In the series of posts that I'm doing on the paper Stephen Davis and I have up on ssrn about wills and trusts in the old South, I thought that I'd start by talking a little bit about the county where we centered our empirical work: Greene County, Alabama. We're talking about a southern place--a place of much beauty and mystery ... and, of course, much brutalization and misery, too.
I should mention up front that there's a fantastic book on Greensboro (which is now the county seat of Hale County--but in the antebellum era what is now Hale County was part of Greene County), by Guy Hubbs of Birmingham Southern College. Guy's book, Guarding Greensboro, is about a company of Confederate soldiers from Greensboro ("The Greensboro Guards"). The Guards existed for a couple of decades before the war, so Guy takes a long look at them and their surrounding community. It's a great book and if you're interested in how historians combine social history (based in such sources as census records and land and legal records and army records, too) and intellectual, cultural history, based in such sources as newspaper records and individual diaries and memoirs it's a terrific model for how to do that kind of history. We were able to base a lot on Guy's description of the Greensboro community.
Among the gems we learned from Guy is that there was at least one prominent antislavery person (John Hartwell Cocke) in operation in Greene County--who set up a plantation with the idea of allowing the enslaved humans working on it to run the plantation. The hope was that this would be an experiment in freedom. But much, much more common was the brutality associated with the plantations of the deep South. For instance, we learned from Loren Schweninger's wonderful project on petitions regarding slavery about a lawsuit among heirs to one fortune of a Greene County planter in this period. Those haunting records detail the extraordinary brutality on the plantation.
But beyond that, it's possible to construct something of the intellectual culture of Greene County. Remember, this is a place that was ruled by Native Americans until the early 1800s. In fact, the Indian Mounds at Moundville, Alabama--one of my favorite places on earth--still stand as testimony to their world. But by the early 1830s, Greene County was a place producing extraordinary wealth--and it was a world where those at the top of pyramid were enamored of the ideas of technological and economic progress. This was the era of the market revolution and the wealthy of Greene County embraced that revolution.
They used all the new technologies they could lay their hands on: technology for drilling deep wells, the steam engine for harvesting crops and for moving up the Black Warrior River from the Gulf. I would also add that they used the technology of law, including trusts, to accomplish their purposes. And they started schools to promote those ideas--the grandly titled Southern University was founded there in the late 1850s. I would love--love--to know more about the curriculum there. One might gage a little bit of the culture from statements made by Joseph Wright Taylor (editor of the newspaper the Eutaw Whig and later a member of the board of trustees of Southern University) at the University of Alabama in 1848. Taylor justified the Southern universities for their role in defending slavery. “The University is useful in enabling the State to protect the peculiar rights and institutions which belong to it, as one of the Plantation States of the South,” Taylor said.
Even before Southern University opened, Greensboro was home to a female seminary and elsewhere in Greene County was Henry Tutwiler's Green Springs Academy. (The Eutaw Female Seminary, constructed about 1840, is pictured at right.) Little is known about Green Springs Academy, though Tutwiler was a most important figure--early on trained at the University of Virginia and an advocate for the American Colonization Society, he left the University of Alabama in the mid-1830s, as it moved from the Enlightenment ideas of Jefferson towards the embrace of a proslavery zealotry of John C. Calhoun. We know little of the female seminary, though we do have one published essay by its president, C.F. Sturgis,on the duties of masters towards slaves. It never ceases to surprise me how much we can learn about the past by looking at the writings of long-dead people. People in Greene County were engaged in the intellectual defense of slavery, as well as the use of the system of slavery. One source of records that has been used little, however, are the probate office records--the wills and probate records they contain. And to that I'll turn shortly.
The top image is of the Southern University in Greensboro, from the Library of Congress' Historic Buildings Survey. Mighty impressive for a building constructed in the 1850s, isn't it? (The building, which housed the Greensboro Academy from 1965 to 1973, was destroyed by a tornado in 1973.) The bottom image of the Eutaw Female Seminary is also from the LOC's website; it's still in Eutaw; I think it's now a public building.
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