Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860 Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch (bio) Keywords South, Markets, Southern economy, Slavery Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860. Edited by Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie, and Louis M. Kyriakoudes. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Pp. 270. Paper $40.00.) In the last decades of the twentieth century, traditional histories of the antebellum South described the region as economically stagnant and [End Page 530] socially backward. More recently, however, new scholarship has brought to light the pervasiveness of market activities in the Old South. Southern Society and Its Transformations builds on this new body of scholarship and makes important contributions of its own. This volume of essays paints a picture of a dynamic South that was constantly evolving and adapting (12). In addition to the preface and editors’ introduction, the book’s nine essays are broken up into four sections that examine race relations, the emergence of the market economy, the rise of a southern middle class, and finance. The essays relocate the origins of regional modernization in the antebellum era and suggest a different timeline and pace for capitalist expansion. The authors depict the ebb and flow of southern economic development that started out slowly in the 1830s, but then rapidly accelerated in the late 1840s and 1850s. Besides these shared contributions, the individual essays in Southern Society and Its Transformations offer three additional assertions that further complicate existing southern historiography. First, antebellum southerners were not only market-oriented, but also willing capitalists. Robert Wright’s essay surveys the economic viability of southern business and argues that southerners were not reluctant entrepreneurs. In fact, Wright demonstrates that southerners adroitly raised needed capital to finance their business ventures. He contends that southerners’ willingness to participate in the market was stifled only by the “negative externality” of slavery (198). Jeff Bremer’s chapter on the evolving consumer economy in Missouri and Gary T. Edwards’s essay on yeomen farmers’ desire to enter into surplus cotton production in western Tennessee further establish southern farmers’ willing engagement in market activities. Elbra David’s chapter on the role of unsecured credit in Natchez illustrates the adaptability of the southern credit system. Like Bremer, David demonstrates the usefulness of examining the whole range of credit relationships, including informal credit transactions that were conducted outside of formal lending channels, because of their importance to regional economic development and in financing southern agriculture. Second, the two essays by Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green trace the creation of a self-conscious middle-class identity among a growing group of educated southern professionals, and they explore the occupational diversification that accompanied economic and social change in antebellum southern life. Wells examines southern professionals’ efforts to differentiate themselves from planters by forming professional societies, clubs, and organizations. Ultimately these organizations [End Page 531] helped the emerging middle class formulate a new future for the South, one that envisioned slavery comfortably coexisting with urban and industrial modernization. Green explores the educational background of antebellum southerners, concluding that graduates of higher schooling overwhelmingly entered into middle-class professional occupations and sought professional, not agricultural, success. These essays demonstrate the growing presence of a middle-class coalition of southerners who helped to redefine southern social mobility and cultivate bourgeois values long before the Civil War. A third group of essays reveals significant tensions among white southerners. As whites increasingly engaged in market activities, their competing economic interests strained both racial solidarity and the traditional framework of the slave system. Specifically, these tensions underscored the need for nonslaveholding whites to participate in the common defense of slavery (which did not always occur). Keri Leigh Merritt’s chapter on the enforcement of vagrancy laws in antebellum Georgia exposes planters’ uncertainty about poor whites’ commitment to slavery. She argues that vagrancy laws were selectively used to punish poor whites whose allegiance they questioned. Michael J. Pfeifer’s essay highlights the surprising prevalence of extralegal lynching in the antebellum era. Like Merritt, Pfeifer uncovers interesting historical moments when the property rights of individual slaveholders were pitted against the larger community’s interest in reinforcing racial solidarity. Moreover, Max L. Grivno’s chapter on rural wage labor in Maryland...