Yeoman Farmers Research Articles

From Brahmin to Biglow (and Back Again): James Russell Lowell as Temporary Satirist

From Brahmin to Biglow (and Back Again):James Russell Lowell as Temporary Satirist Todd N. Thompson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Colored illustration by George Cruikshank. From The Biglow Papers, by James Russell Lowell, 2nd English ed. (London: John Camden Hotten, 1861), facing 126. [End Page 154] Twenty-one years after writing his first poem in the persona of the anti-war farmer-poet Hosea Biglow, James Russell Lowell contrasted the public's reception of his other work to that of the Biglow poems. "Very far from being a popular author under my own name," Lowell wrote in 1867, "so far, indeed, as to be almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere ; I saw them pinned up in workshops ; I heard them quoted and their authorship debated."1 Lowell's recollection evinces a keen awareness of his temporary transformation from an American romantic poet—an idealist aesthete who was "almost unread"—to a popular satirist writing in dialect poetry for a newspaper audience. Lowell's use of a character who speaks in a rustic regional vernacular is itself a political gesture that refigures the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer as a political provocateur. But, just as important, the Biglow poems' dialogic structure placed Lowell's characters and critiques in conversation not only with each other and their real-world referents but also with the media in which they were presented. In this way the poems reflected the cacophony of voices commenting on the U.S.-Mexican War in the popular press while contesting mass media's romanticized accounts of the war. A historicized reading of the formal qualities of the Biglow poems also accounts for why Lowell's career as a popular satirist effectively [End Page 155] ended in 1848, even though he attempted to resuscitate Hosea Biglow to comment on the secession crisis and the Civil War over a decade later. The real politics of the Biglow poems lie not in Lowell's personal antislavery commitments nor in the subjects he treats or the public figures he takes to task, but in the poems' dialogism: that is, their use of competing voices to perform, question and counter jingoistic accounts of the U.S.-Mexican War in the mass media. The Biglow poems are dialogic in their overlaying of multiple speakers engaging in multiple, often overlapping modes of public-sphere discourse—political, editorial, and military—mediated by Hosea Biglow's versification of these voices in Yankee dialect. This structure offers its own political commentary that is at least as important as what these characters reveal, how they act, and what they mock. Mikhail Bakhtin has, of course, done the most among modern scholars to articulate the significance of dialogic thought. "The dialogic means of seeking truth," he writes, "is counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and it is also counterposed to the naive self-confidence of those people who think that they know something, that is, who think that they possess certain truths."2 Unlike Lowell's abolitionist prose essays, which, as we will see, assume and assert "truth" with absolute moral certitude, his satiric poems challenge the "naive self-confidence" of prevailing narratives—both pro-war and anti-war—of the U.S.-Mexican War. Lowell's approach—which, though influenced by the dialect verse of Robert Burns and the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, was radically new in its layering and mutually mediating translations of disparate voices spoken in equally diverse genres (such as letters from the front, political speech, jingoistic newspaper rhetoric)—both mimics and challenges the ascendancy of the penny press, which promised democratic mass communication and delivered visionary delusions of national grandeur. His narrator Hosea Biglow's dialect verse parodies popular mediations of the war experience while mirroring the multitude of voices brought to a news-hungry American public through those mediations. Lowell's polyphonic poems coincided with the rise of the penny press, which coincided with the war itself.3 [End Page 156] The poems exhibit the dangers of bullying political domination by senators, editors, and generals, but they also model dissent by interrupting (in the press) that domination (of the press) and...

A Stabbing in Chawton, Jane Austen, and Emma

SOME of the background to the stabbing in March 1814 of a young man in Chawton, to which Jane Austen alludes in one of her letters as ‘the Baigent business’,1 has already been explained by Robin Vick. We know that the victim was Stephen Mersh, and that the accused, who was later acquitted, was James Baigent, the ten-year old son of yeoman farmer William (1765–1838) and his second wife Elizabeth Baigen (d. 1845). A large family called Mersh, too, lived in Chawton, although there is no evidence that a Stephen Mersh had been baptised, despite the parish records showing the baptisms of ten children with that surname. Vick also identified Mr Wickham, mentioned in Austen’s letter, as the Honourable William Wickham (1761–1840), the eminent politician and diplomat, and he believed that Wickham’s lawyer friend, who had written to Austen’s brother Edward, was Sir John Bayley.2 As Austen told her sister Cassandra, the lawyer ‘is to be on the Grand Jury’ and, judging by his letters, ‘must be an Excellent Man’. His letters to Wickham, which the latter had passed on to Edward, anticipated the boy’s acquittal on the first charge of ‘maliciously stabbing a person’,3 but gave his opinion ‘for the prosecution for assault’ on the second charge.4

Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (review)

Reviewed by: Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside Mark Finlay (bio) Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside. By Benjamin R. Cohen. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xii+272. $55. The question of when and how the residents of the United States and other Western nations became more scientific and quantitative in their outlook toward the natural world is one of the perennial questions in the history of technology and science. In Notes from the Ground, Benjamin Cohen argues that science became "culturally credible" (p. x) in the United States in the [End Page 188] first few decades of the nineteenth century, largely through the writers, agricultural improvers, and "agrarian citizens" (p. 8) who helped persuade a broader public that mastery of the soil encompassed virtues that went beyond the simple matter of crop yields. Cohen divides his tightly argued and well-supported case into two parts. In the first, he establishes that several American observers of agricultural practice embraced a "georgic" approach to the land. Influenced by the Roman writer Virgil, authors such as John Spurrier, a British transplant to 1790s Delaware, asserted that careful improvement of the land was among the first prerequisites for the young nation to advance both agriculturally and culturally. Other well-educated American farmers became convinced that attention to European science, combined with hard, physical labor in their fields, would help Americans combat soil exhaustion, stem emigration to the west, and uplift the moral standing of citizens left on the land. Among its many persuasive arguments, Notes from the Ground establishes that American agricultural improvers were not empty vessels yearning for scientific advice from European chemists. Rather, their georgic framework combined with practical experiences meant that Americans had established the organizations, rhetoric, and forms of communication that became forums for "scientizing the land" (p. 145). Agriculturists who questioned the pronouncements of chemists like Justus von Liebig were not hopelessly backward, but expressing valid concerns about the credibility and local applicability of European chemistry. The second part of the book focuses on antebellum Virginia, where leading agriculturists engaged in sophisticated analyses of agriculture's complexities. These gentlemen became convinced that their local observations, careful recordkeeping, and public dissemination of research results could become keystones in reversing soil depletion and preserving the socioeconomic status quo. In an engaging section on Virginia's state soil surveys of the 1830s, Cohen demonstrates that these were more than a small episode in the early history of geology, but instead an intentional program that collected data from disparate local landowners in order to inform statewide approaches to agricultural improvement and sociopolitical action. Although the surveyors encountered challenging realities and technological barriers—poor roads, broken instruments, and ineffective communication systems—their work allowed Virginians to gain a greater appreciation for a "science of place" (p. 190) and their own role as citizens actively connected to the soil. Especially intriguing is Cohen's suggestion that both sides in the nation's sectional controversies looked to agricultural science for answers. For some northerners, georgic and scientific agriculture presented yeoman farmers with the tools needed to remain independent and prosperous. In contrast, some prominent southerners argued that agricultural science offered the means to preserve a slave-based economy. Political motivations [End Page 189] clearly drove Edmund Ruffin to partake in his thorough study of Virginia's soils and to prescribe the use of shells and marl to neutralize acidic soils. Along these lines, Cohen also makes explicit something that is often unstated: slaves, not elite landowners, did the work that made agricultural improvement possible in antebellum Virginia, for it was they who mined the marl, collected the seeds, and applied the fertilizers. For all its strengths, Notes from the Ground has a few weaknesses. The maps are simple and most illustrations contribute little. At times, Cohen gets bogged down in extensive exegeses of relatively minor texts; what is more, scholars such as Steven Stoll, John Majewski, and Jack Temple Kirby have already assessed several of the same texts in their own recent works. Perhaps most intriguing, but also questionable, are Cohen's repeated claims that the agricultural improvers of early...

Natural Glory in the Midst of War: The Establishment of Yosemite State Park

Natural Glory in the Midst of War:The Establishment of Yosemite State Park Adam Wesley Dean (bio) On July 1, 1864, as William T. Sherman marched toward Atlanta and Philip Sheridan fought Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley, President Abraham Lincoln diverted his attention from the Civil War to sign a bill creating Yosemite State Park in far-off California. The law removed Yosemite Valley and the neighboring Mariposa Big Tree Grove from the public domain so that California could manage the sites for "public use, resort, and recreation"—a state-owned nature park. The law forbade private property ownership, specifying instead that "leases not exceeding ten years may be granted" and mandating that income from these leases be "expended in … preservation and improvement." The act was the first of its kind and generated a heated controversy over whether the government had the right to create parks. Union nationalism, brought to a fevered pitch by the Civil War, and nineteenth-century notions of civilization explain why the United States established Yosemite. Americans used the word "civilization" to label a society that provided material wealth and opportunities for intellectual growth. Nationalism, in turn, can be defined as loyalty to a nation-state defined by politics, ideology, religion, language, and/or economic system. Free soil beliefs, developed during the debate over slavery's expansion in the 1850s, provided the intellectual framework for opposition to Yosemite. This controversy influenced the 1872 creation of Yellowstone as a national park under federal control. Authors of the Yellowstone legislation believed [End Page 386] that California's mismanagement of Yosemite showed the necessity for national—rather than state—control. The growth of the central state after the Civil War, moreover, gave the government the ability to act.1 Yosemite supporters believed that the park provided important values for an American nation undergoing sectional strife. The Union, for countless northern soldiers, citizens, and politicians, was "the last, best, hope of earth." Following Europe's failed revolutions of 1848, many believed that if the United States collapsed, republican government would be discredited and the world's aristocrats would gloat in triumph. William Brewer, of the California State Geological Survey, feared in April 1861 that "the prestige of the American name is passed away, not soon to return. We are doing and reaping as monarchists have often told us we would do." Making areas of scenic beauty accessible to everyone highlighted the value of republican government. Everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful, needed to experience the sublime scenery provided in parks. Second, park advocates believed that the creation of a public park on the California frontier would help the region transform from barbarism to civilization. Yosemite supporters argued that making the valley's beauties accessible would soothe the mind and spirit—making visitors more civilized.2 Free soil ideology created the framework for opposition to Yosemite. Here, I use political historian Eric Foner's definition of ideology as a "system of beliefs, values, fears, reflexes, and commitments … of a social group, be it a class, a party, or a section." Free soil politicians believed that the disbursement of the public domain to yeoman settlers allowed the poor to achieve prosperity. Encouraging western settlement also brought civilization to a barbaric wilderness. Slavery, however, prevented settlement by yeoman farmers and left the West in a barbaric state. As the Indiana Free Soiler George W. Julian sarcastically explained in 1850, slavery "promote[d] the growth of civilization by turning three millions of human beings into savages." Men such as Julian believed that granting land to yeomen farmers was an effective method of promoting civilization and keeping slavery out of the West. He argued, "The freedom of the public lands is anti-slavery measure.… It will weaken the system of chattel slavery by making war upon its kindred system [End Page 387] of wage slavery, giving homes and employment to its victims, and equalizing the condition of the people." Julian supported the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted families 160 acres on the surveyed public domain. Preemption, another method of land distribution favored by free soilers, allowed settlers to claim 160 acres on the unsurveyed or surveyed public domain. When the land became...

Sentient Genetics: Breeding the Animal Breeder as Fundamental Other

AbstractThis article discusses some aspects of the discourses of genetics in eighteenth‐century animal breeding as they affected animals, agricultural labourers and breeders, with a specific focus on the work of the yeoman farmer and master breeder Robert Bakewell. Bakewell's celebrity as an agricultural innovator is discussed in the context of his class position. While the potential malleability of animals appeared limitless in the light of new breeding methods, the opportunities for the social mobility of humans remained subject to the apparently naturalised boundaries of their class position.

Notes from the ground: science, soil, and society in the American countryside

Notes from the Ground examines the cultural conditions that brought agriculture and science together in nineteenth-century America. Integrating the history of science, environmental history, and science studies, the book shows how and why agrarian Americans - yeoman farmers, gentleman planters, politicians, and policy makers alike - accepted, resisted, and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land. By detailing the changing perceptions of soil treatment, Benjamin Cohen shows that the credibility of new soil practices grew not from the arrival of professional chemists, but out of an existing ideology of work, knowledge, and citizenship.

Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction by George Hovis

BOOK REVIEWS Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction, by George Hovis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. 325pp. $39.95 cloth. IN THE INTRODUCTION TO VALE OF HUMILTY, GEORGE HOVIS CONTENDS that while the planter elite class may have ruled the Old South, such was not the case in North Carolina, at least not by the same proportions. Instead, Hovis argues that the yeoman farmer and other “plain folk” dominated the Tarheel state, leaving a lasting impression on the region’s collective memory. Early in his introduction Hovis posits that “in North Carolina no tradition of gentrified letters exists for contemporary writers to supersede” (6), and he makes clear that his study will analyze the various ways in which six contemporary North Carolina writers draw from this plain folk tradition. As any connoisseur of Southern letters knows, North Carolina offers many authors for literary critics to analyze; Hovis’s six are Doris Betts, Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, and Randall Kenan. Literary depictions of plain folk in contemporary North Carolina literature certainly warrant critical exploration. Readers attuned to gender issues may wish for more attention to the “yeowoman” farmer: Hovis always uses the masculine pronoun when referring to the “yeoman,” and his introduction makes no mention of the yeowoman figure or of the fact that men and women were the plain folks who kept farms running. One could argue that the authors Hovis considers extend the previously male “yeoman” label to men and women, to all of the state’s plain folk, but Hovis does not. However, he does investigate issues surrounding female plain folks and writers’ portrayals of them in later chapters. Likewise, he ends his introduction by writing that the authors he considers “hope to help preserve in cultural memory the yeoman’s values while simultaneously interrogating those values and the various ways they have been embodied, as a means of better understanding and critiquing the evolving communities within their state and region” (21). And in fact, one of the critiques of “yeoman values” Hovis explores involves the role of the male patriarch in yeoman society. After his introduction Hovis first considers the work of Doris Betts, working to establish a critical framework that compares independence 734 Mississippi Quarterly with interdependence; readers interested in learning about Betts’ incorporation of religion into her writing will enjoy this chapter. Even so, while Hovis explores the feminist slant of much of Betts’ work, the yeoman paradigm is still somewhat problematic. For instance, Hovis cites Stephanie McCurry’s work, explaining that in most cases men were able to perpetuate the value of their farms because of the work women did (48), but there is still an underlying assumption that yeoman values are male and that women function as a helpful addendum to the system rather than form an integral part of it. Similarly, the subsequent chapter on Reynolds Price opens by using the male pronoun to reference the casual traveler, and such references occur again in a later chapter on Fred Chappell’s work (58, 117, 118). Nevertheless,thechapteronPriceprovidesaninterestingcomparison between Price and Betts, especially concerning their upbringing, social standing, and the reflections of both in their writing. Hovis also treats the subject of race in Price’s work with delicacy and tact, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about the role of race in Price’s writing. Following the chapter on Price, Hovis discusses Fred Chappell’s work, tackling Chappell’s more recent, popular works as well as his earlierpublications,whichmanyscholarsavoid.Next,readersencounter Hovis’ chapter on Lee Smith, subtitled “The Yeoman’s Wife.” Although this chapter is primarily about women and Smith’s depiction of them, Hovis makes no claim that Smith encourages readers to consider how the women of her fiction fulfill the yeoman role; however, he does explore the various ways in which Smith’s characters subvert patriarchal structures, and he does so with grace and skill (144). This chapter also includes a fair amount of psychological criticism, and while this critical approach could have been more usefully framed at the chapter’s outset, the addition is a welcome one. Having given great breadth of coverage to the other authors in...

So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848 by Will Bagley

 Reviews So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812–1848 by Will Bagley University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2010. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 480 pages. $45.00 cloth. Thisbookisthefirstinaprojectedfour-volume Overland West: The Story of the Oregon and California Trails, intended as a comprehensive survey of western overland migration through 1870,the approximate onset of transcontinental rail travel. The outgrowth of a study originally sponsored by the National Park Service’s Oregon and California Trails unit,few ventures in public history would seem to have resulted in such a rich trove of scholarship. The effort is not merely ambitious, but brave, because Bagley knowingly, and graciously , follows John Unruh’s path-breaking masterwork, The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1860. In the book’s preface, Bagley obliquely makes the case for his venture, noting his utilization of “five hundred overland narratives unknown to scholars before 1988” (p. xvii). Here we are reminded once again of historian Sandra Myers’s essential point: “no mass movement in history has been better recorded than the migrations of Americans across the continent” after 1840 (p. 284). With this amplitude of resources at his disposal, Bagley succeeds in bringing a new set of characters to the fore, or bringing a freshened outlook to certain near-legendary figures, such as Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet. Running contrary to the tenor of modern sensibilities, Bagley even attempts a favorable reconsideration of NarcissaWhitman’s personality and endeavors.Nevertheless,the essential outline of the story remains as Unruh so ably told it a generation ago,and that work remains unchallenged as the interpretive gold standard for this topic as a single volume overview. The promise inherent in Bagley’s projected series is the richness of detail that in its own way can serve as a“jumping off”opportunity for other students of western trails history. So Rugged and Mountainous is organized in an imaginative manner. A few stage-setting chaptersarefollowedbyaveryengaging,almost year by year, account of the major migrations west from the river towns of the lower Missouri . A few episodes of regional interest to Northwest readers stand out, including the Hudson’s Bay Company’s effort at countering American settlement through application of colonists from the Red River district of what is now Manitoba.Another is the story of Elijah Heading,the son of aWallaWalla Indian headman whose murder in California in 1844 did so much to sour the future of emigrant-Native relationships on the Columbia Plateau. That narrative trajectory, of course, ends up with the Whitman affair, which is briefly recounted here in an exemplary fashion. Bagley is especially good at unpacking the logistical dynamics of organizing, conducting , and sustaining a wagon train across the continent. Subtopics here include outfitting, wagoneering, packing gear, clothing, and provisioning . This makes for fascinating reading and truly re-creates the practical experiences of the overlanders. Bagley also has a flair for dryly inserting provocative observations from the period, the best two being these:missionary MaryWalker’s observation (from 1841!) that “we see Oregon fast filling up”; and the less well known Mariah King’s 1846 observation that Oregon was unlike any other destination for the yeoman farmer and family because the land was “already paid for when you get here”(p. 114, 335). Both statements were originally uttered without irony, and similarly Bagley lets them stand in print to startle and amaze readers. An ambitious undertaking like So Rugged and Mountainous is always going to create opportunities for small errors to creep in. For example,Bagley confuses George Bush,among the first colonists to Tumwater on Puget Sound,  OHQ vol. 111, no. 3 with George Washington, the African-American town founder of Centralia. And the book would have been better served by a more ample distribution of maps. Still, all serious students of western migration will want this book on their shelves. Anyone who reads this volume will look forward to the next three. David L. Nicandri Washington State Historical Society The Love Israel Family: Urban Commune, Rural Commune by Charles P. LeWarne University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2009. Illustrations, photographs, notes, index. 312 pages. $24.95 paper. With the...

Claire Strom 2009: Making catfish bait out of government boys: the fight against cattle ticks and the transformation of the yeoman south

The first page records the killing in 1923 of an employee of the Bureau of Animal Industry. The man who fired the shotgun was reported at his trial (he was acquitted) to have earlier promised to make catfish bait out of the government boys. How could an agricultural adviser have engendered such belligerence? By page 75, the death toll is recorded as into double figures, and another hundred pages on the federal bureaucracy was employing ex-soldiers and providing them with pistols and machine guns. Arming them with the power to send people to court had early been proven insufficient. The answer is found indirectly amongst cattle ticks and the protozoans they transmitted to cattle and directly in the mandatory treatment of cattle to eradicate the tick from southern USA. These extraordinary events are described and analysed by Claire Strom, editor of Agricultural History, with the objectivity of a professional historian who has never been obliged to adopt the mindset of a public health bureaucracy run by central government and who has access to very detailed records on site. It is the conflict between the ways of operating and assumptions of the cattle tick eradicators and the economic needs and social constraints of yeoman farmers. In the context of cattle rearing in the tropics, the term yeoman can be translated as land-owning and small-holder farmers operating in the traditional economic sector. In the early to middle stages of the campaign to eradicate Boophilus annulatus and Boophilus microplus, from 1906 to its declared success in 1944, there was substantial opposition from these farmers for a potent combination of reasons. They had multiple farming means, and their scrub cattle were often a minor part that survived in semi-feral state on unfenced land. The cattle were resistant survivors of early exposure to Babesia and only rounded up twice a year, not twice a month as mandated for treatment in dip baths charged with arsenic compounds. The cattle were marketed in an economic system separate from the major cattle and meat-packing industry developing in the north. Thus, tick eradication was a severe burden of time, effort and cash to these farmers who saw any benefit as something reserved for well capitalized cattle ranchers. The yeoman farmers suspected, correctly, that the ticks could survive on deer, so they were highly sceptical of success of the scheme. The ticks still do survive on deer, in patches within the USA along the border with Mexico. That border is to this day patrolled by tick quarantiners, whose job is made harder by enthusiasts for game farming with their exotic deer and bovids. If this sounds familiar to those who have been involved with, or learnt about, other eradication or widescale control schemes, it is an indication of the great generic value of such historical analyses. Us ‘government boys’ with our book-learning, fancy equipTrop Anim Health Prod (2010) 42:1037–1038 DOI 10.1007/s11250-009-9493-6

Yeoman Farmers in a Planters’ Republic: Socioeconomic Conditions and Relations in Early National Prince George’s County, Maryland

From the founding of the colonies through independence, contemporary commentators and many historians since have portrayed the independent yeoman farmer as the archetypal early American. Yet colonial Chesapeake social-economic historians have found that landownership rates in the tidewater fell from two-thirds of free household heads in the 1660s to one-half a century later. This article takes Prince George’s County, Maryland, as a test case and uses censuses and tax records to reveal that landownership rates fell further to one-third by 1800 and one-quarter by 1820. Moreover, the proportion of yeomen (broadly defined as owning 40 to 799 acres) fell from 24 percent of free householders in 1800 to under 19 percent in 1820. The decline was due to the precarious economic position of small yeomen, owners of 40 to 279 acres, who formed under 17 percent of free householders in 1800 and just 11 percent in 1820. Furthermore, while historians often portray yeomen as eschewing markets and slavery, the vast majority grew

Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 65 to lynching by contending that the elimination of intoxicating liquor— often packaged with sexually provocative images of women—would reduce the perceived threat of the “black beast” (p. 166). Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause will appeal to historians of evangelicalism , prohibition movements, and the fin de siècle South. The author’s evidence largely derives from denominational publications, sermons, personal correspondence, and secondary sources. Several historiographical asides might prove tedious for laypersons but helpful to graduate students who are studying significant themes from southern history, such as race, honor, and gender. BARCLAY KEY Western Illinois University Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South. By George B. Ellenberg. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. xiii, 219 pp. $42.50. ISBN 978-0-8173-1597-9. Over a period of roughly thirty years (1930–1960), southern agriculture experienced dramatic technological and structural changes. Ellenberg provides a window onto these changes through a detailed accounting of the transition from mule to tractor power and presents a convincing argument that in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth “a special relationship” was formed “between the American South and the mule” (p. 2). The mule is the offspring of a male ass, or jack, and a female horse. The popularity of mules was due to a number of factors, including strength, intelligence, and resilience to disease and mishandling. Oxen may have been stronger and horses quicker, but the mule represented a balance between the two that made it the animal of choice for small farmers. Plantation owners also favored the mule, though many also kept teams of oxen and of course horses for riding and pulling carriages. Smaller farmers did not have the luxury of such diversity and used mules for all purposes. Beyond this observation, Ellenberg devotes relatively little attention to differences between yeoman farmers of the piedmont and plantation owners of the coastal plains, and intersperses observations concerning the role of mules and tractors in the two regions. Thus the author presents mules as a unifying feature in southern agriculture. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, farmers in the cotton states imported mules bred elsewhere, principally Kentucky, Indiana, T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 66 Ohio, and Missouri. Ellenberg explores the trade in mules and the effect of the Civil War on mule (and horse) populations. As the cotton states recovered from war, mules continued to play a central role in the farm economy and efforts were made to encourage local mule breeding. The rise of mechanization, and in particular the farm tractor, affected progress in this direction. Ellenberg notes that the South lagged behind the Midwest in adoption of tractors and associated technologies, but that within ten years of the end of World War II the tractor had effectively supplanted the mule across the region. The final straw was adoption of an effective cotton harvester. Until that development, cotton producers continued to rely on abundant farm labor, and many farmers found little advantage in adopting tractors to prepare the soil more quickly for planting . But when the end came, it came quickly. By 1962, the U.S. Census of Agriculture no longer bothered to count the number of mules, signaling the official end of an era. In the space of a generation, mules went from ubiquitous to rarity, and mule handling became a lost art. Ellenberg characterizes the roles played by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the extension systems as supportive of the transition to mechanized farming. He notes that land grant universities were prime supporters of this technological revolution, but that “the reasons for this have not been fully explored” (p. 77). There is, in fact, a considerable amount of social science literature on this subject developed since the mid-1970s. Ellenberg draws on archival materials, agriculture journals, regional histories, and USDA and extension reports. His focus on technological transformation leaves unanswered a number of questions, some alluded to and others never mentioned. Farm mechanization led to consolidation of farms, resulting in fewer...

The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (review)

The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America. By John Fea. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 280. Cloth, $39.95.)Reviewed by Will MackintoshThe subject of John Fea's new biography, Philip Vickers Fithian, is a man already well known to American historians for his insightful and detailed diary of life as a tutor on Robert Carter's plantation in Virginia in the mid-1770s. Fea removes Fithian from the narrow Virginian pigeonhole in which historians have placed him and replants him firmly in his native social and intellectual soil. The sensitivity of his account is a fitting complement to Fithian's unusually thoughtful and articulate diary, kept throughout his adult life.Fea begins with Fithian's childhood in the Cohansey region of southwestern New Jersey, where he was the oldest son of a Presbyterian yeoman farming family. He then follows Fithian through his religious conversion, his years Princeton and Nomini Hall, and his tours as itinerant preacher in the Appalachian backcountry. Throughout the book, Fea traces Fithian's romance with Elizabeth Beatty, and he ends with Fithian's growing political commitment to the Revolutionary cause and his service and death as a chaplain in the Revolutionary army. Fea's well-structured chapters weave together the social, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional aspects of Fithian's life in each of its discrete moments.This biography is more than just an explication of Fithian's remarkable diary and correspondence, however. Fea explains that his project is to use Fithian's life to illustrate a number of themes at the heart of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century (5). For Fea, the Enlightenment is neither a grand historical abstraction nor the parlor game of a few European intellectuals; rather, it describes a particular path of selfimprovement that many in eighteenth-century America tried to tread. The Enlightenment is the way of improvement of which his title speaks, and for Fithian and his contemporaries it consisted of a fierce commitment to the use of reason to counteract destructive individual passions and to build a universal love of the human race that would supersede local and parochial concerns. Importantly, Fea points out that the rational commitments of the Enlightenment always existed side by side in America with deep Christian faith. These two traditions were sometimes odds, but were often complementary in their visions of personal and political improvement, especially for followers of Fithian's moderate mid- Atlantic Presbyterianism. Fea puts Fithian's skills as a diarist to good use in providing a clear and convincing explanation of these diverse building blocks of an early American worldview.Fea's biographical approach places his book the intersection of several different historiographies. His attention to the specifics of Fithian's experience puts his book in dialogue with other social histories of the Revolution like Alfred Young's The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Boston, MA, 1999). Fithian was neither a leader nor a common soldier; rather, he was an exceptionally articulate member of the middling sorts, and as such, his story takes a first step toward connecting the historiography of the revolutionary experience with the historiography of the nineteenth-century middle class. …

Rethinking Regionalism and the Southern Imagination

Rethinking Regionalism and the Southern Imagination Robert Brinkmeyer (bio) Reclaiming the American Farmer: The Reinvention of a Regional Mythology in Twentieth-Century Southern Writing. By Mary Weaks-Baxter. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. xi + 190 pp. $42.95 cloth. Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation. By Robert Jackson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2005. x + 174 pp. $44.95 cloth. The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. By Leigh Anne Duck. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006. xii + 340 pp. $44.95 cloth. The three books under review here, in broad terms, explore two significant issues concerning the South and its literary heritage: first, the ways that the South, as both a real place and as a cultural construct, has been tagged by the rest of the nation as backward and unsightly in order to highlight America as forward and beautiful; and second, the ways that southern writers have responded to this tagging. While sharing the same basic intent, the three works nonetheless differ widely in terms of the nature of the scholarship, from the fairly traditional and competent work of Mary Weaks-Baxter, to the more theoretical but deeply flawed work of Robert Jackson, to the thoroughly sophisticated and immensely rewarding work of Leigh Anne Duck. Weaks-Baxter’s Reclaiming the American Farmer focuses on images of the yeoman farmer and of common country folk in twentieth-century [End Page 139] southern literature, arguing that southern writers used these images to discover “a usable past for the South . . . that stood for the democratic values of the American farmer.” Standing opposed to these images and to this imagined past were “the aristocratic greed and licentiousness of planter society,” together with the crushing power and dehumanization of modern industrial society. In other words, according to Weaks-Baxter, southern writers of all stripes—both black and white, men and women, left and right—looked to Jeffersonian ideals for grounding their resistance to the unmaking of America’s democratic values in the turbulent twentieth century. While of course there were differences in these writers’ emphases and final visions, she argues that a shared Jeffersonian agrarianism underpins their work, giving modern southern literature a profound significance in the cultural dialogues concerning not just the South’s but also America’s vision of itself. While there is little startling in Weaks-Baxter’s book—for the most part, it is good, solid scholarship, particularly on some southern writers who are typically overlooked, such as Jesse Stuart—there are some significant omissions. Perhaps most troubling is Weaks-Baxter’s failure to address southern representations of the dark underside of farming life, as seen, for instance, in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and Richard Wright’s American Hunger (in which, in an extended passage describing his father’s enchainment to the land, Wright gives one of the most damning portraits ever written of life in the rural South). For Wright and numerous other writers of the rural poor, both black and white, the significance of “place” is associated less with putting down roots than with being prohibited from leaving—that is, being kept “in place.” Almost as troubling in Weaks-Baxter’s study is her failure to take on in any depth the problem that Allen Tate identifies in his essay in I’ ll Take My Stand: how can modern southerners, cut off from tradition, intellectually embrace traditional life without voiding the power of tradition (since traditional life must be accepted without thought, without choice)? Tate’s fraught and charged argument in this essay, which both affirms and undercuts the significance of traditional life for modern southerners, echoes throughout twentieth-century southern literature—but few of these echoes are heard in Weaks-Baxter’s book. More ambitious, but more problematic in its conclusions, is Robert Jackson’s Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture. Jackson begins promisingly enough, establishing his central idea that in the United States regional writing (and regionalism in general) has been, and continues to be, a force of resistance to the overwhelming power of [End Page 140] hegemonic nationalism that has largely shaped America’s destiny. Jackson builds a case that American...

Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865

Becoming Bourgeois is the first study to focus on what historians have come to call the middling sort, the economic group falling between yeoman farmers and the planter class that dominated the antebellum South. At a time when Southerners rarely traveled far from their homes, these merchants annually ventured forth on buying junkets to northern cities. The southern merchant community promoted the kind of aggressive business practices that proponents of the New South would later claim as their own. Frank J. Byrne reveals the peculiar strains of modern liberal-capitalist and conservative thought that permeated the culture of southern merchants. By exploring the values men and women in merchant families espoused, Byrne not only offers new insight into southern history but also deepens our understanding of the mutable ties between regional identity and the marketplace in nineteenth-century America.

Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970-2000 (review)

464Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril American history, civil rights, and legal history will find a treasure of information in this collection. University ofHouston-DowntownGene B. Preuss Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Searchfor a New Frontier, igyo-2000. By Evelyn A. Schlatter. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Pp. 268. Illustrations , map, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-29271-471-7. $19.95, paper.) In Aryan Cowboys, Evelyn Schlatter makes two important and somewhat unsetding assertions. First, she argues that the extreme Right cannot and should not be written offas "simply" a lunatic fringe. To underemphasize their power ignores die reality of their growing presence and increases the threat diey pose to the American government and way of life. Secondly, the extreme Right, Schlatter contends, is not an aberration of modern American life but a natural, if distorted, result of certain traits apparent throughoutAmerican history. In the end, although she uses her research to validate her concerns about die danger posed by extremists and to raise interesting questions about the connections between rightist groups and the West, she does not completely succeed in making her point. As shocking as some academics may find it, Schlatter offers ample evidence that a growing number ofAmericans believe some variation of the theory that an international Jewish conspiracy direatens to eliminate the white race and install women and nonwhite men as a New World Order. Many ofthese believers maintain that the best way to prevent this nightmare is for true Americans (white Protestant men and their families) to begin an intensive program ofpreparation, moving away from the increasingly dark urban areas to die wide open spaces of the West where they can stockpile food and weapons, engage in military training, and plan for the new millennium. Relying on die existing literature as well as her own internet research and numerous interviews, Schlatter uses die modern Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, Posse Comitas, and a number of prominent individuals as examples of the modern extremism. She includes discussions of several important confrontations between the Right and the federal government which resulted in winning new adherents for some of the extremist groups. Schlatter attempts to connect the rise of extremism to at least two traditional American symbols. First, she discusses the ways extremists have manipulated the mydiology of the West as a land of manly men who embodied die American ideal to work to the advantage of rightists. Second, she expands her analysis to include the image of the American farmer. Harkening back to the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer, extremists, Schlatter explains, emphasize the importance of the agricultural life to modern America. Some groups and individuals utilized the economic disasters small farmers faced during the 1 980s to build up their memberships . Farmers' frustration and anger at their situation provided a fertile ground in which extremists could plant dieir seeds of antigovernment conspiracy theories. Schlatter is at her best when describing and deciphering her examples. She treats her subjects with respect even as it is obvious diat she strongly disagrees with 2??8Book Reviews465 them. She provides a great service by helping the rest ofus begin to understand the motivations and goals of the men and women whojoin the movement. Despite all of diis intriguing information, however, die book is ultimately frustrating . Schlatter's assertions are logical, supported by some evidence, and make sense. The problem is that she does not always use the evidence to its full potential. She has a habit ofgoing back and forth in time, ofmentioning individuals as if the reader recognizes their roles, and ofrelying too heavily on secondary sources. Most importandy, she raises questions which she does not fully address. She promises in the introduction that she will connect "masculinity" with the western ideal and that she will show how this played an essential role in die relationship between the West and the extremists. Although she mentions this briefly, she never fully develops that connection. Texas Slate University-San ManosMary C. Brennan LBJ's American Promise: The VotingRights Address. By Garth E. Pauley. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. Pp. 1 90. Illustration, notes, bibliography, index . ISBN 1-58544-574-6. $29.95, cloth; ISBN 1-58544-581-9...

Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 Jonathan Daniel Wells Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865. By Frank J. Byrne . ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. 297. Cloth $50.00.) Is there a revival of interest in the nineteenth-century Southern social structure? After more than three decades of the "cultural turn" in the historiography, it seems that scholars are once again turning their attention to the class structure of the South. Importantly, however, this new trend in the study of class does not leave culture out of the picture but instead ties the two historiographical themes together, to the betterment of both. Building upon recent work on the middle class and the master class, historian Frank Byrne has added yet another dimension to scholarly understanding of the ways in which social structure and culture intertwine. Byrne argues that Southern merchants lived in constant tension between their desire to be accepted as legitimate contributors to society and the feeling among these same merchants that they had more in common with their counterparts in the North than they did with Southern planters or yeomen farmers. Like their brethren in the free states, Southern merchants adhered to nineteenth-century middle-class values such as the importance of education for advancement, the ever-present search for profit, and the belief in evangelical religion. Indeed, as others have pointed out, Byrne finds a great deal of interaction between Northern and Southern merchants, including the trips that the latter made each year to the large cities of the North. In contrast to their affinity with Northern merchants, Southern shopkeepers, grocers, and wholesale merchants found acceptance within the South difficult, according to Byrne. Reviled as "Jews" or "Yankees," Southern businessmen often found themselves targeted for their perceived greed. Although clearly in support of slavery, these merchants questioned the more radical political ideology found in the region; Byrne demonstrates convincingly that these Southerners favored the Whig party and were largely Unionists. When the Civil War broke out, however, Southern merchants were forced from the political fence-riding demonstrated by their adherence to the Constitutional Union party in the 1860 election. Although merchants questioned the wisdom of secession, and realized that war would break [End Page 417] vital trading links with the North, they avidly joined the Confederacy after fighting began. As Byrne points out, Southern merchants "tirelessly worked to place their businesses on a war footing" (128). They served as town quartermasters, army recruiters, and commissary agents even while they tried to benefit from the privation caused by the war. Tales of gouging profits, greed, and opportunism (some of which were exaggerated for effect) found ready believers among a people devastated by war. Byrne is at his best in bringing the social and cultural together when he discusses merchant families. Confronted by financial anxiety before the war, these families faced dwindling supplies and accusations of speculation, especially in the harsh final two years of the war. Interestingly, just as the mistress was forced to run the plantation in the absence of her husband, so too did many merchant wives take over the running of stores and businesses when the men left for the battlefield. Byrne's study would have benefited greatly from an expanded discussion of the Southern social structure. If these merchants were part of a "class," and Byrne uses that term frequently, we need more analysis of important issues such as class formation. If there was a middle class, which elements of the social structure might we consider them in between? Do they fit sandwiched between planters and slaves or should we consider merchants part of an emerging urban society in which white laborers, hired slaves, and incipient industrialists made up the top and bottom of a city-bound social structure? These questions Byrne does not consider. Finally, if the merchants were marginalized and scorned as Byrne argues, then why did so many Southern communities trumpet their progress in business and industry? Byrne has provided us with an insightful analysis of a segment of the Southern population. The hope is that scholars will carry on this work and refine our understanding of the complex society that was...

''A Great Machine'' or a ''Beast of Prey'': A Boston Corporation and Its Rural Debtors in an Age of Capitalist Transformation

In the 1820s and 30s, the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company (MHLIC), established by the Boston elite to administer family trusts, invested in mortgage loans to farmers from western Massachusetts. Those aspects of Company mortgages that marked them as modern debtor-creditor arrangements\-\-formal procedures, written contracts, and above all, the necessity of punctual payments, enforced by the threat of lawsuits\-\- frightened and alienated many borrowers and fueled broader-based political protests against corporations. Rural discontent over the Company's business practices occurred as farmers underwent the difficult transition from a household to a market economy, but the Company's insistence on those practices represent the Boston elite's own adjustment to a new era of corporate capitalism. Conducting business with novel sorts of economic actors, no longer fellow merchants but distant strangers and social inferiors, elite Bostonians positioned the Company as an impersonal mechanism, irrevocably fixed in its method of operation, against what it perceived as an unreliable and assertive yeomanry. Rule-bound regularity soon emerged as not only standard business procedure but a full-blown ideological vision of a clockwork universe of business. Implying both the impartial application of rules and predictability in the business world, this vision held political and cultural appeal in an age of novel social tensions and unprecedented economic instability. Exploring the vexed relations between Massachusetts farmers and the MHLIC thus illuminates the process whereby the practices and values associated with corporate capitalism took hold among yeomen farmers and elite Bostonians alike.

Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (review)

Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865. By Frank J. Byrne. (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. 308. Cloth, $50.00.)Reviewed by Brian P. LuskeyIn this thoroughly researched and provocative book, Frank J. Byrne concludes that southern wholesalers, retailers, and their clerks formed a unique culture in the slave states prior to and during the Civil War (2). Byrne believes that merchants, lodged between planters and yeoman farmers among the South's white inhabitants, were simultaneously central and marginal figures, outsiders and insiders in a region dominated by plantation agriculture (54). They cultivated business contacts with northern wholesalers, haggled persistently with customers- just as their Yankee counterparts did - and adopted the domestic proclivities of the middle classes residing above the Mason-Dixon line. Yet they also offered customers the cornucopia of industrial goods emanating from northern and European mills, developed crucial credit relationships with their neighbors, and provided ideological and financial ballast for white supremacy and the institution of slavery. The Civil War increased tensions between merchants and their fellow Confederates, but did not change the ambiguous position of commercial men. Southerners who endured runaway inflation and food shortages condemned firms for charging exorbitant prices, even while men of business enlisted in armies to preserve white men's rights to human property. The social upheaval caused by the war paved the way for merchants to use the commercial strategies they had employed in the antebellum years to become a New South elite.Byrne has done impressive research in census schedules, credit reports, newspapers, magazines, and merchants' personal writings to create a complex portrait of southern mercantile men and their families behind the store counter and around the domestic hearth. He is attentive to the ways in which subtle regional distinctions and more prominent differences between urban and rural places shaped merchants' lives. Although business proprietors and their families accounted for no more than eight percent of the South's free population, Byrne contends that they loomed larger than their numbers to play important roles in Dixie's political economy and society. Merchants cemented commercial bonds between the regions during purchasing visits to New York and Philadelphia, enabling northern goods, capital, and credit to flow into southern markets. Back at home, however, merchants encountered the perils of a credit economy linked to the fluctuating yields of cotton harvests. Rebuffed by recalcitrant debtors, storekeepers and wholesalers alike relied upon kinship networks to withstand rough patches in the boom-and-bust economy. They also endured ethnic and regional slurs from their neighbors - the labels heartless Shylocks (190) and unscrupulous Southern Yankees (63) registered community disapproval of purportedly greedy men and only grudging acceptance that such behavior had found a home in the South.Byrne's analysis is a sustained assessment of the difficulties encountered by merchants in their attempts to claim power and prestige in the nineteenth-century South. Merchants were independent businessmen, and some possessed considerable pull in local and national economic circles. Nearly a quarter of the merchants in Byrne's wide-ranging census sample owned slaves. Yet commercial men remained dependent on customers' purchases and their ability to pay debts in a timely manner. Unlike planter patriarchs, moreover, merchants who traveled to faraway markets and bought into the ideals of domesticity - emphasizing companionate marriage, consumer culture, the separation of workplace and home, and the nurturing of children - ceded substantial authority to their wives over home affairs and store operations. …

The Last English Peasants? Lake District Statesmen and Yeoman Farmers in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Example of Tom Rumney of Mellfell

Visitors who dcribed the Lake District in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw its society as distinctively different from the rest of England and were struck by the survival of a numerous group of small, independent owner-occupiers. These farmers were often called ‘statesmen’, a term applied by outsiders rather than locals and not of great antiquity. Lakeland owner-occupiers preferred to use ‘yeomcn’. A good deal has been written about this social group. However, much of this relates to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries or has focused on problems of nomenclature. Research on parliamentary enclosure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has established some general trends regarding changing numbers of small proprietors, while census enumerators' books have provided the basis for work on Cumbrian owner-occupiers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Less attention has been paid to, how this society changed in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Lake District was drawn into the mainstream of English society and economic life. The use of the term ‘peasant’ in the title of this article is deliberately contentious as there has been considerable debate on whether the term can be justified for English society after medieval times. Marshall has suggested that one has to go back to the early eighteenth century to find a real peasant society in the Lake District. but Searle has claimed that a peasantry with a near subsistence economy, little penetration of market forces, much mutual assistance and collective regulation of assets survived until the end of the eighteenth century.

The Last English Peasants? Lake District Statesmen and Yeoman Farmers in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Example of Tom Rumney of Mellfell

The Last English Peasants? Lake District Statesmen and Yeoman Farmers in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Example of Tom Rumney of Mellfell