One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee (review)

BOOK reviews339 slaves as necessary; she despised abolitionists and thought secession a proper response to Lincoln's election. During the Civil War, life at Forest Place continued much as it had before. The primary focus of Sarah's letters centers on the struggle to cope with an alarming variety of shortages that appeared as early as 1861. Anxiety and fear forged by economic uncertainty, rumors of approaching Federals, and the staggering casualty reports combined to confirm the early collapse of morale on the homefront. Sarah Watkins died in 1865 and correspondence dwindled. The postwar years brought declining fortunes that turned Thomas Watkins to drink and forced him to sell his estate and find a home with the daughter he had once banished. Editors E. Grey Diamond and Herman Hatttaway provide appropriate commentary and identifications for this important collection that makes a valuable contribution to the study of women in the nineteenth-century South. Carolyn E. DeLatte McNeese State University One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee. By Robert Tracy McKenzie. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. x, 213. $39-95) Sincethe 1970s, historians have become morereluctantto acceptgeneralizations about the Civil War and Reconstruction based largely upon the conclusions found in studies of the plantation South. Concerned that the region's diversity was being overlooked, scholars more recently have expanded the scope of their research to include nonplantation areas like Appalachia and the upcountry of Georgia and South Carolina. In One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee, Robert Tracy McKenzie, assistant professor of history, University of Washington, "provides the first systematic comparison of the socioeconomic bases of plantation and nonplantation areas both before and immediately after the Civil War" (dustjacket). The book, a revision of his doctoral dissertation at Vanderbilt University, contains some important conclusions, one of them being that recent scholarship, in an effort to explore the "many" Souths, has oversimplified the "distinctions between plantation and nonplantation regions and exaggerates the socioeconomic heterogeneity of the Old South" (193). One South or Many? is a quantitative study. It is based upon statistical data from the four federal manuscript censuses for 1 850 through 1 880 for the farm populations in eight sample Tennessee counties, with each of the state's three "grand divisions"—East, Middle, and West—represented. The author justifies this analytical approach because it is "practically simpler'* and "conforms to Tennesseans' own traditional views regarding the diversity of their state" (2). 340CIVIL WAR history Unfortunately, some major geological regions, most notably the Cumberland Plateau and the Tennessee River Valley, are not represented in the sample. McKenzie's most intriguing conclusions are found in his discussion of the effects of the war and its aftermath on the state's people. More than 80 percent of the adult white males entered Confederate or Union service, drawing more than 100,000 men from their homes; at least one-fifth of them died. Although about one-half of the white household heads died or moved from their communities during the 1860s, McKenzie notes that this war-induced dislocation was not as severe as the peacetime mobility rate for the 1 850s. Considering the state as a whole, the emancipation of $100 million in human property resulted in a widespread interregional redistribution of wealth that largely eliminated the antebellum disparities among the three regions. On the local level McKenzie finds that the distribution of real estate was hardly affected and the concentration of wealth continued to be pronounced, resembling the prewar patterns found in the Deep South. While the economic losses engendered by the war and emancipation were substantial in all sections, the author writes that "in none of the Tennessee regions did the white population experience a radical redistribution of wealth" (98). Although absolute economic mobility deteriorated among common whites, he concludes that there was no "proletarianization" (194) of the plain folk as some historians have argued. McKenzie also challenges what he describes as the "standard scenario" (1 22) regarding the postwar fate of freedmen. According to conventional wisdom, freedpeople experienced a rapid transformation from slaves to sharecroppers, which in turn limited their mobility and their chances for land acquisition. The...