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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.3 (2003) 490-492



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Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation. By J. William Harris (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) 454 pp. $45.00

This is an impressive study that explodes the still-lingering perception of the lower South as a homogenous and largely static region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Concentrating on the years between the end of Reconstruction and the onset of World War II, Harris offers a comparative analysis of economic, social, and political change in the Sea Islands of Georgia, in Georgia's eastern Piedmont, and in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta. He organizes the study chronologically and then topically. The book's three main divisions focus on periods of [End Page 490] approximately two decades each: 1876 to 1896, 1897 to 1918, and 1919 to 1939. The author begins each section with an overview of economic change, follows it with a chapter on social and political developments, and concludes with a discussion of a defining crisis in which national events affected regional patterns—namely, the rise of Populism, World War I, and the Great Depression. His central argument is clear and convincing: Despite broad similarities, time and place mattered within the diverse and changing "Deep South."

Antebellum commonalities notwithstanding, the three sub-regions followed divergent paths after Reconstruction. In the Sea Islands, the plantation system disintegrated speedily after the Civil War. The former slaves attained a degree of economic independence unmatched elsewhere in the South. They acquired small plots of land in extraordinary numbers, focused almost wholly on household subsistence, and preserved cultural traditions that gradually vanished elsewhere.

In the Piedmont, by contrast, there was a continued concentration on staple production combined with a dramatic increase in agricultural tenancy. The transition from slavery to sharecropping was not as rapid as historians have traditionally maintained, however; the majority of freedmen were wage laborers—not sharecroppers—as late as 1880. That tenancy grew rapidly among whites (although less because landowners lost their land than because the rising generation found it more difficult to acquire farms) helps to explain the far greater appeal of Populism there than in the other regions that Harris studies.

Postbellum change followed yet another pattern in the Delta, where, beginning near the end of the century, the extensive construction of levies and the influx of thousands of black migrants facilitated the production of cotton on a scale unprecedented before the Civil War. Whereas the plantation system had collapsed in the Sea Islands within a generation of emancipation and began to crumble in the Piedmont after World War I, it survived largely unscathed in the Delta until the 1930s, when the financial incentives of the Agricultural Adjustment Act led to a "southern enclosure" movement in which thousands of black and white tenants were expelled from the land in favor of wage laborers and, by the end of the decade, mechanical cotton pickers. Harris also notes that the constant infusion of African-Americans into the Delta from other regions contributed to a more dynamic black culture—embodied in the birth of "the blues"—than in either the Piedmont or the Sea Islands.

Harris draws on a wide variety of sources to address a broad range of issues: plantation papers, tax and census records, court minutes, state prison records, oral histories from the Federal Writers' Project, early field recordings of African-American music, and the publications of numerous public agencies. He integrates his study with numerous anecdotes and compelling vignettes. He is sympathetic to the plight of the rural peoples that he studies without becoming sentimental. Throughout, he remains sensitive to the frustratingly impersonal structural factors [End Page 491] that often constrained the options of individual decision makers. The result is a compelling, refreshingly balanced analysis that offers insights into the economic, political, and cultural history of the many "Deep Souths" in the age of segregation.

 



Robert Tracy McKenzie
University of Washington

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