The Southern Elite and Social Change: Essays in Honor of Willard B. Gatewood, Jr.

Abstract

The Southern Elite and Social Change: Essays in Honor of Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. Edited by Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002. Pp. xxi, 221. Foreword by James C. Cobb, introduction, bibliography of Gatewood publications, notes, list of contributors. $19.95, paper.) Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack, editors of this valuable collection of essays, begin with an arresting metaphor. Southerners, they affirm, anachronistically and collectively felt a large measure of alienation and despair-they knew what editors call the dance of dinosaur (p. ix). At same time, Finley and DeBlack wisely take note of a lively rejection of nostalgic impulse which challenged those downward moods. As in work of Willard Gatewood, recipient of this well-deserved honor, collection accords as much weighty attention to black elites as to white upper crust. In fact, first essay interprets in incisive, comparative style free African Americans of both Savannah and British Bahamas. Whittington Johnson finds intriguing differences in respective approaches of black slaveholders to prospect of manumitting their racial compatriots. Savannah's free black masters were less likely to release their racial brothers from bondage than were their Bahamian equivalents. With preachers at social pinnacle, slaveholding blacks of early national Savannah became substantial property-holders. Although severely constricted in every way imaginable, some members of this extraordinary elite adopted white customs. A few even fought duels. Thus, Johnson persuasively concludes that oppression did not prevent under-race from substantial achievements. The second essay, by co-editor DeBlack, shifts focus, geographically and socially, from Atlantic coast to frontier Arkansas, from black to white. Kentucky-born Lycurgus Johnson, whose uncle Richard served Martin Van Buren as vice-president, planted cotton with slaves and established requisite patriarchal style of leadership. Building a successful life for himself and his family, Johnson proved a quick learner in post-emancipation Chicot County. Unlike those unable to adjust to black freedom, he won compliments in Freedmen's Bureau reports for his strong sense of fairness and flexibility. We shift again in terms of both color and locale with Bernard E. Powers's sketch of Richard Harvey Cain, a free-born African-American politician in Reconstruction South Carolina. An early abolitionist befriended by more famous Henry Highland Garnet, Cain attended Wilberforce University before taking an African Methodist Episcopal church in Brooklyn in late 1850s. As a black nationalist who advocated African emigration, Cain encountered powerful opposition of Frederick Douglass. Active throughout war in helping slave refugees behind Union lines, Cain then supervised African Methodist Episcopal (AME) missions in postwar South Carolina. His evangelistic work won great success. As a state senator for Charleston, however, his campaign in 1868 for state subsidized land sales to landless freedmen failed. Republican patronage squabbles and cor-ruption sank all hopes. Powers sees Cain's labors to spread AME churches throughout South Carolina as no less significant than his championing of black working classes in short-lived Reconstruction era. …