The Old South and the New

THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW John B. Edmunds, Jr. Francis W. Pickens and the Politics of Destruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. xiii + 256 pp. Illus. Fred Arthur Bailey. Class and Tennessee's Confederate Generation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. x + 205 pp. Maps. Gail Williams O'Brien. The Legal Fraternity and the Making of a New South Community, 1848-1882. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. xi + 231 pp. John T. O'Brien Questions of change and continuity naturally engage historians, but those who study the nineteenth-century South have been especially persistent in taking their measure. Few southern historians can resist juxtaposing the Old and New South because of the crises of secession, Confederate defeat, Emancipation and Reconstruction , because the defenders of its antebellum culture and the heralds of the New South creed were so vocal, and because clattering textile mills scattered throughout the Upper South by the 1880s bore noisy witness to the region's newfound commitment to industrialization. Yet if much sound and fury attended the death throes of the Old South and the birth pangs of the New, historians have differed radically in their assessments of the profundity of the changes, their timing, and the persons and classes most responsible for hurrying or staying change. In quite different ways, the books under review shed light on the stillcontested field of change and continuity below the Mason-Dixon line. In Francis W. Pickens and the Politics of Destruction, John B. Edmunds, Jr. offers the first full-length biography of a man who was a political fixture in South Carolina for over three decades. Born in 1807 to an illustrious family, Pickens attended South Carolina College long enough to be influenced by the extreme states' rights views of its president, Thomas Cooper. Barely twenty years old, Pickens withdrew from college, published letters in the Charleston Mercury urging resistance to tariff impositions, married the wealthy Margaret Simkins, and read law in his father-in-law's office. The young planter-lawyer won a seat in the General Assembly in 1832 and quickly established himself as a rising star in 340 John T. O'Brien Nullifier ranks. He entered Congress the following year and served as John C. Calhoun's chief lieutenant in the House for over a decade, hoping eventually to inherit his leader's position as undisputed master of Carolina politics. Thwarted by rivals and hampered by miscalculations, Pickens continually failed to attain the high offices he coveted. His break with Calhoun by the mid-1840s cast him into the political wilderness until the eve of the Secession crisis. Then the man and the moment finally met: elected governor in 1860, he led South Carolina out of the Union. His popularity and power ebbed quickly, however, and he left office despondent in 1862. Watching helplessly from the sidelines as the North subdued his state and nation, Pickens spent the postwar years prior to his death in 1869 vainly seeking pardon. Although not without sympathy for his subject, Edmunds underlines his many shortcomings. He recognizes Pickens's keen intelligence, deep solicitude for family and friends and acute business sense, but also finds him aloof and overbearing, pedantic, disingenuous, driven by ambition and tortured by frustration . Commenting on a letter Pickens wrote to his wife when governor, Edmunds notes that its ''romantic phraseology demonstrated what a truly pitiful man he was; like his state, he was filled with despair" (167). Such an unheroic figure, who frittered away opportunity and power, probably deserved the obscurity that until now has been his fate, but to Edmunds, Pickens is important because he was a "typical Carolina patrician," similar in character to Calhoun's other radical apprentices and a product of his state's political culture. South Carolina's undemocratic political structures perpetuated oligarchic rule and the prevailing ethos which forbade the ambitiousfrom campaigning openly for office, magnified personal jealousies and sharpened intrigues among the ruling elite. In this unnatural and atavistic political hothouse, the "Carolina temper, driven by mythical romanticism, lost all sense of reality as it found solace in provincialism .'' In trying to preserve their archaic society, South Carolina's sons, including Pickens, ''engaged...