Deep in the Piney Woods: Southeastern Alabama from Statehood to the Civil War, 1800-1865 by Tommy Craig Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: Deep in the Piney Woods: Southeastern Alabama from Statehood to the Civil War, 1800-1865 by Tommy Craig Brown Martin T. Olliff Deep in the Piney Woods: Southeastern Alabama from Statehood to the Civil War, 1800-1865. By Tommy Craig Brown. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2018. xv, 245 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1997-7. Because so few scholars have studied the southeastern corner of Alabama, Deep in the Piney Woods is a very welcome addition to that scant literature. Tommy Brown, archivist at the Auburn University Special Collections and Archives Department, expanded his 2014 Auburn dissertation into this book, building it around white settlement, secession politics, and local prosecution of the Civil War. Within these parameters, he has produced a necessary examination of this slice of the state's history. In addition to noting the gap in the historical literature of southeastern Alabama, Brown claims that the existing interpretation—that leading up to the Civil War "the southernmost counties . . . [were] nothing more than isolated backwoods where poverty reigned, slavery was often inconsequential, Unionism was . . . strong, . . . raiders [End Page 239] and bushwhackers created havoc, . . . and deserters outnumbered the faithful . . ."—is incorrect. The real story is much more complicated, and he sets himself the goal of telling it through "the region's social, political, cultural, and economic institutions" (xii). The organization of Deep in the Piney Woods is methodical. Its first two chapters provide background to the central story that Brown later tells. Chapter One concerns white and enslaved settlement of the richer, more arable land east of the Federal Road that arched from Columbus, Georgia, to St. Stephens, Alabama, and along the piney woods' rivers. He discusses such settlement over forty years, personalizing his story by tracking individuals as examples of larger trends. This is an effective device for engaging the reader. Chapter Two applies Joseph Glatthaar's class analysis of the Army of Northern Virginia to the people of the piney woods just prior to the Civil War. Brown describes and quantifies the economic activities of the poor who "participated in the cotton economy on a limited basis" (27), the "yeoman or middle-class" (30) who grew enough cotton to allow owning a few enslaved people, and the "wealthiest families who controlled the vast majority of the region's slave population" (32) and who often were both planters and professionals. Brown parses his class distinctions among whites based on ownership of the enslaved, but he is able to insert stories of some individual slaves, like Dinah and Bob of Barbour County, through legal records (44-45). Chapters Three through Seven show Brown at his most confident, for here he gets to argue that the piney woods' people fully participated in the state's antebellum political controversies and that they supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. He devotes two chapters to politics. From 1819 to 1845, Henry Hilliard dominated the region's rivalry between Democrats and Whigs, but from 1845 to 1861 that rivalry gave way to unification over expansion of slavery and, ultimately, secession. Here, Brown digs deeply into the standard stuff of political history—party platforms, political personalities, vote totals, and legislation. In the succeeding three chapters he closely examines the piney woods at war. Chapter Five convincingly demonstrates that large [End Page 240] numbers of local men served in Confederate units that fought during some of the hardest campaigns in the western and eastern theaters as well as those units which saw dull duty along the Gulf Coast. Chapters Six and Seven examine the way "the war was taking a toll on families in the piney woods" during 1862 (137), and how the interval between 1863 and1865 became a slow-rolling but unmitigated disaster on the home front. Brown ends with a short epilogue about postbellum events in the piney woods rather than a conclusion that summarizes his argument. Carrying his story to the end of Reconstruction is satisfying for a narrative history but makes his work less functional as an academic tool or for classroom use. On the other hand, he offers extensive footnotes, a thorough bibliography, and a well-crafted index. He also includes images, tables, and maps...