New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–1910 by Don H. Doyle, and: Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 by Loren Schweninger (review)

BookReviews 217 thelibertarian right and advance a theoretical raison d'etre for the American liberal agenda,a worthy ambition in itself. For the rest, despite its acknowledged limits, The Republicof Choice is an always engaging, thought-provoking, often illuminating effort whichdesetves to be pondered by anyone remotely interested in American law and/or culture. MaryM. P. Stokes Toronto,Ontario ••••+. Don H. Doyle. New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile,1860-1910. Chapel Hill andLondon:The UniversityofNorth Carolina Press, 1990.Pp. xxii + 369. Loren Schweninger. Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915. Urbana and Chicago:University of Illinois Press, 1990. Pp. xviii + 426. Propagandists of the New South, Don Doyle points out, followed a standard scenariothat included a role for Afro-American people in the new order. Although their place was clearly a subordinate one, regional progress depended on AfroAmerican education and uplift along the lines that Booker T. Washington had laid down.In paying ritual homage to the good old times before the war, New Southerners insisted (pursuing a theme that would soon be picked up by the historian UlrichB. Phillips) that slavery had already given African Americans a good start by providing a training school second to none for lifting Africans out of their native ''savagery' and setting them on the road to civilization. It is to a modified version of this theme, shorn of Phillips's racism, that Loren Schweninger, in a closely argued text supported by a massive data base drawn from the manuscript census, tax records, probate records, and legislative petitions, gives newscholarly legitimacy. Africans, he argues, had no concept of the absolute right of private property that had developed in western Europe. Yet already in the colonial period, free African Americans and even slaves began a process of acculturation and accumulation whose significance has not been fully appreciated by historians. Schweninger supports Robert Fogel and Stanley Engennan's contention that antebellum slave owners relied heavily on incentives to encourage productive labour. The result was de facto property ownership by slaves that was "fairly widespread" (36). Fortunate entrepreneurs among the virtually free slaves who hired out their own time could even amass "a small fortune" (47). Slave owners, despite 218 Canadian Review of American Studies their own misgivings,had inculcated not only the ''work ethic" in their slaves but also "ambition, drive, and a desire for freedom" (51). In his discussion of free African Americans, Schweninger emphasizes the differences between the lower south, where family and other ties with whites had allowed an urban mulatto elite to emerge, and the upper South, where most free persons of colour were of Afro-American parentage and lived in the country. While Schweninger iscareful to point out that the great majority of free African Americans owned no real estate and only small amounts of personal property, his celebration of Afro-American achievement during the last antebellum decade bears an uncanny resemblance to the effusions of Washington and his New South allies. This perspective is even more apparent in Schweninger's discussion of the Afro-American property-owning class after the Civil War. Despite formidable white opposition to Afro-American land ownership in the lower South, nineteen percent of AfroAmerican farmers there had acquired landed property by 1910. In the upper South, a remarkable forty-four percent of rural Afro-Americans owned their own land by that year. The cities of the New South provided enterprising African Americans with the most opportunity to advance themselves in the professions and in businesses catering mainly to the needs of their own people. The old lower South free AfroAmerican elite suffered declining fortunes after the war and was eclipsed by new men (and a few women), many of them fonner slaves. Schweninger's South was thoroughly bourgeois, but the argument that a bourgeois ethic had permeated all levels of the Afro-American population simply cannot be sustained by what are, after all, a relatively small number of Afro-American success stories. He is unable to demonstrate that Afro-American desire for land after the Civil War, for example, represented much more than the peasant's traditional striving for an independent competency. Turning to Don Doyle's study of the...