The South: Old and New Frontiers, Selected Essays of Frank Lawrence Owsley (review)

74CIVIL WAR HISTORY evil no less than good, can direct the course of events is obviously a basic tenet of American liberalism. The disposition to find conflict in society may also give a reading to reality at least as valid as that of the consensus view. Paradoxically, as well, conspiratorial thought has had a constructive side, for the political process of isolating a presumed enemy has been an important means of reaffirming communal values. Nor was this mode of thought peculiar to the generation before the Civil War: the Revolutionary fathers, the Jeffersonian Republicans, and the Jacksonian Democrats similarly perceived and acted upon the realities of their day. The most important contribution of the present work is the stimulus it gives to further inquiry. More explicit analysis is needed of the relationship between the paranoid style and the Edenic myth. If Americans have believed that the nation began its existence in essential perfection, then they would naturally be strongly inclined to regard political evil as a "snake in Paradise." There is also the need to explain why the paranoid style conduced to "liberal" results in the nineteenth century, whereas the right wing seems more closely identified with it at the present day. A mode of thought shared by Lincoln, Jackson, the Revolutionary fathers, and the John Birch Society clearly presents a challenge to historians not associated with theright wing. Major L. Wilson Memphis State University The South: Old and New Frontiers, Selected Essays of Frank Lawrence Owsley. Edited by Harriet Chappell Owsley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969. Pp. xix, 284. $8.00. ) This volume presents a broad spectrum of the late Frank Lawrence Owsley's work, from his first essay published in 1925 to his last, published posthumously in 1961. The collection, edited by his wife, Harriet Chappell Owsley, with a foreword by Andrew Lytle, provides a summary view of Owsley between two covers. Again we read this prominent southern historian's argument that states rights doomed the Confederate States of America. Clearly stated in an excerpt from Pkin Folk of the Old South is Owsley's conviction—one might say faith—that the yeoman farmer stood at the true center of the Old South. Once more we find his assertion that the King Cotton diplomatists misjudged the importance of that staple to the rulers of England. Here also is the Owsley who contributed to I'll Take My Stand and who continued to revere the tenets of agrarianism set forth in that book. And here is Owsley on the Union and maritime rights during the Civil War, Owsley on destructive sectionalism, and Owsley revealing himself as he writes of what others have said about Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Robert E. Lee. Finally there is a complete bibliography, including book reviews . BOOK REVIEWS75 The appearance of this volume is cause to consider, however briefly, the contribution of Frank L. Owsley. Many would dispute a claim that Owsley was one of the seminal minds in southern historical scholarship ; I make no such assertion. Nevertheless, Owsley's contributions have been significant. We still rely on his work for our understanding of Confederate diplomatic history, and we remember it was he who first emphasized that the localism and states' rights, so important to the antebellum southern politicians, helped undermine their strivings for independence . More important stands the Owsley who focused attention on the antebellum yeoman farmer and who continued to preach that yeoman's gospel of agrarianism. Owsley's claims for the prosperity and centrality of the yeoman in the Cotton Kingdom have, from Fabian Linden to Eugene Genovese, been challenged and disproved. Yet with the yeoman he did forcefully introduce a more complex and realistic social order into a scene too-long monopolized by planter and slave alone. To give credence to their claims for the yeoman Owsley and his students turned to the manuscript census and local tax records. His opponents used these sources to disprove his large claims; now no one writes seriously about antebellum southern society without going to the manuscript census. Few espouse Owsley's agrarianism today. His world view seems, to our age, anachronistic; yet in holding to it firmly and articulately (it is appropriate...