Imagined families: Anglo-American kinship and the formation of Southern identity, 1830-1890

Anglo-American kinship, as a set of historical continuities linking the United States to Great Britain and as a reckoning of relatedness, constituted a valuable cultural resource for Southerners as they contemplated their place within the American nation and outside in the nineteenth century. Like the more conventional calculations of consanguinity and familial belonging it referenced, the Anglo-American kinship was contingent, convoluted, and, not infrequently, contested. Articulated at various times by masters and former slaves, ministers and merchants, plantation mistresses and politicians, this sense of belonging to an imagined transatlantic family transcended the boundaries of gender, race, and class as readily as it traversed national borders. Though grounded in biogenetic factors, the language of Anglo-American kinship encompassed claims of belonging predicated on confessional faith, language, and institutions as well as blood. This thesis considers the interaction between conceptions of Anglo-American kinship and the formation of Southern national identity, both unionist and separatist, between 1830 and 1890 by examining institutions and social rituals that both inculcated filiopietism and constructed Southerness in the Civil War era and beyond. The subjects under consideration in this study include the role of European travel in forging Southern distinctiveness before the war, ring tournaments and the ethos of medieval chivalry they promoted, the Protestant Episcopal Church and its role in managing the sectional crisis, postbellum immigration societies and their vision of the plantation South remade in the image of British manors, and the role that state historical associations played in reunion and the entrenchment of the Lost Cause mythology as the predominant historical framework for interpreting the American Civil War.