JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

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• Forging a Christian Order: South Carolina Baptists, Race, and Slavery, 1696–1860 by Kimberly R. Kellison
• Nicole Myers Turner

This book is a history of South Carolina Baptists from the colonial period to the start of the Civil War. In it, Kimberly R. Kellison argues that South Carolina Baptists, and especially the Reverend Richard Furman (1755–1825), were at the vanguard of advancing arguments about “a Christian version of slavery” as a paternalistic institution and as the cornerstone of social order in a slave society (p. 1). These ideas were privately embraced during the colonial period and came to public expression in the early 1800s through Furman’s political advocacy. Chronicling the emergence of this Christian slavery and the ways it became the dominant argument among not just South Carolina Baptists but Southern Baptists writ large, Kellison contributes a rich local narrative with national and international scope to the historiography on proslavery thought.

Over six chronological chapters, Kellison presents the development of southern Baptist proslavery ideology through the people, churches, and associations in South Carolina. Denominational development of the Charleston Baptist Association (1752), the national Triennial Convention (1814), and the South Carolina Baptist State Association (1821) provides a backbone to the narrative. These developments were achievements given the enduring regional cultural conflicts between the Lowcountry elite and upcountry folk over educational requirements for ministers, foreign missions, and denominationalism. For Furman, these organizations provided the platforms for political engagement as a “religious statesman” tasked with upholding morality in the public square (p. 59). When legislative changes made in response to enslaved rebellions like Gabriel’s in Virginia (1800) threatened enslaved people’s ability to gather for worship, Furman publicly articulated his views about slavery in petitions and other writings. He argued that it was a biblical institution characterized by obligations that would keep enslaved people from rebelling and would maintain white supremacy. As Furman codified his views of Christian slavery and social order, intensifying arguments over the immediate abolition of slavery saw the splintering of the national Triennial Convention into the American Baptist Free Mission Society (1843) and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC, 1845). After that break, the formal association (which some South Carolina upcountry church leaders continued to oppose) becam

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• Abbott’s Creek, North Carolina, Baptist Church ed. by J. Kristian Pratt
• Glenn Jonas

The Sandy Creek Baptist tradition, with its embrace of the religious enthusiasm from the First Great Awakening, left a significant imprint on the DNA of Baptists in the South. The Sandy Creek tradition traces its origin to several families who migrated south from Connecticut to Virginia and eventually to North Carolina, where they established the Sandy Creek Baptist Church in 1755. Led by itinerant preachers Shubal Stearns, Daniel Marshall, and Marshall’s wife, Martha Stearns Marshall (Shubal’s sister), the movement grew rapidly, stretching from the Carolinas northward into Virginia and southward into Georgia. Within three years, the mother church had helped establish the Sandy Creek Baptist Association. By the time of Shubal Stearns’s death in 1771, the movement boasted forty-two churches and 125 ministers.

Abbott’s Creek, North Carolina, Baptist Church is the ninth volume in the Baptists in Early North America Series, initiated by the late Baptist historian William H. Brackney. The series has been helpful for understanding the Baptist tradition in America through the lens of influential and historic local Baptist churches. Each volume in the series provides the historical context of the local congregation and then, significantly, an annotated presentation of the church’s records. These primary source materials provide a vital means for understanding Baptists from the perspective of the local congregation, an approach utilized by some historians over the last several decades.

The editor of this volume, J. Kristian Pratt, provides a helpful resource for historians seeking to understand the Sandy Creek tradition in Baptist life, a topic for which there is need for deeper research. Religion in the South, particularly of the Baptist stripe, cannot properly be understood without studying the Sandy Creek tradition. However, records from the original church are missing due to a fire in 1816. That is what makes this book so important. The Abbott’s Creek church, established within months of the original Sandy Creek church, provides an important glimpse into the broader Sandy Creek tradition.

In the first section of the book, Pratt provides an extensive and careful historical introduction to the Abbott’s Creek church. The fact that there are currently two churches—Abbott’s Creek Primitive Baptist Church and Abbott’s Creek Missionary Baptist Church—across the street from one another is itself an interesting part of the story. Prat

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• Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins by Brooks Blevins
• Kevin C. Motl

Brooks Blevins, Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University, delivers a savory anthology of essays on the Ozarks highlands—a region of mountains and plateaus extending from northwest Arkansas into southern Missouri and northeast Oklahoma—and its people in Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins. Of the thirteen chapters, six are new, while the remainder are republished material with modest revisions. Each chapter aspires to render the once-invisible visible. After all, as Blevins laments in a later chapter, Appalachia has a better publicist, and thus a lens into the world of the Ozarks comes only after a “generational lag,” if at all (p. 220). Indeed, sustained scholarly inquiry into the folkways of the Ozarks people is a relatively recent development, and arguably the most authoritative work on the region to date comes from Blevins himself.

As Blevins’s examination unfolds, the reader is treated to glimpses into the defiant and often dangerous world of seasonal fireworks sales; the resurrection of shape note gospel singing schools; the lingering presence of the clapboard country stores serving sparsely populated hollers; and the ongoing crusade of folklore collectors to construct a definitive inventory of American mountain ballads. These insightful vignettes are seasoned generously with humor born of Blevins’s own life experiences with the very phenomena described therein.

The lighthearted excursions offer an antidote to more sober considerations of race relations and racial violence in the region; the ethically suspect means by which Ozarks waterways—most notably, the celebrated Buffalo River—were expropriated by government to establish the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, and the economic hardships endemic to the region that, over generations, left many rural Ozarkers clinging to subsistence by their fingernails. These erudite treatments engage directly with the relevant scholarly literature and draw meaningful and occasionally revisionist conclusions.

Blevins’s ambition to discern the relative “southernness” of Ozarks culture serves as a key subtext in this volume (p. 7). Several chapters explore either explicit or implicit comparisons between the upland and lowland South. The futile attempts by locals to resist federal power in claiming Ozarks waterways for recreational and conservation purposes highlight a strain of deep distrust toward government. The generational efforts to scratch a life from unforgiving l

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• Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City by Ritchie Devon Watson Jr
• Anne Marie Martin

In Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City, Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. examines the deterioration of the relationship between the South and New York City during the antebellum period. New York was a popular tourist destination, and wealthy white southerners filled the city’s hotels and enjoyed all the city had to offer, from opera and theater productions to the numerous shopping opportunities. However, as the period progressed, white southerners grew increasingly defensive of slavery and felt that it was only fair to demand that New Yorkers, who had grown wealthy as major players in the southern cotton trade, should support the institution’s continued practice. The appeasement New Yorkers offered, though, was never enough. Using the writings of white southerners, New Yorkers, and others, Watson reveals the cracks that emerged in this relationship between 1820 and 1860, demonstrating that proslavery and antislavery Americans were aware of and acted in response to the economic and political ties that bound New York City’s wealth to southern slavery.

Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster’s structure is thematic, with chapters primarily organized by literature type. Chapter 1, “That Most Southern Connected of Northern Cities,” sets the stage, considering not just the general relationship between the South and New York, but also the history of New York City and its long relationship with slavery. In “The Greatest Emporium of the Western Hemisphere: The South Travels to Gotham,” Watson considers travelers’ accounts of their time in the city. He argues that, while the growing tensions between white southerners and the city were clear in other literary forms by the 1850s, southern travelers’ accounts of their time in the city were generally positive across the period.

The deteriorating nature of the relationship also appeared in white southern fiction, as Watson explains in his third chapter, “Early Fictional Appraisals of New York City.” While southerner William Alexander Caruthers’s The Kentuckian in New-York; or, The Adventures of Three Southerns (1834) included themes like national identity and some questioning of slavery, by the 1840s southerners’ works had become more critical of the city. As seen in Watson’s chapter 4, “Blotted from the List of Cities: Southern Write

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• Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America by Timothy R. Pauketat
• James F. Brooks

I have long assigned Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación y Comentarios (1542) in my early America survey courses to provide to students a firsthand glimpse, however culturally biased, of the Indigenous world that would soon be convulsed by European invaders. Yet I never thought to employ that narrative as Timothy R. Pauketat does here: to ask, if four lost foreigners, lacking local languages and without any knowledge of the regional landscape, could traverse some 2,400 miles across the southern reaches of North America, how many Indigenous sojourners, traders, teachers, and preachers might have traveled vastly greater distances to effect changes in ritual practices, architecture, social organization, and world-building in the millennia preceding 1492? North American archaeology, long hostile to diffusionist notions of cultural change (in no small part inspired by nationalist sentiments that sought to downplay cultural influences from Mexico and Central America), now faces a challenge from bold thinkers like Mississippian specialist Pauketat and his southwestern saddle-mate Stephen Lekson, famous for his provocation, which Pauketat quotes, that scholars of ancient America proceed on an assumption that “‘Everyone knew everything!’” (p. 28).

Pauketat situates his argument in the “Medieval Climate Anomaly,” an unusually warm and wet period (800–1300 CE) in the Northern Hemisphere that correlated with the explosion of social complexity and inequality in Europe and North America. In the latter, agricultural productivity soared, urbanization followed, and complex socioreligious systems evolved to manage the “Wind-that-Brings-Rain” deities who, for Pauketat, are foundational to spiritual complexes as separate in distance and time as Mayan cenote sacrifices, Hopi Katsina rituals, Mississippian mound-top sweat baths, and Lakota Sun Dances (p. 9). These deities were “historically linked to one another, much the way that human beings were, and are, intimately entangled in a global evapotranspiration cycle: clouds produce rain and snow that lead to both groundwater and water bodies that relentlessly evaporate, condense in the atmosphere, and appear as clouds once again” (p. 9). For all their discrete cultural expressions, therefore, the many thousands of Indigenous polities of the Americas (Northern Hemisphere, in this case) constituted a mutually comprehensible, if not politically unified, cultural w

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• The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932 by Scott Blackwood
• Beth Fowler

Scott Blackwood’s examination of the blues artists recorded by Paramount Records, an independent label founded by the Wisconsin Chair Company in 1917 to sell phonograph cabinets, tells numerous tales, both joyful and heartbreaking, of the Black musicians who left their southern homes for better opportunities up north. The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932 is an excellent example of creative nonfiction, as Blackwood uses published oral histories and historical monographs like Alex van der Tuuk’s Paramount’s Rise and Fall: A History of the Wisconsin Chair Company and Its Recording Activities (Denver, 2003) to craft beautifully realized stories about what these journeys must have felt like for Black migrants. Readers get an intriguing glimpse into the inner lives of these musicians as they strummed and sang their way into blues history. But preexisting knowledge of both the Great Migration and the early days of Black American music is essential in order to keep up with Blackwood’s tales, which are divided into short vignettes, largely disconnected from one another, and do not always add up to a coherent story.

From the beginning, readers are plunged into Chicago’s “Black Metropolis” during the Roaring Twenties, which was “Lit like an arc light. Midnight like noon. Hot music plays everywhere, spilling out of cafés, cabarets, theaters, into the street, mixing with the sounds of car horns” (pp. 20, 9). Blackwood shows how blues icons such as Alberta Hunter, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, and Jelly Roll Morton ventured into this hypermodern land of opportunity with dreams that were downright dangerous in their Jim Crow home-towns. Blackwood’s exquisite writing breathes life into each account, making the struggles and joys experienced by his subjects urgent and resonant, providing irresistible nuggets that knowingly allude to other untold stories. He dubs Delta bluesman Charley Patton, for instance, “So enigmatic that people thought he was from somewhere else (‘Up North,’ Willie Brown, his protégé and playing partner, had guessed)” (p. 107). But a familiarity with major texts from Great Migration historiography, like Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, 2010) and James Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989), is essential for forming a narrative out of

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• The Governor’s Pawns: Hostages and Hostage-Taking in Civil War West Virginia By Randall S. Gooden
• Thomas W. Robinson

After decades of writing and thousands of books on the topic, it is hard to believe that one can find a subject largely absent from general Civil War histories. But Randall S. Gooden has accomplished such a feat with this excellent history of hostage-taking in West Virginia. Gooden, a West Virginia native, focuses on his home state because, while hostage-taking was a common tactic throughout the history of warfare and was utilized by both sides during the Civil War, hostage-taking in West Virginia was unique: it was an official state program, codified in state law and administered by the governor.

Gooden begins his work with a much-needed primer on hostage-taking, its history, and its evolution in North America. He also includes outstanding background information on the social and political divisions between eastern and western Virginia, which led to the creation of West Virginia as a separate state. Gooden persuasively argues that these divisions had a direct role in creating an environment where taking hostages would emerge during wartime extremes. West Virginia passed a formal hostage law in 1863, but even before that, hostage-taking occurred during cavalry raids, security sweeps, and guerrilla attacks as the region was home to much early campaigning when the war began in 1861. These types of events directly led to the formal hostage law, as the Unionist counties that broke off to form West Virginia pointed to actions such as the Confederate Jones-Imboden raid of April–May 1863 as proof that a hostage law was a necessity. Thus, advocates of West Virginia’s own separate statehood often were advocates of hostage-taking as a necessary wartime measure as well. The hostage law allowed for the retaliatory taking of hostages seized in exchange for pro-Union civilian hostages, but it also permitted the arrest of suspected disloyal persons.

The real strength of Gooden’s work (and this should come as no surprise since the author also served as the assistant curator of the West Virginia and Regional History Collection) is the focus on individual case histories, which serve as examples for the larger issues at play. By focusing on case histories, Gooden shows how and why certain people were targeted to be arrested as hostages and also shows the delicate balancing act between federal and state powers in West Virginia. The book delves slightly into the postwar years as well, where Gooden surveys the

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• By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham
• Michael W. Flamm

After two years as an army corporal, Willie Lee Davis returned to Summit, Georgia, in 1943 to see friends and visit his mother. On the eve of the Fourth of July, he was in a juke joint with a young woman when the town’s white police chief confronted and slapped him. “I’m not your man,” protested Davis, who was in uniform; “I’m Uncle Sam’s man” (p. 179). Then Davis made a tragic mistake—he tried to flee through a dark alley with a dead end. The officer shot him in the chest, and Davis died on the nation’s birthday.

In By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, Margaret A. Burnham, a law professor at Northeastern University, provides painful example after example of how white supremacy and racial violence were interwoven during the Jim Crow era. Drawing on a digitized archive of more than a thousand homicides that she compiled with political scientist Melissa Nobles, Burnham ably chronicles how the legal system and federal government failed to protect the rights and lives of African Americans during the decades between Reconstruction and the modern freedom struggle.

Burnham is careful to note that “Jim Crow took different forms across the country, embedded in culture, articulated in law, and entrenched in politics” (p. xiii). She spotlights the South because racial violence was so prevalent there, but then she contends that she is “fully mindful of the myth of southern exceptionalism” (p. xv). However, her powerful study should have explored, or at least cited, some of the historical literature on this important topic, such as The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York, 2010), edited by Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino.

Burnham organizes her book into seven sections. Part 1 deals with rendition, noting how resistance in the North to the return of Black prisoners to the South, where lynching remained pervasive, continued a century after the Fugitive [End Page 450] Slave Law of 1850. Part 2 examines the visible and invisible conflicts over segregation on streetcars and city buses. Here and elsewhere, the author uncovers fascinating bits of lost history, such as the 1943 “Walk to Work, Walk to Church, and Walk to Shop” campaign in Mobile, Alabama, which foreshadowed the more famous bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954 (p. 83).

In Parts 3 and 4, Burnham describes how the federal government, the legal system, and the Justice Department left African Americans at