FAMILY, KINSHIP, AND MIGRATION IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH, 1810-1860 (WOMEN, MASCULINITY, CHILD-REARING, SEX-ROLES, WESTWARD MOVEMENT)

This dissertation discusses planter families from the seaboard South who migrated to the Old Southwest between 1810 and 1860. The sources are family papers and a variety of public records. A sample of male migrants was tested for patterns such as birth order and persistence rates. The sources reveal that families in the early nineteenth century participated in extensive kinship networks, which were vital in child-rearing, education, and business transactions. The family was elastic in structure and diffuse in emotional makeup and cannot be characterized as nuclear. Men and women made different uses of kinship and had such divergent values that they lived in separate sub-cultures.;In the Southwest the structural and emotional fluidity of the family survived, as men and women relied on kin for assistance in performing work and for companionship. Many men discovered that complete independence was unwise, since the favors that relatives exchanged were often essential to success. Masculine independence was transformed instead into a style of flamboyant behavior, which heightened differences between the sexes. Women nonetheless strove to preserve kinship networks through correspondence and visits with relatives all over the South.;Parents did not always succeed, however, in socializing children. Both sexes were concerned about the unruly behavior of their offspring, especially their sons who absorbed Western values. Parents attempted to refine children through education in the seaboard and lengthy visits with kin. When kinship networks were attenuated in the West, men and women built upon close friendships to form fictive kinships. They also sought out "society," meaning exclusive social groups based on fictive and genuine kinship, wealth-holding, and refined behavior. A sense of community rarely developed, therefore, in Western settlements. Planters throughout the South maintained their loyalty to the family above all other institutions.;These differences between men and women became more pronounced when migration was considered. Soil exhaustion prompted younger sons to leave the seaboard in the 1830s for the fertile Southwest. Women were excluded from decision-making, although most women opposed migration because it threatened kinship networks. Conflicts developed between generations of men, because fathers were reluctant to relinquish their authority or the capital necessary for their sons to establish themselves as planters. Younger men formulated new ideas about masculinity, de-emphasizing familial duties and stressing personal "independence" and achievement.