The Role Of Social Stratification In Southern Society

Political Culture and the social stratification in southern society created a solidarity among Southerners. Southern unity was hinged on the similarity between their ideals in government and the ways they viewed their society. Yet, as evidenced by the nullification crisis during the Jackson Administration, South Carolina failed to turn the gears toward secession. Although passionately pro slavery, and content with status-quo in their plantation society, staunch disunionists failed to convince the southern majority of the practicality of nullification. Even as late as the Nashville Convention in 1850, Southern politicians couldn’t gain unanimous support in leaving the union. (224) Instead, many southerners preferred the of compromise. Ultimately,
An element in the creation of a united southern solidarity, was the shaping of a struggle with anti-slavery and slavery factions into a conflict of southern interests vs. northern interests. Leading up the eventual war, abolitionists provided the perfect foundation for this argument. Promoting the idea that abolitionists were taking “control of the pulpit, of the schools… and the press,” in the 1830s Calhoun and other southern radicals wanted to frame the North as wholly abolitionist, to “engineer proslavery solidarity.” (118) Although this was far from the truth, this narrative would continue to resurface until the eventual birth of the confederacy. Eventually, by 1850, many southern voters elected politicians more inclined to take on the “abolitionist” North. This was evidenced in a North Carolina congressman Thomas L. Clingman. In 1845, he waged a campaign as a pragmatic Southern Whig, who was labeled soft, running as a moderate. He would learn from this mistake, and would run again in
Early in the 19th century churches began to divide on the principle of slavery. (108) Southern churches “rallied” in the defense of slavery. Ministries compared the idea of abolition with “heresy.” Furthermore, Southern churches found justification in biblical verses. (109) This led to, for Presbyterians, a division between and “Old” and “New School.” While New School Presbyterianism “promoted…man’s own agency to overcome sin,” the Old School concentrated in the South maintained the New School was “poisonous.” This idea of sectional divide fed the forces of southern solidarity and helped propel the southern states that much closer to