Antebellum Southern Research Articles

Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War

Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War. By Edward R. Crowther. (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. Pp. vi, 286. $99.95.) In March 1861, James Lewis Petigru, the leader of the cooperationist movement in South Carolina, wrote of the enthusiasm with which many supported the new Confederacy, none are so full of this newborn zeal as the clergy, including in this term the preachers of every denomination, from the Roman Catholics to the Baptists (199). Echoing Petigru, Edward R. Crowther argues that southern evangelicals exerted considerable influence in favor of disunion. In his view, however, secession was not a newborn enthusiasm but was rooted in the (213) that southern evangelicals began formulating in the 1830s. Initially, evangelicals used this vision to justify slavery; later, they refined and elaborated it to confer moral and sanction on other institutions and values of the Old South. Indeed, they did more than that. Crowther asserts that southern evangelicals used rhetorical skills and biblical knowledge to nurture martial feelings among southerners (216) and that they assisted in the secession of the eleven southern states and provided moral authority for the nascent Confederate States of (171). In describing this moral vision, Crowther covers much the same ground as other historians who have written about antebellum southern evangelicals. His discussion of their Bible-based proslavery ethic differs little from Donald G. Mathews's presentation in Religion in the Old South (1977), and his treatment of the denominational schisms of the 1830s and 1840s is similar to-albeit less judgmental than-that of C. C. Goen in Broken Churches, Broken Nation (1985). His description of southern evangelicals' political involvement closely parallels that of Richard J. Carwardine in Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (1993), except that Crowther lays more emphasis on their equivocation regarding politics. On the one hand, he observes, evangelicals endorsed the separation of church and state, which they believed enjoined churches from becoming involved in secular politics. On the other hand, they insisted that as ministers they had a religious duty to offer counsel on those numerous issues wherein politics touched on a moral issue (86). Crowther notes that as the sectional controversy escalated, southern preachers routinely proclaimed political messages, although they tried to disguise their political ranting as instructions in the Christian duties of citizenship or to bury them deeply in a theological defense of slavery (157). In the introductory chapter of his book, explaining how he intends to approach southern evangelicals, Crowther makes an intriguing statement that seems to promise a discussion, not just of the content of the evangelicals' moral vision, but of the means by which they promulgated it and persuaded other to accept it. …

Reviews of Books:Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom Ariela J. Gross

Reviews of Books:Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom Ariela J. Gross

Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom

Professor Ariela J. Gross moves the study of slave law beyond the traditional notion that the civil law of slavery concerned slaves only as property and not as people. Gross has successfully trawled local as well as state court records to find still another dimension of slave law. She argues that slaves' character was often at issue in damage or breach of warranty claims concerning slaves. (Professor Gross has generously posted three of her databases on her Web site.) Gross's analysis of these cases is necessarily subtle and extensive because proslavery white southern litigants and courts developed sometimes tortuous intellectual constructs to deny that dishonored, subordinated people could by their intentions or behavior exercise any influence over their owners and hirers and over court cases. Gross provides an illuminating explanation of “court and market” practices in Adams County, Mississippi, and other cotton South jurisdictions. Adams County lawyer-planters' “practices rested on slavery,” Gross reports. “In this way, slavery shaped legal practice, and lawyers and judges became invested in the institution of slavery.” Indeed, issues concerning slaves made up nearly half of the disputes argued by litigants and their lawyers in the Adams County circuit court.

The Lost Cause: Myth as Educational Metaphor in the New South

Rather than the materialistic notion of linear progress that held the imagination of the nineteenth-century industrialized North, antebellum Southern academics and intellectuals placed their faith in a cyclical notion of progress shared by the planter aristocracy. The antebellum South focused less on the material progress of society as a whole than on the yeoman farmer's ascent to the status of a country gentleman of leisure, with enslaved labor to provide his every need.1 Corrupted by slavery, antebellum intellectuals failed to see the benefit of a utilitarian curriculum to further industry and the applied sciences and resisted the notion of both economic and moral progress. Slavery tainted the southern notion of both progress and manual labor; progress was seen as a threat to the peculiar institution, while labor defined the denigrating activity of the enslaved. Quite distinct from the free labor ideology evolving in the North, the Southern intellectual's cyclic notion of progress viewed servitude as natural to the human condition and civilization. To secure true progress, argued George Fitzhugh, we must unfetter genius, and chain down mediocrity. Liberty for the fewSlavery, in every form, for the mass!2 The power of myth and metaphor is of universal consequence.3 For the postwar generations of the New South, the myth of the Lost Cause

The Humor of the Old South

humor of the Old South-tales, almanac entries, turf reports, historical sketches, gentlemen's essays on outdoor sports, profiles of local characters-flourished between 1830 and 1860. genre's popularity and influence can be traced in the works of major southern writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Harry Crews, as well as in contemporary popular culture focusing on the rural South. This collection of essays includes some of the past twenty five years' best writing on the subject, as well as ten new works bringing fresh insights and original approaches to the subject. A number of the essays focus on well known humorists such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, William Tappan Thompson, and George Washington Harris, all of whom have long been recognized as key figures in Southwestern humor. Other chapters examine the origins of this early humor, in particular selected poems of William Henry Timrod and Washington Irving's The Legend of Hollow, which anticipate the subject matter, character types, structural elements, and motifs that would become part of the Southwestern tradition. Renditions of Sleepy Hollow were later echoed in sketches by William Tappan Thompson, Joseph Beckman Cobb, Orlando Benedict Mayer, Francis James Robinson, and William Gilmore Simms. Several essays also explore antebellum southern humor in the context of race and gender. This literary legacy left an indelible mark on the works of later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, whose works in a comic vein reflect affinities and connections to the rich lode of materials initially popularized by the Southwestern humorists.

The Social and Cultural Dynamics of Soldiering in Hood's Texas Brigade

JUST BEFORE THE START OF THE BLOODY PENINSULA CAMPAIGN OF JUNE 1862, the soldiers of the Fourth Texas Infantry Regiment purchased a horse for General John Bell Hood, commander of what came to be known as Hood's Texas Brigade. Later, as the regiment assembled at dress parade, First Sergeant J. M. Bookman presented the horse to General Hood. Sir: In behalf of the non-commissioned officers and privates ..., I present you this war-horse. He selected and purchased by us for this purpose, not that we hoped by so doing to court your favor, but simply because we, as freemen and Texans, claim the ability to discern, and the right to reward, merit wherever it may be found. In you, sir, we recognize the soldier and the gentleman. In you we have found a leader whom we are proud to follow--a commander whom it is a pleasure to obey; and this horse we tender as a slight testimonial of our admiration. Moved by this gesture of deference and respect from his men, General Hood sprang into the saddle and promised to act as their rallying point when the struggle came.(1) These Texas soldiers--who soon earned a reputation as the toughest combat troops in Robert E. Lee's fabled Army of Northern Virginia--did not always behave so deferentially toward officers. In fact, when the Texas regiments came to Virginia, they clashed frequently with the Confederate government over the authority to select their own regimental and staff officers. men of the Texas regiments claimed the right to veto any appointment that proved unacceptable to them. Fourth Texas Regiment, for instance, refused to accept the assignment of Colonel R. T. P. Allen to lead their unit. He had been in camp for only a short while when several soldiers hoisted Allen onto his horse, and using switches, drove him out of the regimental grounds amid the hoots and jeers of the boys; and he was never seen again.(2) This study examines the social and cultural dynamics of leadership, command, and soldiering in Hood's Texas Brigade for clues to unravel the broader enigma of the antebellum southern social structure, particularly with regard to the place and status of plain folk, yeoman farmers, and other non-elite whites. Much of the literature about the antebellum South hinges on the long-standing debate over whether the Old South an elitist slaveholding aristocracy or an agrarian plain-folk democracy.(3) drift of many recent studies has been toward synthesis, arguing that antebellum society represented a hybrid of hierarchy and equality.(4) However, even studies that recognize the complexity and paradoxes of this society fall short as social history, because the class dynamic that they advance to link elite and commoner, rich and poor, is too one-sided. planters' hegemony is a given. The nonslaveholder, according to one historian, was in a very passive, dependent position vis-a-vis the planter.(5) Studies based on the so-called republican synthesis also tend to infer yeoman values and ideas from the language and behavior of political elites; consequently, the social relation is seen from the top down, the capacity of plain folk to form their own lives is shortchanged, and thus the truly dynamic, interactive, and relational nature of power in the antebellum South has not been fully understood.(6) common soldiers of Hood's Texas Brigade fought the Civil War mainly on their own terms, defending and justifying their right to do so by drawing on a unique mix of ideological and cultural resources. Their conduct as soldiers combined beliefs about popular sovereignty and natural liberty with backcountry shaming rituals of social control, like the charivari, that were used to hold privates and officers alike to particular standards of conduct defined by the volunteer soldiers themselves. This essay examines how popular constitutional ideas and traditional forms of community action affected the performance of one of the elite fighting units in the Army of Northern Virginia. …

Double character: slavery and mastery in the antebellum Southern courtroom

Double character: slavery and mastery in the antebellum Southern courtroom

The Croom Family and the Goodwood Plantation: Land, Litigation, and Southern Lives

The Croom Family and Goodwood Plantation: Land, Litigation, and Southern Lives. By William Warren Rogers and Erica R. Clark. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Pp. xvii, 290. Illustrations, maps. $35.00.) Over the last two decades, several historians have published illuminating studies that have clarified the role of the family within antebellum southern society. Most of these works drew their conclusions from examining the collective experience of numerous families among the South's planter elite. In contrast, William Warren Rogers and Erica R. Clark, in The Croom Family and Goodwood Plantation: Land, Litigation, and Southern Lives, trace the history of one planter family from its colonial foundations through the Civil War era. Aside from participating in the settlement of the cotton frontier in Florida, the subjects of this study became entangled in a complicated lawsuit that eventually produced an important precedent in American jurisprudence. Rogers and Clark begin with an account of the life of William Croom, a North Carolina planter born on the eve of the American Revolution, but the authors' focus quickly shifts to the careers of two of William's sons. Hardy and Bryan Croom grew up with the cotton kingdom and devoted their adult years to their business and planting interests, though Hardy also gained renown as an amateur botanist. By the late 1820s, William, Hardy, and Bryan had invested in several tracts in the Florida territory, including Hardy's Leon County plantation, which later came to be known as Goodwood. Despite fragile health, Hardy traveled frequently between his North Carolina home in New Bern, his Florida holdings, and New York City, the location preferred by his wife, Frances Smith Croom. In the 1830s, Hardy spent more time in Florida than anywhere else and expressed his desire to move there permanently. Frances, however, cared little either for frontier conditions or for the danger presented by the Seminole War. Eventually, the couple compromised by agreeing to relocate to Charleston, a cultured urban center situated closer to Hardy's Florida possessions. Hardy and Frances never completed this move, however, for in October 1837, the couple and their three children were tragically killed when a storm destroyed the steamship S. S. Home on a return trip from New York. Family members and friends believed that Hardy had prepared a will, but the document was never found, so his closest brother and business associate, Bryan, assumed control of Hardy's estate. Yet Henrietta Smith and Richard Armistead, Frances's mother and brother-in-law, respectively, filed suit against Bryan. Hardy, they argued, had been a legal resident of North Carolina; according to that state's law, an estate passed first to an intestate's male children and then to the child's closest next of kin. Witnesses to the shipwreck testified that Hardy probably had died before his ten-year-old son, and that after the boy's death, Henrietta Smith became the heir to Hardy's possessions. Bryan's counsel countered that no solid evidence existed that Hardy had died before his son; even if he had, the fact that Hardy had voted in a Florida election made him a legal resident of the territory, and territorial statute prescribed that an estate should pass to the paternal side of the deceased's family. After nearly two decades of legal maneuvering and rejected settlements, the Florida Supreme Court in 1857 decided in Smith's and Armistead's favor. …

Play in Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes

The distinguishing feature of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Scenes is its depiction of play--in its two senses of contesting and role playing--as hallmark of antebellum southern life. The titles of sketches indicate that they are predominantly concerned with games, sports and artistic performances, and every sketch there is some form of play, from obvious forms of sport and role playing to, a few sketches, more complicated social and rituals. In most cases Longstreet presents characters as behaving life as if they were performing on a stage. These characters range from young man Georgia Theatrics, who rehearses a courthouse fight, to Ned Brace who assumes different characters pursuit of humor, to Miss Crump and her affectations, to a group of young men pretending to be wax figures, to narrators, Hall and Baldwin, taking part activities that are essentially role playing. Characters that act directly and immediately without a sense of a deliberate performance are scarce. Few critics have noted importance of play Scenes. The pioneering effort this respect is that of Michael Oriard his essay on southwestern humor. Oriard observes that in Southwestern humor center appears to be play and games (4). The collectively reveal the fact that game-playing was virtually a mode of existence for many of frontier denizens described hundreds of humorous tales, a mode that captured imaginations of writers that recorded (5). More recently, Scott Romine commented on Longstreet's tendency to connect communal harmony with play. He states, If Longstreet's ideal community each man should be easily apprehended and roles mutually accepted, a corollary truth is that a measure of uncertainty and instability--in short, a measure of play--is no less necessary for maintenance of communal norms and (9). Apt and revealing though these commentaries on play may be, they broach subject rather broadly and generally. A detailed discussion of play Scenes is needed if Longstreet's achievement this book is to be properly assessed. The first thing to note is that Longstreet does not present play simply as a significant activity southern society of early nineteenth century, but depicts it as essence of life of that society. He focuses on it to such a degree that it becomes identical with life or a substitute for it. The sketches contain examples of play that comprehend significant aspects of antebellum southern society, such as trade, education, politics, and interpersonal relationships general. In these examples, typical activities are presented without seriousness and logic that normally define them. They are divested of moral and rational elements order to become flexible enough to exist contexts from which they are normally excluded. Scenes shows clearly that forms of play are useful transforming or, at least, channeling violence, cruelty and similar negative impulses into harmless (if not, altogether, meaningful and creative) action. In these forms of play, there are two possible effects. The obvious and predominant one is catharsis that a player experiences as a result of directing his negative and antisocial impulses to object of play and using them up a contest instead of directing them at other people. The cathartic effect, as we shall see, :is possible even fights between men which violence is displayed, because violence, this case, occurs a context that ultimately transforms it into play. The other effect, which is less frequent and sometimes overlaps with first one, may be described as affirmative effect. This is produced by kind of play which is designed to affirm values of society and educate its members into significance of these values. James B. Meriwether states that Georgia Scenes provides abundant evidence that Longstreet thought impulses towards savagery and violence were to be found not far from surface many men, perhaps most of them; and it is function of human laws and institutions to restrain, discipline and civilize these impulses and to make good citizens out of barbarians (361). …

The Confessions of Edward Isham: A Poor White Life of the Old South

The Confessions of Edward Isham: A Poor White Life of the Old South. Edited by Charles C. Bolton and Scott P. Culclasure. Introduction by J. William Harris. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Pp. xii, 192. Maps, appendices. Cloth, $40.00; paper, $18.00.) What can the life of one obscure man, convicted and hanged for murder in 1860, tell us about the antebellum South? Quite a bit, according to the editors and essayists in this collection of documents and interpretations that will quickly become a classic in southern historical literature. Born into poverty in northwest Georgia in the 1820s, Edward Isham belonged to the sizeable but understudied rural underclass of the antebellum South. Manual labor, transience, drinking, fighting, and frequent sex characterized the lives of these men. From age ten until his death at age thirty-two, Isham constantly moved about as he looked for work, drank, gambled, fled the law, cohabited with and abandoned women, and engaged in one violent confrontation after another. Killing a man in Alabama, Isham traveled to western North Carolina, where farmer and slaveowner James Cornelius employed him as a ditcher in the spring of 1859. A dispute over seven dollars' worth of unpaid wages resulted in Cornelius's death. Isham fled, only to be captured, tried, and convicted, but before he was hanged, his court-appointed lawyer, David Schenck, recorded a lengthy first-person narrative of Isham's life. Editors Charles C. Bolton and Scott P. Culclasure discovered Isham's autobiography in the North Carolina Division of Archives and History and used census and tax records, newspapers, and court transcripts to verify the people, places, and events Isham mentioned and to fill in details of his life, arrest, and trial. Isham's autobiography, reprinted in full, provides a detailed first-person window into the world of the antebellum poor whites (x) of the South, and essays by Bolton, Culclasure, David H. Kleit, Victoria C. Bynum, and Joseph P. Reidy present different perspectives of how one life might be understood (xi). J. William Harris's introduction summarizes the significance of the text and essays, and three appendices of maps, the judge's trial summary, and newspaper accounts complete the book. Southern historians, scholars of poverty and class in nineteenth- century America, and students will profit from this remarkable collection, which highlights important themes in antebellum southern history and models contemporary historical practice. Bolton finds Isham's varied, fleeting, and unstable (31) labor typical of many poor whites. Because slavery limited industrial development and lowered wages, men without land had to posses several skills and move around frequently in order to find work. They preferred independent labor-gold mining, logging, herding, hunting, and gambling-to working for wages, but as railroads opened the southern upcountry to the market economy beginning in the 1840s, these possibilities declined. Isham's flight and arrest metaphorically capture poor whites' diminishing opportunities. Culclasure's two essays, both of which have been published previously, provide a detailed analysis of Isham's life and his trial for murder. Like poor urban neighborhoods housing the underclass today, Carroll County, Georgia, had a reputation for lawlessness, heavy drinking, criminal activity, and weak social institutions. Poverty, family separations, and transience marked Isham's early home life, and his social relationships included abuse of women and violence towards men. Constant flight and family ties enabled Isham to escape the consequences of his violent behavior until he moved far from home to the settled society of western North Carolina and murdered a respectable citizen. Culclasure finds evidence in the governors' papers that when members of a community sympathized with a poor white man convicted of homicide or believed there were mitigating circumstances, they appealed to the governor for clemency. …

Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom

Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom

Masters on Trial: The Enforcement of Laws against Self-Hire by Slaves in Jacksonville and Palatka, Florida

����� In March i 858 the grand jury for Duval County, Florida, indicted Samuel N. WilUams of JacksonviUe for allowing his slaves to hire their own time, a violation of an 1856 state law. Thejurors ended their spring term with a presentment promising more indictments ifthe evil ofslave self-hire did not cease. The next month, the circuit court having made its way farther south, the Putnam County grand jury indicted WiUiam D. Moseley of Palatka for breaking the 1856 law. These cases surely caused a stir. WilUams came from the ranks of prosperous urban masters with his four slaves. Moseley had been the first governor of the state of Florida and in 1858, with more than one hundred slaves, was the greatest slaveowner in northeast Florida. In the towns along the St. Johns River, a campaign had begun that put masters on trial. ' Self-hire by slaves was an illegal but common practice in antebellum Southern cities, whereby slaveowners permitted bondsmen and women to find their own employment, remitting weekly or monthly sums to their masters. Many Southerners condemned the practice for the troubling latitude that it allowed slaves in the management of their own movements and money. However, as Richard C. Wade shows in Slavery in the Cities, self-hire had custom and usage on its side. This formofslave laborprovidedfortheflexibleallocationofworkers

Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee

The antebellum South has been drawn largely as a map of contrasting extremes--a vast agrarian landscape punctuated by a few major cities. Small towns have either been viewed as sleepy villages that reflected the countryside or dismissed as urban microcosms. In Constructing Townscapes , however, the small town emerges from obscurity to reveal its distinctive and influential role in the southern landscape. Using existing architectural evidence as well as photographs, maps, diaries, letters, and newspapers, Lisa Tolbert shows how residents of four county seats in antebellum Middle Tennessee rebuilt and reorganized their towns in response to changing social and economic circumstances. She also illuminates the ways in which three seemingly powerless groups--women, young men, and slaves--influenced the arrangement of town space, vividly retracing the footsteps of members of these groups as they traveled town streets to perform their daily routines. Through careful analysis of the relationships between the material and social contexts of town life, Tolbert shows that small towns, whose stories have usually been considered incidental to the course of southern history, should actually be understood as important components of antebellum southern culture. |Establishes the distinctive and influential role of small towns as an important component in the shaping of antebellum southern culture. Based on documentary materials from middle Tennessee.

Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South

Reviewed by: Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South* Paul B. Hensley (bio) Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South. By Mark M. Smith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xx+303; illustrations, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $45 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Over the last decade or so historians have increasingly turned their attention to the impacts that concepts of time and its use had on Americans during the United States’ transformation from a colonial, preindustrial society to an independent nation moving inexorably along a continuum toward industrialization. Most of those studies focused on how that transformation played out in the North, especially in New England. Of the relatively few historians addressing issues of time in the South, several appeared to agree with David Hackett Fischer (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989]) that southern attitudes toward time and work reflected at best only a pale replica of the well-developed time ethos emerging in the North. Mark Smith challenges this view in his fascinating book, Mastered by the Clock. He is the first to construct a comprehensive study of time throughout the plantation South, aiming to discover “how clock time came to be in the South, its impact on master and slave, and its meaning for our assessment of the Old South” (p. 2). Yet his research goes beyond simply masters and slaves. He brings urban artisans, nonslaveholding farmers, and freed blacks into the mix as well. Smith begins his study by confronting modernization theory and the theoretical debate over what constitutes capitalism to explain why “the historical study of time in the South still rests on the tacit assumption that clock time was alien to the region” (p. 9). He suggests five reasons why historians [End Page 406] have viewed colonial and antebellum southerners as imbued with a premodern and largely natural time orientation. First, some have presumed that slave resistance to the imposition of time work made clock time irrelevant for southerners in general. Second, historians have tried to fit the South too neatly into modernization theory, which sees capitalism and a modern time sensibility marching forward hand in hand, resulting in an ingrained time consciousness for both factory managers and workers. Third, many historians have assumed that few if any mechanical timepieces existed in the antebellum South. Fourth, the tendency to overstate the influence of nature and seasonal rhythms on antebellum southern time sensibilities has tended to blind many historians to the emergence of a clock-driven time awareness that was present in the eighteenth century and escalated during the nineteenth. Fifth, historians have failed to recognize that natural time and mechanical time are not mutually exclusive, but are indeed complementary. Smith challenges these misconceptions in his assertion that “the slave South was one of the few rural regions of the nineteenth-century world to be affected by a modern clock consciousness with only parts of the rural North having a similarly advanced understanding of time” (p. 16). This was true, he argues, because the slave South embraced all the forces promoting time discipline in other nineteenth-century societies. Moreover, the absence of free wage labor in factory or agricultural contexts did not diminish the formation of that time discipline. The evidence presented in Mastered By the Clock makes it difficult to refute Smith’s assertion. In chapter 1 he traces the development of public and private time in the South. Public sources of time, such as church clocks and bells and sundials, appeared in both rural and urban areas throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And privately owned clocks and watches made in the North or imported from England were purchased by a significant number of white southerners, including urban merchants and nonslaveholders as well as plantation masters. After the 1830s, as is described in chapter 2, clock time became an increasingly powerful partner in its triad relationship with sacred and natural time. The result was crucial: “Planters from the 1830s on inherited not only colonial merchants’ imported clocks and watches, but perhaps more important, an equation of time with money and an attendant...

Biology, Diseases, and Economics: An Epidemiological History of Slavery in the American South

The economic history of antebellum southern slavery has been and is the subject of ongoing debates among scholars. The literature includes assessments about the efficiency of slavery as well as about the adequacy of slave living standards and diets. Yet this literature under appreciates the important biologic and historical role that parasitic diseases played in the history of slavery. Recognizing the role of parasitic diseases calls into question some prevailing interpretations of slavery. Lacking direct evidence on slave diets, scholars turned to anthropometric evidence as proxies for the living standards of slaves, leading to the prevailing view that adult slaves were given adequate sustenance, but slave infants and children were severely malnourished. We argue it was not slave diets, but the combination of the plantation system and diseases that caused abnormally small slave children. The diseases that concern us, primarily hookworm and malaria, affected slaves ('blacks') and free labor ('whites') differently. Many slaves were concentrated on large plantations with infants and younger children crowded into 'nurseries.' This system allowed the maintenance and spread of diseases that adversely affected younger slaves. Southern white children however were less likely to be raised in conditions so conductive to parasitic diseases. The disease ecology of the antebellum South has implications for the prevailing view that slavery was more efficient than free labor. Biologic evidence indicates that people of tropical West African ancestry are more resilient to the effects of hookworm and malaria than European descendents. Thus when whites did contract these diseases, they were more afflicted than blacks. When slaves entered the adult work force they were taken from disease breeding grounds (slave nurseries) and sent into relatively (for blacks) healthy fields, while whites that went into the fields found a disease environment that was typically worse than that of their childhood. If black adults were more productive than were white adults because of a greater resilience to parasitic diseases, then part of any measured difference in productivity between slave and free farms should be attributed to the disease resistance of African descendents, rather than to any inherent efficiencies of slavery.

In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature. Susan J. TracyMothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Drew Gilpin FaustDiscovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past. Patricia MortonHine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History. Darlene Clark Hine

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsIn the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature. Susan J. Tracy Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Drew Gilpin Faust Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past. Patricia Morton Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History. Darlene Clark Hine Jane Turner CenserJane Turner Censer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 24, Number 1Autumn, 1998 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495337 Views: 10Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1998 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Traci Wilson-Kleekamp Descendants of Celia and Robert Newsom Speak, Genealogy 4, no.22 (Apr 2020): 49.https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020049

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America.

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. By Saidiya V. Hartman. Race and American Culture. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. x, 281. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-508984-7; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-19-508983-9.) Saidiya V. Hartman's Scenes of Subjection interrogates the apparent transformation from slavery to freedom in nineteenth-century America by paying particular attention to the antebellum and postbellum South. The author hopes to explicate the ambivalence of emancipation in order to address the issues raised by the continuing subjugation of blacks in a liberal nation. Hartman gives particular attention to the role of force and violence in constructing and perpetuating subjugation. She speaks importantly to such major historiographical debates as the question whether antebellum southern slavery was a paternalistic institution. Paternalism has been presented as recognizing the humanity of the enslaved, in part as a response to northern liberalism and abolitionism. In contrast to claims that the master/slave relationship was based upon reciprocal ties of mutual responsibilities and affection, however, Hartman supports those who argue that slavery was fundamentally based upon dehumanizing white physical force and violence. What Hartman's postmodernist analysis perhaps particularly contributes to such debates is her creative use of both traditional and nontraditional historical sources of evidence to interrogate and deconstruct the meaning of the ordinary scenes of subjection. She thereby reinterprets such routine practices as slave dancing and singing, seemingly encouraged by paternalistic masters, as required demonstrations of white dominance that were epitomized by the forced performance of terrified slaves on the auction block. Hartman's deconstruction of the legal non-existence of the rape of a slave woman also emphasizes the dehumanizing violence of the law of slavery. But, at the same time, the personhood of the enslaved was recognized in the sense that they could be charged and found criminally responsible and blameworthy for wrongdoing. The argument that the association of black agency with blameworthiness comprised a lasting legacy of slavery leads on to the book's second section, in which Hartman focuses on the South after emancipation. Hartman's extended deconstruction of meanings, and her prose, can at times be so convoluted that the reader might at times wonder what she means to say; however, the book's second section helps to clarify her thesis that emphasizing the damaging legacies of slavery to emancipation is central to her critique of an American liberalism that defines liberty as the self-mastery of the man who--owning himself--could freely exercise reason, choice, and consent. …

“…the bold atmosphere of Mrs. Hentz” and Others: Fast Food and Feminine Rebelliousness in Some Romances of the Old South

In the romances of the female authors of the Old South, there is no myth-making on the theme of the lost American Eden such as appears in the adventure fiction of their male counterparts. What the women wrote were indoor, triumph-of-love domestic romances that reveal suppressed rebelliousness against the expected submissiveness of females in the nineteenth century. A feminist urge is evident in the neglected fiction of women authors of the antebellum South well before it finds its clearer voice in the twentieth century. Back then and in that place, among women there was indeed a chafing at the bit. But in their day there was little thought that a struggle for the greater rights for women could be won in any measure. There is a current of pessimism that underlies their uncertain fantasies of feminine freedom. It is a very private kind of feminism that is kept out of focus for the sake of the authors' professional and personal endurance in the male-dominated world of the plantation South. One typical example of this pattern of hesitant feminine social protest occurs buried unexpectedly in a lovers' conversation at the end of Chapter 16 in Eliza Anne Dupuy's (1814-1881) The Planter's Daughter (1856). This statement is unique for Mrs. Dupuy: her romances usually are not at all critical of the contemporary relationship between men and women. The main theme in The Planter's Daughter is the danger of land speculation, which destroys the generous, wealthy planter Charles Harrington. Before the crash comes to Wavertree Plantation, however, his beautiful daughter Adele talks one day with her chivalrous Virginia beau Philip Evelyn. Her statement about the need for some redress of wrongs done to women of her time is surprising, because she is otherwise so typical of the demure, blonde, graceful, domestically content Southern belle-a planter's daughter-who appears in antebellum Southern romances. Adele and Philip are discussing the character of Eve in Milton's Paradise Lost and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Drama of Exile. Adele feels Mrs. Browning's Eve is truer to our ideal of the womanly than is Milton's. Philip laughs and says in a mock heroic tone that he cannot tolerate such rebellion against the long established superiority of my sex over yours. Adele persists: You forget that this is the age of woman's rights-or rather the redressing of her wrongs. I need not take up arms in their defense, because my sex are proving themselves in every way, quite capable of taking care of themselves. In answer to Philip's question if she is really an advocate of these women's conventions, she answers, Yes, if by such means only right can assert itself. But then, using her protected and privileged social standing as a way out, Adele backs away from her statement. Agitation will do for those other women who suffer and for whom new liberalizing laws might be helpful; she would not, after all, take part in such a convention. She would stay on the sidelines. Conventions are all right for women who actually today endure ...evils that legislation can correct. I can very well understand that as society is now constructed, a woman may be made too much a slave of a worthless or unprincipled husband. But I am so fortunate as to occupy a position that in a measure places me above the sufferings by which women among the medium and lower walks of life are often crushed. There is another objection [that] I have to the feminine reformers]-they claim too much; they wish to step out of the sphere nature has evidently allotted to them, and claim such privileges as would destroy the feminine qualities which are their greatest charm. They forget the beautiful words of Roger Asham to Lady Jane Gray-Women, like plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade. Through Adele, then, Mrs. Dupuy makes and then backs away from an antebellum Southern woman's protest against social and domestic restrictions and injustices. …

In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature , and: Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era (review)

150CIVIL WAR HISTORY In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature. By Susan J. Tracy. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. ix, 307. $42.50.) Literature andHumanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era. By Gregory Eiselein. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 215. $29.95.) The two works under review here arejoined by their authors' common desire to extract from literature (novels, poems, essays, personal accounts) a picture, in the first instance, of the slave holders' worldview on the eve of the Civil War, and in the second case, a description of the crippling, suffocating attitudes that marred the efforts of well-meaning humanitarians in all but a few cases. Both authors also follow guidelines ofcultural studies to describe not only what ideas reigned during the period of study, but how and why the ideas were produced. Susan J. Tracy studies five male novelists often associated with the defense of slavery and Southern culture: John Pendleton Kennedy, William Alexander Caruthers, Nathaniel BeverleyTucker, William Gilmore Simms, andJames Ewell Heath, whom Tracy identifies as "the only true liberal ofthe group" (1). Tracey considers her work to be a "Marxist feminist project ... to consider the parts of a literary text in relation to the whole" (2). Sure enough, she rounds up the usual savants—Karl Marx,Antonio Gramsci, RaymondWilliams, Eugene Genovese— and with their methodological help argues that the proslavery argument "was as much about gender and class as it was about race relations" (4). Various chapters explore the novelists' characterizations ofthe place for poor whites, blacks, daughters, mothers, spinsters, fallen women, belles, "spirited" women, and slaves. Not surprisingly, she finds that the novelists reflected the ideas of the South's ruling "class," which exercised patriarchal powerwith "terror and violence" (224). Anyone familiar with the novelists studied or with the writings of George Fitzhugh knows that a wide range of national and especially Northern developments came under the condemning gaze of these writers. Especially during the Jackson period, the land was ablaze with proposals from crackpot schemers who wished to redesign the social order with blueprints of their own manufacture . If Tracy is correct, that the novelists' characters reflect concerns about class and gender more than race, and that they in turn represent the social vision ofthe South's leaders, then it is no surprise that gender and class figured prominently in the worries ofthe elite. In the "Age ofthe Common Man" and uncommon women like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, or striking Lowell mill girls, threats to social order were ubiquitous and varied. The dates of Tracy's main texts may offer an explanation for her discovery. The appendix which lists the novels examined reveals the median date of publication to be 1838. One wonders if a description of a "worldview" extracted from a literary analysis of many novels written during or before the Jackson period can suffice to describe the notions of a generation living a quarter century later. Gregory Eiselein, assistant professor of English at Kansas State University, has authored Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era, which BOOK REVIEWSI5I joins seven other titles in the series Philanthropic Studies, edited by Robert Payton and Dwight Burlingame. The subject of the study is the writing and philanthropic practices of John Brown, Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Henry Thoreau, former slave Harriet Jacobs, and especiallyWaltWhitman, who emerges as the most successful practitioner of "eccentric philanthropy." Normal philanthropy, Eiselein asserts, is marred by authoritarianism, control, efforts to stabiUze society, efficiency, social distance between the giver and receiver of the act, and—after the Civil War—the presence and misguided efforts of the national government. In his work the author hopes to defend benevolence from defamation by writers who either praise it uncritically for its pure selflessness, or from "social control" historians who see in benevolence only aggressive efforts to exact obligations "and control the thinking, values, and activities of certain groups" ( 1 1 ). Neither ofthese interpretations "can explain the complexity , diversity, or idiosyncracy of benevolent work" ( 1 2). Benevolence could be made acceptable only if "eccentric" care-giving, by which Eiselein means care that is noncoercive and patient centered, were the...

Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee. 1832-1861 (review)

74CIVIL WAR HISTORY Koistinen divides his book into two parts. Part I discusses what he terms the "pre-industrial phase" of warfare. The American Revolution is the focus of this section. For Koistinen, the mobilization for the American Revolution was the most complex in American history because "the process of warfare created the nation" (? i). The Mexican War, and especially the American Civil War, represent the transitional phase between the preindustrial and industrial stages ofwar mobilization. Although the title indicates that the volume begins with the colonial era, the book, in fact, starts with the Revolution. But the main focus is on the Civil War period. Indeed, the author devotes six of his ten chapters to the mobilization efforts, both military and civilian, ofthe Union and the Confederacy. Koistinen's argument is not particularly new or revisionist. Rather, he has synthesized an enormous amount of literature on war mobilization. For example, his coverage of Confederate mobilization echoes the work of Richard Goff, Robert C. Black III, and Douglas Ball. Although he states in his notes that he utilized primary sources extensively, the citations are composed overwhelmingly of secondary literature. Still, those notes are invaluable, for they approximate a bibliographic essay (in the absence of a comprehensive bibliography). Koistinen states that his research interests he in the twentieth century and that he views nineteenth-century warfare and its political economy from a twentiethcentury perspective. That bias is reflected in his treatment of the Civil War years. Indeed, the book's emphasis on the roots oftotal war in the Civil War period allows Koistinen to lay the groundwork for his second volume. Beating Plowshares Into Swords does not conclude with any startling revelations or path-breaking interpretations. Nonetheless, it provides the scholar and student with a comprehensive synthesis of some of the best monographs on war, mobilization, and the evolution of the American political economy. Mary A. DeCredico United States Naval Academy Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee. 1832-1861. By Jonathan M.Atkins. (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1997. Pp. xviii, 371. $38.00.) The republican synthesis has come at last to Tennessee. Jonathan M. Atkins's aim is to reshape our understanding ofantebellum politics in theVolunteer State by drawing on the insights of modern political historians who have traced the long-lasting influence of the Founding Fathers' ideology. He has succeeded admirably. Atkins rejects the notion, put forth by Richard P. McCormick and others, that the Whig and Democratic parties were essentially vote-getting machines devoid of ideological substance. In Tennessee at least, says Atkins, the parties BOOK REVIEWS75 were highly ideological. They shared a republican worldview that depicted America's cherished liberties as perpetually threatened by corrupt, self-seeking interests. Where the two parties differed was in their response to the continuing crisis of freedom: Whigs believed that economic development and an activist government would safeguard liberty, while Democrats feared that too much of either would destroy it. This basically chronological study thoroughly analyzes the political maneuvering and propagandizing that marked Tennessee's first party system from its birth in the late 1830s to its demise after the i860 election. (Scholars will still want to consult Paul H. Bergeron's Antebellum Politics in Tennessee, however, especially for detailed analysis of election returns.) Atkins challenges the assertion of William J. Cooper, Jr., that at the heart of antebellum Southern politics was the defense of slavery. In Atkins's view, the defense of slavery was but one element ofthe republican agenda. Whig and Democratic politicians got elected not simply by assuring the voters of their fidelity to slavery but by promising that their party's measures would better protect the citizens' freedoms, including the freedom to own slaves. Until 1861 the overwhelming majority of Tennessee voters of both parties rejected Southern-rights extremism and agreed that slavery and liberty would be safe only in an undivided Union. Atkins offers a persuasive explanation for the state's consistently conservative response to the sectional conflicts that drove many other Southern states toward fire-eating radicalism and secession. Likewise , he makes clear how and why the state abruptly changed course with the outbreak of war. Most Tennessee citizens immediately aligned themselves with the...