Antebellum South: A Case Study

lthough the magnitude of child abuse in the antebellum South is impossible to determine, historian Nell Irvin Painter has provided a useful way to approach the issue. She hypothesized that the rate of wife abuse in the Old South was probably not lower than the rate for contemporary households, roughly 25 percent.1 Similar reasoning would suggest that the rate of antebellum child maltreatment would have been not less than that of contemporary society, i.e., 12.1 of every 1,000 children suffered abuse.2 Yet, while this may seem a sensible first step in dealing with child abuse among slaveholders, it may not be the most pertinent approach. The Old South was a backward society. Over vast stretches of terrain, it was a wilderness. The South lagged