Disunion, War, Defeat, and Recovery in Alabama: The Journal of Augustus Benners, 1850-1885 (review)

Book Reviews Disunion, War, Defeat, and Recovery in Alabama: The Journal of Augustus Benners, 1850–1885. By Glenn M. Linden and Virginia Linden. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2007. 357 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-88146056 -8. Early in 1840, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Augustus Benners left his native North Carolina and moved to Alabama, settling eventually in Greensboro. Within fifteen years, he had become a successful lawyer, a state legislator, and a substantial planter who owned more than seven hundred acres and more than eighty slaves. By that time, he had begun to keep a journal regularly and would do so until he died in 1885 at the age of sixty-five. That journal, as edited by Glenn and Virginia Linden, reveals a man of considerable importance in his community and state. Even so, Benners’s greatest interest, as measured by the ink expended in his diary, was not in public affairs but in matters related to farming: the condition of crops, the price of cotton, the health of his farm hands, and, most of all, the weather. In fact, the principal character throughout the thirty-five-year saga is rain: not enough, too much, or just the right amount. Family matters also figure prominently in the journal. Benners suffered much personal sorrow. Five of his children died young, another child had to be committed to the Alabama State Hospital for the Insane, and his wife of thirty-five years passed away before he could reach her bedside. His accounts of these experiences are quite moving, and none is more so than the record of the death of someone who, though not kin, was like family. “I feel very deeply for the loss of my trusted humble old servant & friend [Kit Jones]. . . . [T]ogether we have been fighting lifes [sic] battles for over 20 years. . . . He was a good man and never did any harm that I know of. . . . [H]is place cannot be filled” (pp. 264–65). Insofar as public affairs are treated, what is striking is the scarcity of material on the Civil War and the abundance of attention given to Reconstruction. Perhaps that can be explained by the fact that the war’s battles were usually hundreds of miles away and the freedpeople were always nearby. Emancipation distressed Benners. On New Year’s Day 1867, for example, he wrote that a “race of contented & happy & useful laborers has been changed into one of vagrants and moody dissatisfied and beggarly shiftless drones” (p. 156). Almost six years later, right after elec- O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 305 tion day in November 1872, his displeasure was still evident: “Yesterday . . . a throng of negroes came in and like a dark cloud settled on the town” (p. 188). Despite an occasional slip—for example, did Sherman march “north into Georgia” (p. 10)—the Lindens do a creditable job of editing. In fact, given the tedium of some of Benners’s entries, one could wish for more editing and less journal. Even so, as Edward Countryman notes in a perceptive introduction, “we know less than we ought to know about men of . . . [the] upper middle rank” in the nineteenth-century South (p. 3). This volume helps to fill that void as it expands our knowledge of Alabama history. WAYNE MIXON Augusta State University Race & Medicine in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century America. By Todd L. Savitt. Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2007. x, 453 pp. $49.00. ISBN 978-0-87338-878-8. “For the slave child in 1850s Virginia, infant death was most commonly attributed to ‘suffocation, smothering and overlay’” (p. 3). Thus, Todd Savitt begins his 453-page volume like Janus, the ancient Roman god associated with doorways and beginnings, looking to the future and the past. I find it ironic that a book on race and medicine in the nineteenth and early twentieth century would begin with a chapter about infant mortality. Death in the first year of life remains a valid and reliable metric for the health and well being of human populations in the twenty-first century. The book is organized around four broad themes: Diseases and...