Becoming Free in the Cotton South (review)
- Becoming Free in the Cotton South
Susan O'Donovan, an associate professor of history and African American studies at Harvard University, studied with Steven Hahn at the University of California at San Diego before spending eight years at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) at the University of Maryland. She coedited the FSSP's Land and Labor, 1865 (2007) and edited the 1835–51 journal of Nelson Tift, a Connecticut shopkeeper who emigrated to southwest Georgia, published in nine installments between 1985 and 1997, for the Journal of Southwest Georgia History (282). In short, the author has spent a long time in nineteenth-century southwest Georgia.
As one would expect from a former Hahn student, this study is thoroughly documented. Pages 273 through 355 contain the notes and provide the reader with a handy list of sources to be consulted by any serious scholar of this era. Planter correspondence; plantation books and journals; local church records; county and state court records; town newspapers; governor's correspondence; confederate records; congressional records; federal records of the Freedmen's Bureau, the Secretary of War, the Office of the Comptroller; Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; and census returns. This documentary archive reveals exquisite human stories. The slaves' knowledge and the mother's ignorance of white teenage Delilah Ward's "licentious past" with Nelson David (53). Freedwoman Mary's desire to shoot ("blow off") a white female employer for poor treatment; and, the tragic story of ex-slave Rachel and the death of her son Vernon, for which she received life imprisonment (241, 181–13). Also, the influence of former FSSP director Ira Berlin is never far away, especially as shown in O'Donovan's attention to the changing spatial and temporal dimensions of slavery and emancipation.
This archival time seems to license the author to inform us of the limitations of existing scholarship. Too many scholars of slavery and emancipation posit "the power of self-determination" without regard to the contingency of "human reality" (3, 278). These scholars also flatten the regional diversity of emancipation struggles. O'Donovan's response is a documentary archive of the transition from slavery to freedom for some 63,000 blacks in eighteen counties located in southwest Georgia during the Civil War decade (the book's one map is on page 12). Rather than endless possibilities for freedom, the experience of this region's inhabitants was largely determined by their struggles during slavery. They were "conditioned by what they had been, what they had done, and [End Page 521] what they had endured in the past" (4). The reader is never allowed to forget the regulating of material conditions (6, 11, 58, 60, 99, 100, for example).
Moreover, argues the author, the transition to emancipation in southwest Georgia was regionally distinct, especially in terms of gender. Planters shaped the gender nature of work; black men's traditional familial responsibilities kept them anchored to their homes rather than embracing visiting Union troops; and black women survived emancipation through "domestic assumptions born under slavery" (2). Along with exposing the limitations of existing scholarship and calling attention to a neglected region, the study's aim is to show the ways "the socio-ecological order of a place . . . infused much larger processes with distinctive and localized dimensions" (9). Southwest Georgia is ideal because it compressed "dynamic processes" and, as a nonmilitary theater of operations, it did not interrupt the "rhythms and routines of slavery in the cotton south" (8).
Three of the book's five major chapters deal with the 1820s through to the end of 1865. The first chapter shows how a booming cotton economy produced a cruel slave regimen that left little time for community and culture and largely determined slave men and women's different yearnings for freedom. The second chapter points to the continued production of cotton, the "wartime expansion of slavery," and the late arrival of Union forces thus challenging the scholarly view that the Civil War revolutionized productive relations (85). "Finding Freedom's Edges" (chapter...
