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52CIVIL WAR HISTORY usable index. Also, the University & College Press of Mississippi deserves much credit for producing a handsome and quality product at a reasonable cost. In sum, the volumes present the history of a state with an exciting and turbulent past standing on the threshold of a rich future. The new Mississippi history should stand for years as a yardstick by which the quality of similar efforts by scholars in other states will be measured. Arthur H. DeRosier, Jr. East Tennessee State University Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South 1840-1860. By Sam Bowers Hilliard. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. Pp. 296. $10.00.) Historians of Southern agriculture have usually placed emphasis on the high degree of crop specialization that existed in the antebellum South. The traditional view is that the preoccupation of Southern farmers , especially the planters, with commercial crops—cotton, rice, sugarresulted in food shortages that had to be made up by the importation of considerable amounts of foodstuffs from the West. Not so, claims the author of this book. The South was largely feeding itself either with locally grown produce or foodstuffs supplied by an intraregional trade network. Although he freely uses manuscript materials and travel accounts, the author's major conclusions on Southern self-sufficiency are arrived at by comparing the data found in the published census records with the estimated food consumption of certain key commodities. Using this technique, he makes the following observations.· the South produced an enormous quantity of pork and could have easily supplied the demands of the area; there was less demand for beef, but again, the potential Southern production was far in excess of demand; the Southern corn crop was huge, more than adequate to meet local needs; and wheat, though produced in a small scale, was widespread. So little is known about wheat consumption, however, that any attempt to assess self-sufficiency is highly speculative. While the author maintains that the region as a whole was largely self-sufficient in food, there were parts of the South that depended on imports to meet their needs. The sugar and rice areas, for example, imported a larger percentage of food than other regions, but they also had excellent trade facilities through which food could be brought in. The author gives considerable attention to the trade in foodstuffs carried on along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts and down the Mississippi River. Although this study addresses itself primarily to the theme of Southern self-sufficiency in food, the author also investigates the food habits of the people. He admits that more is known about the diet of slaves BOOK REVIEWS53 than of the white population. Nevertheless, among his conclusions are these: during the nineteenth century, preference for pork became a distinctive feature of Southern culture, and as a food item, it completely overshadowed all others; chitterlings and oppossums were relished by whites as well as blacks; corn bread was more widely used than hominy and grits. There is a great deal of fascinating information in this book, yet one has mixed feelings about it. The author has certainly done a great deal more research than previous writers who have been concerned with Southern self-sufficiency in food. His findings seem to lend support to the conjectures of the Owsley or Vanderbilt school of a generation ago. But this assumes that the author's statistical method is sound and that the intraregional trade network was effective in moving sufficient quantities of food from one Southern region to another. On this latter point, the author is highly speculative. Unfortunately, the book is not carefully written. There are numerous misspellings, sources are lacking for the charts dealing with the New Orleans and Mobile trade in foodstuffs, some of the tables and maps are difficult to interpret, and at least one footnote bears no relation to the information contained in the text. The title of the work is somewhat misleading. The author is concerned only with the new cotton kingdom, excluding Kentucky, Virginia, Florida, and Texas. Richard L. Troutman Western Kentucky University Banks Or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832-1865. By William Gerald Shade. (Detroit: Wayne State...

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