What the Landlord and the Storeman Choose to Make It General Stores, Pawnshops, & Boardinghouses in the New South
What the Landlord and the Storeman Choose to Make It General Stores, Pawnshops, & Boardinghouses in the New South
This chapter discusses the new conception of debt that emerged among white North Carolinians in the decades after the Civil War, and which differed in two important respects from its antebellum precursor. First, this conception lacked the heavy moral overtones that characterized antebellum debt. To be sure, debt maintained certain negative connotations throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, but white North Carolinians increasingly thought and wrote about debt in pragmatic terms. The abolition of slavery also contributed to the demise of the stigma that white North Carolinians pinned to debt. Without the pressing need to maintain the illusion of mastery, white North Carolinians became less attached to the idea that indebtedness implied dependence and, by association, slavery. As the metaphor of the debt slave lost its connection to actual chattel slavery, white North Carolinians found that they could contract debts without assuming the ideologically submissive position of a slave.
Keywords: debt, white North Carolinians, Civil War, moral overtones, antebellum debt, pragmatic terms
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