Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1860 (review)

In his impressively researched and eminently readable work, Timothy Lockley offers an important addition to the historiography of nonslaveholding yeomen in the antebellum South. While the existing literature—ranging from Frank L. Owsley to J. William Harris, Lacy K. Ford, and Stephanie McCurry, to name a few of the most notable—concentrates on planter-yeoman relations, Lockley adeptly explores the complex relationships between nonslaveholders and slaves and how those interactions affected the white elite power brokers in society. Previous works treat such interaction only anecdotally, but Lockley treats the subject comprehensively. Racial barriers were fluid and surmountable—"lines in the sand" that could be crossed for a variety of reasons, despite elite disapproval. White elites "constantly tried, and consistently failed, to prevent biracial interaction" (xvii). Indeed, Lockley argues, "race could defer to self-interest, friendship, cooperation, and brotherly or sisterly solidarity in the minds of the poorer black and white members of lowcountry Georgia society" (xviii).

Lockley opens with a portrait of nonslaveholders in lowcountry Georgia, in which he establishes the foundation for interracial cooperation. Soon after the emergence of slavery in 1750, those who lacked the means to enter the slave-owning class became increasingly marginalized. Most yeomen had to settle for inferior farmlands, while the poorest whites could only inhabit the pine barrens. All nonslaveholders—whether farmers, artisans, or laborers—soon found far fewer opportunities for purchasing land, establishing lucrative trade, or engaging in wage-earning domestic work, creating friction between the haves and have-nots of white society.

It is in these political, economic, and social contexts that interracial exchanges emerge. Lockley examines four categories of interaction: social contacts, economic networks, criminal encounters, and shared religious experiences. Throughout Lockley challenges historians who insist that "the racial ties uniting nonslaveholding whites with the white elite prevented the formation of any common biracial, lower-class culture" (29). Informal social encounters took place frequently in the workplace, taverns, and brothels, as whites and blacks worked, drank, and slept together. This was often a product of residential proximity, which helped foster personal contacts between the races.

Similarly, lower class whites and blacks engaged in trade—in urban shops, farm cabins, and other informal settings—which proved beneficial to both parties. The trade was often illicit and lucrative, especially in the traffic of liquor. Though disapproving elites spent much of their time prosecuting this illegal trade, convictions were few, and fines were "little more than a slap on the wrist" (79). Though Lockley suggests that such continued trafficking in illicit goods indicates an implicit degree of trust between racial parties, weak deterrents probably had as much to do with it as any innate reliance between the races. If the fines were light, and the profits were significant, poor whites could be conveniently colorblind.

The most often prosecuted crime was assault, and race played an integral part in the outcome of the cases. White-on-white crimes were less severe than interracial assaults; black men who assaulted whites could expect harsh penalties, depending on the class of the latter. However, lower class whites frequently assaulted blacks despite mutually beneficial exchanges, and often such violence was a manifestation of racial hostility. If a white man assaulted a slave, elites imposed more severe penalties, for valuable property was at stake. Indeed, property crimes of all sorts were treated harshly. Theft was much more severely punished than assault—and the cases utilized by Lockley are those that employed biracial cooperation, the major dread of white elites. Planters constantly feared a class alliance between lower class whites and blacks who stole from the propertied classes would undermine elite power and the antebellum social order.

Lastly, Lockley demonstrates that whites and blacks interacted in the religious realm. Though initially fairly democratic in its acceptance of all races, the church had become an instrument of white unification by the time of the Civil War. Blacks, who had...