Background

Frank Lawrence Owsley was born on January 20, 1890, on a farm in Montgomery County, Alabama, the son of Lawrence Monroe Owsley and Annie Scott McGehee. His father was a teacher and farmer who rented land to sharecroppers, mostly blacks. Young Owsley was impressed with the many Confederate veterans who had been antebellum yeoman farmers, neither planters nor poor whites. This observation had great bearing on his later researches.

Education

From 1906 to 1909 Frank Owsley attended the Fifth District Agricultural School in Wetumpka, Alabama, where the curriculum included two years of college. In 1911 he graduated from Alabama Polytechnic Institute at Auburn, returning a year later for a master's degree. At Auburn, Owsley was introduced to "scientific" history by Professor George Petrie, a product of Herbert Baxter Adams' famous seminar at the Johns Hopkins University. After a year of public school teaching and two years as instructor in history and Latin at Auburn, Owsley entered the University of Chicago's graduate school. William E. Dodd directed his work on a second master's degree, conferred in 1917. Dodd and Owsley shared a love for Jeffersonian agrarian values, an identification with the common man, and distrust of northern industrialists. In 1924 the University of Chicago awarded Owsley the Ph. D.

Career

Following military service during World War I, Frank Owsley taught briefly at Auburn and Birmingham-Southern College and in 1920 joined the history faculty at Vanderbilt University. Owsley spent nearly three decades at Vanderbilt, where he was instrumental in developing the graduate program in history. A stimulating instructor, he excelled in training graduate students; Owsley directed almost forty doctoral dissertations and many masters' theses at Vanderbilt. The opportunity to help establish a new Ph. D. program was a major factor in his decision to leave Vanderbilt in 1949 to accept the Hugo Friedman chair in southern history at the University of Alabama.

Owsley wrote six books, thirty-four articles, and many reviews and review essays. His historical works developed a number of the most perceptive themes in the literature on the South.

In State Rights in the Confederacy (1925) Owsley attributed the Confederate defeat to the South's factious states' rights ideology rather than to overwhelming Union strength. Six years later he published King Cotton Diplomacy, a pioneer work based on research in previously unexamined European foreign-office records. Owsley criticized Confederate officials for withholding cotton from England and France, a policy that they hoped would forced recognition of the South. Differing with earlier writers, he argued that British neutrality resulted from "war profits, " not from antislavery sentiment or dependence on northern wheat.

Plain Folk of the Old South (1949) focused attention on the heretofore ignored southern middle class of veoman farmers and herdsmen. Owsley revolutionized understanding of the subject by analyzing (with punch cards and calculators) statistics gleaned from manuscript census schedules, county tax records, and wills. He concluded that most plain folk were landowners who frequently lived alongside planters. This work and other studies by Owsley's students made it impossible any longer to describe the Old South's social structure as being composed simply of planters, slaves, and poor whites. This was Owsley's greatest contribution to southern historiography.

In his essays, too, Owsley sought to correct what he thought were incorrect interpretations of the South and its people. He loved the region's rural ethos and criticized what he termed the North's carefully planned exploitation of the South. Owsley associated himself with the Nashville Agrarians and contributed "The Irrepressible Conflict" to their literary symposium, I'll Take My Stand (1930). This essay described the Old South as an agrarian society resisting the depredations of northern industrial capitalism. The North, he suggested, forced the South to secede.

In a number of other essays Owsley applied this thesis to the twentieth century. He portrayed the South defending itself against the encroachments of northern corporate interests, often camouflaged in humanitarian garb. Owsley criticized bigness in industry, labor, and government and argued that the South's cultural heritage was threatened by "industrial insecurity and industrial insensitivity. " So vigorously did Owsley defend the South that he was sometimes accused of being "choleric and impulsive to the point of fanaticism. " Shortly before his death, he admitted that he had been "deliberately provocative" in his polemical writings. In 1940 Owsley was president of the Southern Historical Association. In 1956 he was a Fulbright lecturer at Cambridge University, where he studied Union diplomacy during the Civil War. Owsley died in Winchester, England, of a heart attack.

Achievements

• Frank Owsley's major works: State Rights in the Confederacy (1925); A Plain Folk of the Old South (1949); I'll Take My Stand (1930); King Cotton Diplomacy (1931); A Short History of the American People (2 vol. , 1945-1948); Defeatism in the Confederacy (1926); Local Defense and the Overthrow of the Confederacy (1925); The Economic Basis of Society in the Late Ante-Bellum South (1940); The Pattern of Migration and Settlement on the Southern Frontier (1945).

Works

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• book

  • Plain Folk of the Old South

    (This is the first systematic study to lay to rest the old...)

  • King Cotton diplomacy;: Foreign relations of the Confederate States of America

    (Detailed account of the Diplomacy during the Civil War)

  • Defeatism in the Confederacy: North Carolina Historical Review, V3, No. 3, July, 1926
  • A Short History of the American People: 2 Vol Set Vol 1-1492-1865, Vol 2-1865-1947
  • State Rights In The Confederacy: Civil War

Membership

Frank Owsley was a member of the Southern Agrarians and president of the Southern Historical Association in 1940.

Personality

Owsley believed that professors often neglected their teaching responsibilities and became "selfish, conceited, narrow-minded doctrinaires who care nothing for the students - the personal element is missing. Generations of his students appreciated this concern. They praised his warmth and exuberance, his wit and humor, and his ability to inspire and encourage. Neither dogmatic nor pretentious, Owsley encouraged students to disagree, to have fresh ideas. He was a colorful man, expansive in conversation, and prone to overstate and exaggerate for effect. Patient yet firm, he had the respect of students and colleagues alike.

Connections

On July 24, 1920, Frank Owsley married Harriet Fason Chappell; they had three children.

Father:

Lawrence Monroe Owsley

Mother:

Annie (Scott) McGehee

Wife:

Harriet Fason (Chappell) Owsley

She served as coauthor and research associate for many of husband's publications.

Daughter:

Margaret Chappell (Owsley) Seigenthaler

Daughter:

Frances Mildred Owsley

References

• Frank Lawrence Owsley: Historian of the Old South : A Memoir by Chappell Owsley: With Letter and Writings of Frank Owsley