num_pages: 334
description: "A sweeping and spirited history of Southern slaveholders."―David Herbert Donald 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 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.
language: English
title: The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
titlecomplete: The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
genres: 19th Century, History, American History, Race, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 91
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company