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Planters and the Making of a 'New South': Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900 (review)
- Civil War History
- The Kent State University Press
- Volume 26, Number 2, June 1980
- pp. 180-182
- 10.1353/cwh.1980.0010
- Review
- Additional Information
180CIVIL WAR HISTORY describing the achievements and ultimate failure of these church leaders, Clarke reveals the essential irony of ante-bellum, Southern, white Christianity—the insufficiency of well-meaning paternalism in a repressive, slave society. With insight and balance, Clarke analyzes the varied black responses to white missionaries. While urban blacks had more opportunities to shape religion to meet their needs, both groups accepted the labors of the whitemissionaries, but saw through the whites' paternalism and used the limited freedom offered them through religion to shape positiveself images, train leaders (especially Morris Brown and Daniel Payne), strengthen black family and community ties, andlay the foundations for future independent black churches. Despite the common assumption that freedmen assumed their masters' names, Clarke showed that when one white-controlled, black church allowed slaves to record their surnames on the church roll, 85 per centchose surnames other than those of their owners'. If Clarke's study has a flaw, it is in not dealing with the question of the survival of elements of African culture. Otherwise, his solid scholarship, empathy with the strengths and weaknesses of whites and blacks, and vivid writing make Wrestling' Jacob a classic in Southern black, white, and religious history. Robert G. Sherer Wiley College Planters and the Making of a 'New South': Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900. By Dwight B. Billings, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. Pp. xiii, 284. $15.00.) The character of post-bellum Southern society has become the focus of intense historical debate. C. Vann Woodward established the dominant interpretation nearly three decades ago when he argued that the Civil War meant the rupture of Southern history. Defeat and emancipation broke the back of planter power and allowed for the rise of the middle classes, new men with a new ethos. Jonathan Wiener, an important critic of the thesis of drastic change, has argued recently that in Alabama the planter class managed to retain its land and thus its economic and political power. Planters, moreover, maintained their premodem, antibourgeois ideology and continued to cripple urban and industrial development. Dwight B. Billings, Jr. joins the argument on the side of continuity—he agrees with the theme of persistent planter dominance— but he seeks to turn both Woodward and Wiener on their heads by arguing that rather than being opponents of modernization, planters in North Carolina were industry's primary agents. In 1860 North Carolina was the poorest state in the South, and by 1900 it hadbecome the South's industrial leader. This transformation, Billings contends, was achieved BOOK REVIEWS181 by "planter-industrialists" who led their state down the road of "conservative modernization." This is a bold, highly ambitious foray into a most significant subject. Unfortunately, the author's failure to define crucial terms, to utilize pertinent historical data, and to employ an adequate historical methodology undercuts confidence in his conclusions. It is more than ironic that the central concept—the planter class—remains undefined. Planter, large farmer, extensive landholder, agrarian, and several other terms are used interchangeably, and the only discernable criterion for membership in the planter class is landholding. Billings offers no systematic evidence of slaveholding (we learn, however, that one "planter" owned no slaves because his wife was a Quaker), of agricultural production, or any other common requirement for planter status. Thus, land speculators and landholding lawyers, as well as nonslaveholding farmers, are eligible for membership. Billings sets the transformation of nineteenth-century North Carolina within a provocative general theory of development that draws heavily on the works of Barrington Moore and Immanuel Wallerstein. Planters are characterized as economically-rational capitalists who invest in what ever pays best, usually a mix of land and industry, with emphasis on the former in ante-bellum years and on the latter after the war. So extensive was planter investment in industry after 1865 that Billings claims for them "sponsorship of southern industry" (p. 92). What we have, however, in both the ante-bellum and post-bellum discussions, is evidence that some "planters" invested some undetermined amount of capital in textile mills, giving them some undetermined degree of control. To argue persuasively the thesis of "revolution from above," one must...