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  • Living a Big War in a Small Place: Spartanburg, South Carolina during the Confederacy by Philip N. Racine
  • Paul Yandle
Living a Big War in a Small Place: Spartanburg, South Carolina during the Confederacy. By Philip N. Racine. ( Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 122.)

Philip Racine introduces his survey of an Upcountry South Carolina district’s descent into turmoil during the Civil War as “a distillation of material … gathered over a forty year period” (ix). Racine spent his career at Wofford College in Spartanburg, during which time he edited and published volumes of journals and letters written and kept by Union officers as well as Coastal and Upcountry South Carolina slaveholders. Having delved into the mindsets of mid-nineteenth-century South Carolinians as well as men moving through the South as warriors and conquerors, Racine is uniquely qualified to interpret wartime Spartanburg.

Many of Racine’s descriptions of the hardships faced in Spartanburg and its surrounding district should have a familiar ring to scholars of the Upcountry and Appalachian South. Like many towns in the Confederacy, Spartanburg witnessed no battles and only a minimal presence of Union troops during the Civil War. It also escaped the wrath of Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army as Sherman marched through South Carolina in the war’s final weeks. Instead, residents faced the frustrations of enduring the personal, economic, and social effects of events from which they were physically separated.

Racine’s work is divided into two parts. Part I presents an overview of Spartanburg District: largely but not exclusively secessionist in sentiment, with just below one-third of the population enslaved. Like John Inscoe’s mountain masters in western North Carolina, Spartanburg’s slaveholders tended to think of themselves in a less aristocratic manner than their coastal counterparts. Nonetheless, whites kept a close eye on slaves even before the war, and a small set of families tended to dominate the political life of the district.

Once the war came, Spartanburg’s economy was turned upside down, as a significant percentage of its white male population was forced to fight, and the Confederacy began to discourage the production of cotton, a market crop that officials feared would fall into the hands of Union sympathizers. As cloth and food became increasingly unavailable, slaveholding women struggled to maintain farms and homes, and business owners, speculators, and thieves took [End Page 103] advantage of the scarcity of necessities. The disappearance or clandestine butchering of livestock, coupled with the increasing number of transients moving through the district, leant additional uneasiness to the lives of rural residents.

Part II provides closer views of individuals involved in the larger story Racine tells in Part I. The reader sees the precariousness of slave life in Racine’s account of a young slave woman accused of arson in addition to the ironic poignancy of loneliness felt by slaveholders who spent their days with little privacy on farms isolated from the larger community. Most striking, however, is Racine’s treatment of the staggering degree of brutality inflicted by the district’s Magistrates and Freeholders Court, which handled cases brought against slaves. Racine notes that, as defeat loomed and slaves began to sense that the unraveling of society meant their impending freedom, slaveholders in Spartanburg district tended to take their frustrations out on slaves. Punishments involving several hundred lashes (distributed in increments) were not unusual.

Readers may infer, perhaps incorrectly, that Racine’s sympathy toward the white population he examines overextends itself into a degree of sympathy for the political cause it supported. Racine does recognize, however, the raw, abusive, and often arbitrary power disguised as paternalism in the behavior of smaller slaveholders as well as the anxieties slaveholders imposed upon their own lives as they insisted on maintaining that power. Portions of Racine’s narrative occasionally lack clarity, perhaps due in part to the ambiguity, and in one case the mysterious disappearance of archival material related to his subject. His work, however, is not intended as an exhaustive monograph but as a coda expressing gratitude to the many people who were foundational to his career. As such, it offers a good narrative upon which scholars...

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