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" (1930) in which he lamented the economic loss of slavery for the defeated Confederacy and wrote of the "half savage blacks" that had been freed. He is also known for his study of Confederate diplomacy based on the false myth of "King Cotton" and especially his quantitative social history of the middling folk—the "plain people" of the Old South.

Born in rural Alabama, he attended Auburn University for his undergraduate degree. He earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago in 1924 under the tutelage of William E. Dodd. He taught at Vanderbilt University. Owsley specialized in Southern history, especially the antebellum and Civil War eras.

He argued in his dissertation State Rights and 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.

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 [1933]: 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".

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