Revolt of the Planters
Hybrid – 3:10 pm – 4:50 pm
March 12, 19, 26, April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
What is popularly viewed as the Civil War or the War Between the States began as a revolt by the planter class. America’s royalty—basking in cotton, slaves and mint juleps—feared the coming of industrialization. In an effort to stop the clock in the 18th century, they revolted in the 19th. Their revolution was from the Right, not the Left—to maintain the gentry system of ruralism to hold on to economic and political control. The Confederacy was not only an agrarian state but a supremacist state. Yet the attempt to rend the Union will come to naught. For in the modern industrialized world, a nation of farmers will not defeat a nation of wrench-turners in the arena of war. The Confederacy’s time was brief. But it did provide an object lesson in history: for those who learn least the lessons of history, end up paying for their folly. A previously offered LLI course.
- Week 1: What is revolution? Description and explanation of revolution
- Week 2: Those who own the country ought to run it: significance of land as a determinant of power
- Week 3: Southern aristocracy: the purveyors of America’s slaveocracy
- Week 4: American gulag: basic construct of the concentration camp system known as plantations
- Week 5: Unholy competition between North and South, 1790-1860: the race for control of the economy and government and, therefore, the Nation
- Week 6: Confederacy as a revolution: the confederacy as a revolution from the Right
- Week 7: Levee en Masse: North and South, conscription of entire populations and economies for war
- Week 8: Flirtation with dictatorship: Lincoln and Davis, autocrats?
Mark Albertson is the historical research editor at Army Aviation magazine. He has authored books, written articles in magazines and newspapers and presents courses and talks on a wide variety of topics, including history, current events and politics.