Frank Lawrence Owsley

Frank Lawrence Owsley (January 20, 1890 – October 21, 1956) was an American historian who taught at Vanderbilt University for most of his career, where he specialized in Southern history and was a member of the Southern Agrarians. He is notorious for his essay "The Irrepressible Conflict" in which he lamented the economic loss of slavery for the defeated Confederacy and of the "half savage blacks" that had been freed. He is also known for his study of Confederate diplomacy based on the idea of "King Cotton" and especially his quantitative social history of the middling "plain people" of the Old South.

Life and career Born on his grandparents' farm near Montgomery, Alabama, Owsley graduated from the Fifth District Agricultural School (now Wetumpka High School) in Wetumpka. He then completed two degrees at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University), a Bachelor of Science in 1911 and Master of Arts in 1912.

Confederacy Owsley argued in his dissertation State Rights in the Confederacy (1925) that the Confederacy "died of states' rights". Owsley held that during the Civil War, key Southern governors resisted the appeals of the Confederate government for soldiers. His book King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (1931) is the basic study of Confederate diplomacy. It emphasizes that Southerners before the war had a profound belief in the power of King Cotton to rule the industrial economy, so that Britain and France would enter the war on behalf of the Confederacy to get that cotton. The belief was not based on knowledge of Europe and failed in practice.

Southern Agrarians As an active member of the Southern Agrarians group based in Nashville, Owsley contributed "The Irrepressible Conflict" to the manifesto I'll Take My Stand (1930). In this work, he described "half-savage blacks . . . some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism." He lashed out at the North for what he alleged were attempts to dominate the South spiritually and economically. In "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" (the American Review : 257–85), he criticized northern race reformers as the "grandchildren of abolitionists and reconstructionists." He announced that the South was white man's country and that blacks must accommodate that reality. Serving as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1940, Owsley castigated the North for assuming its people and thinking represented the entire nation, and for violating what he called "the comity of section".

Plain Folk of the Old South After 1940, Frank and Harriet Owsley pioneered what came to be called the "new social history". They studied the historical demography of the South and social mobility and produced a history called Plain Folk of the Old South (1949). Historian Vernon Burton described it as "one of the most influential works on Southern history ever written." He characterized the postwar South as made up of a broad class of yeoman farmers, between poor blacks, many of whom were sharecroppers in a kind of debt bondage, and poor whites at one end, and large plantation owners at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. Owsley asserted that the real South was liberal, American, and Jeffersonian, not radical or reactionary.

Critics suggested Owsley was a reactionary defender of the Confederacy who was attempting to rewrite the past to preserve white Southern culture, and that he overemphasized the size of the Southern landholding middle class, while excluding the large class of poor white southerners who owned neither land nor slaves. Further, they suggested Owsley's theory assumed that too much commonality in shared economic interests united Southern farmers, and asserted that he did not fully assess the vast difference between the planters' commercial agriculture and the yeoman's subsistence farming.

Biographer Priscilla Roberts argues that his work on Plain Folk of the Old South:

Vanderbilt University At Vanderbilt University (1920–49), Owsley specialized in Southern history, especially the antebellum and Civil War eras.