Summary of Bruce Levine's The Fall of the House of Dixie

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The planter aristocracy was made up of ten thousand families that owned fifty or more slaves apiece. These were the people who, as the former North Carolina slave William Yancey recalled, gave shape to the government and tone to the society.

#2The planter elite was made up of about fifty southern planters, who each owned at least five hundred slaves. The richest planter in North Carolina was Thomas P. Devereux, the father of Catherine Devereux Edmondston, who owned more than one thousand people.

#3 The southern states were extremely wealthy, and their planters had political power that extended far beyond their own states.

#4 The South’s laboring population was made up of four million slaves, who provided the core of the region’s economy. They worked in all sectors of the society and economy, from the small urban economy to the fields.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Aug 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350017182

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Insights on Bruce Levine's The Fall of the House of Dixie

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The planter aristocracy was made up of ten thousand families that owned fifty or more slaves apiece. These were the people who, as the former North Carolina slave William Yancey recalled, gave shape to the government and tone to the society.

#2

The planter elite was made up of about fifty southern planters, who each owned at least five hundred slaves. The richest planter in North Carolina was Thomas P. Devereux, the father of Catherine Devereux Edmondston, who owned more than one thousand people.

#3

The southern states were extremely wealthy, and their planters had political power that extended far beyond their own states.

#4

The South’s laboring population was made up of four million slaves, who provided the core of the region’s economy. They worked in all sectors of the society and economy, from the small urban economy to the fields.

#5

Some masters did offer modest rewards to encourage the hardest, fastest, and most continuous work from their employees. But they did not have enough confidence in the persuasive power of these incentives to depend on them alone.

#6

The centrality of slavery to the southern economy meant that masters were constantly worried about their slaves escaping and trying to get better treatment, as this would mean less profit.

#7

The slave owners who were also the fathers of the states of the lower South claimed to be paternalistic Christian masters, but in reality, they were simply removing families from each other as they sold off individual family members.

#8

There were many slave owners who were excellent family men, and they would constantly boast about it. They would say that there were hardly any cases of divorce, separation, or rape among their slaves.

#9

The solution, according to many southern men, was to introduce reforms that would protect slaves from gratuitous cruelty, while still keeping them enslaved. None of these changes would undermine slavery itself, they said.

#10

The sale of individual family members greatly increased what economists call labor mobility - the ease and cheapness with which masters acquired just the kind of human property they needed or wanted.

#11

Over time, more and more masters came to agree that slavery was a positive good. It