Southern History is Inexorably Tied to Race Relations

Any serious student of Southern history will ultimately reach the conclusion that its major events, movements, conflicts, and societal upheavals have one common element - the relationship between blacks and whites. When slavery came to the South, its agrarian society flourished with a large body of free labor, which had to be maintained and supervised. There were necessarily codes which regulated and restricted what slaves could and could not do. Colonial planters, for the most part, and most assuredly for practical reasons, cared for their slaves in order to keep them physically fit. Slaves, for their part, were wholly owned and dependent upon their masters and those whites employed to supervise them.

As tensions developed between the North and the South, the issue of slavery naturally erupted. Northerners, who had no need for a large agrarian work force, had no vested...