Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker John Bardes Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. viii, 247. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7219-3.) This collection of original essays makes an important contribution to the literature on southern capitalism in the nineteenth century. These essays do not concern traditional captains of commerce—bankers, plantation owners, and industrialists—or how they operated within formal markets. Rather, the editors have compiled absorbing tales of marginal men—counterfeiters, fraudulent slave traders, corrupt judges, seedy speculators, itinerant preachers, hired guns, and purveyors of stolen goods—who thrived by bending the rules of the South's developing capitalistic system. More than colorful stories, these essays suggest that unlawful and unscrupulous market activities "were not outside the true nature of capitalism in the nineteenth-century South but, to the contrary, wholly integral to it" (p. 5). In their introduction, editors Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker observe that literature on southern capitalist development traces broad macroeconomic contours—for example, how commodities produced by enslaved people fueled transatlantic trade and economic growth—while neglecting "bottom-up social histories" of how capitalism advanced on the ground (p. 6). They propose that microeconomic studies of how grifters exploited cracks in the economy can reveal "ways that capitalism actually worked in real life and not just in theory" (p. 4). Ten engaging microhistories follow, loosely sortable into three themes: violence, the slave trade, and questions of self-presentation and identity. Compelling essays by Alexandra J. Finley, Maria R. Montalvo, and Forret explore slave traders: men depicted as disreputable outcasts but whose actions steered the South's broader economic development. Montalvo examines fraud in New Orleans's slave market. Complementary essays by Finley and Forret reveal how slave traders laid tracks for the growth of banks and the spread of specie. Essays by Jimmy L. Bryan Jr., John Lindbeck, Rodney J. Steward, and Jeff Strickland evaluate trust, fraud, and self-presentation in a society with few formal institutions for assessing identity and creditworthiness. Lindbeck [End Page 377] examines the itinerant preachers who facilitated financial transactions in the lower Mississippi River Valley. Bryan recounts the colorful life of William G. Cheeney, a sweet-talking huckster of dubious qualifications employed as a printer in Missouri, submarine builder in Virginia, and mineralogist in Texas. Strickland examines another fast-talker: William A. Britton, a cotton trader in occupied New Orleans who tried swindling the Union army. Steward studies Confederate judges who lined their pockets (and ruined the lives of ordinary folk) through military sequestration. Elaine S. Frantz and T. R. C. Hutton explore "violence workers" (p. 3). Frantz examines William Faucett, a marginal man in Civil War–era South Carolina who left a bloody trail of attacks on other poor whites, local elites, and freedpeople (often, it seems likely, on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan). Hutton examines Alfred W. Burnett, a bounty hunter of Gilded Age Appalachia, whose career straddled the boundary between policing and thuggery. Bruce E. Baker's essay on labor and theft along the New Orleans waterfront is distinctive, in terms of both its subject (which does not fit neatly into the book's three themes) and the breadth of its argument. Recognizing that criminality was vital to survival among the waterfront's underemployed day laborers, Baker challenges distinctions between "legitimate" and "underground" economies: legal and stolen commodities were inseparable facets of the same economic ecosystem (p. 5). Direct analysis of gender would have strengthened this collection: masculinity is an invisible constant in these tales of manly posturing and homo-social violence, omnipresent but never unpacked. Likewise, essays exploring the lives of grifting women would have brought the collection's questions of identity and self-presentation into sharper focus. What the reader will gain is a powerful atmospheric sense of a violently messy economy, brimming with innovative if unscrupulous entrepreneurs, where the on-the-ground realities of actual markets rarely mirrored the idealized structures of theoretical markets. John Bardes Louisiana State University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association