- Essay on Sources
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- Johns Hopkins University Press
- pp. 215-222
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Essay on Sources
Research into hunting and fishing in the post-Emancipation South required a great deal of digging through a broad range of sources. This essay provides a brief tour of the most important primary and secondary sources that informed the study. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide, but rather as a focused discussion of the key materials that most aided my work.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Contemporary Magazines
The most useful sources were the national sporting periodicals. By the 1880s, the South had become more a part of the national outdoor sporting culture and the region became a more frequent topic of discussion in these periodicals. The most important sporting publications of the day, Forest and Stream (New York), Field and Stream (St. Paul, MN), and Outing (Albany, NY), provided excellent discussions of Southern natural environs, sporting destinations, and race relations. In addition, American Sportsman (West Meriden, CT; this later became the Rod and Gun and American Sportsman [New York]), National Sportsman (Boston), Outdoor Life (Denver), and Recreation (New York) often discussed the South, proving extremely helpful in identifying the central role of race in national debates over hunting and fishing.
In addition to sporting magazines, other national and regional periodicals helped identify the many links between hunting and fishing and such topics as Emancipation, labor, tourism, and agriculture. Agricultural journals such as American Farmer (Baltimore), Southern Cultivator (Atlanta), and Southern Planter and Farmer (Richmond, VA) were the best sources for tracing attitudes toward the Southern “labor question,” as well as its connection to African Americans’ customary rights, over the period studied.
Memoirs, Guides, and Interviews
Memoirs of Southern life after the Civil War provided critical material for the study. Only a few dedicated, elite sportsmen made hunting and fishing a major emphasis of their recollections, but memoirs that include discussions of these sporting activities and African Americans make the perspectives of elite whites clearer. Some of the more helpful memoirs, readily available through the Documenting the American South Collection at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, are Frances Butler Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation since the War (London, 1883), an account of the Butler family’s Georgia plantations; Elizabeth Allston Pringle, A Woman Rice Planter (New York, 1914), an account of plantation life near Georgetown, South Carolina, written under the pen name Patience Pennington; Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter (Baltimore, 1887), an account of post-Emancipation life in Mississippi; and Edward J. Thomas, Memorials of a Southerner (Savannah, 1923), an account of life and labor in and around Savannah, Georgia.
The published sporting memoirs and accounts of Southern natural history, though much more scarce, offer critical information on sporting culture and conservation that helped establish the contours of Southern hunting and fishing. Among these are Horatio Bigelow, Flying Feathers: A Yankee’s Hunting Experiences in the South (Richmond, VA, 1937); William Elliott, Carolina Sports by Land and Water (New York, 1859), probably the best known of all antebellum sporting accounts; William Templeton Hornaday, Thirty Years’ War for Wildlife: Gains and Losses in the Thankless Task (Stamford, CT, 1931), the naturalist’s assessment of the early conservation movement; James Henry Rice Jr., Glories of the Carolina Coast (Columbia, SC, 1925), a valuable account of natural and sporting matters by the long-time secretary of the South Carolina Audubon Society; many books by South Carolina’s poet laureate and novelist Archibald Hamilton Rutledge, including Days off in Dixie (London, 1925), Home by the River (New York, 1955), Hunter’s Choice (New York, 1946), Santee Paradise (New York, 1956), and Those Were the Days (Richmond, VA, 1955), accounts of Rutledge’s South Carolina upbringing that made hunting and fishing central parts of the story; and A. S. Salley, The Happy Hunting Ground: Personal Experiences in the Low-Country of South Carolina (Columbia, SC, 1916).
Published accounts of Southern visitors’ impressions of the region, which often include discussions of both hunting and fishing and race relations, proved another essential source. Travel accounts with occasional commentary on hunting and fishing and related topics include Clifton Johnson, Highways and Byways of the South (New York, 1904), a photographic and textual exploration of the Southern countryside; Edward King, The Great South: A Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland (Hartford, IL, 1875), an account of the Scribner’s correspondent’s travels in the Reconstruction South; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States: Based upon Three Former Volumes of Journeys and Investigations (New York, 1861), one of the most famous antebellum memoirs; and Julian Ralph, Dixie; or Southern Scenes and Sketches (New York, 1895), a record of the New York journalist’s journey through the South.
Published guides promoting Southern tourism or extolling the region’s virtues for potential visitors and investors helped establish both the economic importance of the natural environment and the central place of hunting and fishing in luring Northerners to the South. Representative publications include Frank Presbrey, The Empire of the South: An Exposition of the Present Resources and Development of the South (Washington, DC, 1898), published by the Southern Railway Company; and Richmond and Danville Railroad, Summer Resorts and Points of Interest of Virginia, Western North Carolina, and North Georgia (New York, 1884). Both are found in the extensive North Carolina Collection at UNC Chapel Hill. Also useful are Seaboard Air Line Railway, A Guide to the Famous Hunting and Fishing Grounds of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia Traversed by the Seaboard Air Line, with a Synopsis of the Game Laws of Those States (Richmond, VA, 1898), at the South Carolinia Library (SCL) in Columbia; and Southern Railway Company, Hunting and Fishing in the South: A Book Descriptive of the Best Localities in the South for Various Kinds of Game and Fish (Washington, DC, 1904). These guides helped both in tracing the immense changes occurring in the Southern landscape and economic structure and in locating hunting and fishing in those processes.
Sources that capture African Americans’ voices, especially important since so vastly outnumbered by whites’ publications, proved indispensable to uncovering the long relationship between former slaves and hunting and fishing. Unsurprisingly, the most valuable documents are published former-slave narratives. George Rawick’s The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, CT, 1972) provides scores of Federal Writers’ Project (Works Progress Administration, WPA) interviews with former slaves who discussed hunting and fishing, sometimes in great detail. Some particularly useful interviews included in American Slave are those with Holt Collier (“Mississippi Narratives,” in suppl. ser. 1, 7[2]), Heywood Ford (“Alabama Narratives,” in 6[1]), and Josh Horn (“Alabama and Indiana Narratives,” in 6[1]). The Horn interviews are also compiled in Alan Brown and David Taylor, eds., Gabr’l Blow Sof’: Sumter County, Alabama, Slave Narratives (Livingston, AL, 1997), 69-70.
Besides the WPA interviews, numerous published slave narratives discuss hunting and fishing. Examples of these are Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States (New York, 1837); William Hayden, Narrative of William Hayden, Containing a Faithful Account of His Travels for a Number of Years, Whilst a Slave, in the South (Cincinnati, 1846); and Peter Randolph, From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit: The Autobiography of Reverend Peter Randolph (Boston, 1893). While rarely spending substantial time on hunting and fishing, these narratives occasionally provide important accounts of how former slaves used those activities to survive the transition from slavery to freedom.
Archival Sources and Unpublished Material
Archival research provided much essential information for the study. Among the most useful records were those of sporting clubs and resorts. These records, while not as numerous in the archives as I had hoped, nonetheless provided some of the study’s most valuable information. The records of the Kinloch Gun Club and Santee Gun Club, both housed at the South Carolina Historical Society (SCHS) in Charleston, for example, contain invaluable details about African-American huntsmen and sporting laborers. The same is true of the records of the St. John’s Hunting Club and the Kosmos Club, housed at the SCL in Columbia, although these records are not nearly as comprehensive. The John Edwin Fripp Papers, including records of Fripp’s time as overseer of the Chelsea Plantation Club, a Beaufort County, South Carolina, sportsman’s association, are housed in the Southern Historical Collections (SHC) at UNC Chapel Hill; these helped establish the connection between hunting and fishing and elite Southerners’ sporting and racial identity. In addition, the SHC also contains the David Franklin Thorpe Papers, with their unfortunately brief records of the St. Helena Island Rifle and Sporting Club—wherein can be found the sad story of the maimed sporting laborer Isaac Polite.
Surviving records from state and private wildlife protection agencies were also very useful. The annual reports of the South Carolina Audubon Society, in the reading room of the SCL, allowed me to follow the evolution of natural conservation in South Carolina and to connect African Americans to elite sportsmen’s concerns about wildlife and labor problems. Perhaps the most important of such records for this study were the annual reports of South Carolina’s chief game warden. These detail the connection between controlling black labor, protecting elite sporting privilege, and guaranteeing white supremacy. The collections of the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) in Richmond contributed invaluable material linking wildlife protection and race relations. The pamphlet “The Conservation of Bird Life and Game Preservation in Virginia: Reasons Why the Moncure and Rutherfoord Bill Should be Enacted into Law without Amendments,” for example, helped establish that race was used to justify wildlife protection beyond the Deep South.
At the SCHS in Charleston, the Mitchell and Smith Records, particularly the incomplete “Alston v. Limehouse Case Records, 1892-1902,” provided evidence of the conflict engendered by the competing interests of whites and blacks in commercial fishing. The Mitchell and Smith Records also contain brief records of the Otranto Club, a Berkeley County sporting organization founded in 1872. In addition, the SCHS contains the Conner Family Papers, which include fascinating correspondence between F. C. Ford and Audubon Society Secretary James Henry Rice Jr. documenting whites’ anger over supposed sporting abuses by blacks.
The SCL in Columbia also has numerous archival collections, beyond those discussed above, that contributed to my research. The rules and regulations for the “Oakland Club, St. Stephens, P.O., Berkeley County, South Carolina” (1908) helped establish the cost of labor at sporting plantations. Henry D. Boykin’s unpublished “Looking Back at the Boykin Hunting Club” (1984) provided useful commentary on biracial hunting in South Carolina from someone with deep sporting ties to the region. The SCL also houses the Henry Edwards Davis Papers, the surviving business and personal records of this renowned turkey hunter and sporting author.
The SHC at Chapel Hill led me to letters in the James Philip Jones Papers, which discuss the postwar labor problem. In addition, the James Lee Love Collection contains a multi-volume typescript that occasionally mentions hunting, fishing, and problems with labor; the Robert Pinckney Tucker Papers, which contain a wealth of material related to hunting, fishing, and other land uses, left by Tucker, the South Carolina land and lumber speculator; and the Jackson and Prince Family Papers, which contain typescript descriptions of sporting plantation land for sale in Glynn County, Georgia.
The NCC at Chapel Hill holds many travel and tourism broadsides produced by railroads, resorts, and land agents, and informative pamphlets on wildlife protection in North Carolina, such as T. S. Palmer’s “Some Possibilities for Game Protection in North Carolina” (1904) and “Prospectus of the Shocco Game Association” (1894). The NCC also contains the valuable study of farm tenant life by the North Carolina State Extension Service, J. A. Dickey and E. C. Branson’s “How Farm Tenants Live” (1922), which helped establish the importance of fish and game to laborers’ diets even as late as the 1920s.
The VHS in Richmond possesses a wealth of useful information on Southern hunting and fishing. The broadside collection contains The Virginia Fish and Game Protective Association to the People of Virginia (1878), a pamphlet in which the association announced its intention to aggressively pursue wildlife protection in the Old Dominion. Most importantly, the VHS general collection contains the essay “The Direct Benefits Accruing to the Farmers and to the State as a Resultant Effect of Model and Modern Game Protective Legislation” (1912), written by Alabama Game Warden John Wallace Jr.; this was Wallace’s attempt to convince Virginians of the need to pass wildlife legislation as a check to African Americans’ abuses. The VHS also contains the Kelly Walker Trimble Papers, including the letter to George Washington Trimble complaining of the flight of the laborer William Carter after he reacquired his hunting dog Jack.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Despite the frequency with which accounts of hunting and fishing appear in narratives of blacks’ life before and after slavery, these activities have received comparatively little attention from scholars of Southern or African-American history. Most works that discuss these topics either do so briefly—such as the classic plantation studies: George Rawick’s From Sunup to Sundown: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT, 1972); Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974); and John W. Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972) —or do so in short articles in which hunting and fishing are not the central focus. The latter include John Campbell’s “‘My Constant Companion’: Slaves and Their Dogs in the Antebellum South” (in Working toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South [Rochester, NY, 1994]); and David K. Wiggins’s “Good Times on the Old Plantation: Popular Recreations of the Black Slave in Antebellum South, 1810-1860” (Journal of Sports History 4, no. 1 [1977]: 260-84). Aside from these works, none of which address the post-Emancipation period, few scholars have addressed the role of hunting and fishing in the lives of African Americans in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Most studies of hunting and fishing in the United States between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries have focused primarily on such topics as how elites used field sports to reinforce class distinctions; how hunting and fishing reinforced or redefined American masculinity; and how such activities fit into the ebb and flow of American evangelicalism. Two essays—Gary Kulik’s “Dams, Fish and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth Century Rhode Island” (in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, ed. Steven Hahn and Johnathan Prude [Chapel Hill, NC, 1985]), and Harry L. Watson’s “‘The Common Rights of Mankind’: Subsistence, Shad and Commerce in the Early Republican South” (Journal of American History 83 [1996]: 13-43) —discuss conflicts over dambreaking strictly in terms of class. Ted Ownby’s Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation and Manhood in the Rural South 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1990), a study of how male Southern recreational culture changed after the Civil War in response to growing Southern evangelicalism, is far-reaching and comprehensive. But it does not address hunting and fishing in extensive detail and does not devote significant attention to black Southerners. It must be noted, however, that while Ownby spends little time on race relations, his work is extremely important because it does establish that African Americans’ hunting activities threatened both white landowners’ economic prosperity and white sportsmen’s sense of sporting superiority.
Most studies mentioning Southern hunting and fishing give little more than passing notice to how such activities, which were common for nearly all groups of Southerners, black and white, rich and poor, reflected larger and longer-lasting racial conflict. There are several notable exceptions to this trend. Nicholas Proctor’s Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South (Charlottesville, VA, 2002) is perhaps the best and most useful work in laying out the antebellum antecedents to messages of race and racial control developed in late-nineteenth-century accounts of African Americans’ hunting and fishing. Arguing persuasively that slaveholders used hunting to cultivate mastery over nature, over their own emotional impulses, and, most importantly, over slaves, Proctor presents hunting as an activity used to reinforce the social order. He compares the meanings of hunting by white slave owners and by slaves to great effect, clearly establishing hunting as an important way in which Southern elites defined and conserved their class privilege and racial identity.
Studies of hunting have become more popular in the past decade, thanks, in part, to the increasing popularity of environmental history, the history of sports, and the history of tourism. Some of these studies demonstrate the connection between the social structures of field sports and the construction of cultural values and institutions. The work of Mart A. Stewart, Albert Cowdrey, David S. Cecelski, Daniel Justin Herman, Jacob F. Rivers, and other scholars has demonstrated that the social meanings ascribed to field sports, particularly in justifications for and written narratives of these sports, give excellent insights into American cultural, intellectual, and social life. Stewart’s What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens, GA, 1996), and Cowdrey’s This Land, This South: An Environmental History (Lexington, KY, 1996), are among the best environmental histories of the South and help make plain the general plenty that initially made the region’s fish and game such a valuable source of subsistence and income for poor Southerners and later, as the nineteenth century wore on, the source of increasing conflict over environmental use between the races and classes. Cecelski’s fine The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001) outlines the general importance of long-standing customary rights such as fishing for whites and blacks living in coastal North Carolina in the nineteenth century, but does not address the topic in terms of race relations. Herman’s Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, DC, 2001) is a fascinating study of how popular images of hunting both reflected and reinforced American ideals of manliness, racial identity, and nationalism. It is effective in locating racial attitudes in sporting narratives, but does not address the South or African Americans in any substantial way. Rivers, in his Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative (Columbia, SC, 2002), provides primarily a literary analysis of Southern sporting narratives, which, although allowing him to tease out some aspects of whites’ attitudes toward African Americans, deals only briefly with the decades after Emancipation. Taken together, these works provide excellent pointers for future scholars in their attempts to locate aspects of American social, cultural, and intellectual development in various groups’ visions of field sports. But scholars have yet to make a detailed attempt to do so for the postwar South.
None of the above works, even though each deals with race to some degree, attempts to connect the culture of Southern hunting and fishing to race relations from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. One notable exception is Steven Hahn’s “Hunting, Fishing and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South” (Radical History Review 26 [October 1982]: 36-64), which demonstrates how Southern elites’ loss of control over the lower classes, especially African Americans, proved an incentive for restricting, from the 1870s, the general right to hunt, fish, and forage and put animals to graze. Hahn’s work, which first established elite Southerners’ wide-ranging assault on plebeian customary rights, is central to my study. Another work that attempts to connect Southern hunting and fishing to race relations is Stuart A. Marks’s Southern Hunting in Black and White: Nature, History and Ritual in a Carolina Community (Princeton, NJ, 1991). Although focusing to a degree on race, it gives little attention to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, despite the title, does not make a broad argument about Southern race relations. Aside from noting the differences between the hunting habits of slaves and their masters and suggesting that Emancipation played a role in the growing sentiment for wildlife restrictions, Marks does not deal much with the many connections between hunting and race in the postwar South. Hahn and Marks argue for a general connection between hunting and fishing and race, but neither gives the topic detailed analysis.
Several scholarly monographs dealing with American hunting and fishing, although not focusing on the South, help demonstrate the importance of such activities to poor Americans across the country and the omnipresence of conflict created by these customary activities. Karl Jacoby’s Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, CA, 2001) documents the criminalization of the hunting, fishing, and foraging traditions of the lower classes that attended development of three national parks, making clear that elites’ assault on plebeian subsistence methods was truly a national process. Likewise, Louis Warren’s The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, CT, 1997) analyzes the conflict created by emerging government efforts to regulate wildlife in the twentieth century. Together, these works help locate the struggles in and over the Southern sporting field in a larger context.
There are several valuable studies of the post-Emancipation South that proved helpful for situating hunting and fishing in the lives of Southerners after the Civil War. Studies of economic development and tourism, for example, which are central to any understanding of Southern sporting traditions, help us understand how both nostalgia and economics underlie the importance of hunting and fishing. J. William Harris’s important book Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation (Baltimore, 2001) provides a clear picture of the economic, particularly agricultural, transformations occurring in three regions of the Deep South between Reconstruction and the 1930s. It includes a fine discussion of the growing importance of Northern sporting tourism to the region as changes in the agricultural economy, particularly in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta and coastal Georgia, made more lands available for Northern investors.
Other studies reveal the clear links between tourism and growing national nostalgia for a mythical antebellum South, particularly the key place of race in that relationship. Nina Silber’s The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993), although not addressing hunting and fishing, is important for identifying the strong connection between race-based nostalgia and the emerging tourism industry—which, as Silber demonstrates, became an important factor in sectional reunion. David W. Blight’s influential Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2001), again not dealing with hunting and fishing, makes clear the concrete relationship between idealized, racialized memories of the Old South and the physical and symbolic reunion of North and South—both of which became central to the emergence of hunting and fishing as a key site for drawing the color line.
These works collectively indicate the potential usefulness of customary activities such as hunting and fishing for studying both African-American life and Southern race relations in general, but they also demonstrate a lack of attention to the critical post-Emancipation period and the construction of the Southern racial divide. By clearly establishing the impact of hunting and fishing on African Americans’ lives, we can view the South’s fields, forests, and streams as contested arenas that reflect crucial tensions in Southern life. The work that scholars have done to date suggests that a further examination of Southern hunting and fishing can reveal as much about race and race relations as about class conflict, masculinity, and American religiosity.