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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0105-2043
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
History
Year Degree Awarded
2022
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
BARBARA KRAUTHAMER
Second Advisor
MANISHA SINHA
Third Advisor
LYNDA MORGAN
Fourth Advisor
SARAH CORNELL
Subject Categories
History of Gender | Intellectual History | Labor History | Military History | Public History | Social History | United States History | Women's History
Abstract
This dissertation examines the Telfair family of Savannah, Georgia who enslaved the most people in the state before the American Civil War. It uses the frameworks of microhistory and transnational history to examine the social, political, and economic connections the family had beyond the American South, and the implications of those connections for the people they enslaved. The dissertation argues that a southern, sectional framework, is inadequate for explaining the activities of the “Antebellum One Percent”, the less than one percent of the antebellum South’s population who owned more than one hundred slaves before the Civil War. In many ways, the Telfair family are an exceptional case, but their unique history demonstrates that historians should view racial chattel slavery in the early United States as a national rather than a sectional institution before the Civil War.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/31060661
Recommended Citation
Weisenberger, Charles A. III, "BEYOND THE SOUTH: THE TELFAIR FAMILY, SLAVERY, AND THE ANTEBELLUM ONE PERCENT" (2022). Doctoral Dissertations. 2690.
https://doi.org/10.7275/31060661
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2690
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.