, especially in demonstrating their multiple forms, definitions, and functions."--Sally McMillen, Davidson College This collection of essays on family life in the nineteenth-century American South reevaluates the concept of family by looking at mourning practices, farming practices, tavern life, houses divided by politics, and interracial marriages. Individual essays examine cross-plantation marriages among slaves, white orphanages, childhood mortality, miscegenation and inheritance, domestic activities such as sewing, and same-sex relationships. Editors Craig Thompson Friend and Anya Jabour have collected work from a range of diverse and innovative historians. The volume uncovers more about Southern family life and values than we have previously known and raises new questions about how Southerners conceptualized family--from demographic structures, power relations, and gender roles, to the relationship of family to society. In three sections, these ten essays explore the definition of family in the nineteenth-century South, examine the economics of family life, both rural and urban, and ultimately answer the question "what did familymeanin the Old South?"

Author Biography

Craig Thompson Friend, associate professor of history at North Carolina State University, is the author of Along the Maysville Road and Kentucke's Frontiers, coeditor of Southern Manhood, editor of Southern Masculinity, and The Buzzel About Kentuck. Anya Jabour, professor of history at the University of Montana, is the author of Marriage in the Early Republic and Scarlett's Sisters, and editor of Major Problems in the History of American Families and Children.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. vii
Introduction: Families, Values, and Southern History	p. 1
Defining (and Defying) Southern Family Values	p. 17
"Every Thing but a Parents Love": Family Life in Orphan Asylums of the Lower Mississippi Valley	p. 19
"He come sometimes widout de pass": Rethinking Cross-Plantation Marriages and Enslaved Families in Antebellum South Carolina	p. 42
Little Eva's Last Breath: Childhood Death and Parental Mourning in "Our Family, White and Black"	p. 62
Female Families: Same-Sex Love in the Victorian South	p. 86
Measuring Families' Value	p. 109
Out of Whole Cloth? Sewing and Family in the Old South	p. 111
A Family Firm: The Marital and Business Partnership of Ann and Richard Archer	p. 134
Making a Home in Public: Domesticity, Authority, and Family in the Old South's Public Houses	p. 158
Family Values and Social Order	p. 187
Family Ties: Indian Countrymen, George Stinson, and Creek Sovereignty	p. 189
White Families and Political Culture in the Old South	p. 210
A View of a Will: Miscegenation, Inheritance, and Family in Civil War Era Charleston	p. 233
Contributors	p. 249
Index	p. 251
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