Lindbeck, John

Description

This dissertation focuses on the antebellum lower Mississippi Valley, a place in which white Americans identified the commercial progress of the slave-based cotton kingdom with the manifestation of Gods will. It reconciles the two different Souths described by recent historians of slavery and capitalism and scholars of antebellum southern evangelicalism. The dissertation begins with the early years of white settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley, when the connection between commercial prosperity and Gods providence was not clear. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, these twin ideals merged as one. In those decades, churches and ministers provided stable centers of faith and confidence in the years of high prices for land, cotton, and slaves. Despite their faith in God, however, white southerners doubts about the market and roving peddlers often morphed into doubts about the intentions of itinerant preachers. Still, evangelical denominations played a crucial role in providing reliable credit networks when few methods of examining the character of distant planters and merchants existed. With confidence in their economic system restored in the 1840s, evangelical slaveholders began to connect plantation efficiency with Gods will. They believed that maximizing productivity, whether through violence or prizes for enslaved people, increased prosperity and aided in the spread of the Gospel. In this way, white southerners in the lower Mississippi Valley believed race-based slavery was a holy institution, not just for its supposedly Biblical endorsement, but for its economic advantages over free labor. Spreading Gods kingdom necessitated driving slaves harder. By the 1850s evangelicals in...

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