Talk:Antebellum South

This page is so bad
I just pointed the redirect at Antebellum South to History of the Southern United States. "Plantation era" isn't even a proper noun, let alone the name of this period. The article needs to be moved to Antebellum South and rebuilt or simply be merged with History of the Southern United States and its economic and general information removed to articles like Plantation economy. — Llywelyn II   00:09, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

Sources for future article expansion
Spamming the bottom of the page with sources doesn't actually make up for not using them or incorporating them into the running text. Assuming the page continues to exist (ideally under a non-misleading title), kindly restore these only once they're being used to verify statements in the running text. — Llywelyn II   00:11, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Engerman, Stanley L. 2013. "Slavery and Its Consequences for the South in the Nineteenth Century." In The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, edited by Stanley L. Engerman, Robert E. Gallman, Stanley L. Engerman, and Robert E. Gallman, 329–366. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 * Feiner, Susan. 1982. "Factors, Bankers, and Masters: Class Relations in the Antebellum South." The Journal of Economic History 42 (01): 61–67. doi:10.1017/S0022050700026887.
 * Genovese, Eugene D. 1962. "The Significance of the Slave Plantation for Southern Economic Development." The Journal of Southern History 28 (4) (November 1): 422–437. doi:10.2307/2205407.
 * Genovese, Eugene, Roll, Jordan Roll (1975), the most important recent study.
 * Gray, L. C. 1930. "Economic Efficiency and Competitive Advantages of Slavery Under the Plantation System." Agricultural History 4 (2) (April 1): 31–47. doi:10.2307/3739358.
 * Lerner, Eugene M. 1959. "Southern Output and Agricultural Income, 1860-1880." Agricultural History 33 (3) (July 1): 117–125. doi:10.2307/3740892.
 * Niemi, Albert W. 1977. "Inequality in the Distribution of Slave Wealth: The Cotton South and Other Southern Agricultural Regions." The Journal of Economic History 37 (03): 747–754. doi:10.1017/S0022050700095462.
 * Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery; a Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime. (1918; reprint 1966)online at Project Gutenberg
 * Phillips, Ulrich B. Life and Labor in the Old South. (1929).
 * Phillips, Ulrich B. ed. Plantation and Frontier Documents, 1649-1863; Illustrative of Industrial History in the Colonial and Antebellum South: Collected from MSS. and Other Rare Sources. 2 Volumes. (1909).
 * Phillips, Ulrich B. "The Economic Cost of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt," Political Science Quarterly 20#2 (Jun., 1905), pp. 257–275 in JSTOR
 * Phillips, Ulrich B. "The Origin and Growth of the Southern Black Belts." American Historical Review, 11 (July, 1906): 798-816. in JSTOR
 * Phillips, Ulrich B. "The Decadence of the Plantation System." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 35 (January, 1910): 37-41. in JSTOR
 * Kenneth M. Stampp. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (1956)
 * Shalhope, Robert E. 1971. "Race, Class, Slavery, and the Antebellum Southern Mind." The Journal of Southern History 37 (4) (November 1): 557–574. doi:10.2307/2206546.

"psychological patterns"
What is this? It seems deliberately vague and subjective. Gourmet spackle (talk) 00:34, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Requested move 7 January 2018

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Move to Antebellum South instead, per consensus by many editors, and per SnowFire's request below. ToThAc (talk) 16:05, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Plantation era → Antebellum era – article lede uses Antebellum, specific term for the Southern United States, as there were also plantation eras in Hawaii and Ireland. *Note, "plantation" seems to get more Google hits, but their software also autocorrects the search box to "Antebellum" Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 08:14, 7 January 2018 (UTC) --Relisting. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:08, 15 January 2018 (UTC) --Relisting. ToThAc (talk) 19:34, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Oppose. "Antebellum" is merely Latin for "before the war", and without disambiguation to me here in England it first suggests Europe before the start of WWII in 1939. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 09:49, 7 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment. Maybe Antebellum South?  Or Antebellum Southern United States if people think that "South" isn't clear enough (I think it is, though, at least with "Antebellum" next to it)?  SnowFire (talk) 21:06, 7 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Support Antebellum South. If somehow that fails, will take other alternatives over suboptimal present title as well (Antebellum Southern United States, Antebellum era, etc.).  SnowFire (talk) 17:48, 18 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Support - This is the WP:COMMONNAME used to describe this period of American history. -- Netoholic @  10:22, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment – I think 's suggestion of Antebellum South is a good one. If that seems too brief, perhaps Antebellum era in the southern United States? Egsan Bacon (talk) 22:49, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
 * "Antebellum South" is a common phrase, but it means more like "The South during Antebellum". Since this article is about a historical era (which could potentially be written to include information about the Antebellum North, Antebellum West, etc.), its not a great fit.  -- Netoholic @  05:11, 10 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Support move to "Antebellum South". Rreagan007 (talk) 05:49, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment. See Talk:Antebellum for a history lesson. Hoping that we might finally establish a stable configuration in this topic area. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:07, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment. Culturally, "Old South" is used to describe the rural, agriculturally-based, pre-Civil War economy and society in the Southern United States. What came before the New South. But, "Old South" has a different geograpic definiton. I suppose Alabama is part of the "cultural Old South" but not part of the "geograpic Old South". – wbm1058 (talk) 18:18, 16 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Support almost any move from the current title to something with antebellum in it. Antebellum era works fine, and as this title already directs to this article, the ambiguity claim seems overblown.  If there is a move, some HISTMERGE might be in order since there was once another article at the target title (with a different scope).  —  AjaxSmack  02:46, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Right, moving over the top of Antebellum era seems a nonstarter to me. There are multiple cases of copy-paste content merging to and from multiple titles. The only way to "move" to Antebellum era while maintaining coherent page histories is with yet another copy-paste, unfortunately. A traditional move is only an option if we move to virgin territory (some title that doesn't hold significant content history). "Antebellum" is ambiguous to Europeans, which has been the cause of some of the ill-considered hasty copy-pastes of the past, in my opinion. Even in America, while the end of the antebellum era (the period before the war) is clearly defined by the start of the Civil War, the beginning of the "era" is less clearly defined. While nearly everyone would include the decades leading up to the war, say 1820–1860, would you say it started before the American Revolutionary War too? The recently created Template:Periods in US history says the era began in 1700. If you associate slavery with the era, then you might say the era started when slavery first started in the States. Note again that thanks to our European friends (French Revolutionary Wars), Revolutionary War is ambiguous. So, how about American antebellum era? A virgin title. Which allows for the era to begin before the United States became an independent nation. Which doesn't limit the scope to the South. "New York City and upstate textile mills did extensive business with the South during the [ [antebellum]] years." "New Bedford had a small but thriving African-American community during the [ [antebellum]] period." Actual quotes from Wikipedia articles. – wbm1058 (talk) 03:22, 17 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Move to Antebellum South, a WP:PRECISE and WP:RECOGNIZABLE enough phrase generally treated as a proper name.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:20, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, consensus is clearly trending to Antebellum South. This is a viable target as the page history of that title doesn't have any significant content. However, this does narrow the scope of the article to the American South. Antebellum United States has a broader scope, and was merged/redirected to here. That redirect needs to be re-merged/re-targeted to History of the United States, as History of the United States (1789–1849) and History of the United States (1849–1865) are each too limiting. The antebellum era in the US overlaps those two time periods. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:19, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Relisting comment: Please determine whether to move to the proposed title, Antebellum South, or simply Antebellum. Thanks! ToThAc (talk) 19:34, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Nobody has proposed "Antebellum" to be the title (and such a proposal would instantly fail as horrendously unclear and inaccurate). You misread Kintetsubuffalo's nom, he meant Antebellum vs. Plantation as the modifier for "era."  I think you can safely close this one for Antebellum South. SnowFire (talk) 15:52, 24 January 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Inaccurate characterizations?
The article as written seems to focus on the viewpoint that slavery was economically inefficient, largely citing the work of Phillips. However, this viewpoint is mostly discredited by modern scholars who generally contend that the plantation system was extremely profitable overall and that per-capita income among the "white" Southern population was the highest in the nation (though as pointed out, the wealth distribution was severely skewed). This fact should be borne more explicitly. One of the key facts of U.S. history (that sadly too few school children understand) is that the collapse of the South caused by the Civil War was a massive economic transformation from great wealth to extreme poverty, at least in many parts of the South. Again, the degree of transformation varied greatly by individual. But still it is something that deserves clarity.

It is also worth being more clear that part of what hurt the profitability of the plantation system before the Civil War was the ban on slave importation, which drove up slave prices. Part of the reason for the establishment of the Confederacy was to remove this bottleneck. Despite the common belief that the Confederacy was established based entirely on a moral principle (white supremacy), the reality is that (like the establishment of the United States itself) its establishment was really more economically motivated.

-- MC 141.131.2.3 (talk) 21:14, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

"Antebellum peiod" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Antebellum peiod. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Senator2029 “Talk”   16:16, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Four Sources - The earliest from 1958
Did someone in 1958 know something special about pre-1861 Southern United States. I really doubt it. This article makes Wikipedia look foolish.--SBohrman (talk) 17:42, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Photo Date?
There's a photo of a family of slaves in a field, with a caption giving the number of slaves in 1790. But photography didn't begin until 1825 or so. It seems to me we could come up with a better caption for the photograph. —MiguelMunoz (talk) 21:41, 13 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Gotchu. I changed the infobox from "Historical event" to "Historical era," added key events to it, and aligned the photo caption with the approximate year the it was taken. Also submitted the article to Articles for improvement so we can hopefully turbocharge the edits to this Level-5 Vital History article Sweetstache (talk) 23:46, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

Confusion of centuries
The 17th Century is the 1600s, the 18th Century is the 1700s and the 19th Century is the 1800s. The section under the heading “History” scrambles the timeline into inaccuracy. It jumps back and forth and puts events in the wrong centuries. 107.122.85.9 (talk) 07:55, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Article heavily focuses on slavery
The article almost entirely focuses on slavery with little to no mention of political events. There's also no mention in the body of the 'Key events' outlined in the infobox. This article seems very poorly weighted and needs some significant work. Willbb234 20:21, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Willbb234, Agreed! The article fails to address for instance, that the very term antebellum is a dog whistle for racism and revisionist history. — Jacona (talk) 00:16, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Frederick Law Olmsted’s writings on the Antebellum South
While it is widely known that Olmsted was a famous landscape architect (Central Park, NYC), before entering that field, he was a dedicated researcher and practitioner in farming techniques and agricultural science and also worked as a journalist. In the 1850s he was hired by the predecessor of the NY Times to go undercover into the South and write reports on southern life for the paper. He later compiled the reports into books, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), and later a condensation, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (1861). These books were widely read, including in Europe, and are considered easily some of the most important collections of observations and insightful comparative analysis of Antebellum South from a northerner’s perspective. See Frederick_Law_Olmsted. Wikipedians interested in the history of this era, not just the South, should consider the superb biography, Genius of Place by Justin Martin. Zatsugaku (talk) 05:33, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: The History of Sexuality
— Assignment last updated by Pensive.Shrimp (talk) 22:21, 18 November 2023 (UTC)