Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark
M. Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern
or southern, slave or free--to understand sectionalism and the
attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War--we must
consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and
silences they heard.
Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived the sounds
associated with antebellum developments including the market
revolution, industrialization, westward expansion, and
abolitionism. In northern modernization, southern slaveholders
heard the noise of the mob, the din of industrialism, and threats
to what they considered their quiet, orderly way of life; in
southern slavery, northern abolitionists and capitalists heard the
screams of enslaved labor, the silence of oppression, and signals
of premodernity that threatened their vision of the American
future. Sectional consciousness was profoundly influenced by the
sounds people attributed to their regions. And as sectionalism
hardened into fierce antagonism, it propelled the nation toward its
most earsplitting conflict, the Civil War.