The Literate South: Reading and Freedom in the Early U.S.

FAIN: FB-56666-12

Beth Barton Schweiger
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (Fayetteville, AR 72701-1201)

Like nineteenth-century Northerners who derided the absence of public schools in the South, scholars assume that the slave South had little, if any, use for reading. Yet the 1850 census recorded that more than 80 percent of white adults and 70 percent of free black adults in the South could read. The Literate South: Reading and Freedom in the Early United States recovers what free and enslaved Southerners read and how they used their books in the decades before the Civil War. The tradition of reading in the South challenges the ideology that literacy fosters individualism, freedom, and social progress. Scholars have furiously debated whether the slave economy was capitalist or not, but the proliferation of books in the region signaled that the market economy had arrived. People in both regions read for the same reasons, and in similar numbers. As they did so, readers made the South central, not peripheral, to the emergence of a market economy in the antebellum period.

Associated Products

A Literate South: Reading Before Emancipation (Book)
Title: A Literate South: Reading Before Emancipation
Author: Beth Barton Schweiger
Abstract: A provocative examination of literacy in the American South before emancipation, countering the long-standing stereotype of the South’s oral tradition Schweiger complicates our understanding of literacy in the American South in the decades just prior to the Civil War by showing that rural people had access to a remarkable variety of things to read. Drawing on the writings of four young women who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Schweiger shows how free and enslaved people learned to read, and that they wrote and spoke poems, songs, stories, and religious doctrines that were circulated by speech and in print. The assumption that slavery and reading are incompatible—which has its origins in the eighteenth century—has obscured the rich literate tradition at the heart of Southern and American culture.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300112535/literate-south
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300112535
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

Award of Distinction
Date: 10/1/2020
Organization: North Carolina Society of Historians

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