Getting Right With the Poor White
- Getting Right With the Poor White
Michael Fellman is Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. He has recently completed Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War, which will be forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Notes
1. Arthur C. Menius, III, “James Bennitt: Portrait of an Antebellum Yeoman,” North Carolina Historical Review, LVIII (1981), 305–28.
2. Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), 67–82.
3. John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 177.
4. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
5. The best modern developments of this argument are in Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), and Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
6. Two other neo-Marxist analyses of the origins of the New South are Dwight B. Billings, Jr., Planters and the Making of a ‘New South’: Class, Politics and Development in North Carolina, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), and Jonathan M. Weiner, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
7. Persistence rates are the single most useful technique to deal with mobility, especially when they are placed in wider contexts, as does Faragher. See the pioneering works of James C. Malin, “The Turnover of Farm Population in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, IV, (1935), 339–72, and Merle Curti, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959). Also see the rigorous analysis in Hal S. Baron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For further references to studies of persistence in antebellum New England and the Middle West see Faragher, 249, n. 14.
8. On the development of the local market economy also see in particular the introduction to Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), John Schlotterbeck, “‘The Social Economy of an Upper South Community’: Orange and Greene Counties, Virginia, 1815–1860,” in Orville Vernon Burton and Robert C. McMath, Jr., Class Conflict and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 3–28, Hans Medick, “The Proto-Industrial Family During the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,” Social History, III (1976), 291–315.
9. Faragher makes this point, but less forcefully than do I. He also emphasizes the subsistence aspects of farming. However, the accumulation of a cash surplus to purchase land, to which the plain folks leaned their backs very hard indeed, was almost tautologically the economic element which set off the persistent core from the transient majority.
10. I have analyzed aspects of the cultural delegitimization of squatters and other rural transient people in “Alligatormen and Card Sharpers: Deadly Southwestern Humor,” Huntington Library Quarterly, XXXIX (1986), 307–23.
