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Historians of the nineteenth-century rural South have long distinguished the antebellum agricultural system of plantations and gang-style slave labor from the family tenancy system that is thought to have developed only after the Civil War. In Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia, however, Frederick Bode and Donald Ginter demonstrate a far greater consistency in economic traditions than many historians have recognized. Through a detailed critical interpretation of the 1860 federal census, Bode and Ginter show that extensive family tenancy, and probably sharecropping, were not the creations of Emancipation and Reconstruction, but instead were widely present before the upheaval of the Civil War. Bode and Ginter's analysis of the 1860 census reveals a complex rural economy of plantation owners, slaves, and yeoman and tenant farmers. Though census agents lacked a category for reporting tenant farmers and therefore often devised their own methods for recording land tenure, Bode and Ginter examine the agricultural and population schedules to reveal coherent regional patterns of tenancy. In older areas of greater cotton cultivation, tenant farmers were relatively scarce; in areas of recently cleared land within the cotton belt, and even more strikingly in the upcountry, tenant farming was pervasive. Bode and Ginter's findings not only demonstrate the presence of antebellum tenant farmers and sharecroppers but also dispel the current conception of yeoman farmers reduced to tenancy on their return from the battlefields of the Civil War. They show, finally, how new regional patterns of tenancy followed the demise of slavery. Probing the shifting relations between races and social classes in the nineteenth-century rural South, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia revises the dominant scholarly view of the region's social and economic history by carefully measuring the true extent of the changes brought by the Civil War.
Regardless of whether they owned slaves, Southern whites lived in a world defined by slavery. As shown by their blaming British and Northern slave traders for saddling them with slavery, most were uncomfortable with the institution. While many wanted it ended, most were content to leave that up to God. All that changed with the election of Abraham Lincoln. Rebels in the Making is a narrative-driven history of how and why secession occurred. In this work, senior Civil War historian William L. Barney narrates the explosion of the sectional conflict into secession and civil war. Carefully examining the events in all fifteen slave states and distinguishing the political circumstances in each, he argues that this was not a mass democratic movement but one led from above. The work begins with the deepening strains within Southern society as the slave economy matured in the mid-nineteenth century and Southern ideologues struggled to convert whites to the orthodoxy of slavery as a positive good. It then focuses on the years of 1860-1861 when the sectional conflict led to the break-up of the Union. As foreshadowed by the fracturing of the Democratic Party over the issue of federal protection for slavery in the territories, the election of 1860 set the stage for secession. Exploiting fears of slave insurrections, anxieties over crops ravaged by a long drought, and the perceived moral degradation of submitting to the rule of an antislavery Republican, secessionists launched a movement in South Carolina that spread across the South in a frenzied atmosphere described as the great excitement. After examining why Congress was unable to reach a compromise on the core issue of slavery's expansion, the study shows why secession swept over the Lower South in January of 1861 but stalled in the Upper South. The driving impetus for secession is shown to have come from the middling ranks of the slaveholders who saw their aspirations of planter status blocked and denigrated by the Republicans. A separate chapter on the formation of the Confederate government in February of 1861 reveals how moderates and former conservatives pushed aside the original secessionists to assume positions of leadership. The final chapter centers on the crisis over Fort Sumter, the resolution of which by Lincoln precipitated a second wave of secession in the Upper South. Rebels in the Making shows that secession was not a unified movement, but has its own proponents and patterns in each of the slave states. It draws together the voices of planters, non-slaveholders, women, the enslaved, journalists, and politicians. This is the definitive study of the seminal moment in Southern history that culminated in the Civil War.
Reidy has produced one of the most thoughtful treatments to date of a critical moment in southern history, placing the social transformation of the South in the context of 'the age of capital' and the changes in the markets, ideologies, etc. of the Atlantic world system. Better than anyone perhaps, Reidy has elaborated both the large and small narratives of this development, connecting global forces with the initiatives and reactions of ordinary southerners, black and white.--Thomas C. Holt, University of Chicago "Joseph Reidy's detailed analysis of social and economic developments in central Georgia during and after slavery will take its place among the standard works on these subjects. Its discussions of the expansion of the cotton kingdom and of the changes after emancipation make it necessary reading for all concerned with southern and African-American history.--Stanley Engerman, University of Rochester "Successfully places the experience of one region's people into the larger theoretical context of world capitalist development and in the process challenges other scholars to do the same.--Rural Sociology
In The First American Frontier, Wilma Dunaway challenges many assumptions about the development of preindustrial Southern Appalachia's society and economy. Drawing on data from 215 counties in nine states from 1700 to 1860, she argues that capitalist exchange and production came to the region much earlier than has been previously thought. Her innovative book is the first regional history of antebellum Southern Appalachia and the first study to apply world-systems theory to the development of the American frontier. Dunaway demonstrates that Europeans established significant trade relations with Native Americans in the southern mountains and thereby incorporated the region into the world economy as early as the seventeenth century. In addition to the much-studied fur trade, she explores various other forces of change, including government policy, absentee speculation in the region's natural resources, the emergence of towns, and the influence of local elites. Contrary to the myth of a homogeneous society composed mainly of subsistence homesteaders, Dunaway finds that many Appalachian landowners generated market surpluses by exploiting a large landless labor force, including slaves. In delineating these complexities of economy and labor in the region, Dunaway provides a perceptive critique of Appalachian exceptionalism and development.
Drawing on the history of the British gentry to explain the contrasting sentiments of American small farmers and plantation owners, James L. Huston's expansive analysis offers a new understanding of the socioeconomic factors that fueled sectionalism and ignited the American Civil War. This groundbreaking study of agriculture's role in the war defies long-held notions that northern industrialization and urbanization led to clashes between North and South. Rather, Huston argues that the ideological chasm between plantation owners in the South and family farmers in the North led to the political eruption of 1854-56 and the birth of a sectionalized party system. Huston shows that over 70 percent of the northern population-by far the dominant economic and social element-had close ties to agriculture. More invested in egalitarianism and personal competency than in capitalism, small farmers in the North operated under a free labor ideology that emphasized the ideals of independence and mastery over oneself. The ideology of the plantation, by contrast, reflected the conservative ethos of the British aristocracy, which was the product of immense landed inequality and the assertion of mastery over others. By examining the dominant populations in northern and southern congressional districts, Huston reveals that economic interests pitted the plantation South against the small-farm North. The northern shift toward Republicanism depended on farmers, not industrialists: While Democrats won the majority of northern farm congressional districts from 1842 to 1853, they suffered a major defection of these districts from 1854 to 1856, to the antislavery organizations that would soon coalesce into the Republican Party. Utilizing extensive historical research and close examination of the voting patterns in congressional districts across the country, James Huston provides a remarkable new context for the origins of the Civil War.
James Huston has undertaken a unique and Herculean labor in examining American beliefs about wealth distribution over one and a half centuries. His findings have led him to a startling conclusion: Americans' earliest economic attitudes were formed during the Revolutionary period and remained virtually unchanged until the close of the nineteenth century. Why those attitudes existed and persisted, how they informed public debate, and what caused their ultimate demise are among the channels explored in Securing the Fruits of Labor, a grand excursion into waters of economic history only glimpsed by previous works.
Bolton (history, U. of Southern Mississippi) illuminates the social complexity surrounding the lives of a group consistently dismissed as rednecks, crackers, and white trash: landless white tenants and laborers in the era of slavery. A short epilogue looks at their lives today. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This study of Pope County, Arkansas in the 1850s represents an analysis of the pioneer decade of an upper South region largely settled by yeoman farmers; the presence of slaves constituting approximately ten percent of the population also enables one to view that peculiar institution in a non-plantation environment. As we celebrate the century mark of the 1890 census, which inspired Frederick Jackson Turner's study of the influence of the frontier on the American experience, historians turn anew to examine the influence of that frontier. Today insights provided by computer assisted quantification, "thick description" of social anthropologists and the concept of the New Social History shed additional light on that quest for meaning. This study is a first-rate example of the New Social History in practice. Contents: The Beginnings; Communications and Transportation; Agriculture; Table Fare; Artisans, Business and Professional Activities; Disorder and Crimes; Morbidi Mortality; Marriage; We are Family; Education; Religion; Slavery; and Moving In-Moving Out.
In Rich Man's War historian David Williams focuses on the Civil War experience of people in the Chattahoochee River Valley of Georgia and Alabama to illustrate how the exploitation of enslaved blacks and poor whites by a planter oligarchy generated overwhelming class conflict across the South, eventually leading to Confederate defeat. This conflict was so clearly highlighted by the perception that the Civil War was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight" that growing numbers of oppressed whites and blacks openly rebelled against Confederate authority, undermining the fight for independence. After the war, however, the upper classes encouraged enmity between freedpeople and poor whites to prevent a class revolution. Trapped by racism and poverty, the poor remained in virtual economic slavery, still dominated by an almost unchanged planter elite. The publication of this book was supported by the Historic Chattahoochee Commission.
Appalachia first entered the American consciousness as a distinct region in the decades following the Civil War. The place and its people have long been seen as backwards and 'other' because of their perceived geographical, social, and economic isolation. These essays, by fourteen eminent historians and social scientists, illuminate important dimensions of early social life in diverse sections of the Appalachian mountains. The contributors seek to place the study of Appalachia within the context of comparative regional studies of the United States, maintaining that processes and patterns thought to make the region exceptional were not necessarily unique to the mountain South. The contributors are Mary K. Anglin, Alan Banks, Dwight B. Billings, Kathleen M. Blee, Wilma A. Dunaway, John R. Finger, John C. Inscoe, Ronald L. Lewis, Ralph Mann, Gordon B. McKinney, Mary Beth Pudup, Paul Salstrom, Altina L. Waller, and John Alexander Williams