Dissertation Information for James David Miller NAME: - James David Miller
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1996)
ADVISORS: - James L Roark
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Dan T. Carter - Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: South by Southwest: Planter emigration and elite ideology in the Deep South, 1815-1861
Abstract: This dissertation examines the debate surrounding the emigration of elite Southerners from Georgia and South Carolina to the Southwest in the years between 1815 and 1861. In those years, thousands of planters formed a unique emigrant group in American history. A slaveholding, landholding elite, the South's leading citizens uprooted themselves from their communities and headed for their society's borderlands with a frequency and intensity unmatched by any comparable class.
A phenomenon of such singularity and significance preoccupied many elite Southerners, generating a great deal of interest and discussion among movers and prospective movers, as well as among those who stayed behind. While many wondered what emigration could do for them as individuals or households, others engaged in a public debate as to what emigration said about them as a class and as a society. This multi-layered debate surrounding the personal and social, spiritual and ideological, meanings of emigration, is the subject of this work.
In exploring what planter mobility reveals about planter character and culture this dissertation blends analysis of both public and private responses to emigration and, in doing so, illuminate the ways in which elite southerners themselves understood the connections between emigration as private conduct and as a public phenomenon. In bringing together these two "spheres" of inquiry the study explores the diverse geographical, cultural, and intellectual meanings that elite southerners gave to their private and public journeys and what they reveal about their broader attitudes regarding the people and places of slaveholding society. An examination of relations of family and individual, blood and business, slavery and freedom, as they relate to the slaveholders' westward movement suggests what the planters' progress across the continent reveals about their capacity, as a unique modern conservative class, to reconcile the dual necessities of high geographic mobility and stable social order. To track the continuities and changes of elite Southerners' private and public perceptions of their society's geographical transformation is also to follow the complex, often crooked, intellectual and spiritual paths that paralleled that transformation and eventually converged with it to create the mature plantation society of the American South.
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MPACT Scores for James David Miller A = 0
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calculated 2008-04-01 00:00:21
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