Slavery in the Clover Bottoms: John McCline's Narrative of His Life during Slavery and the Civil War (review)

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 women: "There are more slaves in the U.S. than most of us are aware of. Freedom is a great thing, but woman cant be allowed to enjoy it; they are slaves to men." At a local debate, the issue was whether the dispossesion ofthe Indians was justified by manifest destiny: manifest destiny lost by one vote. On slavery and race, Thomasson maintained a no doubt judicious silence, but he was a Unionist who contemplated moving his family north during and after Secession ; he died before he had to face the question of what he would do if he were conscripted by his state. The absence of written sources such as Thomasson's diary led American social history into its wrong turning of quantitative history. The result has been, at best, a history that resembles paleontology in its reconstruction of skeletal fragments of the material lives of America's working people. (And at worst there are the kind of scholastic "debates" over methodology exemplified by J. Morgan Kousser's attack in The Journal ofSouthern History on Steven Hahn.) Consciousness , and the humanistic sense that class is a process, evolving over time as lived history, has been lost in the reification imposed by static, quantitative evidence . The richness ofNorth Carolina Yeoman evokes a world that is not only lost but that may not be recoverable even by historians with the best of intentions. David C. Ward Smithsonian Institution Slavery in the Clover Bottoms: John McCline's Narrative of His Life during Slavery and the Civil War. Edited by Jan Furman. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998. Pp. xxvii, 155. $30.00.) For the first time in its Voices of the Civil War series, the University ofTennessee Press has published a fugitive slave narrative. It is also a full-fledged Civil War military memoir. If it does not fully conform to the conventions of either BOOK REVIEWSI75 genre's its uniqueness as a narrative lies in the fact that it is both. The author's youth at the time of the events he described also makes this an unusual war narrative. John McCline was born around 1850 and thus experienced slavery only as a child and the war only as an early adolescent. He was a mere fourteen years old when he was mustered out of the Union army in May 1865. McCline spent his young life as one of Dr. James Hoggatt's hundred slaves on a large plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee. In December 1862, he was driving cattle when soldiers from the 13th Michigan Regiment stopped along the road and befriended the young slave. When they moved on a few minutes later, John went with them, responding eagerly to their assurances that they would take him north and set him free. For the next thirty months, he remained a part ofthat regiment, serving as an officer's servant and as a teamster. Although he...