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Prompted by theories about the complexities of power in modern society, a number of historians, feminists most prominent among them, have joined the recent debate over the proper definition and boundaries of "the political." The stakes are high. As one feminist philosopher put it, "this question about the limits of the political is precisely a political question." (1) In advocating an expanded approach to political history that transgresses the limits of formal politics and confounds conventional distinctions between public and private spheres, Joan Scott and others have raised the intriguing possibility of a gendered history of politics. (2)
The history of republican political ideology and culture in the antebellum South may seem a long way from the concerns of contemporary theorists, but it is not so far, perhaps, as it appears at first glance. After all, theories of government and citizenship, in modern republics as in ancient ones, have been grounded in assumptions about the relation of public and private spheres, or civic sphere and household. In Aristotle's Politics, for example, according to Jurgen Habermas, "Status in the polis was ... based upon status as the unlimited master of an oikos. Moveable wealth and control over labor power were no substitute for being the master of a household and of a family." (3)
In the antebellum South, where the defense of domestic institutions and relations were matters of the utmost political significance, one finds even more compelling reason to eschew conventional historiographical boundaries, and particularly those that separate the public from the private sphere and the history of women and gender relations from that of "high" politics. In the Old South, "high" politics was the politics of the household, and all relations of power in what we would call the "private sphere," including those of men and women, were inevitably politicized. Indeed, the gender and class relations contained in southern households were the distinctive social conditions to which proslavery politicians pointed as permitting the South, and the South alone, to retain the proper political arrangements of republican government.
The slave South was commonly represented as the last republic loyal to the principle of government by an exclusive citizen body of independent and equal men. However inadvertently, that portrait revealed the two faces of republicanism in...