It's Not All Black and White

Our historical understanding of antebellum America is heavily colored by the war that brought that era of American history to a close. If you need some catching up, "antebellum" is Latin for "pre-war." The Civil War was...

(a) a disaster.
(b) a resolution.
(c) ...it's complicated.

If we look past the Latin definition of "antebellum," this American era was marked by the booming plantation and slavery-based economy in the South. And the subsequent destruction of that economy once the war was over and Reconstruction was under way. 

The people who lived through the antebellum period had no way of knowing that historians would later define their era by the war that ended it. They did, however, understand and appreciate the seriousness of the increasing sectional conflict dividing the country between the slave-labor, agricultural South and the "free labor," industrializing North.

Antebellum culture in America reflected the growing sectional crisis, at times seeking to pave over sectional differences and at other times making light of them.

• Congressmen pushed through a "gag rule" so that the difficult subject of slavery would simply be made taboo in the chambers of government.
• Playwrights invented "vernacular characters" that represented the Yankee of the North and the Cavalier of the South. These exaggerated representations of regional stereotypes enabled audiences to chuckle at the, uh, "idiosyncrasies" of each group.

Your basic textbook may tell you that the North was home to the good antislavery guys. But sometimes, the North and South had more in common than Northerners would be willing to admit.

While only Southerners enslaved Black people, white Americans from both North and South overwhelmingly embraced anti-Black racism. White people in the North rubbed burnt cork or coal on their faces to perform in "blackface," mimicking ludicrous stereotypes of African Americans to entertain each other.

Racist? Heck, yes.

But the popular form of entertainment was more complicated than that. The performances revealed how Northerners were simultaneously fascinated by Black people and derisive of them. Onstage mocking of Blacks provided relief for working-class whites' anxieties over their own social status as hourly wage laborers.

Makes video games as an outlet look not so bad, after all...

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

At the same time that racial tensions were brewing, economic, technological, and social changes in antebellum American society lent a hand in speeding 'em up. 

The innovations of the mass printing press made possible the first popular newspapers and advertisements, especially in the cities, and fueled an explosion of printed material. From women's sentimental novels to classic works of literature to...dun dun dun, inflammatory abolitionist manifestos.

Rapid communication made possible by the telegraph facilitated the advent of mass spectator sports. Today, we obsessively check the Lakers' game from Buffalo Wild Wings. Back then, men in saloons hundreds of miles from a horse race or boxing match could receive rapid updates on the progress and outcome.

On top of live stats, photography was a newfangled technology: the selfie of the antebellum period meant sending a self-portrait through the mail. People purchased pictures of their favorite celebrities, famous political leaders, and even erotic nudes. Photography also made possible the evidence of whipped and abused slaves, which folks could receive whether they wanted to or not.

With a nudge by improved communication, Andrew Jackson's administration was championed by patriotic rhetoric. On one hand, the common white man felt empowered to voice his political opinions. Political machines churned out parties, organized huge torchlight parades, and transformed political participation and democracy into a spectacle. And we had the highest voter turnouts in American history. 

On the other hand, Americans dealt with the rapidly changing conditions of the antebellum era by manifesting their hopes, their values, and their anxieties through their culture. And that included the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Death Before Dishonor: More Than A Slogan at a Tattoo Parlor

Dueling.

It probably seems like a quaint stereotype or a Hollywood cliché, but there was a time when a man was not a man if he failed to answer a challenge to a duel.

The culture of the nineteenth century—much more than today—deemed honor to be a matter of life and death.

If you were from an affluent family or were on the public stage, and you wanted to redeem your family name, your reputation, and the honor of your home against a public insult, you had to risk your life with swords or pistols.

Yikes.

An American president once had to be restrained from physically beating a man who tried to pull his nose. Seriously. Clearly antebellum America was a different place from the country we know today. But being the professionals we are here at Shmoop, we'll say that only by understanding its culture can we understand what daily experience was really like for people of the time.

Good answer, right?

They Did What Back Then?

At the same time, early manifestations of the America we know so well today were beginning to take shape throughout the period. Newspapers assumed, for the first time, the importance that they hopefully still maintain, and almost immediately, they began to exploit the sensational and tawdry stories about sex, violence, and murder for which some are still known.

Bustling cities gained more bustlers, creating a new urban culture that was shocking to the rural majority of the antebellum American population. The growth of these anonymous metropolitan centers of vice and materialism—as many perceived them—created a great deal of anxiety throughout the period.

The large crowds amassing in America's cities craved entertainment and increasingly possessed disposable income from their wage labor. Magazines, books, liquor, prostitutes, the theater, mass sporting events that charged admission: they bought it all.

In many ways, these pastimes don't seem all that different from our own, but two centuries ago it was perfectly acceptable for a white audience to seek out amusement from white actors covered in black makeup, mocking Black people onstage.

Blackface minstrelsy seems as bizarre today as a president beating a man for pulling his nose. If you want to understand antebellum American culture, from the familiar to the outlandish, read on.