Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina 1849-1881 (review)

92CIVIL WAR HISTORY promoting racial equality, sometimes even politicking in high style, reflects a fundamental inconsistency. Then, because Emma and Alice are the only women Currie-McDaniel introduces who interact with Bryant, readers are left to speculate how Bryant felt about the aspirations of black women for self-determination following the war, and about how the carpetbagger responded to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who joined their abolitionism with advocacy of women's suffrage. While CurrieMcDaniel illuminates some aspects of Bryant's life, her hedging on his patriarchal authoritarianism suggests she has overstated her case. Jonathan W. McLeod California State University, Los Angeles Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina 1849-1881. By Robert C. Kenzer. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988. Pp. 153. $28.95.) The technique of putting a single community under a microscope, pioneered by Philip Greven nearly twenty years ago in a study of colonial Andover, Massachusetts, is gradually moving South, and forward in time. In this briefstudy Robert Kenzer applies it to Orange County in piedmont North Carolina for the three decades surrounding the Civil War. He uses census data and a wide variety of manuscript sources to recreate the eight neighborhoods which were, he argues, the fundamental social, political, and economic units of the county. His statistical and manuscript evidence confirms what most southerners take for granted: kinfolks are different from non-kin, neighbors are important, rural young people marry close to home. He shows in detail how these central relationships shaped political behavior and economic activity. He argues that kinship and neighborly relations always overrode class and suggests that Civil War battles began to be lost when the neighbor-kin basis of military units broke down. Kenzer enters the never ending continuity-discontinuity battle firmly on the side of continuity, though much of his data could be used equally well by the other side. Some of his interpretations are a little startling, as when he remarks that widowed war brides became "attractive wives"by virtue of their inherited property (p. 98). Perhaps this comment is more a symptom of Kenzer's difficulty in precise use ofthe English language than ofa failure of insight. The data he has collected is a welcome addition to the growing body oflocal studies which will, when there are a hundred more, allow us to rethink the social history of the nineteenth-century rural South. Anne Firor Scott Duke University ...