JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World by Christopher Michael Blakley
• Rachael L. Pasierowska

Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World marks a refreshing watershed in the historiography of slavery. [End Page 600] Christopher Michael Blakley has penned the first full-length book that centers enslaved persons and slaveholders in the world of fauna and the transatlantic slave trade. Historians of both slavery and animals will find a rich study that covers differing geographical scales across West Africa and throughout the British Atlantic world in the 1700s. Blakley’s overarching argument focuses on the various ways white slaveholders intentionally attempted to strip enslaved Black persons of their humanity. The author further contends that such attempts were often futile because enslaved persons refused such treatment and that, instead, “they dared to imagine a world that recognized and reckoned with Black humanity in its fullness” (p. 150).

His chapters follow an approach similar to many Atlantic slavery studies, beginning in Africa and then moving to the British Caribbean and North America, with their primary focus on the eighteenth-century British slave societies. The extensive archival research draws from an extensive wealth of sources, including advertisements for runaway enslaved persons, diaries, essays, inventories, letters, newspapers, plantation manuals, portraits, and the Royal African Company’s records, to demonstrate how colonial slaveholders held similar “racial attitudes among Europeans who equated people of African descent and livestock” (p. 89).

While the author states that the study’s primary focus is on white attitudes toward Black people, there already exists an extensive historiography on travel narratives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regarding scientific racism. Where Blakley’s study enhances this literature is through an analysis of Africans’ knowledge of the animal world and how they utilized such information through the variables of trade. One interesting example is the employment of cowrie shells (from small mollusks) as currency between sub-Saharan Africans and European merchants. These shells, upon which the Royal African Company pinioned much of its transactions with African trading partners, illustrate African agency in crafting relationships between slavery and animals along the West African littoral. In this vein, chapters 4 and 5 are Blakley’s strongest, detailing ho

Reviewed by:

• Nothing More Than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law by Giuliana Perrone
• Emily Blanck

Since the publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, 2010), critical race theory—legal theory around the systematic racism within the legal system—has become a central focus of popular and academic discourse about racial justice. Activists have since targeted policing and criminal justice as key places of reform. In Nothing More Than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law, Giuliana Perrone uncovers the pernicious ways the legal system enshrined slavery within virtually all its nooks and crannies. Abolition, she argues, was incomplete. Judges throughout the slaveholding South refused to dismantle the legal structures of slavery in several areas of the law that frequently go unnoticed: contract law, family law, and inheritance and succession. Perrone distinguishes between emancipation, as the end of coerced labor, and abolition, as the end of all systems that sustained the coerced labor system. To do this research, Perrone has dug deeply into the case law throughout the South, carefully unpacking the decisions of cases that directly impacted freedpeople during Reconstruction as well as areas of the law where Black people were not explicitly targeted.

One of the most refreshing aspects of Perrone’s book is the emphasis on an alternate outcome by focusing on abolitionist judges. Perrone finds that there was a large minority of judges who recognized that abolition was a [End Page 628] prescription to change the law and genuinely adjudicated to dismantle the vestiges of slavery. She begins her book with the unlikely abolitionist James Govan Taliaferro, a slaveholding Whig who opposed the Thirteenth Amendment. Decisions from dozens of judges (it is not clear in the book how many of these judges existed in the South), like Taliaferro, demonstrate that Jim Crow and the other ways that the law sustained slavery were not inevitable and that another path was available.

The book is largely organized according to different realms of the law. Perrone covers contract law, property rights, private law, the recognition of the end of slavery (which has a convenient chart by state), the legality of succession, citizenship, and marriage and family law. In each chapter, she lays out the abolitionist position and shows how the majority of judges pushed back against unraveling slavery to maintain aspects of the i

Reviewed by:

• Newt Gingrich: The Rise and Fall of a Party Entrepreneur by Matthew N. Green and Jeffrey Crouch
• Andrew E. Busch

For many years, students of American politics have elaborated on how various members of Congress act either as procedural entrepreneurs who devote themselves to reforming the way Congress does business, or as legislative entrepreneurs who prioritize enshrining their preferred policies in legislation. In Newt Gingrich: The Rise and Fall of a Party Entrepreneur, political scientists Matthew N. Green and Jeffrey Crouch identify a third type of congressional entrepreneur, who devotes unusual resources to building the strength of his party. They have produced a richly researched, insightful, and evenhanded account of Newt Gingrich’s long drive to win and then maintain a majority for House Republicans.

Their account follows Gingrich from his first election to the House of Representatives from Georgia in 1978 and finds that party entrepreneurship consistently explains his career both before and during his stint as Speaker of the House. The story is told in five stages. During the first period, 1979–1984, Gingrich was the “Entrepreneurial Outsider”—a backbencher whose ambition far exceeded his resources, and who had little to show for his efforts (chap. 1). He nevertheless planted the seeds of future success by forming the Conservative Opportunity Society (COS) of like-minded House Republicans. He gained his footing in the second stage, 1985–1989, when, as an “Ascendant Party Warrior,” he built up the COS and inherited control of Pete DuPont’s GOPAC, an external structure to build support around the country (chap. 2). Gingrich also won respect within the Republican conference by bringing down Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas. In the third stage, the Georgian became an “Entrepreneurial Insider,” entering the House Republicans’ leadership when he was narrowly elected party whip after Dick Cheney left to become President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense (chap. 3). In the election of 1994, Gingrich reached his goal of a party majority and his own speakership, leading to a two-year period of “Promise and Pitfalls” (chap. 4). He won impressive policy victories but also was outmaneuvered by President Bill Clinton. Finally, 1997–1998 represented “A Failing Speakership,” marked by a loss of Republican House seats in the 1998 election and Gingrich’s own resignation (chap. 5).

From 1978 to 1998, Gingrich did not really change. He was driven to win a majority for Republicans and was convinced tha

Reviewed by:

• Old Southwest to Old South: Mississippi, 1789–1840 by Mike Bunn and Clay Williams
• Patrick Luck

Mike Bunn and Clay Williams’s Old Southwest to Old South: Mississippi, 1789–1840 is the ninth volume in the Heritage of Mississippi Series, which is projected to include fifteen volumes covering the most important aspects of Mississippi’s history. In their preface, Bunn and Williams rightly bemoan that the period covered by their volume has often been ignored and, when discussed, has usually been briefly sketched “as the first several years of a decades-long antebellum story revolving around little more than slavery, secession, and Civil War” (p. xiii). Bunn and Williams’s book is a welcome (if flawed) contribution that goes some way to overcoming this historiographical neglect.

Old Southwest to Old South is divided into two parts, with the first “chronicl[ing] the story of Mississippi’s American settlement and governmental administration” and the second “detailing the ways most of Mississippi’s territorial and early statehood period residents actually lived their lives and how their efforts at community building laid the foundation for the development of [the] state” (p. xv). Bunn and Williams argue that “key themes that still resonate today can trace their beginnings from this time period,” including “troubled race relations,” “heavy reliance on certain agricultural pursuits,” and “persistent economic inequalities” (p. xiii). Overall, Bunn and Williams succeed in their goals, and Old Southwest to Old South is a detailed exploration of these decades of Mississippi’s history that will be essential reading for any scholar of the state. The book is particularly strong at showing how a settler-colonial society (a term not used in the book) was created and consolidated in Mississippi.

However, Bunn and Williams make a regrettable choice in how they frame this book that undermines its overall effectiveness. This book is predominantly a history of white male settlers. This perspective is apparent in an introduction that focuses on the “wildness” of a Mississippi that was both a “paradise” and full of “potential environmental troubles,” but does not mention Native Americans and mentions the enslaved only once (pp. 4, 6). In fact, the authors barely discuss women and Native Americans, and the enslaved are discussed [End Page 416] relatively briefly. They justify this decision by referring to a lack of sources for women and a desire not “to repeat too much information” found in other volu

Reviewed by:

• The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South by Charles Reagan Wilson
• Douglas E. Thompson

It would be hard to imagine the field of southern studies without Charles Reagan Wilson. He has reshaped how we study religion in the American South. Scholars like Samuel S. Hill, Donald G. Mathews, and John Lee Eighmy define religion in denominational terms. They have been narrators of the Protestant Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian histories of the region. In contrast, Wilson’s civil religion thesis in Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980) outlines a way to understand the cultural affinity for Lost Cause mythology within white southern identity beyond denominational loyalties. He has helped explain how white southern Protestants’ identity in white supremacy was a feature of public religion in the region. Though conceived to explain the Lost Cause as civil religion, Wilson’s body of work today can be understood as a way to think about the role of religion in the making of the state, or at least in the failure of the Confederacy. Additionally, for almost five decades, Wilson served at the University of Mississippi, first as an editor for the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and then as director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The “Author’s Note” at the end of his newest book, The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South, captures the scope of his engagement with the people and places that have shaped the field as we know it today.

The book’s nine chapters divide into three parts, forming a structure that also serves as Wilson’s understanding of the “field of conceptual history” (p. 4). This “interdisciplinary” approach to the region “considers the evolution of ideas and value systems and how they seem to become commonsensical, natural, and normal over long time periods” (p. 4). The “ideas” examined are notions of “‘southern civilization,’ ‘the southern way of life,’ and ‘southern living’” (p. 4). While the terms may fit neatly into notions of moonlight-and-magnolias storytelling, Wilson shows how the words and the concepts behind those words shifted under changing circumstances, often in conversation with the region’s nonwhite residents. As he has done for much of his career, Wilson explores “the many Souths” as a form of content—from Thomas Jefferson to OutKast—and he uses all academic disciplines that can help us make sense of the region trying to make sense o

Reviewed by:

• Cherokee Civil Warrior: Chief John Ross and the Struggle for Tribal Sovereignty by W. Dale Weeks
• John P. Bowes

In Cherokee Civil Warrior: Chief John Ross and the Struggle for Tribal Sovereignty, W. Dale Weeks examines Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross’s leadership over the course of the mid-nineteenth century, beginning with Ross’s defense of Cherokee sovereignty against Georgia and Andrew Jackson but focusing primarily on the challenges that Ross and the Cherokee Nation faced during the American Civil War. The emphasis placed on the Cherokee perspective and the central theme of tribal sovereignty are both critical to this book and its effort to analyze the Cherokee experience. While the context of the Civil War matters, this is not a book about the war.

Over the course of seven chapters, including the introduction and conclusion, Weeks asserts two points consistently. The first is that John Ross always made decisions that he believed provided the best opportunity to maintain Cherokee unity and protect tribal sovereignty. The second is that the federal government’s actions toward the Cherokee and its dealings with Ross “led directly to dismantling the country’s prewar Indian policy of treaty making and its replacement with a less defined policy of impatience and violence” (p. 19). The book supports the first assertion well but is less effective in proving the second.

From the first chapter examining removal to the fifth chapter discussing postwar negotiations, Weeks delineates the challenges Ross and the Cherokee encountered from the 1830s to the 1860s. Not all events are treated in equal depth, however; and at times the analysis moves the narrative forward while not providing details that a reader might want or need. The discussion of removal, for example, serves more as a background to illustrate the forging of Ross’s principal beliefs about unity, sovereignty, and treaty rights. As a result, discussions of Cherokee political changes, the framework of the so-called Marshall Trilogy cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, and implementation of removal are less developed. Similarly, the postremoval period from 1839 to 1860 gets a relatively brief nod on the way to the onset of the Civil War.

The crucible of 1860–1866 receives the bulk of the author’s attention, but the book stays true in maintaining a Cherokee perspective so that the reader views the political and military conflicts in Indian Territory from that vantage point. Ross remains the axis on which this narrative rotates, however, which means that Weeks reckons with S

Reviewed by:

• Forces of Nature: A History of Florida Land Conservation by Clay Henderson
• Madison W. Cates

Visitors to Florida’s state parks are often greeted by a sign that announces one’s arrival in “the Real Florida.” In many ways, the sentiment behind this slogan—that the Sunshine State’s essence is not found in a theme park or amid its gleaming skylines—is at the heart of Clay Henderson’s book Forces of Nature: A History of Florida Land Conservation. If much has been lost as Florida was “ditched, drained, cleared, and developed,” this work argues that much has also been protected (pp. 119–20). In an in-depth and wide-ranging narrative, it traces efforts—from William Bartram through the long career of Marjory Stoneman Douglas up to the recent past—to protect the Sunshine State’s lands, waters, and wildlife.

As a prominent environmental lawyer and advocate in the state, Henderson is a well-qualified chronicler of these events. The first two-thirds of the book draws heavily on secondary source material, much of which will be familiar to environmental historians of Florida and the South. Yet there is clear value to such an expansive yet fast-moving narrative describing how the state’s environmental concerns and debates have evolved from the time of European colonization through the early twenty-first century.

Henderson’s chapters are mostly topical or episodic, with each one following a consistent chronological progression to advance this lengthy history at a decent pace. Moreover, the narrative does well to rely on biographical profiles of figures like May Mann Jennings and on institutional histories of key groups such as the Florida Audubon Society to help make such a vast subject [End Page 411] more readable. Although some may quibble with an over-reliance on influential public figures, this approach reinforces Henderson’s claim that “the story of conservation in Florida is the story of dedicated people” and their “connection to a special place” (p. 17).

The final third of the book addresses the last fifty years of environmental politics in the state, concluding with the successful efforts to create the Florida Wildlife Corridor. These chapters rely on secondary sources combined with the author’s own recollections and dozens of interviews he conducted with relevant activists and policy makers. The book benefits from Henderson’s expert assessment of the impact of Floridians such as Nathaniel Reed and Carol Browner on environmental policy as well as his insider perspective on campaigns to establish unique conservation

Reviewed by:

• African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom: Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Ashley Towle
• Hannah Katherine Hicks

This well-researched book bridges the scholarship on the cultural history of death and historians’ work on African Americans’ experiences during emancipation and Reconstruction. Between epidemics in refugee camps and the [End Page 444] one-fifth of Black soldiers who perished during the Civil War, as well as the racial violence that erupted across the South during Reconstruction, many Black southerners lost their lives. Ashley Towle explores how African American communities both made sense of these deaths and invoked the memory of the dead to sustain their fight for civil rights and racial justice. Employing Vincent Brown’s concept of “‘mortuary politics’” from The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), Towle’s African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom: Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction demonstrates that Black southerners symbolically called on their dead when they denounced racial violence and staked claims to citizenship (p. 4). The author draws on an impressive range of sources, encompassing congressional hearing reports, Freedmen’s Bureau and military records, memoirs, and African American newspapers.

The first two chapters center on cemeteries. Black southerners created and maintained civilian cemeteries after the war, seizing the opportunity to exercise control over their dead and their burials. These cemeteries were not only places of sacred remembrance, but also sites for political meetings and mobilization. African Americans gathered in burial grounds like Wilmington, North Carolina’s Pine Forest Cemetery and Columbia, South Carolina’s Randolph Cemetery to mourn the dead, including Black politicians and civilians killed during Reconstruction, and to hold political events. Such events celebrated Black achievements since emancipation and galvanized communities to continue fighting for equality. The second chapter focuses on the central role of Black soldiers in creating the South’s national cemeteries. Here the author turns to records of the quartermaster general’s office to trace the extensive, somber work of Black troops in recovering fallen soldiers and giving them proper burials. These chapters show that both civilian cemeteries and national cemeteries, where generations of Black southerners celebrated Decor