A Literate South: Reading Before Emancipation by Beth Barton Schweiger (review)

Abstract

Beth Barton Schweiger’s A Literate South: Reading Before Emancipation addresses beliefs about the relationship between literacy and slavery, but not in the usual ways. Although a handful of enslaved people are mentioned throughout, the book is emphatically not about enslaved people’s relationships to reading, but literacy and print’s relationship to enslavers and other white people living in proslavery states before the Civil War. Reading Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1857 commentary that “slavery is the parent of ignorance . . . inevitably hostile to literary culture,” Schweiger shows how the enslaver South did not eschew reading or writing culture (xiii). Rather than illustrating a culture that shunned literacy, this study reveals a variety of reading tastes and writing habits among white people who variously upheld or nominally opposed slavery. Scholars of African American studies will be unsurprised that a literate South was no less likely to uphold a culture of slavery, although it would continue to wield access to literacy as a tool for racial oppression even after emancipation. However, Schweiger’s attention to literacy in the antebellum South dispels still commonly held beliefs about literacy in the soon-to-be Confederate states. Print was not absent in the rural South, Schweiger argues, but ubiquitous, writing that “[t]hose living far from the rapidly concentrating publishing industry in northeastern cities were hardly beyond the reach of print. Nor were illiterate people, who heard texts recited and talked about everyday” (16-17). Increased access to print was facilitated by advances in both its production and circulation, and print touched both reading and nonreading people. This argument necessarily counters myths about the reading abilities and habits of people without exceptional access to formal education, the availability of printed texts in rural areas, and the relationship between print and nonprint culture. Schweiger’s study draws on the circulation of printed materials, histories of literacy instruction, and the relationship between the literary and the oral. A Literate South takes as its primary examples of Southern literacy four white women from rural Southern families; Schweiger’s principal case studies are the antebellum diaries of two sets of sisters, Amanda and Betsy Cooley of Virginia and Jennie and Ann Speer of North Carolina. Schweiger grounds her readings of Southern literacy in the reading habits of these women whom she understands to have been unexceptional in this respect. This methodology allows these women’s commentary on the various things they read to compensate for the difficulty of tracing ephemera such as periodicals, broadsides, pamphlets, and educational texts that largely do not survive in numbers indicating their widespread availability. The records of reading practices that Schweiger examines therefore present a fuller view than the availability of archival print materials may otherwise suggest. These women were avid readers with significant access to print, and the two families’ writing tendencies and reading preferences were rather varied. Focusing on white women’s reading habits, Schweiger also explores reading both within and beyond formal educational contexts and traces literacy’s inextricable intertwining with oral cultures. The book’s first section treats literacy via readers’ relationships to pedagogical texts. These three chapters focus on three primary texts of what Schweiger calls “A Good English Education”: spellers, grammars, and rhetorics. This progressive series of educational texts were not equally available to readers, although each bore