North Carolina Yeoman. The Diary of Basil Armstrong Thomasson, 1853-1862 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS173 of the Union decision to conduct the campaign and the way the campaign was fought; otherwise his conclusions are similar to Johnson's. Johnson offers a fuller recounting of the background of the campaign. Surprisingly, the military events are covered at a similar level of detail as in the Johnson book, in spite of Brooksher's military background. Brooksher, of course, does use more recently published articles and theses about the campaign. Brooksher's book is a survey for readers with an interest in the Red River campaign. The work is written in a lively fashion and includes a number of quotes from participants. Readers' though, should be aware that no new or startling conclusions have been reached—the basic outline is the same as the Johnson book. In spite of the book jacket's claim, this monograph does not fill a gap. M. Jane Johansson Pryor, Oklahoma North Carolina Yeoman. The Diary ofBasilArmstrong Thomasson, 1853-1862. Edited by Paul D. Escott. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Pp. lxvi, 355. $50.00.) Basil Armstrong Thomasson (1829-1862), called Strong by his family, was a small farmer and part-time schoolteacher in the Piedmont North Carolina counties of Yadkin and Iredell. A seemingly otherwise unremarkable exemplar of the antebellum South's yeomanry, Thomasson left a remarkable diary covering the years from 1853 to his death. As Paul Escott notes in his lucid, contextualizing introduction, Thomasson's diary is one of only six such documents that have been recovered from the yeomanry, and as such it provides rare first-person testimony from a class of Southerners whose history remains largely unknown in both its details and in its wider relationships with the world the slaveholders made. It is uncertain, however, whether the example ofThomasson's diary will inspire the widening of Southern social history for which its editor hopes. This widening has been a desideratum of southern historiography for at least the last quarter century, but despite sterling work by people like Steven Hahn, Stephanie McCurry, and Vernon Burton, it remains a goal still wished for, not achieved. Part of the problem is the very paucity of sources to which the richness of the Thomasson diary negatively attests. No diary orjournal can ever be called typical, and Thomasson may have been an exceptionally atypical member of his class; he was a temperance man, for instance, and this caused him some difficulty in successfully navigating the social rituals—local politics and barn raisings—of his community. If anything, Thomasson seems to be out of place as a kind of Ben Franklin Yankee on a Southern farm: frugal, religious, given to self-moralizing lists, and an autodidact ofthe most attractive sort. Thomasson's diary entries are frequentlyjust a record of the weather ("Clear and warm.") and work ("Hauled my hay from Pardue's meadow."), but there are also literary effects such as the following, which rises 174CIVIL WAR HISTORY to a rustic pastoralism: "Just after the 'bright orb of day' had gone down behind the western hills, I heisted the head of three of my beestands, two of which was, I think, as rich as I ever saw. . . . The comb was white, and the honey beautiful. I guess from its appearance, that most it was collected from the bloom of the sowerwood." Thomasson belies our notion of the Southern yeomanry in other ways as well perhaps because he lived in the hermetic world of Appalachian North Carolina but also perhaps because we so little know Thomasson's class that we are surprised to hear it speak in ways that have escaped the historian's paradigms. For instance, if Thomasson did not seem to participate in or even notice the vaunted Southern conception of honor perhaps that concept needs some revision or moderation of its totalitizing aspects. Indeed the very hermeticism of the mountain hollows and Thomasson's hardscrabble day-to-day existence must be counterpoised to his subscriptions to many national and regional newspapers andjournals; he courted his wife, in part, by taking out a newspaper subscription for her. And on women's issues generally, Thomasson was remarkably progressive, taking the Northern feminist line that linked slavery with the state of...