Glossary

artisans, mechanics

Skilled craftsmen, known as artisans or mechanics, performed most manufacturing in small towns and larger cities until the 1820s. This system of labor was disrupted by the division and specialization of labor in many industries between 1790 and 1850 .

cavalier

The popular nineteenth-century stereotype of the Southerner was that of a cavalier, who was alleged to be violently sensitive to insult, indifferent to money, and preoccupied by honor.

Commonwealth v. Hunt

In this landmark case in 1842, the Massachusetts supreme court established a precedent by recognizing the right of unions to exist and by restricting the use of the criminal conspiracy doctrine against unions that used strikes to obtain wages higher than those set by custom.

George Fitzhugh

Fitzhugh was one of the southern writers who held that slavery was a beneficent institution that permitted the development of an upper class devoted to high intellectual pursuits. They believed that the South's hierarchical, organic society was superior to the individualistic, materialistic civilization of the North.

Mason-Dixon line

By 1860 most Americans believed that the Mason-Dixon line divided the nation into two distinctive cultures: a commercial North and an agrarian South. Each civilization was believed to be operating according to entirely different sets of values and to have its own manners, habits, customs, principles, and ways of thinking.

plantation legend

Nineteenth-century popular writers from both North and South created an image of the South known as the "plantation legend." The legend envisioned the South as a land of aristocratic planters, beautiful Southern belles, poor white trash, faithful black household servants, and superstitious fieldhands.

Samuel Slater

Slater was an English textile worker who immigrated to Rhode Island to become the manager of the first textile mill in the United States. The opening of the mill, built by Moses Brown, a Providence merchant, marked the beginning of the movement to consolidate manufacturing operations under a single roof.

Southern nationalists

These "nationalists" sought to free their region from cultural, economic, and religious dependence on the North. They hoped to preserve the cultural and intellectual distinctiveness of the South and to insulate it from the commercial and industrial values of the North.

turn-out

In the early nineteenth century a labor strike was called a "turn-out" or "stand-out."

wage slavery

As part of the process of forming a distinctive Southern national identity in the 1840s, a growing number of Southern ministers, journalists, and politicians denounced the North's form as capitalism, in which laborers worked for wages, as "wage slavery." In their view, wage slavery was worse than actual slavery.

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