Bolton (history, U. of Southern Mississippi) illuminates the social complexity surrounding the lives of a group consistently dismissed as rednecks, crackers, and white trash: landless white tenants and laborers in the era of slavery. A short epilogue looks at their lives today. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Tennessee played a critical and vital role in national politics in the mid-nineteenth century. Two Tennesseans, for example, served as president and two others were presidential candidates. Such prominence be-speaks the importance of politics in the state's antebellum culture. For the first time in its history Tennessee developed a two-party system, one that was vigorous and exciting. In his study Paul H. Bergeron examines the development of this two-party competition by focusing on statewide contests. Two-party politics in Tennessee was marked by intense and evenly balanced competition, so much so that the outcome of virtually every election was un-certain. In such an environment each party worked diligently to stir the voters; that they were successful is indicated by the exceedingly high levels of turnout for elections. Paul H. Bergeron, the first scholar to study the development of the two-party system in Tennessee, presents a detailed narrative of this period coupled with a quantitative analysis of electoral behavior. He relates the peculiarities of Tennessee's experiences to other states during the antebellum decades. Bergeron also offers fresh insights and information on Tennessee's defections from Jacksonianism in the pre-Civil War period. His book is an important contribution to the growing list of state studies, north and south, that are steadily building a greater appreciation of the complexities of politics in Jacksonian America.
A major contribution to our understanding of slavery in the early republic, Deliver Us from Evil illuminates the white South's twisted and tortured efforts to justify slavery, focusing on the period from the drafting of the federal constitution in 1787 through the age of Jackson. Drawing heavily on primary sources, including newspapers, government documents, legislative records, pamphlets, and speeches, Lacy K. Ford recaptures the varied and sometimes contradictory ideas and attitudes held by groups of white southerners as they tried to square slavery with their democratic ideals. He excels at conveying the political, intellectual, economic, and social thought of leading white southerners, vividly recreating the mental world of the varied actors and capturing the vigorous debates over slavery. He also shows that there was not one antebellum South but many, and not one southern white mindset but several, with the debates over slavery in the upper South quite different in substance from those in the deep South. In the upper South, where tobacco had fallen into comparative decline by 1800, debate often centered on how the area might reduce its dependence on slave labor and "whiten" itself, whether through gradual emancipation and colonization or the sale of slaves to the cotton South. During the same years, the lower South swirled into the vortex of the "cotton revolution," and that area's whites lost all interest in emancipation, no matter how gradual or fully compensated. An ambitious, thought-provoking, and highly insightful book, Deliver Us from Evil makes an important contribution to the history of slavery in the United States, shedding needed light on the white South's early struggle to reconcile slavery with its Revolutionary heritage.
David Settle Reid served North Carolina as governor and as U.S. senator. The papers shed light on Democratic Party activities, education, internal improvements, tariffs, territorial expansion, slavery, and sectional conflict. They also chronicle antebellum family life in the rural South.
In this study of political party development in North Carolina during the antebellum period, Thomas E. Jeffrey accounts for the persistence of the second-party system in that state, emphasizing the sectional conflict that divided eastern plantation and western small farming counties. Although members of the Whig and Democratic parties disagreed strongly over national issues, the state issues—public school funding, internal improvements, the creation of new counties—divided citizens along sectional rather than party lines. Party leaders attempted to reconcile progressive western interests and conservative eastern interests by accentuating cohesive national issues. Jeffrey reveals factors that preserved the vitality of the secondparty system in North Carolina even as other states became politically stagnant. This vitality would shape politics of the Old North State during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The upheaval of the Civil War vindicated the policies of the Whigs, and although extinct outside of the state, this party would lead North Carolina into the age of the New South.
In the 1820s, young congressman Willie Mangum imbibed the political philosophy of North Carolina's senior senator Nathaniel Macon, the "prophet of pure republicanism." From his election in 1824, Mangum was at the epicenter of national and state government. In the 1830s, he emerged as leader of an opposition party--the Whigs--and became an opponent of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party. Mangum's career offers insight into the ideology and politics of North Carolina's Whigs. Opposition to executive power was fundamental to the Whig platform but in North Carolina the party was a coalition that melded the Old Republicans' creed with the National Republican economic agenda touted by Henry Clay, a combination that enabled them to dominate. Mangum and the Carolina Whigs have received little attention from scholars. This book traces their rapid rise to power and their even more rapid fall in the years prior to the Civil War.
In the months after Appomattox, the South was plunged into a chaos that surpassed even the disorder of the last hard months of the war itself. Peace brought, if anything, an increased level of violence to the region as local authorities of the former Confederacy were stripped of their power and the returning foot soldiers of the defeated army, hungry and without hope, raided the already impoverished countryside for food and clothing. In the wake of the devastation that followed surrender, even some of the most virulent Yankee-haters found themselves relieved as the Union army began to bring a small level of order to the lawless southern terrain. Dan T. Carter's When the War Was Over is a social and political history of the two years following the surrender of the Confederacy -- the co-called period of Presidential Reconstruction when the South, under the watchful gaze of Congress and the Union army, attempted to rebuild its shattered society and economic structure. Working primarily from rich manuscript sources, Carter draws a vivid portrait of the political leaders who emerged after the war, a diverse group of men -- former loyalists as well as a few mildly repentant fire-eaters -- who in some cases genuinely sought to find a place in southern society for the newly emancipated slaves, but who in many other cases merely sought to redesign the boundaries of black servitude. Carter finds that as a group the politicians who emerged in the postwar South failed critically in the test of their leadership. Not only were they unable to construct a realistic program for the region's recovery -- a failure rooted in their stubborn refusal to accept the full consequences of emancipation -- but their actions also served to exacerbate rather than allay the fears and apprehensions of the victorious North. Even so, Carter reveals, these leaders were not the monsters that many scholars have suggested they were, and it is misleading to dismiss them as racists and political incompetents. In important ways, they represented the most constructive, creative, and imaginative response that the white South, overwhelmed with defeat and social chaos, had to offer in 1865 and 1866. Out of their efforts would come the New South movement and, with it, the final downfall of the plantation system and the beginnings of social justice for the freed slaves.
Class and culture in Antebellum North Carolina have been largely forgotten. In the past few years, several important studies have examined common whites in individual counties or groups of counties, but they have focused on family life, the economy, or other specific features of the common-white life. C ommon Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina is the first comprehensive examination of these nonslaveholders and small slaveholders in over forty years. Using North Carolina as a case in point, Bill Cecil-Fronsman has sketched a broad portrait of the world made by this group. Drawing on travelers' accounts, newspapers, folksongs and folktales, quantitative analysis of census reports, and, above all, the common whites' own words, he has woven the individual threads of their culture into an in-depth analysis of their world and their responses to it. This work focuses on the issues of class and culture. Here, Cecil-Fronsman explores why the common whites accepted the slave system even though it worked to their disadvantage. He demonstrates how the market economy of the outside world played a negligible role in their lives and how their unique traditional attitudes toward family and community evolved. Finally, he recounts how, although most common whites supported the Confederate cause during the Civil War, many of the old loyalties broke down during the war years. The common whites, though they outnumbered the slaves and the elites, make up the least studied group in the Old South. This book takes us beyond the stereotypes and misconceptions to a better understanding of a group of people virtually ignored by traditional history.
Thomas Lanier Clingman: Fire Eater from the Carolina Mountains is the first book-length biography of one of the most important, colorful, and controversial figures in nineteenth-century American life. A man of enormous intellect and intense ambition whose ultimate goal was nothing less than the presidency, Clingman was a lawyer, entrepreneur, Civil War general, inventor, amateur scientist, explorer, and, as a U.S. congressman and senator, one of the foremost champions of southern rights. Thomas E. Jeffrey's explanation of how a leading advocate of this cause could thrive within an environment where slavery was only a marginal institution provides fresh insights into the political culture of southern Appalachia, the character of the southern rights movement, and the coming of the Civil War.
