A History of Georgia Agriculture, 1732-1860 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS is the diversion of black male labor to the plantation. Granted that the problem of control operated to encourage the owner to send his slave out of the city, was this the only factor operating? Numerous recent studies such as those of Stampp and of Conrad and Meyer have underwritten the profitability of plantation slavery; did this economic fact affect such transfers of labor? Did the insatiable labor needs of the plantation which drew from the Upper South large numbers of slaves also operate within the cities? Did the advent of white immigrant workers in southern ports, a class ready to man the docks, drive the drays, provide skilled craftsmen, and serve as domestics permit this black labor diversion? To write as Wade has in light of the present runs the risk of distorting the past Nonetheless, Wade has raised provocative questions; no historian can overlook this work, lest he distort the most complex of ante bellum institutions : slavery. James P. Shenton Columbia University A History of Georgia Agriculture, 1732-1860. By James C. Bonner. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964. Pp. viii, 242. $6.00.) Few states have had their history, especially of problems related to ante bellum agriculture, so well and so throroughly explored as Georgia. To the many contributions of Coulter, Destler, Flanders, Gray, Heath, House, Phillips, and Range and their students must now be added this overall history of the development of Georgia agriculture to the outbreak of the Civil War by James C. Bonner. The author has used the usual travel literature, the few farm journals that barely survived on the meager patronage the planters and farmers offered, some newspapers, and considerable manuscript material. Where others have searched in original materials for the facts of land disposal, he has not thought it necessary to follow their footsteps but has relied on their results. The story is, on the whole, a familiar one, though here for the first time one finds a comprehensive treatment which combined with Willard Range's Century of Georgia Agriculture, 18501950 , covers the entire recorded period of Georgia agriculture. One may regret that no attention is paid to the less familiar story of the pre-white agriculture of the Indians which scientists have long been trying to uncover. The treatment of colonial agriculture, cotton culture, and the efforts Georgians made to achieve self-sufficiency follows well-established lines while the accounts of the search for nutritious and long seasonal grasses and the movement for diversification, especially in fruit and in the cultivation of grapes and the production of wine, is the freshest. Possibly Georgia readers will not feel the lack of maps as much as this reviewer but illustrations showing the improvements that are described, for example, plows, would have been an asset. Some commercial presses still show a willingness to place notes at the foot of pages. Surely the university presses should not be behind. At the very least they might include the titles of chapters with 290CIVIL WAB HISTOBT the notes, thus making it easier to refer back and forth to the sources from which material is drawn. Paul W. Gates Cornell University Lovejoy: Martyr to Freedom. By Paul Simon. (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1964. Pp. 150. $3.00.) It is, perhaps, surprising that another biography of Elijah Lovejoy should have appeared so scon after the publication of Merton Dillon's revealing study. But Mr. Simon's book is not an ordinary "Life." It is rather a passionate plea for justice, a clarion call for action—not merely against the evils of society, but also against the widespread indifference which allows them to flourish. Mr. Simon is an unusual man. A newspaper editor when still in his teens, he made a name for himself in Troy, Illinois, as a determined fighter against organized crime. Since then, in keeping with his interest in public affairs, he has served several terms in the state legislature. That the story of a newspaperman in the ¦——H«*" neighborhood murdered because of his convictions should appeal to him is only natural The author is not a professional historian. Writing in a simple and straightforward style, he has produced a book that may easily...