Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (review)

Abstract

266CIVIL WAR HISTORY the complex and even tragic connections between a code of conduct and human behavior. Clinton's essay, however, along with Brenda Stevenson's discussion of Virginia slave families and Jacqueline Jones's economic analysis of sharecropper families exemplify a growing interest in the African-American women of the nineteenth-century South. Unlike much of the scholarship of the past decade that has exaggerated the strength of the slave family, Stevenson rightly argues that the interference of white masters in the rearing of black children, the devastating impact of miscegenation, and the ever-present threat of breakup through sale left the slave family a "viable but battered institution" (124). Jones too steers a middle course between those historians and economists who would interpret sharecropping either as a logical free market response or as an effort to restore slavery in everything but name. For her, economic coercion and frequent "shifting" of black sharecropping families made for a life of both "resourcefulness and fatalism" (198). In any collection of essays by such talented historians, there is bound to be some stimulating iconoclasm. Rejecting the long-held view that black masters in the old South for the most part merely owned members of their own families, Michael Johnson and James Roark contend that a significant number of these men owned slaves out of self-interest, hoping to further separate themselves from the slave population and securing additional protection for their families' freedom. Eugene Genovese makes a second appearance (this time in a spirited after-dinner speech) to chide historians for ignoring women as participants in the political culture of the old South. Although like many other historians he exaggerates the sectional extremism of these women, he nevertheless makes a persuasive case for taking them seriously. And finally there is plain old novelty. Bertram Wyatt-Brown's wideranging discussion of mental depression and literary talent among the "female Percys" in the nineteenth century combines his usual flair and subtlety with a few unfortunate detours into pretentious psychological speculation and trendy literary theory. Alan Grubb rescues old Southern cookbooks from the collectors and antiquarians. His use of cookbooks as social documents is both creative and stimulating though one suspects unlikely to provide many insights unavailable in other sources. All in all, this essay and the others in this excellent book provide a wonderfully satisfying intellectual feast. George C. Rable Anderson University Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915. By Loren Schweninger. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Pp. 448. $50.00.) This groundbreaking study significantly enhances our knowledge of black property owners in the nineteenth century. Utilizing federal census re- BOOK REVIEWS267 turns, local tax records, newspapers and memoirs, Schweninger vividly portrays a people determined to earn an economic stake in the United States. When Africans first arrived in North America, the author claims, private property ownership was alien to their heritage. They eventually concluded that survival depended not upon communal harmony, but upon individual ingenuity including owning property which, in turn, brought some confidence and self-esteem. Schweninger traces property ownership from 1860 to 1915 among slaves, free blacks, affluent free blacks, and lower and upper South blacks. Even the casual reader knows that a few free blacks owned substantial amounts of land and slaves. More surprising is the degree of property holding among slaves. Many plantation hands managed to acquire small amounts of both money and property which gave a sense of self worth. A few, by conniving their owners, accumulated sizeable estates. In 1860 Anthony Weston, a rice mill builder, held $40,000 of real estate in his free wife's name. Abram Stewart leased five hundred acres from his master, owned more than three hundred head of cattle, and was one of the most successful butchers in Savannah. Before the Civil War a prosperous black was most likely a rural landholder in the lower South. By 1990 the wealthy black more commonly was an urban dweller in the upper South. While free blacks in the Northern states benefitted from the stimulated war economy and decreased competition from whites, Southern black landholders were seriously damaged by the war. For several years after the war those with a...