Frank Lawrence Owsley (January 20, 1890 – October 21, 1955) was a
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
historianAn historian is an individual who studies and writes about history, and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all events in time...
who taught at
Vanderbilt UniversityVanderbilt University is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the South...
for most of his career, where he specialized in southern history and was a member of the
Southern AgrariansThe Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...
.
Born in rural
AlabamaAlabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States of America. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its...
, he attended
Auburn UniversityAuburn University is a public university located in Auburn, Alabama, U.S. With more than 24,100 students and 1,200 faculty members, it is one of the largest universities in the state. Auburn was chartered on February 1, 1856, as the East Alabama Male College, a private liberal arts school...
for his undergraduate degree. He earned his Ph.D. in history at the
University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private, coeducational research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by oil magnate and benefactor John D...
in 1924 under the tutelage of William E. Dodd. Owsley specialized in Southern history, especially the antebellum and
Civil WarThe American Civil War , also known as the War Between the States and several other names, was a civil war in the United States of America. Eleven Southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America...
eras.
He argued in his dissertation
State Rights and the Confederacy (1925) that the Confederacy "died of states' rights".
Frank Lawrence Owsley (January 20, 1890 – October 21, 1955) was a
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
historianAn historian is an individual who studies and writes about history, and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all events in time...
who taught at
Vanderbilt UniversityVanderbilt University is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the South...
for most of his career, where he specialized in southern history and was a member of the
Southern AgrariansThe Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...
.
Life and career
Born in rural
AlabamaAlabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States of America. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its...
, he attended
Auburn UniversityAuburn University is a public university located in Auburn, Alabama, U.S. With more than 24,100 students and 1,200 faculty members, it is one of the largest universities in the state. Auburn was chartered on February 1, 1856, as the East Alabama Male College, a private liberal arts school...
for his undergraduate degree. He earned his Ph.D. in history at the
University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private, coeducational research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by oil magnate and benefactor John D...
in 1924 under the tutelage of William E. Dodd. Owsley specialized in Southern history, especially the antebellum and
Civil WarThe American Civil War , also known as the War Between the States and several other names, was a civil war in the United States of America. Eleven Southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America...
eras.
He argued in his dissertation
State Rights and the Confederacy (1925) that the Confederacy "died of states' rights". Owsley held that during the
Civil WarThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, key Southern governors resisted the appeals of the
Confederate governmentThe Confederate States of America was a separatist political entity existing between 1861 to 1865, established by eleven southern slave states of the United States of America, each of which had previously declared their secession from the United States...
for soldiers. His book
King Cotton Diplomacy (1931) is a study of Confederate diplomacy.
As an active member of the
Southern AgrariansThe Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...
group based in
NashvilleNashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is the second most populous city in the state after Memphis. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state...
, Owsley contributed "The Irrepressible Conflict" to the manifesto
I'll Take My Stand (1930). He lashed out at the North for what he alleged were attempts to dominate the South spiritually and economically. In "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" (the
American Review [1933]: 257–85), he criticized northern race reformers as the "grandchildren of abolitionists and reconstructionists." He announced that the South was white man's country and that blacks must accommodate that reality. Serving as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1940, Owsley castigated the North for assuming its people and thinking represented the entire nation, and for violating what he called "the comity of section".
After 1940, Owsley and his wife Harriet pioneered what came to be called the "new social history". They studied the historical demography of the South and social mobility and produced a history called
Plain Folk of the Old South. Historian Vernon Burton described it as "one of the most influential works on Southern history ever written." The Owsleys culled data from federal census returns, tax and trial records, and local government documents and wills. In
Plain Folk, they argued that Southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role. The religion, language, and culture of white common people created a democratic "plain folk" society, Owsley argued.
Owsley's work
Plain Folk of the Old South (1949) was an answer to opponents' emphasis on the dominance of the planter class' social and political control of the South. Owsley instead depicted a complex social structure in the South, one that featured a large middle class of yeoman farmers, and not just wealthy planters and poor whites. He argued that the South was devoted to republican values generally and was not locked into race and slavery. Owsley believed the Civil War's causes were rooted in both North and South.
In rejecting the
Lost Cause of the ConfederacyThe Lost Cause is the name commonly given to a literary and intellectual movement that sought to reconcile the traditional white society of the Southern United States to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the Civil War of 1861–1865...
and the New South's romantic legends, Owsley sought to uncover a "real" South, what he called the plain folk. He characterized the postwar South as made up of a broad class of yeoman farmers, between poor blacks, many of whom were sharecroppers in a kind of debt bondage, and poor whites at one end, and large plantation owners at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. Owsley asserted that the real South was
liberalLiberalism is the belief in the importance of individual freedom. This belief is widely accepted today throughout the world, and was recognized as an important value by many philosophers throughout history...
, American, and
JeffersonianJeffersonian democracy is the set of political goals that were named after Thomas Jefferson. It dominated American politics in the years 1800-1820s. It is contrasted with Jacksonian democracy, which dominated the next political era...
, not
radicalIn political science, the terms political radicalism and radicalism denote radical political principles. Derived from the Latin radix , the denotation of radical has changed since its eighteenth-century coinage to comprehend the entire political spectrum — yet retains the “change at the root”...
or
reactionaryReactionary refers to any political or social movement or ideology that seeks a return to a previous state . The term originated in the French Revolution, to denote the counter-revolutionaries who wanted to restore the real or imagined conditions of the monarchical Ancien Régime...
.
Critics suggested Owsley was a reactionary defender of the Confederacy. They said he was attempting to rewrite the past to preserve white Southern culture. [Wood (2003)]
Critics said he overemphasized the size of the Southern landholding middle class, while excluding the large class of poor white southerners who owned neither land nor slaves. Further, they suggested Owsley's theory assumed too much commonality in shared economic interests united Southern farmers. They believed that he did not fully assess the vast difference between the planters' commercial agriculture and the yeoman's subsistence farming. When the planter Democratic elite regained power in the late 19th century, they passed new constitutions and laws that made voter registration and elections more difficult. These actions effectively disfranchised all blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites. Only the elite and some of the yeoman farmers were qualified to vote.
At
Vanderbilt UniversityVanderbilt University is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the South...
(1920–49), Owsley directed nearly 40 Ph.D. dissertations and was a popular teacher of undergraduates. In 1949 he went to the
University of AlabamaThe University of Alabama is a public coeducational university located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA. Founded in 1831, UA is the flagship university of the University of Alabama System. Within Alabama, it is often called "the Capstone"...
to build its history program. Reacting to attacks by critics of Southern
segregationRacial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the racial segregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines...
, Owsley tried to refute what he saw as their misunderstanding of the true South. He regarded the future of American civilization as dependent on the survival of southern regionalism.
The
Southern AgrariansThe Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...
in the 20th century espoused values which they saw being overtaken by the industrialism and modernism that had begun to influence the South. According to Owsley, the position of the South vis-à-vis the North was created not by slavery, the dominance of
cottonCotton is a soft, staple fiber that grows in a form known as a boll around the seeds of the cotton plant, a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, India and Africa. The fiber most often is spun into yarn or thread and used to make a soft,...
and agriculture, or
states' rightsStates' rights in U.S. politics and constitutional law refers to the rights and political powers that U.S. states possess in relation to the federal government, as guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights.-Background:...
, but by the two regions' misunderstanding of each other.
Primary sources
- Owsley, Harriet Chappell and Owsley, Frank Lawrence. Frank Lawrence Owsley, Historian of the Old South. A Memoir with Letters and Writings of Frank Owsley (1990).
Books and articles by Owsley
- "Local Defense and the Downfall of the Confederacy", Mississippi Valley Historical Review 11 (Mar. 1925): 492–525, in JSTOR
- "The Confederacy and King Cotton: A Study in Economic Coercion", North Carolina Historical Review 6 (Oct. 1929): 371–97;
- with Harriet C. Owsley, "The Economic Basis of Society in the Late Ante-Bellum South", Journal of Southern History 6 (Feb. 1940): 24–25, in JSTOR
- with Harriet C. Owsley, "The Pattern of Migration and Settlement on the Southern Frontier", Journal of Southern History 11 (May 1945): 147–76 in JSTOR.
See also
- Plain Folk of the Old South
The Plain Folk of the Old South is the title of a history by Frank Lawrence Owsley, one of the Southern Agrarians. In it he used statistical data to analyze the make-up of southern society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought...
- Southern Agrarians
The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...
- Owsley Family Historical Society website