Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders

This pathbreaking social history of the slaveholding South marks a turn in our understanding of antebellum America and the coming of the Civil War. Oakes's bracing analysis breaks the myth that slaveholders were a paternalistic aristocracy dedicated to the values of honor, race, and section. Instead they emerge as having much in common with their entrepreneurial counterparts in the North: they were committed to free-market commercialism and political democracy for white males. The Civil War was not an inevitable conflict between civilizations on different paths but the crack-up of a single system, the result of people and events.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 01/17/1998
ISBN: 9780393317053
Pages: 307
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 1.00d